OpenMoko and Google Android are the two most promising mobile projects. But almost everyone I try to convince of my passion is not impressed. They are much more interested in the iPhone. But the iPhone is not going to bring us anything remotely interesting. It will just bring us a better version of something we already have: phone, camera, media player, etc. And above all the iPhone platform is unbelievably closed. The only ‘thing’ that is going to bring us something significantly different is openness. And that is exaclty what Google is committed to. Apart from Android and its platform it recently started offering a completely freed developers version of the G1. Android is not yet ready for the OpenMoko (I have a Freerunner,) so I am trying to justify (to myself) why I need this…

Sun acquiring MySQL is old news, I know, but writing about OpenOffice I was genuinely surprised at the logo in the bottom left corner of the OpenOffice site. This logo appears to be two logos, but it is really one. The two logos shown are both Sun and MySQL. Like Exxon Mobil, or closer to home ABN Amro, it suggests a merger. But I am not aware of a rebranding of the resulting company. I have searched quite intensively for reasons behind this ‘move’, but having found nothing of significance I can only speculate…

Objected by the wireless industry and some consumer groups, but “free, pornography-free wireless Internet service to all Americans” is still what the FCC is pushing for. Interesting! Is this the reason the FCC approved the White Spaces left by analog television to be opened for wireless broadband? The business model of a USA wide wireless ISP would be much more ‘problematic’ if they also have to license a certain frequency for operation. But this plan is not intended to use the White Spaces, but is negotiated to be part of a plan for one of the frequencies just sold.

The presidential election was without doubt the most important vote on November 4, 2008. There was yet another very interesting and important vote, the FCC voted on what to do with the “white spaces” (frequencies unused after the USA will go to an all digital TV broadcasting system.) The FCC voted 5-0 allowing unlicensed devices to operate in the frequencies formerly used for TV signals. Larry Page calls the wireless broadband technology “WiFi on steroids” on his blog. Initially intended for “customer premises devices” it is a direct competition of WiMAX. It might prove a threat to mobile (3G/4G) as well, but comparable to how iPhone uses WiFi.

I have been enthusiastically reporting on Amazon’s cloud activities lately. And yesterday they launched yet another interesting service. They launched a content delivery network called Amazon CloudFront. This content delivery framework makes your S3 bucket (sorry for the lingo) accessible through a domain of your choice. But not from one location, no from the location geographically near. With the familiar ‘pay as you go’ model they charge for actual downloaded GBs. Europe and US are cheapest, but Hong Kong and Japan also have edge locations.

Microsoft’s most important product (line) is Microsoft Office. Certainly on the PC, but also on the Mac, it is the de facto standard in office productivity. Google Docs are heralded as the next evolution in office productivity. But Balmer is not so scared of Google Docs. His direct competition in office productivity comes from OpenOffice.org and StarOffice, he responded when asked about Google Docs. As with Linux these products has taken their time to mature. But with 3 million downloads in the first week the lates release can be called a blockbuster. But still Google will be their worst nightmare, only somewhere else, a phone.

29 billion what? A loan? The price the US government is willing to pay for AIG? No, it has nothing to do with financial crisis. Last week Amazon reported a growth 30% in storage objects the last quarter, they went up from 22 billion objects to 29 billion objects. It is still a mystery how much total GB (gigabyte) or TB (terabyte) or PB (petabyte) they are storing for their customers. But they revealed that their peak load is 70.000 transactions per second. This is what virtualization looks like, HUGE economies of scale. (Their price plans offers reduced cost per GB for customers storing more than 500 TB!!!)

With 7 days to go the presidential elections in the USA are coming to a close. With ‘important republicans’ supporting Obama it appears to be a done deal. But until the polls close you never know what the result will be. Obama needed almost 2 years to get where he is now. I thought elections culminated on 1 day. It now appears to be an illusion in this era of time-shifting. With postal voting and early voting d-day has changed to deadline. And I expect this presidential election to turn into an anticlimax.