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Mozilla is not just thinking of putting together a mobile operating system, the open source project actually has a roadmap in place to bring a demo sometime in the first quarter of 2012. We have seen a bunch of would-be mobile OS competitors rise and fall in fortunes over the last year or so, but Mozilla might actually have the name recognition and engineering clout to make a real dent in the market.

Mozilla's mobile OS would be open in the truest sense of the term open. Open is what Mozilla does. Mozilla will be working on bringing HTML5 as a fully functional OS to mobile. A look at Mozilla's roadmap is below.

News broke last night that speech-to-text software creator Nuance has acquired mobile text software designer Swype for $102.5 million. This is a big merger in the information input vertical of mobile ecosystem as it combines two of the hottest and most used features on smartphones today.

This could be the first steps to bringing Swype to the iPhone. We lamented after the iPhone 4S announcement that Siri, the voice input "assistant" coming in iOS 5, should have been Swype. Apple was a good working relationship with Nuance and if the parties can figure out a good graphical interface for Swype on the iPhone, it may be the next important feature in iOS.

Yesterday we wrote about the LiMo Foundation and how it could team with Intel to save its mobile operating system MeeGo from the depths of an icy grave. Well, MeeGo is dead. From its ashes rises Tizen, an open mobile OS partnership between LiMo and Intel and hosted by the Linux Foundation.

The first release of Tizen and its software developer kit is expected to come in early 2012, which means we could start seeing the first Tizen handsets by the second half of next year. What exactly is happening to MeeGo and can Tizen enhance on its potential?

Intel is trapped with dying mobile OS MeeGo and has very few options to develop it. That does not mean Intel is completely out of luck in the mobile world. An announcement is expected soon that Intel will partner with a global Linux consortium called the LiMo Foundation to develop Meego. LiMo's major partners include Samsung, Panasonic, NEC, Vodafone and NTT Docomo, the largest cellular carrier in Japan. What could be up the sleeves of the LiMo consortium by getting into MeeGo at this late hour?

Samsung may hold the key. There are multiple routes that Samsung could travel with LiMo. It could passively support MeeGo's development from afar or actively throw resources at it to provide a framework for its own mobile OS Bada. One thing is clear: Intel cannot completely abandon MeeGo.

Rumor surfaced last week that Samsung, the largest manufacturer of Android devices, may be looking into buying webOS from Hewlett-Packard after the computer company announced it would no longer manufacturer mobile devices. Samsung CEO Choi Gee Sung told reporters that Samsung would "never" buy webOS. This week, new rumors suggest that Samsung is considering throwing development resources into near-defunct mobile operating system MeeGo, a week after Intel dropped support of the platform.

It would make sense for Samsung to consider its options, especially in the wake of the Motorola/Google deal and the potential effects on the Android ecosystem. Yet, these rumors are also a classic case of the anatomy of how rumors circle the world of technology on a daily basis.

Baidu, the Chinese search giant, became the latest company to jump into the mobile operating system game this morning when it previewed Baidu Yi. The Android-based OS will offer much of the core functionality of Google's mobile OS, but replaces Google's apps with Baidu's own equivalents.

The previously-rumored OS was officially announced this morning at the company's Baidu World event in Beijing and is expected to be available on handsets soon. Some of the OS's default apps include maps, a book-reading app and a mobile version of Ting, the company's social music service.

Intel is reportedly stepping away from its investment into mobile operating system MeeGo. According to DigiTimes, Intel may be discontinuing development of MeeGo due to lack of interest from original equipment manufacturers and vendors. Has another mobile OS been buried in a shallow grave?

MeeGo was initially a joint project between Intel's Maemo and Nokia's Moblin projects and was designed as a response to mobile devices not supporting Intel's Atom line of mobile processors. The Linux-based OS has been doomed since Nokia shifted its resources away from the project when the company signed on to make Windows Phone 7 devices. In the opinion of one Linux admin, Intel has "been flogging a dead horse."

Researchers for the Chetan Sharma Consulting group have put together a 2011 State of the Global Mobile Industry mid-year assessment and have come up with some very interesting results.

The entire global mobile market weighs in at about $1.3 trillion or close to 2% of the world's gross domestic product. Of that giant $1.3 trillion pie, about $300 billion is expected to be through data revenues. That means that people are starting to use data at much higher rates and Americans are on the forefront of data usage even as India and China are the fastest growing mobile markets in the world.

One of the most impressive parts of Google's beta rollout of Plus is the fact that Google had a fully functional Android application available in the Android Market the minute Plus went live.

As such, I have a unique introduction to Google Plus - mobile first. It is an interesting way to test an experimental new social network. The Plus Android app is polished and impressive. But, just as Plus is entering into the crowded social network space, so does the Android application against the likes of Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. How do the Android applications compare?

According to a tweet from Google's head of Android Andy Rubin this morning, Android is seeing more than 500,000 activations per day.

If accurate, that is a significant number because it means that Android is gaining momentum heading into the slower summer buying season and later this year into the back-to-school and holiday busy seasons. According to Rubin, Android activations are growing 4.4% week-to-week. Can the little green robot keep up the pace to maintain its leading market share?