Published by Head Robot on 29th November 2007

Mike Butcher wrote at TechCrunc.com.
Dave Burke, an engineering manager within Google’s mobile team, stood up today at the Future of Mobile conference in London to talk about Android and the Open Handset Alliance (OHA), the new open mobile platform initiative from Google. This is the the first conference presentation in Europe on the subject since Google’s announcement on November 5th, and was live blogged by TechCrunch UK.
But if you were expecting much new information on all this you would probably have been disappointed. Burke introduce the OHA, outlined how it has 30+ industry leaders on board and how there is no gPhone, just a phone built by partners using the Android platform - this we already know. There was a run-down of what the platform will be capable of and a reminder that the SDK is a only a few days old and that we will probably not see handsets until the second half of next year when the full open source platform will be released.
He also did a fairly impressive demonstration of coding an application (in this case a mobile browser) inside 8mins (or 7mins 58 seconds to be exact - he timed it on stage).
Read the rest of, Google Pitches Android to European Developers.
Technorati Tags: Google, Android, Europe, SDK, Developers
Published by Head Robot on 28th November 2007

This could come in handy for Android Developer’s. Found at The Wall Street Journal On-Line
According to the Wall Street Journal this morning Google’s preparing a service that would let users store on its computers essentially all of the files they might keep on their personal-computer hard drives - such as word-processing documents, digital music, video clips and images. Or, as CBS News says it, “Google Wants To Be Your Hard Drive.”
Here is how the Journal summarizes the imminent development:
“Google is hoping to distinguish itself from existing online storage services partly by simplifying the process for transferring and opening files. Along with a Web-based interface, Google is trying to let users upload and access files directly from their PC desktops and have the file storage behave for consumers more like another hard drive that is handy at all times, say the people familiar with the matter.”
Read the rest of the Wall Street Journal’s article, Google Plans Service to Store User’s Data.
Technorati Tags: Google, Storage, Servers, Internet, Applications
Published by Head Robot on 28th November 2007

Blogger Richard Monson-Haefel writes in, Application Platform Strategies Blog
You won’t hear Microsoft say this out loud, but secretly they are celebrating Google’s contribution of the Android mobile phone platform to the Open Handset Alliance - at least they aught to be. Android is perhaps the best thing to happen to Microsoft since they won the browser wars in the 1990’s. And given Verizon’s announcement yesterday that they will be opening up their network to any device and operating system that meets a “minimum technical standard” it seems that Android may have legs even if Google doesn’t secure the 700 MHz spectrum.
Microsoft’s biggest competitor in the software development industry has been, for the past 12 years, Sun Microsystems’ Java Platform. Starting in the mid to late 1990’s Java began to gain mind share among developers in every area in which Microsoft has an interest. Today, with over 6 million developers (according to Sun) Java clearly dominates the software development industry. Point in fact, Microsoft had to completely revamp their software development platform in 2000 to mimic the Java platform in order to complete; enter Microsoft .NET. While Microsoft .NET has been extremely successful at winning back a portion of the developer community from the Java platform, Java has remained the darling of the enterprise and perhaps the most successful software development platform in the history of computing. Microsoft really doesn’t like the Java platform very much. Java is Microsoft’s biggest competitor in software development and is arguably the platform to beat.
Read the rest of Why Microsoft Loves Google Android.
Technorati Tags: Google, Sun, Microsoft, Java, Software