Matsushita Position Paper for "W3C/WAP Workshop on the Multimodal Web"

Matsushita Electric (Panasonic) is one of the largest manufacturers of home appliances, including network devices such as mobile phones and digital TV sets. As such we have been closely involved with the standardization activities in this area, and recognize the importance of them. For example, besides W3C and WAP activities, our leading role in the development and promotion of DVD means that we have an overview of the development and potential synergy of the digital technologies related to three major delivery systems: network communication, broadcast and package media (e.g. optical disk). Matsushita has also started the effort for electronic media distribution with these delivery systems, including music distribution through some wireless communication systems, and continues to participate in standardization for portable devices and memory devices for those services.

As a consumer electronics company, Matsushita understands the need to deliver services to end users in the most convenient manner and through simple user interfaces, and naturally sees the Web as a major component in the delivery of these new services. It is important for those services to have best suited and standardized content formats.

From these kinds of view, we would like to have discussed the following issues in this Workshop:

1. How does the convergence of content formats for mobile devices, e.g. XHTML Basic and WML go forward?
2. How are the original functions of WML modularized that should be added to XHTML Basic modules?
3. What should be the key points for multimodal content formats?
4. How and to what extent will the interoperability of contents for mobile devices and other "net-aware" devices like digital TV be achieved?
5. What is the proper use of SMIL at the mobile devices?
6. How should multimodal contents be stored on storage devices in or attached to mobile devices?