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!

Google SearchWiki
Finally, folks at Google have decided to directly involve users to improve search results. I have long maintained that direct user input is essential for better search results. Page-rank provides an indirect user input for search and, as proven by Google, is very effective in ranking search results. However, I am not very happy with the approach they have taken of identifying the users who have changed the search results. They do warn that others will be able to see that I made the change. Here is a link to a computerworld article about the negative press this feature has attracted. Obviously, privacy is a huge concern.

I am usually logged-into Google and was quickly able to change the order of search results. However, when I was not logged-in, the order was what Google had originally presented. I wonder if the input I provided will later propagate to the full system.

I am convinced that Google will find that the user input provides very valuable enhancement to the search experience. They do have to make sure that privacy is not compromised.

Microsoft Getting Serious about Cloud Computing
Interesting article in Business Week. I am intrigued by the scale of their offering and the approach of building a modular facility - a module being a container full of 2500 servers.

Trust Digital
They claim to provide Blackberry-level security to non-blackberry devices. We should look into it for iPhones, G1s and other non-blackberry smart phones.

Intel Presentation on Enterprise 2.0
Came across this article about a presentation by the Intel CIO on Social Media within the enterprise. Some interesting stats in the presentation.

DLA Piper Tech Conference
Attended a very interesting one day event in California. In addition to great weather enjoyed some very interesting sessions.
I was very impressed by Ray Ozzie. His comments were very insightful. Here are a few I noted:

• India is ahead on mobile
• China is seeing parallel growth in mobile and pcs
• Ray uses constraints to drive behavior within the organization
• cloud is fast becoming a hub that we connect to via fat pipes. This will again give us an opportunity to think about where work gets done: on personal vs central locations
• PCs and mobile phones become appliances that you log into to access your information - anywhere, anytime. This considerably reduces the cost of management of devices.
• media is the new document driving usage of local compute power
• every HD-IPTV end-point requires 6MBPS of bandwidth
• Instant Messaging has morphed into social networks (especially facebook)
• social networks are driven by technology, social dynamics and organizational design
• two big opportunities? mobile collaboration, virtualization / server consolidation
• biggest challenge at Microsoft? ability to manage complexity