Nokia wants to buy the 52% of the Symbian operating system that it doesn't already own to open source it and set it free. It's a defense against advances into the fragmented mobile space that Nokia and Symbian dominate - particularly - from the looks of case - against Google's nascent open source Android initiative and the freebie Linux-based LiMo Foundation - but then there's also Apple's proprietary iPhone, Microsoft's equally proprietary, royalty-charging Windows Mobile and the ever-present Blackberry and Palm.

Nokia announced it has launched a cash offer to acquire all of the shares of Symbian Limited that Nokia does not already own, at a price of EUR 3.647 per share. The net cash outlay from Nokia to purchase the approximately 52% of Symbian Limited shares it does not already own will be approximately EUR 264 million.

So how does this relate to MobileMe? MobileMe is, according to Phil Schiller's keynote, 'Exchange for the rest of us'. What this means is that using MobileMe, you will receive push contacts, push e-mail, and push calendar notifications. This will work with any MobileMe-aware application, including Outlook on the PC and iCal, Mail, and Address Book on the Mac and iPhone. This also includes the old iDisk functionality which allows you to share files among all of your devices using file synchronization technologies. iDisk works, but don't ever try to code directly on an iDisk folder with Xcode unless you have a back-up. Hopefully this peculiarity has been fixed in MobileMe.

From Application Virtualization to Xen, a round-up of the virtualization themes & topics being discussed in NYC June 23-24, 2008 by the world-class speaker faculty at the 3rd International Virtualization Conference & Expo being held by SYS-CON Events in The Roosevelt Hotel, in midtown Manhattan.

TRANGO announced it has partnered with Symbian to support the growing market for Symbian OS mobile phones, extending the benefits of virtualization to the Symbian ecosystem. Symbian develops and licenses Symbian OS, the open operating system for mobile phones. Symbian OS is licensed by handset manufacturers, and to date, over 200 million Symbian devices have shipped worldwide to over 250 major network operators.

Objective Systems announced the selection of its ASN.1 tools by Symbian. Symbian is a software licensing company that develops and licenses Symbian OS, the open operating system for mobile phones. Objective Systems ASN.1C compiler has been recently updated to provide built-in support for Symbian OS.

Friday morning the local Fox television station in New York City broke the news - Apple was suing New York City. Six out of 100 of their viewers thought Apple had the right to sue the City, but 94 out of 100 viewers are now calling for New Yorkers to drop Apple and its products, including the iPhone and Macs. New Yorkers are pissed off! New York City, universally known as The Big Apple, is facing a lawsuit from Steve Jobs' Apple Computer Inc. for, of all things, copyright infringement.

Red Hat CTO Brian Stevens, Citrix CTO Simon Crosby, Egenera CTO Pete Manca, Allen Stewart, Group Manager, Windows Virtualization at Microsoft, and Brian Duckering, Sr. Director of Products and Alliances at Symantec were the top industry executives who joined Jeremy Geelan in the 4th Floor Reuters Studio overlooking Times Square for a special SYS-CON.TV 'Virtualization Power Panel' recorded on June 22, 2008, the day before the opening of SYS-CON's 3rd International Virtualization Conference & Expo - which was held 23-24 June 2008 in New York City.

Intrinsyc was appointed a Symbian Competence Center by Symbian Limited. Symbian recognized Intrinsyc's expertise in mobile device software development, as well as Intrinsyc's contribution to the successful development of Symbian OS handsets. As one of only ten Symbian Competence Centers worldwide, and the only center based in North America, Intrinsyc helps handset manufacturers, operators, partners and silicon vendors reduce product development time and cost while improving time-to-market and quality.

QSound Labs announced that its mQFX and QSurroundMobile technologies will be made available on Symbian OS as a reference component. mQFX, for 3D stereo audio enhancement effects, and QSurroundMobile, the multichannel audio virtualization technology, will be available in Symbian OS developer and customer kits and can be used for test and demonstration purposes. QSound's mQFX and QSurroundMobile will provide extended functionality for Symbian OS mobile phones, delivering a superior listening experience for all types of multimedia content.

Curl announced the beta release of Curl Nitro, the code name for an extension of the Curl Rich Internet Application (RIA) platform which offers enhanced desktop capabilities required by today's enterprises. The Nitro extension simplifies the process of installing and managing Curl applications accessed via a browser as well as directly from the desktop. Curl Nitro is the only platform for both traditional RIA and Desktop RIA that provides enterprise-level security, high performance and support for large data sets.

