'Our proprietary technology enables direct peer-to-peer connection rather than using several peers (i.e. devices from other and unknown users) in between - like Skype does,' said Wizzl CEO Jaap Korevaar as Wizzl officially launched today the beta version of the first all-in-one virtual telephone during Gameplay 07, the biggest game event in the Benelux.

With 34 years' experience as a journalist - the last 27 of them with NBC - Gary Krakow has seen all the best and worst technology that's come along. So when Krakow writes of the iPhone that 'the cell phone part is merely average, data speeds are on the slow side and it's not really designed to handle enterprise e-mail,' you can be certain many folks will listen.

'Our monitoring of retail site performance has shown a definite slow-down in site performance over the course of Black Friday for many leading sites,' said Shawn White, director of external operations for Keynote. 'Almost a third of the thirty leading retail sites we monitor for our holiday shopping index experienced significant slow-downs that impacted the product search and check-out processes - and presumably will impact online sales.'

Burst.com, the company that has for 2 years alleged that Apple's iTunes Music Store, iTunes software, the iPod devices, and Apple's QuickTime Streaming products infringe various of its U.S. Patents, this week settled with Apple in return for a one-time payment of $10M cash, giving Apple a patent license providing the right to use Burst's intellectual property in its own technology and products, without further consideration.

Keynote Competitive Research announced Europe's first performance index for the mobile Web. The Keynote Europe Mobile Index is a weekly performance ranking of 10 popular European mobile sites compiled from more than 26,000 measurements taken on multiple carriers from different geographical locations. Keynote recently announced a U.S. mobile index. The Keynote Europe Mobile Index provides insight into the overall performance and availability of popular mobile sites and can be used by customers to benchmark their mobile site performance against the biggest names in the industry.

Countless companies rely on machine-to-machine (M2M) communications, from asset tracking to fleet management to security and beyond. However, very few companies that offer integrated communications services have what they need to effectively manage this aspect of their system. The time has come to put the power of device communications management where it belongs - in the hands of the device manufacturers.

A Google spokesman told the Wall Street Journal today that Google is 'making all the necessary preparations to become an applicant to bid' for a chunk of 700MHz spectrum from the FCC. 'Our goal is to make sure that American consumers have more choices in an open and competitive wireless world,' the spokesman continued.

Google, as promised, put the Android SDK out in early access - along with a $10 million pot for the best apps written for its open Android mobile platform by third-party developers. It said the platform would be open and it's going about proving it. It also needs the buzz - and a killer mobile app - for Android to hit a homerun. The first $5 million will be paid out in $25,000 prizes for the continued development of the 50 most promising entries submitted between January 2 and March 3 2008 to the Android Developer Challenge I.

LiveVox, an on-demand voice portal company delivering robust outbound, inbound and automated call distribution voice applications for the billing and collections industry, has announced LiveVox Voice Portal 3.0, an on-demand call center platform that emulates and extends the functionality of the dialer, enabling customers to transition off of their dialers and seamlessly move to a true VoIP-based environment.

Here are my thoughts on this. I was expecting Alfred - who is known to be an arrogant and incompetent CEO - to run away from Larry as fast as he could. But this movie usually ends as follows. First, history repeats itself. By that I mean that Alfred should remember Larry's PeopleSoft hunt, which ended up with the PeopleSoft's CEO's head on a stick. In my humble opinion, in Act 2 of Larry's BEA hunt, we will see Alfred's head on a stick and the BEA shareholders will make the wedding plans, as always happens when Larry plans another marriage for his baby Oracle.

After Google's Android announcement, at least four big guys should be irritated: Sun Microsystems, Apple, Adobe and Microsoft.Google approaches telephony from the open source side - Linux-based platform, uses Java but does not care about sticking to Java ME - they are planning to use fast OpenGL libraries and are not afraid to be hardware-specific.

