Yesterday's news of Berlin-based Plazes getting consumed by Nokia was overshadowed today with news from a London press conference that Nokia will acquire the remaining 52% of Symbian it didn't already own for $410M.  They then plan to follow the Android and LiMo for-free model, and offer Symbian as an open source mobile OS under the consortia management of the newly formed Symbian Foundation.  Initial foundation members include AT&T, Broadcom, DoCoMo, Ericsson, Freescale, LG Electronics, Motorola, Orange, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, STMicroelectronics, Texas Instruments and Vodafone.  

With Symbian commanding 60% market share in the mobile OS smartphone space today, the move sends clear a message to Apple and Google...  Nokia is in the fight for mindshare with developers and users in what I think we'll reminisce on 5 years from now as the true beginning of the mobile Web era.  

Google's My Location works better than an MPC/GMLC in terms of responsiveness and performance. I'm still not exactly sure how it works (Google won't tell me), but had a hunch it was a crowdsourced database of published information from millions of mobile users unknowingly volunteering to the system through Google Maps usage. Ted Morgan's comment on my theory, however, made me second guess these assumptions. With Skyhook already investing heavily in mapping wifi access points with drive-by-surveys, why not capture the cell side of the wireless airwaves? Consider this snippet from the Geolocation API description (yes, there's an API coming from Google...)

Many devices do not have native access to GPS or other location data. Additionally, GPS can take a long time to get an accurate location fix, drains battery, and does not work indoors. Because of these problems, the location API also has the ability to send various signals that the devices has access to (nearby cell sites, wifi nodes, etc) to a third-party location service provider, who can resolve the signals into a location estimate.

It's the third-party location service provider reference that's interesting – in addition to Ted’s comments…

MIT's minds of tomorrow value Location in mobility contexts more than other features such as voice or messaging.  A professor there recently challenged his computer science students to develop applications using Google's Android SDK, and a majority of the entries focused on location-based scenarios. 

If the brainstorms of these MIT students are an indication, phones will soon challenge the Internet as a source of innovation. For these students at least, cell phones should be all about location, location, location. Most of the projects produced by the seven teams of students involved programs that let phones track people's physical place -- or that of their friends -- to help them do things and meet up.

Here's one example from project Loco 

On the topic of openness at the 2008 Dow Jones Wireless Innovations conference...

All carriers have a lot of baggage.  We know we are hard to do business with. We can be caught up in our own bureaucracy with the size of our business.

We are working on a new approach for all our platforms so developers can have access to open software development kits and applications programming interfaces.  We are very excited about a set of open Android APIs and a variety of devices using them.  I hope it will generate development of not dozens but tens of thousands of new applications that will spawn a new level of excitement in this industry.

-Joe Sims, T-Mobile 

Google has really thought through what Apple has just begun to unlock.  Developers are now bringing up media applications on the systems and then will turn to work on location-based services and systems optimization for lowest power and maximum throughput.

-Sy Choudhury, QCT on the topic of Androids port to Qualcomm 3G solutions, which will initially include 5 new handset releases in the next 12 months   

-EE Times 

You just can't help but to be curious about Android.  It's not like a Linux-Java stack is revolutionary, but rather that the Android packaging and porting plan is by supporting the rapid introduction of thousands of mobile clones leading to the emergence of a device long tail, which could indeed lead to free phones someday.  That approach belittles big mobile OEM efforts big time by democratizing the tools of production and design now down to mobile manufacturing, and it arrives with impeccable timing when everyone is distracted by Apple and the head of the tail.  And with Google rounding up 1788 developers to write long tail apps for their Android Challenge, OEM Jedi's best watch your back.  A clone army is mobilizing.

