• Today we’re somehow in between yesterdays geek fight between Apple and Google over the openess and/or integration of Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android mobile operating system and tonights Apple event.
    Developer Joe Hewitt, who for example built the great Firefox Extension Firebug and the first few versions of the great Facebook iPhone App, has now joined in to the discussion via Twitter.

    How does Android get away with the “open” claim when the source isn’t public until major releases, and no one outside Google can check in?

    Until Android is read/write open, it’s no different than iOS to me. Open source means sharing control with the community, not show and tell.

    Check his Twitter stream for all of his statements. So why is this interesting? Well, firstly Joe Hewitt has given up on developing the Facebook iPhone client because of a lack of choice over the whole process, but he didn’t stop working for Facebook and rumors say he’s in charge of developing an official Android client for Facebook. So now he’s equally frustrated with the state of things over at iOS’s biggest rival. We’ll see if any more voices appear but for the time being it seems like the “open claims” of the Android folks didn’t hold for very long and in my personal opinion enduser satisfaction probably ranks higher than having an OS that can be compiled yourself and in this field Apple still holds the crown. I – as a geek – might enjoy hacking my devices and tweaking every little aspect of the platform, but for the average user it’s much more important to find the applications you want to use easily and without much set up effort which is still easier with a unified platform like iOS in contrast to the fragmented multi incarnations of Android on different carriers and handheld platforms.

  • The other big thing is of course Apple’s “Back to the Mac” event that will be held this evening which will probably announce a new version of OS X together with some Mac centric product announcements. I wont go into speculating what exactly will be announced though.
  • In other news: App Stores seem to be popping up all over the place:
  • HP offers a Video Walkthrough of webOS 2.0

  • WiMAX 4G Coming to New York City, San Francisco and Los Angeles in 2010
    The next-next generation U.S. wireless technology is preparing itself for primetime in major metropolitan areas. New York City, San Francisco and Los Angeles will each have 4G WiMAX by the end of 2010.
  • Microsoft’s Ray Ozzie To Step Down As Chief Software Architect
    Microsoft has just?announced?that?Ray Ozzie, the company’s Chief Software Architect is stepping down from this position.
    Ozzie assumed the chief software architect’s role in June 2006. In his role, Ozzie was responsible for oversight of the company’s technical strategy and product architecture. Prior to this role, Ozzie was chief technical officer from April 2005 to June 2006. He assumed that position in April 2005 after Microsoft acquired Groove Networks, a next-generation collaboration software company he formed in 1997.
  • Driverless taxi gets called with an iPad
    This is just wild! A group of researchers in Berlin have been?working on “autonomous cars” for a while. The Berlin team has pushed the idea ahead by hooking the car up to an iPad. The iPad’s GPS location is sent out to the car, and then the user can even track the car’s movement and scanner information directly from the iPad.
  • Google Puts the Emphasis on Location in Search
    With a few tweaks and an interface change, Google has placed location and location-based search front-and-center in its search engine.
    The big change, announced earlier today?on Google Blogs, is thatGoogle has moved the user location setting to the left-hand panel of the search engine results page. This feature automatically detects your current location and tailors search results based on that.
    The change rolls out starting today and will be available to users in 40+ languages sometime soon.
  • Apple releases Q4 results: $20.34B revenue, $4.31B profits
    Apple reports earnings of $4.31 billion, or $4.64 a share, in the fiscal fourth quarter, versus $1.82 a share in the year-ago quarter.
    3.89 million Macs, 14.1m iPhones (almost 2x the previous year’s number), 4.19m iPads sold in Q4.
    ANdy Rubin's answer to Steve JobsDuring Apple’s earnings call yesterday, Jobs pointed out that open systems don’t always win.?
    But he also tried to reframe the debate. Open versus closed is a smokescreen,? he argues. Google likes to characterize Android as open and iOS as closed. We think this is disingenuous.? The real difference between the iPhone and Android is, he says, integrated versus fragmented.
    Android chief Andy Rubin responded with his first tweet. (See image)
  • IPv4 Space Shrinks To 5% Final Addresses To Be Issued In Early 2011
    The Number Resource Organization, the coordinating mechanism for the five?Regional Internet Registries or?RIRs, this morning?announced that less than 5% of the world?IPv4 (Internet Protocol version 4) addresses remain unallocated. The IPv4 pool first dipped below 10% in January 2010, and in the next nine months some 200 million addresses have subsequently been allocated from the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) to the RIRs.
    Follow @IPv4Countdown to keep up to date and meanwhile prepare your systems for IPv6 (it’s about time anyway).

Today seems to be a slow news morning. Mostly because everyone is apparently only slowly recovering from weekend mode I guess, but here are the bits I deemed noteworthy today.

  • Yahoo Mimics Facebook Connect With Y Connect??
    Yahoo will soon launch a service called Y Connect?? with features very similar to those of Facebook Connect?portable identity management, integrating Yahoo content on third-party websites, and sharing data about what you’re doing and where with your Yahoo contacts.
  • Throwback to the 90s: How Social Networking is Moving Back to Private
    On the social networking battle field, people are dropping like flies and canceling their Facebook accounts or taking a break from Twitter. These social networking casualties are looking for news ways to share and interact with select friends in a more private and intimate setting.
  • Benoît Mandelbrot at the EPFL, on the 14h of M...

    Image via Wikipedia

    Benot Mandelbrot 1924 – 2010
    Mandelbrot died in a hospice in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on 14 October 2010 from pancreatic cancer, at the age of 85.
    Mandelbrot worked on a wide range of mathematical problems, including mathematical physics and quantitative finance, but is best known as the father of fractal geometry. He coined the term fractal and described the Mandelbrot set. Mandelbrot extensively popularized his work, writing books and giving lectures aimed at the general public.

This is the first post of what I plan to make a recurring feature on this blog. Each day I will try to assemble a post with interesting news that pop up in my newsfeed.
So here it goes…