Here at GigaOM we’ve pretty much decided that the femtocell market is dead. At the very least, it’s significantly smaller than what was forecast (GigaOM Pro, subscription required) when these tiny base stations for the home first started garnering attention last year. However, analysts at Deutsche Bank beg to differ, arguing in a new report that femtocells will be necessary to deliver fat data over mobile broadband networks. It comes just days after Atlas Ventures, Highland Capital Partners  and Pond Venture Partners put $20 million into PicoChip, a maker of femtocell silicon.

The report says that femtocells, which use a consumer’s home connection to provide a stronger cellular signal inside a home or office, are merely at the trough of the S-shaped technology hype curve. It goes on to speculate that the carriers listed below aren’t the only ones conducting femtocell trials as all carriers will have to use them in order to keep up with the demand for mobile broadband. From the report:

One of the dark secrets of mobile technologies is that we are nearing the physical limitations for the speeds we can pump out of mobile networks. Cellular standards manipulate the timing, frequency and amplitude of radio waves. As we move into LTE and its enhancements, we are starting to maximize all those manipulations. Companies like Qualcomm have talked about this publicly, highlighting that the next major wave of improvement of cellular network performance will have to come from in advances in what they call ‘topography’ – the physical planning of network elements. Translated that means a larger number of and more sophisticated base stations. A big part of these topography improvements will come from femtos or some form of in-building coverage.

I’m willing to be surprised by the femtocell market opportunity, but without a compelling business model and consumer price point, the industry won’t make it very far trying to improve carrier networks by using femtocells to ride over consumer’s broadband connections. And even if systems makers can build a cheap femtocell and carriers offer them for free, carriers are already using Wi-Fi to ease the strain on mobile networks, and consumers have already bought into using Wi-Fi as an alternative to 3G in their homes and other settings. The number of Wi-Fi phones rose 177 percent between 2007 and 2008, according to a recent report by In-Stat, a number that’s expected to continue to rise.

So while the carriers and the several companies like PicoChip are probably right with their assertion that some type of network offload will be necessary, the carriers will have to play a huge role in making femotcells acceptable to users. After all, consumers with WiFi-enabled phones are already boosting their in-home data coverage and taking a load off of carrier networks with their in-home Wi-Fi networks. So in order to be viewed as a worthy competitor to Wi-Fi, the femto industry needs to do two things: make a really complicated piece of telecommunications gear cheaply and find some way to sell it to consumers.

Right now, carriers are pretty much charging consumers the price of the base station and a monthly fee to improve the carrier network. But consumers — understandably — aren’t terribly jazzed about paying too make life easier for carriers, especially given some of the limitations on what the femto actually offers. The dark secret here may be that carriers are going to have to improve their networks in a way that doesn’t pass on the femtocell cost to consumers. Are they ready to do that?

AT&T today introduced a prepaid mobile broadband product that exactly matches the pricing of similar plans launched earlier this month by Verizon Wireless. I was skeptical of Verizon’s offering because it’s pretty pricey, and I’m not sold on AT&T’s either, but my colleague Kevin Tofel points out that for folks who use Wi-Fi most of the time, this plan may still make sense. So here’s what AT&T is offering:

• Daily – $15 for 75MB (20 cents a MB)
• Weekly – $30 for 250MB (12 cents a MB)
• Monthly – $50 for 500MB (10 cents a MB)

Customers get a SIM card specifically for the plan and can activate it and replenish it with megabytes online. AT&T will send customers a text and email message after either 30 minutes or 20 percent of allotted data usage remains in their session. At that point, consumers have the option to purchase more time or allow the session to expire. I just wish AT&T and Verizon would stop hemming the megabytes in with a time limit, or folks could buy an unlimited chunk of bytes without having to worry about when their minutes expire. That would speed mobile broadband adoption and make it far more flexible.

