Various friends of Symbian, including Nokia, Psion, Palm and Motorola, have kicked off an effort to develop an open industry spec for universal data synchronisation of remote data and personal information. Other founders are IBM and its subsidiary Lotus, and Motorola sub Starfish (whose raison d'etre is of course synchronisation). The SyncML Initiative will be open to all, but you could say that there's maybe less to it than meets the eye. It's intended to produce an XML-based synchronisation protocol, so essentially it will be building on the XML industry standard and providing mobile appliance manufacturers with a standardised way to communicate and synchronise data with Web servers, PCs and enterprise servers. XML itself is likely to meet SyncML more than half way here. But that's not to say the Initiative isn't laudable. The partners intend to support email, calendar, contact management and data synchronisation, and as people find themselves more and more using multiple devices to communicate their need for simple and standard synchronisation systems will increase massively. ®