The goal of the convergence is to build a robust content moderation platform that will let organizations that host multiple sites moderate content for all of them from a single dashboard, said Bryan House, VP of product marketing for Burlington, MA.-based Acquia.

Mollom uses machine learning to evaluate user-submitted content including comments and videos to make sure it’s legit before it posts. To do so, it first it performs text analysis which catches much of the spam, but if it can’t determine whether the submission is for real, it triggers a CAPTCHA process, said Bryan House, VP of product marketing for Burlington, MA.-based Acquia. Mollom competes with offerings from Akismet and Impermium, a startup founded by Mark Risher, the former “spam czar” of Yahoo.

Mollom which works with other content management platforms will continue to do so, House said. Acquia, which competes with content management systems from Adobe and others, sports some pretty big customer names including Twitter, LinkedInStanford University and Intel.

The buyout was partly done to make “Drie’s life a little easier so he doesn’t have to manage two companies but also to accelerate the product roadmap,” House said.

“A lot more digital marketers are using Drupal because it offers content publishing as well as social and community features. They love that but also need a quality experience without being overloaded with spam. We’re working so companies like Time Warner Music — can get a way to moderate content across all their sites from a single dashboard,” he said.

Buytaert’s Mollom co-founder Benjamin Schrauwen will continue to lead Molom product development and will serve on the Acquia board. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user basketman23

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Joining other cloud, or cloud-able, content management offerings such as Box.net and SharePoint 2010, M-Files Cloud Vault moves away from the typical folder-based approach that content management traditionally takes and replaces it with a keyword and tag driven file system. In the M-Files approach, documents are classified as a common type, such as an invoice, proposal, message/email, agreement, etc., and descriptive tags are added.

This approach towards documents is similar to that taken by Gmail with regard to email: There’s one “storage vault” where documents are stored, with tags, labels and rich search used to find files. The difference here is a move away from a tree structure of nested folders. M-Files allows searching based either purely on metadata (type, date, company, etc.) or full text searching.

M-Files follows the model of other products — such as Jungledisk and Dropbox — and fools the operating system into thinking that the cloud storage is a local drive. In this way, users can find and open files using the traditional search and open dialogs within Windows, both online and off great if you’re a windows user – not so well if you’re not. This also means that M-Files natively works with all applications: Open, attach and save functions within desktop applications can see files stored on M-Files. The integration of desktop applications with cloud document storage is an approach that others, including MainSoft (whom I’ve written about before) also take. While there are many offerings in this space, the market for this sort of product is massive. Hence, there’s an opportunity for many vendors to be successful in their particular niche.

Documents are stored on a “hosted server managed by Motive systems,” but M-Files can also be installed and run as an on-premise application. Given that M-Files is sold as a product, customers could choose to deploy it on their own choice of cloud infrastructure,  for example, one could deploy M-Files over Amazon Web Services to give a true, cloud-hosted product.

In terms of pricing, the standard product is $19.95 per month per user. M-Files is a nice halfway step for businesses wanting to be able to leverage the power of connected and aggregated data. Functionally it’s a nice fit for enterprise users who are accustomed to the Windows way of working – the pricing while at the upper end when compared to offerings like Box.net, is not completely out of the ballpark.

M-Files customers options both in terms of how they work and also where their data is held: public cloud, private cloud, hosted servers or fully on-premise.

Related GigaOM Pro research (sub req’d): Making Co-Working Corporate Scale

Ben Kepes is an independent consultant and contributing writer for GigaOM. Please see his disclosure statement in his bio.

The solution? Develop a system around your blogging efforts. Here are the steps I took to create a system for producing and managing content for my own site.

About a month ago, I was approaching yet another week of blank canvases, so I set out to find a way to be more intentional and focused with my content. The first thing that came to mind was an editorial calendar. Big magazines and newspapers have used them since the dawn of the publishing industry, so I was fairly confident the solution would work for me, but I didn’t want to just throw together a calendar in spreadsheet form and think that all my problems would go away. I really wanted to approach this as a big magazine would, so I started by thinking in terms of a single magazine issue and how an editor might produce and manage its content.