Ciena today beat out Nokia Siemens Network to buy bankrupt Nortel’s metro Ethernet business for $769 million, winning the bidding war for the assets that it began in October. A court will still have to approve the deal that will see Ciena, which makes fiber optical equipment, pay $530 million in cash and issue $239 million in debt that will be due in 2017. The transaction will more than double Ciena’s sales when it closes in the first quarter of 2010.

Ciena reported fiscal 2008 sales of $902.4 million (it’s fiscal year ends Oct. 31). Sales for the first three quarters of fiscal 2009 were hit hard by the macroeconomic decline that began in September of 2008, and have totaled $476.3 million. The Nortel assets generated $1.36 billion in revenue for the Canadian company in 2008 and $556 million in the first six months of 2009, so Ciena is taking on a huge integration with this deal, which could more than double its sales and total employees (it’s expected to make job offers to at least 2,000 Nortel employees).

A motion to approve Ciena as the acquirer will be heard by bankruptcy courts in the U.S. and Canada on Dec. 2. Ironically, it was Nortel’s failure to sell its metro Ethernet business in September of last year that marked the beginning of the end for the venerable Canadian telecommunications firm.

As compute demand increases, demand for power in data centers is soaring. To help IT professionals halt the spread of watt-consuming servers, the industry needs to develop software that can communicate the ways in which the various layers of the data center perform and interact. They need a binary version of Cesar Millan — a data center whisperer.

Speaking at a panel held Wednesday night in Austin, Texas, several folks from the large server shops and a distinguished engineer who runs a data center for IBM spoke about the challenges of keeping power consumption down in a world where computing demand is going up. (For a truly in-depth look at this topic, check out our GigaOM Pro report — subscription required.) The panel went beyond just power and cooling (thank goodness) to focus on how companies are increasingly viewing power consumption in the data center as a whole, rather than merely as the sum of of the data center’s processors.

IBM’s Scott Winters said he saved 30 percent on his energy costs over three years while increasing his computing abilities by 50 percent and his storage by 150 percent. He did this in two primary ways: by virtualizing his data center and creating a pool of shared resources that are used on demand, and by paying attention to software he has running that tells him what’s happening on his servers.

“My data center was whispering secrets, and now I have a way to understand them,” Winters said. He said his IBM software and linking that software to the physical infrastructure helped him reach such an understanding, especially in regard to managing power consumption. It’s a strategy that HP has embraced with its products; there are also several startups pushing data center sensor networks that allow the data center’s server hardware and its physical infrastructure like the chillers and air conditioners to communicate.

But as the facilities and IT infrastructure merge (the jobs of the facilities manager and the IT manager are also on a path to merge, according to members of the panel) standards are needed. The folks building the physical infrastructure typically use proprietary software in their products and sensors and getting that sensor network to talk to your servers can require a big programming effort. Once folks can manage their physical infrastructure and their hardware, the next step is to tie the physical and hardware layers to the application layer. That’s a big dream, and we’re still far off. But given the demand for computing and constraints on providing the power to meet that demand, it’s an issue that panels like the one Wednesday night will help solve.

Air Canada is testing an in-flight Wi-Fi service from Aircell on its flights between Toronto and Los Angeles and Montreal and L.A. From now until Jan. 29, passengers can plunk down $9.95 per flight to surf on a laptop and $7.95 to access the Internet on smaller devices such as a smartphone or WiFi-enabled media players like the iPod touch. AirCell also provides its GoGo in-air Wi-Fi service on Delta and American Airlines flights in the U.S.

And because Aircell currently only has regulatory approval and the antenna coverage that enables airlines to offer Wi-Fi in the U.S., Air Canada passengers can only get their Wi-Fi fix when flying over U.S. soil. Perhaps that accounts for the slight discount on Air Canada’s prices for Wi-Fi when compared to American’s charge of $12.95 for in-flight access.