The mouse was the original idea of Doug Engelbart who was the head of the Augmentation Research Center (ARC) at Stanford Research Institute. Engelbart's philosophy is best embodied, in my opinion, in the design of another device that he invented, the five-finger keyboard - with keys like a piano, used by one hand. The problem was, Engelbart's five-finger keyboard and mouse combination was very difficult to learn.

Now, what Google announced is really exciting! I'm not kidding. It's even better than I hoped. Yes, it's only Python, but IBM's PC-DOS was only BASIC and Pascal when it first came out, and it didn't matter. Yeah, I preferred C, but I coded in Pascal because that's what you had to do to get an app running. What you're going to see here that you've never seen before is shrinkwrap net apps that scale that can be deployed by civillians. That's a mouthful, but that's what's coming. Why? Because here is a standardized platform that can be stamped out in the billions of units. Maybe Google can't do it, but the perception is that they can. Who is willing to stand up and say Google hasn't nailed scaling? What PCs did in the 80s, Google is doing now. PCs took the black magic out of owning a computer.

Adobe has put an alpha pre-release of AIR for Linux up in hopes, it says, of getting feedback from the community, not to mention winning adherents. It's English-only. The company also joined the Linux Foundation to encourage the growth of RIA technologies on Linux, it said. The company says Linux developers can use HTML, AJAX, Flash and Flex to build rich Internet applications (RIAs) that deploy to desktops across operating systems.

If you're like me, you've probably been spending every waking moment you have eating, living, and breathing the iPhone SDK. Since March 6th, that's pretty much all I can think about once I get home. So, what do you do if you want to learn how to write iPhone apps, but you want to become a pro at iPhone SDK programming? Its one thing to read the SDK, page-by-page until your eyes bleed (what I do for fun), but most people like to hang out with other developers, get hands on, do labs, see demos, and generally get their hands dirty.

'Unlocking content to be remixed into new business value' is the driver of Web 2.0 in the enterprise, says Rod Smith, IBM VP of Emerging Internet Technologies, in this Exclusive Q&A with Jeremy Geelan on the occasion of IBM's release of a new technology created by IBM researchers, codenamed 'SMash' - short for Secure Mashup.

Outbid by Verizon Wireless in the great American airwaves auction last week, Google plunked a six-page letter on the Federal Communication Commission's desk asking the government to make the 'white spaces' - the airspace between TV channels - available for unlicensed wireless data use by mobile devices. The notion is backed by Microsoft, Intel, HP, Dell and the North American arm of Philips Electronics, a k a the White Space Coalition, and opposed by broadcasters on the theory that it's going to interfere with TV reception.

Apple's iPhone is a massive hit; the company has sold millions of handsets since the product's launch in June 2007. Within weeks of the iPhone hitting the market, the first of several highly publicized security exploits, a Trojan virus targeting the device, was identified. SMobile Systems has announced that it has ported its signature application suite, Security Shield, to the iPhone, utilizing the recently released Apple Software Development Kit (SDK).

Sybase iAnywhere announced availability of support for Apple iPhone during the first international iPhone Developer Summit, colocated with AJAXWorld Conference & Expo 2008 East. Information Anywhere now enables IT organizations to provide secure delivery of Lotus Domino and Microsoft Exchange enterprise email to iPhone users, in addition to a broad range of other mobile devices. Sybase iAnywhere?s unique approach to providing enterprise email support for the iPhone reduces potential security concerns while still providing a rich user experience utilizing native iPhone applications.

This session will provide attendees with an overview of the iPhone SDK, including discussion of the App Store, Apple's planned distribution channel for SDK applications. Keep in mind that the contents of the SDK and experiences while using it are covered under NDA, so be prepared for me to talk in generics and leave out specific details that might be covered by the NDA. I am planning on providing a quick introduction to Objective-C for those attendees who may have never seen it and might be worried that it will be difficult to code in (it isn't!).

For the past ten years application developers have been stuck with only two desktop client choices. Traditionally, they can choose either a very thin Web-client technology implemented in HTML and CSS, or a very heavyweight thick client experience implemented using traditional client/server (C/S) technologies (e.g. Java Swing, MFC). It wasn't until the introduction of RIA technologies (e.g. AJAX, Adobe Flex, Curl, and Silverlight) and widget engines (e.g. Yahoo! Widgets and Google Gadgets) that we were given more options.

