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Apple's acquisition of mobile assistant Siri and its partnership with speech recognition leader Nuance Communications (the latter confirmed by references found in code), appear to be coming together in the launch of a new feature called "Assistant," to appear in the forthcoming update to iOS 5, Apple's mobile operating system.

According to leaked information, it appears that the smart technology found in the Siri iPhone application will now be fully baked into the operating system itself. With Nuance's ability to understand natural language queries, iOS 5 will have it all - voice navigation, voice control and voice assistance - allowing users to go beyond simple search and basic actions. When Siri's technology is fully integrated, users will be able to direct their iPhone to actually "do" things, too.

How would you like to have a "cognitive prosthetic" that could "adapt to unexpected events" in situations of "intense information overload"...as a personal newsreader app online? That sounds pretty hot and it's exactly what startup TrapIt was when it spun out of DARPA's $200 million research project CALO (Cognitive Assistant That Learns and Organizes) more than a year ago.

TrapIt begins to open up its next-generation newsreader today (the first 500 people to visit this link can try it out for themselves) and I've been testing it this afternoon. My verdict so far? It's attractive, the user experience is pretty good, it seems like its smarts could deliver some meaningful value with ongoing use - but like so many newsreading services trying to go mainstream, the quantity of news it delivers is just too small.

Bump, the mobile app that lets you share information with other people by bumping your phones together, announced tonight that it now has 25 million iPhone and Android users and has raised $16 million from hot investors Andreesen Horowitz, Google-backers Sequoia, early Google investor turned billionaire Ram Shriram and Silicon Valley godfather Ron Conway.

What are these people funding? Bump is a fascinating integration of the online and offline worlds. It's not the Apple-acquired super-intelligent voice-controlled Siri mobile personal assistant, it's not the plug-and-pay Square dongle that raised twice as much venture capital just today, it's not the maybe-it-will work Near Field Communication (NFC) chips that Google is putting in Android phones and in window stickers for businesses - it's yet another new way for users to interact with mobile devices to get things done. We'll probably get a chance to try them all in the fast-approaching world of mobile-enabled commerce.

Five years ago, "social" was the next great paradigm, and sure enough, today social is everywhere and everything is social. Facebook's most recent announcements capitalize on this ubiquity and position the company as the hub of a system with an almost infinite number of spokes.

We are today with virtual personal assistants (VPAs) where Facebook was in 2004 - simultaneously on the verge of something very big, and yet only at the very beginning of a decades-long trajectory.

When we first reviewed Siri last February, we called it "one of the most ambitious mobile services we have seen in the last few years." At the time, we acknowledged that, while Siri - which was recently acquired by Apple - has answers for a plethora of questions, it wouldn't be able to handle them all. We lamented that "sadly the app doesn't use Wolfram Alpha to give you answers to factual questions (yet)."

Today, we lament no longer, as the latest update to the virtual personal assistant notes that it can now provide you with "more knowledge and computation results" using "computational knowledge engine" Wolfram Alpha.

According to a number of well-informed sources, Apple just acquired Siri, the personal mobile assistant that won the SXSW BizSpark Accelerator competition last month. Nobody at Siri is allowed to talk about this acquisition before Apple makes its own announcement, but our own sources confirm that this acquisition has indeed happened. These rumors are also substantiated by this recent FTC disclosure (PDF) by Apple and Siri.

Today at the South By South West festival in Austin, three finalists competed in the Microsoft BizSpark Accellerator finals in the "Innovative Web Technologies" category.

The companies, RecycleMatch, Siri and Skimble argued their positions on stage in front of three judges and tonight the winner will be announced at 6pm CST.

Apps on the iPhone, there are so very many of them - how's a person to find the best ones? We look at a whole lot of them here at ReadWriteWeb and we'd like to share with you some of our favorites we've discovered in the month of February.

Some of us on the team are proud Android users but most of us are still using iPhones. I just discovered how incredibly effective the Genius recommendations on the phone can be, so I've been going nuts downloading new apps. Here are the ones our staff is most excited about this month.

Siri is one of the most ambitious mobile services we have seen in the last few years. Imagine if you could just talk to you phone and tell it to call you a taxi, reserve a table at your favorite restaurant or tell you what the weather in New York City will be like tomorrow. If you have an iPhone, you will be able to start doing that tonight. Siri, a virtual personal assistant, will recognize your voice query and either give you the answer to your question or connect you to the right web service.

Siri has been getting a lot of hype over the past year. It's an as yet unreleased product that aims to be a "Virtual Personal Assistant" (VPA). At the recent SemTech conference in San Jose, I sat down with two of the founders of Siri: Dag Kittlaus (CEO) and Tom Gruber (CTO). I was informed that the product will launch end of summer U.S. time - starting out as an iPhone app, but later other platforms will be supported. The iPhone app will go into private beta July/August time period, then launch in Q4 2009 or Q1 2010.

Siri has been preparing for this for some time now. While the product is still more promise than substance, I at least got to look at some real-life iPhone demos in San Jose.