Step 1: Choose a Theme

If you think about a single magazine issue, there’s generally a theme to it, a common thread that ties together the articles within it, so that was my first step — develop a theme. I decided to have “focus months” on my site to guide the content for a given month. This would help me accomplish a couple of things.  First, it would make my content more intentional. It would center my efforts around keywords and information that was relevant to my target audience. Second, it would help me better anticipate the content I was going to create, which would allow me to line up guest experts and interviews that were relevant to the content. I was immediately able to come up with themes for the next six months.

Step 2: Choose Your Sub-Topics

Once I had a theme in mind, I was able to think about sub-topics within that theme that would deepen my coverage of the content that month. At first, I just listed out the possibilities for sub-topics without thinking too much about them, and created a list of ten or twelve ideas. As I created the list, I noted possible guest experts who might provide greater insight into the sub-topics than I could provide on my own.

Step 3: Establish Your Schedule and Content Needs

With my topic and sub-topics ready, I had to decide on the frequency I would publish. I settled on publishing one content piece per day (could be an article, an audio piece, etc.). I decided to interview guest experts within the sub-topics and then spread out the content over the course of the month. My plan would be to line up and interview guests the month before I intended to publish the content. That way, I would avoid last-minute scrambling to produce content and could instead focus on quality well in advance of publishing. This would also help when I got sick or took time off, since I would already have content on tap for the given week or month and could simply schedule it to be published (or, even better, hire someone else to do it for me).

I decided that the number of weeks there were in a given month would be the number of guest experts I would line up for that month (five weeks, five guest experts). And to make things simple, each guest expert would produce one week’s worth of content (five content pieces per guest).

My site has a mix of articles and audio, so I decided to do one-hour interviews with each guest (and then each interview would be divided into four shorter content pieces) and then have each guest contribute one article in addition to their interview. That made it really easy on my guests, since they only had to show up for a one-hour interview and create one article. Plus, that little bit of effort on their part would equate to weekly promotion for their businesses, since I would be spreading their content out over the course of the month.

The great thing for me was, instead of having twenty to twenty-five separate content pieces to create on my own in a given month, I would simply do four to five interviews (depending on the number of weeks that month) and knock out four content pieces in one hour. Of course, that meant a lot more planning on the front end, but then the actual content creation part would become very easy.

Step 4: Produce the Content

So, I knew how many guest experts I would have (the same as the number of weeks that month), and I knew how many content pieces I needed from each of guest (always five), so that let me know how many titles I had to create for the month. Say, for instance, the month’s theme was “balance.” I knew I needed five content pieces, so I created five generic titles.

• Stress-Reduction Tips
• Personal Renewal
• Food and Mood
• Balancing Home and Work Life
• Disconnecting from Technology

Then I could create more interesting titles from the generic ones:

• 60-Second Stress-Busting Techniques
• The Importance of Personal Renewal
• Is Food Affecting Your Mood?
• Creative Ways to Balance Work and Home Life
• Cut the Cord: How to Disconnect from the World

This part was surprisingly simple. While I normally could sit and ponder blog post titles for what seemed like hours, I was immediately able to think of several ideas when thinking about picking the brains of experts on a given topic.

Step 5: Create an Editorial Calendar

I had my theme, my sub-topics, and even the specific post titles for the content I wanted to create. All that was left to do was actually create the content, edit it, and publish it. That meant that I actually had to conduct the interviews and then lay out exactly when I was going to edit and publish the audio and articles contributed by the guests.

Tom’s Planner is actually a great tool for organizing an editorial calendar (as mentioned by Simon just the other day, you have until SUnday to sign up if you’d like to get a free premium account for a year).

The first step was getting the content and editing it. Within Tom’s Planner (see image below), I created a place for each contributor and all of the content he or she would be creating. Next to each content piece, I put when we would be recording it and when I would be editing the content.

The second step was then organizing and publishing all the edited content, so at the very top of Tom’s Planner, I created an “ALL” group and listed out the types of content I had available for publishing and then evenly distributed it across the month (see image). I knew I would have one article per person, four audio pieces per person, plus a few other pieces of content. The thing I didn’t know, at least until everything was edited, was where I would use the content, so for instance, lesser quality audio pieces (say, if the sound wasn’t as good as with other pieces) might be used on the “Conversations” section of my site instead of within my premium audio program.

