[Foundation-l] Partnering with Telefonica to support Wikimedia's mission

[Kul Takanao Wadhwa]

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