I asked what she did for a living. She said she was a software engineer working with SOA. I did not think about my plane ride much until I arrived in San Francisco to attend the SOA World Conference & Expo this past Monday and Tuesday. The first day of the conference as I walked into the hotel, guess who I saw? My friend who I met on the Turkish Airlines flight from Istanbul. What a small world, isn't it? Her company was one of the sponsors of the event.

'What better way to show we are committed to turning our Outdoor assets into next-generation interactive platforms than providing free Wi-Fi service in what is arguably the busiest stretch of real estate in the world?' said Wally Kelly, Chairman and CEO of CBS Outdoor, as he announced today that CBS will 'light up' midtown Manhattan with the creation of the 'CBS Mobile Zone,' a wireless high-speed network enabling New Yorkers with Wi-Fi-enabled cell phones, laptops or other devices to access the Internet for free, and to make VoIP calls.

FFE Software has announced the first release of its new Java DB - FirstSQL/J Embedded Mobile Edition. Embedded Mobile is a special packaging of the standard FirstSQL/J Java DB for a small footprint, supporting JME and suitable for other embedded configurations.

The Android Developer Challenge will provide $10 million to developers who build mobile applications for Android, a complete, open, and free mobile platform. The Challenge is designed to support the developer community and spark innovation on the Android platform by awarding cash prizes ranging from $25,000 to $275,000 to developers whose applications are picked by a panel of judges.

I want to counter a lot of the press and blog comments stating that the release of the SDK is a reversal or some kind of about face. If anybody had done their homework, they would know that Steve Jobs himself stated that he wanted to create an environment that supported native 3rd party app development, but that they didn't have it 'right' just yet, and that he wanted people to be patient.

The three-year-old Dojo Foundation has put out version 1.0 of Dojo, an open source JavaScript toolkit for AJAX development meant for building rich Web 2.0 applications without proprietary plug-ins or single-vendor solutions. The widgetry makes use of Google Gears, Google's solution for making applications work both on- and offline. What Dojo calls Dojo Offline is based on it. The toolkit is all of 25K in size and supports progressive enhancement and animations and is supposed to open the door to a wealth of high-quality widgets and extension modules. Dojo also supports the Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer and Opera browsers and the OpenAjax Alliance Hub 1.0 to guarantee interoperability with other toolkits IBM, Sun, BEA and AOL are Dojo backers.

Egenera, which claims it's the archetype Virtualization 2.0 company to VMware's Virtualization 1.0 - and is going put its PAN Manager software on other people's hardware to prove it - has convinced Fujitsu Siemens, which OEMs Egenera's BladeFrame servers, to put PAN on its own industry-standard Primergy servers. It's Egenera's first PAN partnership since the American company said last week that it was setting up a software line of business around PAN and would move the software out through fellow OEMs. Fujitsu Siemens says the widgetry will form part of its FlexFrame Infrastructure, its latest milestone in its Dynamic Data Center strategy of creating business-responsive IT using the latest virtualization and automation technologies.

MIR3 has announced the availability of an enterprise notification and command interface for the Apple iPhone and iPod touch (dubbed 'iTouch' by the media) mobile communications platform. These full-featured Web-based management applications from MIR3 run under Apple's mobile Safari browser to enable corporate executives and IT administrators to initiate emergency notifications and remotely manage enterprise notification systems and response teams using Apple iPhone or iTouch mobile devices.

HP has announced an enhanced network platform to help telecom operators provide services to millions of customers. HP Service Delivery Platform (SDP) 2.0 enables operators to offer their customers greater access to convergent, multimedia, and 'Web 2.0' services on their mobile devices. The platform also addresses the need for operators to increase revenue from convergent services while simultaneously reducing the cost and risk of creating such services.

My own personal install of Leopard seems to be having periodic trouble completing a shutdown on the 17' MBP. Annoying? Yes. Worthy of posting something inflammatory such as 'wrong with Leopard's spots'? Doubtful. So, in looking at eWeek's Microsoft Watch's latest article, I leave you with this parting thought: If it walks like a shill, acts like a shill, and smells like a shill....

