Today I'm excited to announce the Foundation's second major, multi-national partnership with a respected leader in global telecommunications: Telefónica. Most of you will have heard of, or perhaps are customers of, one of Telefónica's many properties and portals already. They are a Fortune 500 global telecommunications company - one of the largest in the world - with a major presence in Europe and especially throughout Latin America.
This news will be announced fairly soon (Monday, 4:00PM UTC / 8:00AM PST) but I wanted to give all of you a quick heads-up before it went public. Today Wikimedia and Telefónica will co-announce the partnership, which consists of a three year, strategic partnership to extend the reach and access of Wikimedia's educational content. You may recall from Wikimania that Telefónica and Terra (a Telefónica company) were the main sponsors of the event and have already supported chapter activities in Argentina. We have extended this relationship into a multi-phase partnership to distribute Wikimedia's educational content in Telefónica territories worldwide. This partnership will support the Foundation's mission objectives, give us access to new technologies and R&D, and provide revenue to help us achieve financial sustainability. Telefónica also runs a non-profit Foundation that supports non-business activities to promote education in Spanish and Portuguese languages and, with good faith efforts, will find ways to help us with the development of content in those languages (via chapter activities, etc). Telefónica will also explore the development of offline readers for Wikimedia content to increase distribution. This is another significant opportunity to increase the access to Wikimedia's project content among key populations - particularly throughout Latin America. Telefónica is the leading telecom provider in Latin American countries, on mobile, IPTV, broadband, and in other emerging technology spaces. This is particularly good news in relationship to the mid-project update from the strategy team earlier this month. For more info, here are the links on the wiki to the Press Release and Q&A: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases/Telefonica_and_Wikimedia_partner_February_2010 http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases/Telefonica_and_Wikimedia_announce_partnership_Feb2010QA Kul Wadhwa Head of Business Development _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
