, founded in April 1979 and incorporated in February 1984 in

Tokyo Tokyo (; ja, 東京, , ), officially the Tokyo Metropolis ( ja, 東京都, label=none, ), is the capital and List of cities in Japan, largest city of Japan. Formerly known as Edo, its metropolitan area () is the most populous in the world, ...

, Japan, by Arakawa Toru and Kamada Tomihisa,ACCESS Company Profile
ACCESS. is a company providing a variety of software for connected and mobile devices, such as

mobile phone A mobile phone, cellular phone, cell phone, cellphone, handphone, hand phone or pocket phone, sometimes shortened to simply mobile, cell, or just phone, is a portable telephone that can make and receive calls over a radio frequency link whi ...

s, PDAs,

video game console A video game console is an electronic device that outputs a video signal or image to display a video game that can be played with a game controller. These may be home consoles, which are generally placed in a permanent location connected to ...

s and

set top box A set-top box (STB), also colloquially known as a cable box and historically television decoder, is an information appliance device that generally contains a TV-tuner input and displays output to a television set and an external source of si ...

es. The company makes the NetFront software series, which has been deployed in over 1 billion devices, representing over 2,000 models, as of the end of January 2011,Kamada, Tomihasa
/ref> and which has been used as a principal element of the widely successful

i-mode NTT DoCoMo's i-mode is a mobile internet (distinct from wireless internet) service popular in Japan. Unlike Wireless Application Protocols, i-mode encompasses a wider variety of internet standards, including web access, e-mail, and the pa ...

data service of NTT DoCoMo in Japan. NetFront is also used by many consumer electronic devices beyond mobile phones, such as the

Sony PSP The PlayStation Portable (PSP) is a handheld game console developed and marketed by Sony Computer Entertainment. It was first released in Japan on December 12, 2004, in North America on March 24, 2005, and in PAL regions on September 1, 2005, ...

and the Amazon Kindle, both of which have their web browsers powered by NetFront. In addition, the NetFront Browser and related products are used on a wide variety of mobile phones, including those from

Nokia Nokia Corporation (natively Nokia Oyj, referred to as Nokia) is a Finnish multinational telecommunications, information technology, and consumer electronics corporation, established in 1865. Nokia's main headquarters are in Espoo, Finland, i ...

Samsung The Samsung Group (or simply Samsung) ( ko, 삼성 ) is a South Korean multinational manufacturing conglomerate headquartered in Samsung Town, Seoul, South Korea. It comprises numerous affiliated businesses, most of them united under the ...

, LG Corp.,

Motorola Motorola, Inc. () was an American multinational telecommunications company based in Schaumburg, Illinois, United States. After having lost $4.3 billion from 2007 to 2009, the company split into two independent public companies, Motorol ...

Sony Ericsson Sony Mobile Communications Inc. ( ja, ソニーモバイルコミュニケーションズ株式会社) was a multinational telecommunications company founded on October 1, 2001, as a joint venture between Sony Group Corporation and Ericsson. ...

and others. In September 2005, ACCESS acquired PalmSource, the owner of the

Palm OS Palm OS (also known as Garnet OS) was a mobile operating system initially developed by Palm, Inc., for personal digital assistants (PDAs) in 1996. Palm OS was designed for ease of use with a touchscreen-based graphical user interface. It is pro ...

and BeOS. The company has used these assets and expertise to create the

Access Linux Platform The Access Linux Platform (ALP) is a discontinued open-source software based operating system, once referred to as a "next-generation version of the Palm OS," for mobile devices developed and marketed by Access Co., of Tokyo, Japan. The platform ...

, an open-source

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, w ...

-based platform for

smartphone A smartphone is a portable computer device that combines mobile telephone and computing functions into one unit. They are distinguished from feature phones by their stronger hardware capabilities and extensive mobile operating systems, whic ...

s and other mobile devices, with some proprietary parts including the user interface and some middleware. The Access Linux Platform 3.0 was released to the market in October 2008. Two of the world's largest operators, NTT DoCoMo and Orange, have announced support for Access Linux Platform-based handsets. In March 2006, ACCESS acquired IP Infusion, Inc., a provider of intelligent networking software, providing Layer 2 and Layer 3 carrier-class switching and routing as well as a comprehensive forwarding plane implementation supporting L2, L3 (IPv4 & v6), multicast and MPLS/Traffic Engineering. ACCESS is active in open source-related efforts, including memberships in the Linux Foundation and the

Linux Phone Standards Forum The Linux Phone Standards Forum (LiPS Forum) is a consortium of a group of companies to create standardization, standards for the use of Linux on mobile devices. The main goal of the LiPS Forum is to create application programming interfaces (APIs) ...

. In 2007, ACCESS employees presented at

GUADEC GUADEC, the GNOME Users And Developers European Conference, is an annual developer conference, whose prime topic is the development of the GNOME desktop environment and its underlying base software, such as GTK, GStreamer, etc. The first GUADE ...

(which the company also sponsored) and the

Ottawa Linux Symposium The Linux Symposium was a Linux and Open Source conference held annually in Canada from 1999 to 2014. The conference was initially named Ottawa Linux Symposium and was held only in Ottawa, but was renamed after being held in other cities in Canada ...

. , ACCESS employs approximately 657 people globally, with headquarters in Tokyo, Japan and facilities in the USA (Sunnyvale), Germany (Oberhausen), Korea (Seoul), the PRC (Beijing) and Taiwan (Taipei).ACCESS: Global Offices
The company reports consolidated revenues of ¥9.4 billion (for the fiscal year ending January 2020).

References

External links

*
IP Infusion
{{Open Handset Alliance Members Companies based in Tokyo Companies listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange Software companies established in 1979 Software companies of Japan Japanese companies established in 1979 Japanese brands

See also

References

External links