ReadWriteWeb

Several years ago, I spoke on a panel at an advertising industry conference with Om Malik and Michael Arrington. Arrington, my former employer, was bored by the conversation and mocked me throughout it. One of the last questions we were asked on the panel was what technology we were most excited about at the time. I said I was most excited by trends represented by a little startup called Rapportive, which sits in your Gmail sidebar and shows you aggregated information about whoever you are emailing.

Arrington laughed at me, just like he had laughed at me in the conference green room when I showed people photos on my phone of the chickens I was raising in my backyard. Just as I was vindicated when the TV show Portlandia later demonstrated that it is perfectly reasonable to raise chickens here in my home town, so too do I feel a little vindicated by the reported acquisition in the works of Rapportive by social network LinkedIn. OK, so both are a little silly. But the point is: Rapportive is awesome and I was right.

Today, Alpha Software has released version 11 of its Alpha Five tool. It helps developers build Web applications to solve a business problem once and make the app available on major platforms. Using Microsoft .NET and HTML5, Alpha Five enables developers to avoid Flash, Silverlight and other plugins that limit the compatibility of apps with major devices like the iPad.

Applications built with tools like Alpha Five will work the same on all your devices. The forms, dialogs and security features, as well as the calendars, video players and image galleries, are backed on the server side. Users won't have to worry about which device to use, and developers won't have to reinvent the wheel for each one.

We all know what the acronym BYOB means, but when it comes to bringing your own mobile devices, there are several implications for enterprise IT managers. Of course, BYOD isn't a new concept: people have been bringing their own PCs and connecting them to corporate networks almost as soon as the PC was invented back in the 1980s. I recall dealing with this issue as a young IT worker, trying to convince my manager that the nascent Compaq (which is now buried inside HP's product lines) wouldn't bring our network to its knees. Fun times.

Appcelerator & IDC's new mobile developer survey is out now, with details on a wide range of development trends including platform choice, developers' future plans and mobile industry challenges. Notably, the companies have now added HTML5 as a new option to rank among mobile development platforms, and its middle-of-road showing indicates that mobile websites are increasingly a complementary requirement for today's mobile developers.

Meanwhile, despite seeing a slight jump back to Q1 levels of interest, Android tablets remain a platform with a number of challenges, developers report. Explains Appcelerator, these tablets are in somewhat of a "no-man's land" in terms of developer priorities right now, as developers aren't sure what to make of the overall Android Tablet picture.

CumuLogic, a Java Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) software provider, today announces the public beta version of their new PaaS solution which will enable enterprises, cloud providers and ISVs to build and manage Java PaaS in public, private and hybrid cloud environments. The product is based on a cloud application management platform, and includes cloud services automation, autoscaling, monitoring, policy-base workload deployment resource management and user management. The idea is to mix and match different cloud-based applications, no matter where they reside.

As IT becomes more consumerized and cloud computing becomes more of a reality, the app itself is becoming almost irrelevant across enterprises. As the desktop PC model has morphed into the network, and as the network has become just another extension of the Internet, it is all about the API, the ways that apps talk to each other that has made them front and center to today's corporate computing infrastructures.

With today's launch of PhoneGap 1.0, a framework that allows developers to build mobile apps using Web standards, it seemed like a good time to put up a poll about HTML as an app platform. HTML, and in particular, HTML5, has come a long way to addressing the needs of cross-platform development by delivering a platform where apps can run on any modern browser. But is it ready yet for you? How do you use HTML when building your apps? Or do you?

Share your thoughts on HTML as an app platform in this week's ReadWriteMobile poll.

PhoneGap, the open source mobile developement framework that allows mobile developers build apps using Web standards, is launching today into version 1.0. This is a milestone release for the platform, which now adds additional APIs, features and improvements in its newly updated product.

The launch is being celebrated in Portland, at an event called PhoneGap Day held at Urban Airship, a company which just had some major news of its own. Champagne all around!

Market analysis and strategy firm Vision Mobile released a new infographic today, featuring key findings from its comprehensive Developer Economics 2011 report. The report, which delves into topics like developer mindshare, platform fragmentation, distribution and revenue, offers a ton of great information for developers, publishers and brands alike.

The infographic, which cleverly depicts each platform as a contestant in a race, can be found below.

Does the type of device that you use change the way that you consume and create information? Does it alter the types of content that you look at? We were curious, so we took a look at a week of Bitly click data (June 6th - 12th) to find out!

For the most part, the use of traditional computing platforms such as Windows, Linux and Macintosh follow a similar pattern, demonstrating that your habits don't really change regardless of which you choose.