The New York City Council is voting on a resolution this morning supporting the idea that Internet service providers cannot discriminate against web traffic on their networks. As gestures go, this resolution supporting net neutrality is more symbolic than it is useful, and to that end has already yielded a couple of photos of FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski and New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg shaking hands and looking concerned about the future of NYC broadband.

However, New York City is a nice case study for competitive broadband, so I hope Genachowski took notes while he was there. Verizon,  Time Warner Cable and  Cablevision all serve the city (although they don’t all compete head to head in every block), so some residents there have access to both fiber to the home and cable’s wideband service using DOCSIS 3.0. Our own Ryan Lawler, who lives in Harlem, is paying $33 a month for Internet service from Time Warner Cable, which currently has the monopoly in his building. However, he says he just got a note informing him that Verizon FiOS will also soon be available, so we’ll see what happens to his cable speeds (which are currently 9 Mbps down and 500 kilobits per second up) and service in the next few months.

The state’s CIOwants to collect real data on broadband penetration and speeds so that it can get a sense of customers’ level of satisfaction with their service as opposed to just knowing which areas have broadband and which don’t. A Congressman from the state is also attempting to pass legislation that would give the FCC the power to regulate certain aspects of net neutrality and broadband access. So given the competition, better data collection and consumer-friendly legislative efforts, I hope Genachowski is doing some learning, not just politicking for a symbolic victory on net neutrality.

With Azure, Microsoft is trying to strike a balance between giving customers the ease of a platform as a service and the customization that power users need to build tailored applications — both in-house and in the public Azure cloud. In the wake of the Redmond giant’s developer conference, where it detailed more of its plans, it became clear that Azure is striving to be a general purpose cloud offering for enterprises that doesn’t make developers sweat the small stuff or compromise on bigger things.

If we compare it to infrastructure-as-a-service providers such as Amazon’s Ec2 or Rackspace’s CloudServers products, Azure attempts to handle more of the actual management and provisioning of virtual machines for a user. The biggest issue the target customer faces isn’t the hardware cost but the expense of managing an application on the hardware, Amitabh Srivastava, senior vice president at Microsoft with responsibility for Windows Azure, told me. So the goal was to allow Azure to run so developers don’t think about the underlying hardware as they might on a pure IaaS product.

This is where the idea of Azure as Microsoft’s OS for the cloud comes in. Azure is a platform-as-a-services play that seeks to leverage what Microsoft has learned through its OS dominance. First, it’s playing nice. Microsoft ensures that developers can use a wide variety of  programming languages to build on Azure such as PHP, Eclipse and Java, which is pretty unique among platforms. Earlier this year, I spoke with Microsoft about its plans for Azure and came away with the clear sense that the company’s programs and .Net would really shine on Azure, even though other programming languages would also work. Now I get the sense that Microsoft is working hard to emphasize how suitable Azure is for programs built using a variety of languages, even those that have no ties to Redmond.

Second, Microsoft is hoping Azure can play on many machines. If we view the data center as akin to a machine, Microsoft wants folks to be able to create applications that can run on a Microsoft Azure cloud or internally on an in-house cloud. Newly launched AppFabric is the solution for that. AppFabric is software that folks can run in their own data center to create an internal cloud that can talk to and share information with the public Azure cloud if the client wants. Rackspace and IBM are both attempting to build these types of bridges between internal and their external clouds.

Finally, Microsoft is trying to keep its own offerings separate. Instead of bundling Microsoft products with Azure, Srivastava outlined a software-as-a-services strategy that will offer customers Microsoft Exchange on Azure or SharePoint on Azure as a service. This may explain why some offerings such as SharePoint Services and Dynamics CRM Services, announced last year, are now divorced and missing from the Azure announcement this year.  However, competing software can be offered on Azure as well.