Acquia has yet to price its maintenance and support subscriptions - there should be a variety of SLAs - but they're supposed to include an electronic update notification system code named Spokes for updates that have been reviewed for security and compatibility and are supported by Acquia. Acquia is currently at 12 people, expecting to be 25 by the end of the year. Its Series A money comes from Northbridge Venture Partners, Sigma Partners and O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures. According to Dries' blog, Drupal 7 should offer the ability to create, share and mashup managed content, letting Drupal be a data repository accessed by tools and web sites across the network.

Microsoft today attempted to exorcize the interoperability bogeymen that have haunted it since it was first discovered to be using secret APIs 20 years ago, bogeymen that now quote European antitrust law at it and carry writs from the Court of First Instance in Luxembourg. To avoid further confrontation with the European Commission, which opened a broad investigation of Microsoft's interoperability last month, the company said it would voluntarily open up all the APIs and communications protocols in its biggest revenue producers now and forever. To be clear, it said that these are the APIs and protocols 'used by other Microsoft products.'

4 of our 6 first quarter projects have major components in Java ME. These are new applications, from companies who understand the porting issues and the complexities. This quarter is not particularly different from other quarters: we get far more work designing applications than designing web sites. Java ME is going to keep on chugging, maybe even seeing a rebirth, for quite a while yet.

Key opinion-formers in the field of infrastructure and pioneers of virtualization technologies of all types have already begun submitting speaking proposals to Virtualization Conference & Expo 2008 East, being held in New York City, 23-24 June, 2008. Topics covered will range from Server Virtualization, Application Virtualization, Desktop Virtualization, Network Virtualization, I/O Virtualization and Storage Virtualization, to Virtual Machine Automation, Physical to Virtual (P2V) Migration, Management Applications, Tools and Utilities, and Virtualization Scripts and Procedures.

Since the iPhone was first released, early adopters haven't stopped talking about what they think of the device. While the free promotion can be a great marketing tool for wireless carriers, it can be crippling if users have issues with session and network quality. This is the background to the iPhone Developer Summit session 'Early Adopters: The Key to Free Publicity or the Fall of a Technology,' to be given in March by Mark McIlvane, President & COO of Velocent Systems.

Google's new-year special logo, which went live briefly as 2008 began, celebrated the 25th anniversary of TCP/IP - adopted by Arpanet on January 1st, 1983. While 'invisible' to most users, many of the layers built on top of TCP/IP are well-known even to laymen: HTTP (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol), FTP (the File Transfer Protocol), SMTP and POP3, and IRC.

Perforce Software announced that Ixonos Plc, headquartered in Helsinki, Finland, has chosen Perforce, the Fast Software Configuration Management (SCM) System, to manage software development projects for its leading smartphone customers. Ixonos' telecommunications business unit specializes in the development, verification, maintenance and project management of software applications and information systems for licensees of the Symbian OS and smartphone manufacturers.

In keeping with the longstanding SYS-CON tradition of being at the very forefront of software development with all its online and offline resources, SYS-CON Media & Events jointly today announced a double whammy, launching both 'Open Web Developer's Journal' (htt p://openweb.sys-con.com) and 'Open Web Developer Summit' (http://openweb.s ys-con.com) - to be held for the first time in New York City April 21-22, 2008.

Since Ed Zander led Sun into the valley of the shadow of death back, what? over five years ago now, it has never recovered. And there's a good chance the same thing may happen to Motorola. With a year left to run on his contract, Zander quit yesterday and clearly not a moment too soon given the events of the last year or so. There are people who would have gladly ridden him out of town on a rail months ago and it's assumed he's resigning now to avoid getting fired. Zander, whose telecom experience consisted of answering the phone, was brought in four years ago to narrow the lead in phones between a first-place Nokia and a second-place Motorola. Motorola is now in third place, losing ground to both Nokia and Samsung, its market share sheered from 20.7% a year ago to 13.1% now.

Within minutes of my blog entry, I received the strangest email notification, alerting me to another blog written by Alan Zeichick, 'co-founder and editorial director of BZ Media, which publishes SD Times and Software Test & Performance, and which also produces the Software Security Summit, Software Test & Performance Conference, and EclipseWorld. Also president and principal analyst of Camden Associates.' That's what his bio says.

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.

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.

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.

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....

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.

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.

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.

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.