VZW expands BREW deck capabilities

SAN DIEGO--Verizon Wireless affirmed its commitment to Qualcomm’s BREW platform, announcing at the BREW developers event it would enhance its Get It Now content deck with new features such as short-code third-party transactions and customized merchandizing for customers.

Earlier this month, Verizon Wireless revealed it is investigating a Linux-based operating system as the platform for its future feature phone, a move that could have displaced the BREW runtime environment on millions of phones. But Verizon’s investment in new BREW features seems to indicate many elements of the BREW end-to-end platform will remain in the Verizon network for some time even if the operating system itself changes.

At the conference, VZW vice president of consumer product development Lee Daniels didn’t refer to Verizon’s recent membership in the LiMo Foundation, instead highlighting the new functionality the company will be adding to its BREW deck. Verizon will launch Qualcomm’s Group Manager, a means of providing custom application catalogs to different customer. In its current incarnation, the Get It Now catalog is the same for Verizon’s millions of customers, but Group Manager will be able to tailor individual catalogs to customer niches based on their content tastes. Group Manager can even scale down to individual personal catalogs, using customers past behavior and through merchandizing partnerships.

Verizon will also support Premium SMS and off-deck transactions for the first time, tapping into BREW’s BrandXtend platform. So far, BrandXtend only has two customers, Major League Baseball and the Universal Music Group, but they’re sizable ones. Instead of going after niche content players, like most third-party content aggregators, Qualcomm is targeting media heavyweights who want to go mobile independently and whose content is presumably in high demand.

BrandXtend and Group Manager essentially give Verizon and its content partners a way to merchandize, sell and distribute off of the Get It Now phone portal, a platform that VZW has enjoyed success but has limitations, Daniels said. “We built it and the customers have come but we know the future depends on more,” Daniels said.

By adding the new BREW elements, Verizon’s content partners can set up their own online storefronts for their applications, initiating transactions from a WAP portal an online Website or a short code that triggers a purchase session on the customer’s phone. In the catalog itself, the content will be far more tailored to individual users’ tastes. And new billing and settlement capabilities will allow Verizon to offer subscription-based billing and micropayments.