ReadWriteWeb

The most open thing going on in the Android realm today may be warfare. Today's announcement of Google's intent to acquire Motorola Mobility, the producer of many Android phones and a prominent contributor to the Droid brand, points to a new and severely altered landscape for mobile apps where absolutely every platform is controlled by a principal corporate entity that is directly partnered with, owns, or is a phone maker.

"Google has drawn some lines in the sand by essentially becoming a competitor to OEMs with whom it has previously aligned as a partner," says Yahoo Canada technology analyst Carmi Levy. "If you're in the corner office of Samsung or HTC, your world just became a lot more complex. They need to consider whether they want to continue contributing to the growth of what is now going to be their largest competitor."

Ever since Google's latest social platform, Google+, began limited testing in late June, the question among both prospective developers and prospective members has been, how will it compare to Facebook with respect to privacy? Although Facebook has taken incremental steps to help its users protect the data they may intentionally or inadvertently share with other people directly, Facebook has been notorious for the degree of frankness its platform presents to its applications.

Google has been particularly careful about demonstrating its concern for protecting its members' personally identifiable information (PII), and an update late Friday to its engineering director, David Glazer's Google+ stream was no exception. Giving the first technical details about the forthcoming Google+ Games platform - the first apps platform for Google's new social network - Glazer said end-user information would only be obtained through direct user consent.

There's been a surge in platform-as-a-service providers in the past year, but many of them remain in private beta. Today one more is open to the public: DotCloud.

DotCloud supports PHP, Ruby, Python, Perl, Java, Node.JS, MySQL, Redis, RabbitMQ, Solr, MongoDB and PostgreSQL. Like many other PaaSes, it runs on Amazon Web Services.

Consolidation has been one of the main trends of 2011. In December of last year, Salesforce.com acquired Ruby PaaS Heroku and, Hat acquired Java PaaS Makara and CloudBees acquired Stax Networks. That lead to much speculation about the future of PaaS consolidation. But the real consolidation action in 2011 has been in telcos acquiring infrastructure-as-a-service companies. Meanwhile companies like VMware have decided to build instead of buy PaaS companies.

Today GigaOm's Derrick Harris broke the news that dotCloud is acquiring DuoStack. It seems that this sort of acquisition is a long time coming.

Khris Loux and his company, Echo, have always had a tentative relationship with the lowly blog comment. Echo launched in 2009, described as a "blog commenting platform" much like Disqus. Right from the beginning, however, Echo went beyond the comment and aggregated all sorts of real-time data from around the Web to pull into the section normally reserved for comments. Now, Echo has gone beyond declaring the death of the comment and re-launched as a "real-time as a service" platform.

At its re-launch event today, the company brought out the big guns to show off just how useful it thinks its new incarnation will be. We got a chance to talk with them beforehand to go beneath a bit of the flashiness and we got a glimpse of a service that adds a new building block onto the Web and could bring the real-time Web to previously untouched corners of the Internet.

Today, Location Labs is announcing the launch of its newest location, controls and security platform called "Sparkle." The platform, which will exist both as a pre-loaded client and set of APIs, provides access to location services, security and user level controls for things like voice, data and applications.

With Sparkle, developers can do things like add geo-fencing to location-aware applications, or control the time of day an app can be used. It can even detect the motion and velocity of the handset.

A couple of weeks ago, Alex Williams asked on the ReadWriteCloud weekly poll what people thought were the "worst terms" in cloud computing. The results were inconclusive. Or rather, there are a number of terms we dislike.

"Cloud-in-a-box," "cloudstorming," and "cloudburst" led the pack with the most votes, the latter two suggesting that we may be tiring of weather metaphors in cloud marketing.

But one of the terms that has recently been on the receiving end of criticism didn't make it onto Alex's list: platform-as-a-service. Or even just "platform."

Evernote just revealed the next phase of its business plan during a small press conference at the company's Mountain View offices. Evernote, which wants to be the "global platform for human memory," currently allows its users to capture a lot of different types of data but doesn't offer a lot of ways to manage and structure this information. Going forward, Evernote's plan is to allow its users to add more structure to their data, visualize it and find hidden connections.

Evernote also launched a new product called Evernote Trunk today. Currently, this is only a showcase for third-party services that integrate with Evernote, though the company plans to turn it into a full-blown Evernote app store in the near future.

Facebook's new head of mobile products, Eric Tseng, spoke today at MobileBeat 2010, introducing a new approach to the company's OpenGraph.

"Where we're going from here is a platform strategy. We're going away from a one-off app strategy,"

In other words, OpenGraph's going mobile, in more ways than one.

If you've been following our posts about augmented reality (AR) in the last few months, you've noticed that we speak often about practicality and its importance for the proliferation of the technology. Sure, gimmicky applications can be fun and new, but it's my opinion that the more practical and useful an AR application is, the better suited it is to help push AR toward mainstream acceptance. With that being said, AR developers should be aware of a contest being hosted by metaio, the makers of the junaio iPhone app and mobile AR platform, which will reward creativity and practicality in AR.