Larry Augustin, CEO of Sugar CRM, has chosen to offer customers the ability to host Sugar CRM on Azure, and says the platform was easy to build on, even though SugarCRM is built using PHP. He also mentioned that Microsoft’s database offerings were more complete than the newly launched Amazon Relational Database Service, and offered me a possible model for future clouds. In his vision, customers will be able to choose which clouds their software as a service are hosted on. This is the polar opposite of the vision espoused by SugarCRM’s biggest rival, Salesforce.com, which hosts its software on its own cloud. But the power of the modular and open approach is hard to deny, and Microsoft is smart to embrace that.

Verizon Test

WiMAX Test

Sprint held a happy hour last night to show off the WiMAX launch in here Austin, Texas, so I wandered over for some BBQ and broadband. I want to love WiMAX, but I can’t get excited about the promise of upload speeds of some 400 kilobits per second, which are only a wee bit more than what my Verizon 3G connection delivers. However, on the download side things are decent for a wired network and awesome for a wireless one.

And before any WiMAX boosters despair, I was told that the local 4G network should continue to improve over the next few weeks, which is why I’m holding off on an all-out review. For a sneak peak, check out the experience in the video below. You can see some freezing in the Hulu video stream during the demo; John Taylor, the Sprint spokesman I interviewed, said the location we were in had only two bars of coverage, which may have been the problem. Given the paucity of devices on display for mobile use and the lackluster network quality so far, I’m still thinking the bet that Clearwire (which is powering the 4G part of the Sprint network) and Sprint made on WiMAX is a bad one, but I’m hoping to be proven wrong.

The iPhone has not only changed the way people consume data on their mobile phones — thanks to its touchscreen, and the myriad of apps that make grabbing such info from the web on a small device easy — it’s changed assumptions as to which devices consume the most data on mobile networks. Bytemobile, a company that provides equipment for carriers to help deliver video and data to mobile devices using less bandwidth, issued a report today that shows the difference in data consumption by device among carriers that have the iPhone and carriers that don’t. It’s pretty significant.

Laptops are still consuming most of the data on carrier networks that don’t have iPhones on them, but once folks get a touch-based smartphone such as the iPhone (and right now it’s the most popular touch-based smartphone out there), the volume of data used by those devices far exceeds that of laptop usage. In other words, when it comes to the network and data consumption, the device does matter. The report also offers some self-serving data about video consumption on mobile devices that may help carriers save on bandwidth consumption. (GigaOM Pro, subscription required).

Cisco expects mobile data traffic to increase 63-fold over the next five years, driven in part by video. But while it’s clear that laptops and touch-based smartphones make video consumption easier, the rise may not be as steep as Cisco predicts. The report found that while the average video online is about 5 minutes in length, about half of the people only watch 60 seconds of a video, which means that sending the entire file to a user would be a waste of bytes and bandwidth. Only 31 percent of people watched all of a video, and 30 percent watched less than 10 percent. The rest of the viewers stopped watching somewhere in the middle. In addition to bandwidth consumption, such findings also could help determine where best to place ads. Although I for one hate getting pre-roll ads on my phone because that data consumed counts against my mobile bandwidth cap. But maybe I’m just super cheap.

Regardless, the problem with the iPhone is that it’s both a gateway drug for consumers, who’ve now tasted the mobile web and want more of it, as well as a canary in the coal mine, as it shows carriers what’s likely to happen as other touch-based smartphones become more popular on their own networks. Curtailing video, as suggested by the report, will solve some issues, but once you give folks a taste of broadband, they’re going to want more.

Even though we’re inching ever-closer towards consumption-based broadband, not all ISPs are implementing metered or tiered plans as a way to punish users who clog their pipes. For example, Verizon plans to may one day move to a consumption-based model as a way to generate additional revenue, not because of any network constraint. Brian Whitton, executive director of access technologies at Verizon, spoke with me earlier this week about that company’s fiber network — and why he believes every other ISP is going to have to embrace a fiber to-the-home strategy, too:

