It was just over a year ago that we launched Samsung Mobile Innovator at the 2008 Smartphone Show.  Dr. Ho-Soo Lee, the Executive Vice President of Samsung’s Media Solution Center introduced Samsung Mobile Innovator on Tuesday 21 October 2008. This was during his morning keynote titled Eight Reasons to Innov8 with Samsung.  Dr. Lee presented an image of the future where the success of any technology organisation is determined by its speed of innovation.  Moreover any success in achieving rapid innovation is greatly influenced by an organisation’s ability to partner and collaborate with outside parties.  In this context the arrival of Samsung Mobile Innovator was a timely and crucial addition to Samsung Mobile.

Samsung Mobile Innovator initially launched with support for the Symbian platform.  During the launch period, Samsung Mobile Innovator also revealed the program’s intention to grow to become a cross-platform mobile developer resource.  This would be achieved by adding additional forums to the program to support Samsung’s Windows Mobile and Java ME devices.

This intention was made public at the 2009 Mobile World Congress in Barcelona where we announced that Windows Mobile and Java forums would be opened on the Samsung Mobile Innovator website on Friday 27 February 2009.  This growth continued with the launch of Chinese language version of the Samsung Mobile Innovator website in March 2009.  This website offered Chinese-speaking developers a full range of resources and services initially for Symbian and Windows Mobile. In August 2009 this was extended to cover Java developers, and included a Chinese language Java ME SDK, built specifically for targeting Samsung devices in this region.

We redesigned our website in July 2009.  This was in anticipation of adding additional services and functionality to the program. The first addition was the Samsung Mobile Widget SDK, allowing developers to target the Samsung TouchWiz UI. Next, we introduced its InnovLab service, giving members the opportunity to give and receive valuable feedback.

In the next 12 months, Samsung plans to deepen its engagement with the developer community through number of exciting promotions. The first activity will be the creation of a regular email update from the Samsung Mobile Innovator Team. You will be hearing more about this and our other initiatives shortly.

But for now Samsung Mobile Innovator would like to thank our members and our partners who have supported us through a busy and eventful first year.