So it seems as though a few minutes after I wrote this blog entry, Google put forth the announcement about Android, a project named after the company they purchased a while back. Google is essentially spearheading an open source project that is an open SDK for mobile devices that runs on a variant of Linux optimized for mobile devices. This could be good or bad for them - they'll need a critical mass of partners who adopt this platform to provide a large enough ecosystem to attract developers. Devs are freaking busy these days, and none of us have time to learn yet another SDK without some reasonable assurance that someone will actually use the software we're building.

Google made its first public move today to put its brand on the mobile sector, announcing an Open Handset Alliance of 33 partner companies committed to advancing an open source platform called Android. Google's partners, gathered apparently over the last year, include T-Mobile, Motorola, Sprint Nextel, China Mobile, KDDI, NTT DoCoMo, Telecom Italia, eBay and Telefonica as well as HTC, Samsung, Qualcomm, Nvidia, TI and Wind River. Obviously Apple, Microsoft and Nokia aren't members.

Google has made its first public move to put its brand on the mobile sector, announcing an Open Handset Alliance of 33 partner companies committed to advancing an open source platform called Android. Google's partners, gathered apparently over the last year, include T-Mobile, Motorola, Sprint Nextel, China Mobile, KDDI, NTT DoCoMo, Telecom Italia, eBay and Telefonica as well as HTC, Samsung, Qualcomm, Nvidia, TI and Wind River.

Do I care just because I am a Google fanboy? Not exactly, although that does amp up my excitement. With an open platform for development for mobiles, plus Google's conquest of Jaiku for its mobile/presence capabilities - I am a big fan of Jyri Engestrom, the founder of Jaiku, a smart and innovative person devoted to the Net's common good - this could be the disruption that turns mobile phones from annoying bricks of bad reception into a platform for apps that can assume constant presence and that know where we are and who our friends are. It could make FaceBook look like CompuServ.

Google is supposed to be inching closer to unveiling its fabled 'Gphone,' according to the Wall Street Journal Tuesday. The paper says that in the next couple of weeks Google should trot out 'advanced software and services that would allow handset markers to bring Google-powered phone to market by the middle of next year.' Google is supposed to want to deliver stuff like Gmail, Google Maps, YouTube and its almighty search to handsets and Gphone's Linux-based widgetry would be completely open to rally third-party developers to write additional - albeit potentially insecure and hackable - services. Ads would follow. The Journal says Google is chasing deals with T-Mobile USA, 3 UK and Orange SA.

Sprint Nextel shares, which have already lost 12% this year, fell further on the announcement yesterday of a massive 77% profit dive in its latest reported results. 2007 profits will be less than $11BN on sales of $41BN. CEO Gary Forsee left the company recently, leaving CFO Paul Saleh to act as CEO since his resignation. Sprint Nextel lost 60,000 wireless customers in the third quarter alone.

Now that Leopard is out and everyone is, I suspect, feverishly reformatting their laptops and desktops to install the retail copy of Leopard, developers can finally start sharing their Leopard code samples. Rather than me sitting around making up stupid reasons why such-and-such code sample might be useful to you, I figured I would ask what code you want to see written in Leopard. Keep in mind that I will not write code samples that do not use garbage collection or the new property syntax, so you'll just have to suffer through that.

Let's consider the pages of a traditional corporate Website. They include an 'about me' page, a contact page, a careers section, and probably a page with news and press releases. The words look good on paper, and, more than likely, a committee gave the final sign-off on the site's content. Visitors frequent these pages because they want to learn about the company's products and services, contact the company by phone to request more information, or find a job.

Readers of TIME's November 5 edition, which will be on on US newsstands tomorrow November 2, will find that the iPhone is TIME Magazine's Invention of the Year 2007. Among the reasons cited are 'It's touchy-feely' and 'It will make other phones better.' The award also recognizes that the iPhone is not just a phone but a platform.