• Personalized Video: As video moves from broadcast to a time- and place-shifted model that lets consumers watch what they want, when they want, sending televisions shows out on demand in a unicast model will overwhelm cable networks.
• 3-D TV: Depending on the technology consumers adopt (GigaOM Pro, subscription required), sending 3-D video content for games and television could consume up to 1.8 times a normal video stream for autostereoscopic delivery, while true holographic TV, which is the eventual goal, would require 100 Mbps per channel.
• Upstream Video: “I think in this whole marketplace of video that oligopoly [of content creation] is deteriorating and HD camcorders and codec tools will lead to different TV programming coming from the masses,” Whitton said. Thanks to YouTube, anyone can create their own content and send it up, so personalized channels are not unrealistic. Whitton said the result will be a burden on the uplink that cable companies can’t current handle.

Despite the trash talk directed at cable companies by Whitton, the companies with the most to fear right now are those relying on copper networks such as Qwest and AT&T, both of which have put their money behind a fiber-to-the-node strategy, which takes fiber out to the existing node and then relies on existing copper wire to get to the home. The cable providers are able to bundle their channels together to provide faster up and downstream access using DOCSIS 3.0, but extracting more performance and speeds from copper is difficult.

That’s not stopping the telcos with copper still in the ground, which is why ASSIA received $10 million in funding recently for its software that helps tweak DSL networks, and why folks are still funneling money into research that boosts copper performance. At some point the telcos are going to have to take a hard look at their aging infrastructure and decide how much longer they should poor money into copper, much like you or I might do when evaluating whether or not to fix or junk a 12-year-old car. In the meantime, I have to agree with Whitton — eventually everyone will need a fiber to their home.

Salesforce.com today announced Salesforce Chatter, an application that provides a social network for enterprise businesses. Salesforce Chatter incorporates social networking and real-time connection features as well as integrates Facebook and Twitter status updates, making it unique from other enterprise collaboration offerings from Cisco and Microsoft, which revolve more around traditional IM screens, video conferencing and presence awareness inside an email program. For internal use, Salesforce Chatter gives employees profiles, feeds and groups. With the Salesforce Chatter platform, developers will be able to build social enterprise applications that can contain status updates, create Facebook apps, and hook into APIs from Twitter so enterprises can track comments about their brand or from their employees. As employees use more social-networking applications while at work, the security of those applications and how to harness them for corporate use have become increasingly common concerns in IT.

The Asia-Pacific region is getting ever-closer to faster mobile broadband, with network operators in Japan, Singapore, Australia and Indonesia readying their Long Term Evolution networks. Today NTT DoCoMo, Japan’s largest mobile operator, affirmed its plans to deploy LTE in 2010; it also said it would shut off its 2G network in March 2011 since most subscribers now have 3G phones. NTT DoCoMo had previously said it would keep the 2G network running until December 2012. Speaking at the GSM Association’s Mobile Asia Congress 2009, Ryuji Yamada, president and CEO of NTT DoCoMo, said LTE data cards will be ready in 2010 and handsets will be ready in 2011.

Singapore Telecommunications, the largest carrier in Singapore with operations in Australia, Indonesia and the Philippines, also disclosed plans for LTE trials. SingTel has chosen Alcatel-Lucent as its equipment vendor for the trials, which will begin in the first half of 2010 and take anywhere from six to nine months. The network operator hopes the trial will help it and its regional associates and joint ventures better understand LTE and determine the best approach and strategy for its adoption in their respective local markets. Meanwhile, here in the U.S., we await Verizon’s and MetroPCS’ 2010 deployments, with netbooks and smartphones in hand.

Qualcomm holds about a quarter of the patents required to make the Long Term Evolution wireless standard happen on mobile devices and networks, according to an ABI Research report published earlier this week. Other big holders include Interdigital, with 18 percent; Huawei, with 10 percent; Nokia and LG, with 9 percent each; and Samsung, with 7 percent. Which basically means Qualcomm may not be the patent shark that it could be with the CDMA 3G standard, but it’s still going to make some serious money with LTE. In fact, Len Lauer, COO of Qualcomm, confirmed that the company’s royalty rate for LTE would be about 1 percent lower than the royalty it charges for 3G.

