About the news itself, I invite you to spend 2 minutes to read directly from the words of Eric Chu on the official blog.

Said that, what is not defined yet (just the screenshot you see here) is Security. Better, what exactly they have in mind? Just put on the Market WHATEVER the developer will come with and leave to the final user the burden of reading, understanding and accepting/rejecting the application. Based on just some words written on a little screen? Words that sounds like C3PO?

When I first met Jason Chen, a Google Android Developer Advocate who did the Android Code Day here in London, that «this idea was not going to work!». And all the other mobile developers agreed with me. And I still believe that sort of “Test&Approve” infrastructure is needed.

And one of the newest, but very noisy, guy out there is doing a decent job on that .

But I can be wrong. Or Google showed just “half of the cake”.

[Original Source: Android Authority]

No, I’m not Dead. I’m just “very Busy” guys
A lot of things are happening at the same time: as soon as I have more time I’ll speak about it.

I’ll just make a list of things I would like to speak about… if I would have time to do so:

• My new Job in France Telecom R&D UK - Orange Labs and my work inside the Source of Webkit (and a bit of Opera)
• The fact that Joe Nocera was finally kicked in his balls by a proud Steve Jobs about his health
• Symbian going Open Source AND some (stupid?) rumors about Symbian “merging” with Android
• My aiming to buy a Samsung SM2032MW 20″ Widescreen TV Monitor- Black (that supports HDMI, DVI, RGB, SCART, 1080p/i and so on… (yes, for a PS3 ) )

But… I’ll just keep doing what I’m doing.
See you soon

From Slashdot:

Nokia Urges Linux Developers To Be Cool With DRM

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superglaze writes in to note that according to Nokia’s software chief, its plans for open source include getting developers to accept things like DRM, commercial IP rights, and SIM locks.

«[Ari] Jaaksi admitted that concepts like these “go against the open-source philosophy,” but said they were necessary components of the current mobile industry.
“Why do we need closed vehicles? We do,” he said.
“Some of these things harm the industry but they’re here [as things stand]. These are touchy, emotional issues, but this dialogue is very much needed. As an industry, we plan to use open-source technologies, but we are not yet ready to play by the rules; but this needs to work the other way round too.”»

So, Nokia wants to EAT using the knowledge and the software that the Open Source Community created… and, at the same time, change it’s culture and impose concepts that are COMPLETELY against the Open Source “philosophy” itself. Interesting…
Instead of learning of the quality of what the Open Source community is capable of doing using a development model built around “equality and quality”, they want to teach/impose? And to who? To the Trolltech employee? They are free to do so… but this does not mean that the rest of the Community will change its mind.
QT? There is KDE that has a foundation to protect it PLUS there is always the Fork option .
Think about XFree86 and X.org: nowdays they lost all the users… because of the stupid decision of changing the license.

Sorry mates, this is not the right way. And now you are not the only player any more: still the biggest… but this is changing, and the Q4-2007 + Q1-2008 says that more than anything else.

Source: Pollycoke.

I was looking for info about MapReduce and I thought that would have been a good idea to take a look at the Tech Talks published by Google. Here we go.

Title: 2007 Seattle Conference on Scalability: MapReduce Used on Large Geographic Data Sets
Location: Google Tech Talks June 23, 2007
Speaker: Barry Brumitt, Google Inc.
Abstract: MapReduce is a programming model and library designed to simplify distributed processing of huge datasets on large clusters of computers. This is achieved by providing a general mechanism which largely relieves the programmer from having to handle challenging distributed computing problems such as data distribution, process coordination, fault tolerance, and scaling. While working on Google maps, I’ve used MapReduce extensively to process and transform datasets which describe the earth’s geography. In this talk, I’ll introduce MapReduce, demonstrating its broad applicability through example problems ranging from basic data transformation to complex graph processing, all the in the context of geographic data.

Other than just the topic of MapReduce technique itself, this guy, Barry Brumitt, gives an hint of “how things work” in Google (developer wise). And it’s not boring at all: is actually quite funny.

Last 2/3 months I used a bit of my free time studying Android the so called “Google OS”, that is the result of the Open Handset Alliance.

In this relatively short amount of time I had the possibility to collect information from the official sources, as well as from very interesting and active forums (like this one and this one). I had also the possibility to meet other experts during the Android Code Day event (here a summary what we did there). It was a very good place to ask important business related questions: I should say that the Google Developer Advocate Jason Chen was very keen to answer my tricky questions .

Spending other words on this here is quite pointless: half of the web speaks about it (while the other half speaks about iPhone ). But I would like to share part of the result of this study:

• A Presentation: “Into the Android” [PDF | HTML+Flash]
• Video #1: MWC - Android running on different ARM-based devices [mp4]
• Video #2: MWC - Android running on E2831 [mp4]
• Source code of the Application I developed for study (actually, is just the Tutorial that comes with the SDK with much more internal documentation ): VSNotepad.tar.gz.

The presentation explains different details of the Development process using the code of this application as an example.

The video are also on Youtube and embedded here after the jump. Continue…

An impressive video from the Nokia Research Center: it shows a concept technology called “Morph” based on the usage of NanoTechnology for mobile devices (I feel that continue to call them “phones” is becoming very reductive).

I’m sorry I can’t embed the video in this post: you can find it here.