As I would edit and publish, I would be able to move content up from the individual contributor sections.

This has been a really great system so far. I have all of my audio content recorded for September, and with the exception of a few articles, I’m all set on content for the month. Now, all that’s left is editing and publishing, which makes my job a lot easier.

Why a System? Why Not Just Blog?

If you’re running a business blog, there’s generally an underlying purpose behind it. Maybe you want more clients or to create a fan base for an upcoming book. Whatever the case, there’s a reason that you blog, and the content you create should help you reach your end goal. By being more intentional and focused with your content, you’ll achieve greater success in a much shorter period of time and make sure that your content is, in fact, serving the audience it’s intended to serve.

My favorite things about having a system?

• Content has become so much easier to create
• My efforts are more focused and are helping me reach my goals
• I’m more intentional when it comes to guests, which means greater cross-promotion, back links, and visibility with new audiences.
• I’m no longer staring at a blank screen wondering what I’m going to write.

So, what’s your system? How are you staying on track and organized when it comes to your blogging efforts?

Photo by Flickr user Gustty, licensed under CC 2.0.

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Ever since Marc Benioff announced Chatter at the DreamForce conference late last year, the concept of bringing a Facebook-like social newsfeed to enterprise has gained attention. While Salesforce.com wasn’t the first company to embrace the newsfeed (Yammer, for example, has a microblogging offering for enterprise that long predates Chatter), Chatter was the first product from a mainstream vendor that took the newsfeed concept and applied it to more than people. In Chatter’s case, any piece of data that resides within a force.com application can become a Chatter item.

Chatter brought this concept to the attention of mainstream enterprise users, and it wasn’t long before analysts began to see that social feeds would be very prevalent in 2010. As Forrester analyst Rob Koplowitz said;

While integrating social tools into other systems is still nascent, social technologies will increasingly become services to adjacent technologies. Concepts like social-enabled content management and social-enabled business intelligence will take shape in 2010 as vendors begin to integrate social technologies with other technologies in their portfolio.

Seeing this trend, Box.net is introducing a newsfeed that aims to encourage engagement directly within the feed: when users are opening, editing or sharing a document within the Box.net content archive. In execution, the Box.net newsfeed looks like you would expect: It’s appearance (see screen capture below) borrows heavily from Chatter, which in turn borrows from Facebook’s wall.

However, the rapid adoption of newsfeeds does raise some interesting questions. With more and more enterprise applications moving to the cloud and leveraging their connectedness to present information in a real-time dashboard, keeping a watchful eye over that dashboard is a necessity. I put this issue to Box.net CEO Aaron Levie asking how users can create a single place for social streams to aggregate. While I’m sure he’d hope that all Box.net users would spend a significant portion of their day within his application, the reality is that users each have unique workflows. How can a product-centric newsfeed reflect that?

His response reflected the issues enterprise staffers face with regard to social streams:

Given the diversity of critical business applications that people live out of today, I don’t think the enterprise is moving towards a single feed that rules them all… Our mission at Box is not to compete with other social streams, but rather to provide a content-centric feed of what’s going on within our customers’ organizations

This brings us back to the need for some clarity around aggregation of cloud data. As more and more cloud-based applications provide social news streams, the issues around filtering the noise will become more pressing.

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The organizers approached me to develop a web site to aggregate these posts in real-time before, during and after the event. In the process, I learned how such a site can reinforce the development of community.

I’m sure that you’ve been to events where good ideas are hatched and projects are planned, but often, despite the best of intentions, activity loses steam after the event is over, and nothing much gets done. It’s too early yet to judge the long-term effectiveness of this particular event, but I’m optimistic that it will make more of a difference than many such gatherings.

The electronic component of the event was relatively simple. We created a content-managed web site that would act as the hub for the many places that participants would post their contributions and reflections. We didn’t require participants to use a specific CMS tool (although they were welcome to use ours). Instead, before, during and after the conference, participants were encouraged to use existing technologies with which they were familiar to document their thoughts, and we then created links to their contributions.

Before the Event

The web site went live a couple of weeks before the event began. By that time, event announcements and registration had already been posted to a section on the sponsoring organization’s web site. Participants had been asked to interview another attendee as a “get-to-know-you” exercise. The results were to have been posted, but very few did so — I suspect because the CMS used by the sponsoring organization has a significant learning curve.