So Qualcomm’s sitting pretty with regard to 4G (this includes WiMAX, thanks to its 2005 Flarion buy). However, at least three different entities are attempting to get companies and people to create an LTE patent pool. I’ve covered efforts by Via Licensing, which operates the Near Field Communications patent pool, and MPEG LA, which controls the patents for MPEG-2 video codec. There’s also an attempt to pool patents by Sisvel, unveiled Monday. I’ve been skeptical of these from the beginning, however. As I noted in my Via story:

Via can’t force patent holders to play, and without a majority of solid patents with which to negotiate, its attempts will fail. There’s little reason for a larger company to join a patent pool, unless it wants to help push through a standard, which isn’t the case with LTE (for the skinny on patent pools, check out this article I wrote back in 2007).

Now that we know the leverage Qualcomm has — and the fact that Qualcomm doesn’t swim in patent pools (it has a dedicated staff to handle licensing and as such, no need to do so) — I’m pretty confident that these myriad efforts to get an LTE patent pool going are already sunk.

Get ready for the next generation of fiber to the home, which will deliver 10 Gbps downlink and 2.5 Gbps uplink shared across 32 homes. Verizon will announce next year that it has achieved these results in its labs, a huge improvement over the 2.5 Gbps down and 1.2 Gbps up the company is currently deploying. But get ready to dig deeper into your wallet, too, because even if the demand for broadband isn’t breaking the Internet, it’s surely forcing ISPs to rethink how they charge for such a valuable service — even Verizon.

While many ISPs are implementing caps or tiers because they have real resource constraints at points in their network – Comcast’s 250 GB-per-month cap, for example, is aimed at stopping folks from unduly clogging its shared, last-mile networks — some are eying such measures as a source of additional revenue and a way to fend off potential competition from online video. The best example of this is Time Warner Cable’s tiered broadband plan, which caused such consumer ire that the company ended up backing down from it. However, when Verizon’s CTO Dick Lynch said in September that Verizon was also in favor of some kind of consumption-based billing, it was kind of like watching your favorite indie rocker sell out. Why would Verizon, which is building out a fiber-to-the-home network, plan to eventually move to some sort of consumption model?

The answer is because it can. I spoke with Brian Whitton, executive director of access technologies at Verizon, about the FiOS network in an effort to get some clarity regarding the rumor that even it would eventually face constraints under the onslaught of video. Whitton quickly disabused me of that notion, pointing out that the network is built to be upgradeable for decades to come by replacing electronics at the ends of the pipe. He basically told me that Verizon didn’t spend $18 billion (it spent $23 billion in total but some of that would have been spent anyhow) in additional upgrades to its network only to rip it out a few years later, and explained how the fiber stretches from the customer home all the way back to the fiber-based long-haul network.

But he did acknowledge how valuable broadband has become — valuable enough that people will pay for premium access to it, especially those using up a disproportionate amount of network assets. “Ultimately this is the fairest cost recovery model, and with a tiering plan or a meter everyone is paying their fair shares to finance the network,” Whitton said. Unlike other ISPs, Verizon doesn’t view heavy bandwidth users as hogs, but it does view them as potentially high-end customers.

What’s frustrating as a consumer is that because of the fragmented nature of competition in U.S. broadband markets, providers offering these consumption-based plans don’t have real competition to keep prices in check. Most places have two providers that offer slightly different sets of services and plans, making it hard to compare prices. I don’t mind paying more for a better network (I do so for my cell phone), but most consumers don’t have that option when it comes to wired access. While Comcast (which competes against Verizon in about 12 percent of its footprint) is rolling out faster broadband to ensure its customers don’t leave the cable provider for fiber, in other areas of the country, such as here in Austin, Texas, folks get the choice between DSL (with some U-verse) and cable that hasn’t been upgraded to the faster DOCSIS 3.0 speeds. So while Verizon’s FiOS will deliver faster service to customers, as it implements consumption-based billing of some sort, there’s no real competition to keep its pricing in check for those who have a need for speed. And eventually, we’ll all have that need.

