Funded by the EU, MuLiMob's vision and ambition is to use Europe's linguistic and cultural diversity as hallmark to bolster the mobile market: to acknowledge the importance of recognizing cultural diversity and identifying potential applications for multilingualism in the mobile environment; to consider development methods, technology and business models, as well as lowering the barriers that currently limit deployment in the mobile marketplace and increasing interoperability and openness.

MuLiMob's main objectives are to enhance the wireless community's awareness of multilingual and multicultural mobile services and application issues; to stimulate a rapid take up of innovative ideas, within the whole mobile value chain, for user-friendly and cost effective multilingual services for mobile users; and to identify issues and problems that need further research, applications or solutions.

In a 16 month project. MuLiMob will review and analyse elements to be changed, fine-tuned and solved in order to develop wireless applications that are truly multilingual, from their inception right through to their final development and hence greater suited to the mobile user profile and their respective needs. An integral component to MuLiMob will be the investigation of a variety of technologies, applications, content and marketing mechanisms available to European businesses today.

MuLiMob will establish a dialogue between European businesses and stimulate a thorough discussion on these issues, thanks to a series of workshops, conferences and interviews. We will engage with a diverse range of European mobile and content companies, especially within the music sector, to gather learning experiences, identify tangible and intangible barriers to success and identify possible solutions to avoid pitfalls.

A wide variety of companies will be consulted, ranging from technology platform providers, handset manufacturers, application developers, content providers and aggregators, mobile portal providers, location based specialists, mobile network operators as well as the end mobile user. MuLiMob will also consult the music sector including labels, distributors and promoters. We will identify what has to be taken into consideration and solved in order to provide easy, cost efficient multilingual and multicultural mobile services to the user, so that the end-to-end user does not have to confront to the underlying complexity of localization.

Finally, MuLiMob will gather and present our findings in a set of best-practice guidelines that will make it easier and cost effective to produce functional services that take language and culture differences into account.

In this way, we aim to show that wireless cultural localisation can be easy, cost efficient and positive. We therefore wish to affirm that Europe's cultural diversity is a real advantage, not only in the people that make up Europe, but also in terms of applications and commercial business.