Smart Phone Hell for Developers
If you are a small company planning to develop applications for smart phones, you are trying to decide which platforms to support and in what order:

• iPhone: Cool but the AppStore is crowded and you better have a way to get your application on to the first page of your category.
• Windows Mobile: They claim to have the largest installed-base for smart phones. However, delivering apps on the platform is not easy. I do not know any Windows Mobile phone user who has downloaded more than a couple of apps.
• Google Android: It has a lot of buzz in the marketplace. Many of the mobile phone manufacturers (except Apple and Nokia) seem to be planning to launch devices with this OS. Should you bet your company on the success of this platform? Google has not demonstrated a lot of success beyond search.
  
• Blackberry: They continue to thrive and control the thumbs of a the large enterprise customers with deepest pockets. The new devices are really cool!
• Symbian (owned by Nokia): Outside of the US, Nokia has the largest market share of mobile devices and if you have any hope of gaining a global customer base, you just cannot afford to ignore Symbian.

I recently spoke with the founders of a small mobile-app company and they are having a hard time deciding where to put their $$$. Any suggestions? As usual, when the OS platforms fragment, someone comes up with an idea of a portable development environment using Java - read this article on MobileMentalism: Erricson to the rescue!

On top of all that - customers are gravitating towards "free" apps and there is no mobile Google AdWords in sight. Also, customers hate Mobile ads and ad revenues for any mobile site are expected to be extremely low for a very long time.

Conflux
I just read about this really cool festival held in NY in Sept. I do miss living in NY!

Coghead - Visual Development tool
Came across this Infoworld Article about this Web Application Development Tool in the cloud. Here is the link to the review.

IBM - Resilient Cloud Validation program
Interesting news in Cloud Computing. The technology media is rife with this most recent IBM announcement (link to an article on GigaOM).

This sounds so 1970s. I am not sure if CIOs and tech-savvy business folks will wait for IBM to finish all their testing. Further, this is such a moving target. I may be proven wrong but I am not holding my decisions for the seal to appear on my service-provider's websites.

Google Lively (Virtual Rooms) - Not so lively any more
Google is shutting down this and several other (list on WebGuild) services. I am not surprised that they failed. The initial reception was quite poor (my earlier post). I still feel that there is a place for 3D Virtual Worlds beyond Games. We are still waiting for the Killer App - my bet is on Retail.

On a positive note, I am very impressed by the speed at which Google decided to kill this. It is important to cut and run when the message is on the wall!