This article also appeared on BusinessWeek.com.

Microsoft today at its developer conference in Los Angeles unveiled its Pinpoint service, which looks kind of like an app store aimed at enterprise developers and customers using Microsoft’s Azure cloud offerings, albeit one that goes beyond mere apps. It also showed off  a data repository, code-named Dallas, that offers developers access to a wide variety of public and fee-based data sets with which they can build useful programs. Dallas, which can be found in the Pinpoint market, strongly resembles the service shown off this year at DEMO from Austin, Texas-based Infochimps. It was also by far the most interesting element of Microsoft’s chief software architect Ray Ozzie’s opening keynote, which highlighted what he called Redmond’s “three screens and cloud” view of the world.

If the remainder of the conference’s speaker line-up is any indication, Microsoft is embracing a world of apps and mashups to enable developers to build software that can run across mobile, PC and other device platforms. Linking all this together will be Microsoft’s Azure cloud, which will go into production Jan. 1, 2010. For more on Azure, check out our previous coverage. With Pinpoint, Microsoft is acknowledging the success of the Android Marketplace and Apple’s App Store, and trying to get developers excited about the prospect of building programs to run in Windows environments. Pinpoint also offers links to consulting services and companies that work with Microsoft.

The Dallas data store is a pretty compelling showcase “application” in the Pinpoint market, as developers could access any manner of data and build an application around it. For example, one could build an Urban Spoon-style application that uses a bunch of the available data sets to offer up evening entertainment options in the user’s local area. As Ozzie said after he emphasized all of the data now available to us in the form of government information, news, sensor networks and even web analytics, “Data does no good unless we turn it from the potential into the kinetic.”

With Dallas and Pinpoint Microsoft wants to become a company that aggregates, stores and serves up information in ways that are accessible to developers and corporate clients. On the consumer front, Microsoft has created agreements with companies like Wolfram Alpha, Facebook and Twitter for its Bing search engine as another way to surface data beyond the mere words listed on a web page. Microsoft isn’t just selling software anymore; it’s selling itself as a clearinghouse for information.

Among the other developments that have come out of the conference so far:

• Seesmic, the popular Twitter client, is building a Windows client that uses Silverlight.
• Matt Mullenweg Mullenwag, CEO of Automattic (Disclaimer: Automattic, maker of WordPress, is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True), appeared onstage to say WordPress will offer access to Microsoft Azure for blogs to help handle spikes in traffic.
• Azure nerds will appreciate that Microsoft will support Java, PHP, MySQL, and Eclipse in addition to .Net.
• Those concerned about storing information on Microsoft’s servers after the T-Mobile Sidekick disaster should be relieved to hear that all items stored in Azure will be replicated in two data centers in each geographic region (in case a problem in one data center takes out the information there).
• The Cheezburger Network has launched a new site called Oddly Specific that showcases funny signs and uses the WordPress for Azure platform.

ARM and more than 35 other companies have banded together to create an alliance dubbed the Solution Center for Android, which is aimed at increasing the resources available for developers trying to build for the relatively young OS on top of ARM hardware. Android, an open-source, Linux-based OS pioneered by Google, is the underlying operating system in several popular smartphones such as those from HTC and the Motorola Droid. However, as computer companies plan netbooks based on the ARM architecture (known as smartbooks), ARM and several other companies, including Texas Instruments and Mentor Graphics, determined that the Android OS needed more infrastructure to support these more complicated consumer devices.

The Solution Center will serve as a go-to place for developers to get information on development tools, as well as resources and services optimized specifically for Android on the ARM platform. The end result should be better devices that are able to get to market quickly. And because ARM is so prevalent in other consumer gadgets scattered around the home, it’s possible that the alliance will help bring Android to more devices.