Does a device like the iPhone really need funding allure for developers to start coding with its new SDK?  I would think most just want to get their hands on anything resembling some platform extensibility beyond Operator lockdown, even if that's now not till June.  Or, perhaps  the iFunders think that while Apple is sure to get droves of taxable developers and designers going after other consumer-oriented pay-for apps beyond the already popular native free ones, getting enterprise apps on the iPhone actually won't be as easy and therefore might need a little incentive.  Can you see all those Mac-toting IT coders itching to integrate the iPhone with their back-end customer care, inventory management, communications, and IT automation wares.  Ha.  That's a joke.  And, where's the GPS?  

There were four Android demos onsite in Barcelona this week. The three I saw at Marvell, Texas Instruments, and Qualcomm booths weren’t enough to convince me that the industry is on the verge of a disruptive paradigm shift a la Android, but rather that single-chip promises powering Android will indeed introduce disruptive motions; of course though, what I saw of Android itself wasn’t much beyond what Google shared back in November.

Marvell, Qualcomm, and TI were all demonstrating identical Android capabilities, apparently at Google’s request for non-differentiation - according to Sy Choudhury, a sharp PM from Qualcomm.  These capabilities included Browsing, OpenGL, etc. And all demos combined single-chip features such as GPS, broadband connectivity, graphics acceleration, and multimedia capabilities to showcase Google applications. For me, the wow-factor was not a spinning globe care of the OpenGL demo that looked like Google Earth, but rather the packaging of the computing & communications resources and integration porting of the Android Linux stack to them. The implications suggest anyone can build an Android phone or device by simply dropping the packaged silicon solution into a casing which any one of 1800+ ODMs in Asia can do these days. …Layer on a full stack open source operating system plus APIs and extensions, and the possibilities then become quite clear. It’s difficult to see how this approach (not necessarily Andriod itself) won’t change everything and turn the mobile world upside down for those selling mobile OS platforms or designing mobile devices… I hope Google can handle the porting demand though. They could get very busy, very soon. 

Dr Batty says he's coming out of the woodwork soon to unleash his spatial networking invention onto the facebook masses.  In other developments, team FOKUS is equally boiling-up some pioneering broth to not only include geospatial contexts but others like presentity, unified calling & conferencing, and instant messaging coupled with geospatial. 

With all the hubbub around openness - open networks, open business models, open sources of software, open platforms, and lots of open mouths about them all, I've come to the conclusion this is all more about a struggle over power and establishments than technology, with the decentralized under empowered gaining the strategic advantage and setting the tempo for conflict. There are thousands of coders out there always looking for the next opensource offering that holds the promise of disintermediating the established licensor's of royalty based bliss despised by those on the opposite side of the receiving end.   And the opposite side is good, really good at what they do because it's a shared mission, with a singular objective that can't be defeated.  Google knows this, and Android is the weapon.  Dash does to, and Openmoko is theirs... uh I mean ours. 

So I agree, and because I do, here's a quick survey...  How many of you would prefer to code with MicroEmulator over Java ME tools from Sun?  Answers will be taken quite seriously, and I will include the chosen in the next version of product.       

So I've been too busy to comment on news, but heard about Verizon allegedly opening up under pressure (I'll believe it when I see it), about Google's 700 Mhz "money where our mouth is" intention, and about MyLocation.  What do they all have in common?  Freedom, and the impending end of a tyrannical good ol' boys club of privileged access to scarce mobile Location resources. 

The later is remarkable.  I don't think MyLocation is RF science or algorithmic, but rather sources inherent handset-based Cell-ID keys and couples them with anonymous and voluntary GPS positions through Maps usage, which is elegant; as is appending voluntary address inputs with Cell-ID keys to further build up the database.  It's classic Google and looks like what LBS old-timers might consider a wisdom of the crowds MPC/GMLC minus the privacy management mechanics.

...Lets hope this manifests itself as a wrecking ball against walls for Cell-ID access and perceived value, allowing anyone to start building applications, not just those who have built their business on courting carriers who still foolishly assume this data is worth something.  These guys aren't so special now, neither is the information, and I suspect you'll be free to compete in an open market soon enough (and once this is commoditized by the very people who use and generate it).