CourseCast of the Week

Episode 0055, 06/28/2008

Title/Description: Competition in Open Mobile Software

Welcome to Course Technology's CourseCast of the week, Episode 55, recorded June 28th, 2008. This is Ken Baldauf bringing you this week's technology news and information. This CourseCast is brought to you by Course Technology. Check out www.course.com for innovative textbooks and creative electronic learning solutions.

Story 1 - Competition Ramps Up In Open Mobile Software

Which software company holds the largest share of the global mobile smartphone market? If you think its Microsoft, Apple, RIM, or Palm, think again. Symbian dominates the global smartphone market with 60 percent of smartphones using its software. This will come as a surprise to most Americans since phones like the Blackberry have outsold Symbian-based phones in the US market. Outside of the US, however, Symbian is king.

Nokia has been a large share holder in Symbian, and this week announced that it is buying up the remaining shares. Nokia has announced that it plans to open source Symbian software, making its softer code available to any software developer that would like to write programs for Symbian-powered phones. This news has tech analysts buzzing as it will strongly impact competition in the next generation phone market. Symbian now joins Apple, and Google in providing an application programming interface or API that allows anyone to submit new software for handsets. Google's Android platform has already generated thousands of amazing handset applications that are due to hit the market later this year. Apple's iPhone coming in July will bring with it hundreds of applications designed outside of Apple. Breaking down the dam that has held back innovation and allowed the cell phone carriers to load handsets with only their own proprietary software, will provide a flood of new cell phone software and services that will hit the market over the course of the next year. Unlike the direction that PCs have followed, cell phones appear to be destined for an open source future. Keep your eye on competition in the cell phone market to see if open source platforms are able to dominate over proprietary systems.

Sources: By Open Sourcing Symbian, Nokia Kicks Off the Mobile Age [Wired], Google's Open Source Android OS Will Free the Wireless Web [Wired], Symbian Foundation Could Unleash Mobile Innovation [NewsFactor]

And that brings us to News Briefs.

  • ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, has unanimously approved new guidelines that will allow anyone with money and time to create new top-level domains. This means the list of approved TLD's like .com, .edu, .org, .net, and .gov, is about to get a lot longer. [NYTimes]
  • Speaking of ICANN, Turkish hackers broke into the Web servers of ICANN and redirected visitors of the sites to another page which stated "You think that you control the domains but you don't!" [Computerworld]
  • You think outsourcing has gotten out of hand? Consider tech students in the UK who are outsourcing their programming homework to coding firms in India. [silicon.com]
  • Google has begun beta testing social networking functionality that it intends to add to its iGoogle service - look out Facebook and MySapce! [Computerworld]
  • MySpace has added a new feature that will allow users to transfer content of their pages to other Web sites and social networks.[Ars Technica]
  • Bill Gates has retired from Microsoft, marking and end of an era. He and Paul Allen founded Microsoft 33 years ago, expanding computing to personal desktops, and building a software dynasty. [Ars Technica]
  • In addition to buying Symbian, Nokia has also purchased a social-networking startup called Plazas. It appears that Nokia is setting up to give Google a run for its money in the mobile Internet market. [Reuters]
  • An article in Time discusses a growing crisis in the job market: fewer college students choosing computer-related degrees, in a time when the demand is increasing for computing professionals. [Time]
  • Windows Vista is still struggling in the business arena. According to a recent survey, 92 percent of corporate software developers are ignoring the Vista platform in favor of XP and Linux -even Microsoft-friendly Intel has announced that it will not be upgrading to Vista in its corporate offices. [NYTimes]
  • That said, NBC apparently likes Microsoft and Windows Vista. An exclusive agreement between NBC and Microsoft will restrict Summer Olympic video downloads to PC's running Vista. To view streaming video of the games will require Microsoft's Silverlight technology. [Ars Technica]
  • Facebook has overtaken MySpace in popularity, boasting 123 million unique visitors in May, up 162% from a year ago. [PCPro]
  • Microsoft's June security update zapped malware that was running on over two million PCs stealing users passwords. [Computerworld]
  • A group of well known Internet academics, activists, and entrepreneurs have created the "Internet for Everyone" campaign to pressure the US government to provide universal, affordable, high-speed broadband for its citizens. [Ars Technica]

That's it for this week's CourseCast. Links to this week's stories and many more news and information resources are provided at the CourseCast Web site at www.course.com/coursecasts. E-mail us with your suggestions for the show at course.coursecasts@cengage.com. Until next time, have a great week and be sure to take advantage of the Power -- of Technology!