According to Umang Gupta, chairman & CEO of Keynote, 'Zenprise's BlackBerry customers will greatly benefit from this service. Now, Zenprise customers will be continuously aware of an end user's experience with their carrier network. Keynote's emphasis on real-time network visibility is a crucial component in this partnership and highlights our ongoing investment in the mobile experience. By partnering with Zenprise, the leader in BlackBerry trouble shooting software, customers receive immediate notification of any carrier, server infrastructure, or device issue that impacts BlackBerry users.'

Leopard introduces a bunch of amazingly powerful new controls, but one of my favorite new controls is the NSCollectionView. This control works a lot like the FlowLayoutPanel if you're familiar with Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). It essentially is a layout container responsible for laying out a collection of subviews. You can either manually create the subview collection, or you can set the content array of the NSCollectionView. This is a really powerful option because if you can set the content array, you can also bind it. For this demo, I've bound the content array of the NSCollectionView to an array controller. If you follow along (or if you cheat and just download the code), you'll notice that the NSCollectionView subviews automatically request Core Animation layers. This means that, by default, new items fade in as they are added, but you can change that transition using the animations tab of the inspector.

What I am going to do in this regular column is feed my habit by highlighting some of the books I am reading, and (mostly) enjoying. (I will only rarely write negative reviews; it's a rare book that I 'do not put down gently but throw across the room with great force' after all.) Geeks like to read - and not only programming books. Most of us read incessantly. Whether it's popular science, sci-fi or fantasy, a good thriller or an occasional popular history book or biography, it's a rare geek who isn't in love with books. And I am no exception, although I have to confess I am rather an extreme case since my love of books and eclectic tastes borders on the 'gentle madness' aka bibliomania.

The first Rich FAQ we are presenting is the long overdue Mobile Ajax FAQ and was created by Ajit Jaokar, Rocco Georgi and Bryan Rieger. We welcome comments and feedback. AJAX is a browser technology that involves the use of existing Web standards and technologies (XML/XHTML, DOM, CSS, JavaScript, XHR - XMLHttpRequest) to create more responsive Web applications that reduce bandwidth usage by avoiding full page refreshes and providing a more 'desktop application-like' user experience. The term AJAX was coined by Jesse James Garrett in his seminal document at Adaptive Path.

Gee whillikers. After hours on Monday Apple, the PC company people love to love, started behaving like Google. While its Q4 conference call was in progress its stock price went up almost $13 to over $187, a personal best, a position it then failed to hold. Even if it pulled in its December gross margin and had doubts Mac could outdo itself, September was a scorcher and December promises to be better still, it said, projecting earnings of a whopping $1.42 a share on revenues of $9.2 billion, better than the $1.30 on $8.7 billion that the Street has been imagining.

There's a really interesting (free) article by Amol Sharma in the Wall Street Journal about Google's expected cellphone software, and whether Google will be able to do the necessary deals with the mobile carriers. In addition to providing core Google apps (search, maps, YouTube, etc.), the rumor is that the Google mobile operating system will be open to developers who want to use the phone's services, such as GPS data.

According to a report this morning in the Wall Street Journal, and quoting 'people familiar with the situation,' within the next two weeks Google is expected to announce advanced software and services that would allow handset makers to bring Google-powered phones to market by the middle of next year.

Anything you can do on your Facebook web page you will shortly be able to do instead on your BlackBerry, thanks to a new Facebook app being released by RIM, the makers of BlackBerries. RIM co-CEO Mike Lazaridis made the announcement yesterday at the CTIA conference in San Francisco. For example you can now invite people to join Facebook and accept new friend requests on the spot.

'Sideloading can take mobile video advertising where it has never gone before -- directly to the consumer without the intermediation of a mobile carrier network,' said Philip John, founder and CEO of Clippz.com, as he today announced what he described as the world's first and only way to sideload optimized videos from the Internet to a mobile device.

In 2008, the last frontier of broadband access will finally be conquered. Air travelers in the U.S. can look forward to surfing the web as they fly through the sky. Using air-to-ground (cellular) technology, AirCell, a 15-year leader in airborne communications, will pioneer the launch of inflight broadband connectivity on commercial airlines, improving the travel experience for millions of fliers in the new year.