In the future, I would recommend creating the event-specific web site much sooner, and using a simpler CMS-, group-blog, social-network or wiki-based system for posting pre-event discussions and comments.

During the Event

The venue at our local university had limited wired connectivity, but it was sufficient for a video stream, an audio stream, and the web updates that I was doing. The video stream worked fine; the audio stream was less successful because the university had blocked the ports we needed. For the same reason, we had to use a MiFi connection to use FTP. Thankfully, this did not affect access to our CMS.

Participants were able to connect using Wi-Fi, which worked well, aside from some issues with entering passwords. I’m guessing that perhaps fifty people were connected at any one time.

The event web site included the following, all of which was updated frequently:

• An attendee list, with links to participants’ web sites and Twitter feeds.
• The event agenda. Since the event was an “un-conference” using the “open space” approach, much of the agenda was developed on the spot by attendees.
• A Twitter statuses JavaScript badge showing posts from the event. These tweets were mostly done by me on behalf of event organizers, but other committee members also tweeted through the conference account.
• A Twitter search widget showing a real-time feed of all posts using the conference hashtag. A full-screen version of this widget was projected in the room where most discussions took place, and it proved very popular.
• A link to a Twapperkeeper archive of the Twitter hashtag feed.
• A Facebook fan box linking to the event’s Facebook page.
• A Flickr badge and links to tagged photos and videos. Flipcharts and graphs were scanned or photographed, then posted to Flickr and to the web site as JPGs and PDFs. We also put up a Picasa link at the request of attendees, but it didn’t get used.
• A Ustream video feed. Video of many sessions was fed live into the site, then archived.
• A link to YouTube search results tagged with the event’s tag.
• An audio feed. Podcasts of many sessions were made available later.
• Links to blogs of those attendees who were writing about the event.
• A wiki for allowing attendees to post notes from event sessions. We chose to use a wiki rather than giving all users access to the CMS, although I think that in future we might go the other way, as some found editing the wiki difficult.
• An RSS feed for tracking changes to all of the above.

After the Event

We had not created a LinkedIn group before the event. However, participants indicated that they wanted to have an electronic venue for continuing the discussion after the conference. We surveyed the room, and discovered that almost everyone was already a LinkedIn user. Since LinkedIn groups and subgroups can be created immediately, we chose to use that service. We could have selected another group conversation service, though, and participants may move to more sophisticated collaborative tools as their discussions continue.

Planning and Setup

If you are ever called upon to provide this sort of support to an event, it can be fun and educational. Here are some tips to make things go smoothly.

• Get involved with the planning committee as soon as possible, and get an event-specific web site posted early.
• Agree on the hashtag for the event, and publicize it.
• Coordinate with the meeting venue to make sure that it has adequate power and bandwidth (both wired and Wi-Fi), and that it does not block ports.
• Plan to bring your own equipment if possible, or make sure that you have everything you’ll need.
• Set up a “tech table” in a convenient location.
• Have a group of volunteers who can cover the full event.
• Give yourself lots of time for setup and breakdown.
• Have a dedicated laptop and projector for displaying the Twitter hashtag feed — participants will love it.
• Consider what you’ll need in the way of cameras, scanners and printers. We had them all, and they were handy to have, but we could probably have done without them.

I found that attendees’ blogging, tweeting, recording and instant posting about the event reinforced what they were thinking and learning. Thus, the effectiveness of the event was increased, along with the potential for new learning and insights to cause change in the wider world.

How do you use social media and the web for events?

Images by Flickr users Choconancy1 and hajush

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Nike’s Shambhala initiative

Traditionally, employees had two methods of communicating with one another: email and the company intranet. The former, while dynamic enough to support actual work, lacked transparency, longevity and opportunities for collaboration. The intranet, on the other hand, was great for sharing static information across teams and individuals. Neither, however, reflected how people actually worked together. So in 2004, Yuen left his position in Nike’s corporate social responsibility team, and set out on his own to develop a product that could do better. The result was fmyi — as in, “for my information” — and it’s a rare success story in the web 2.0 landscape: a social-media-infused enterprise collaboration tool that’s been profitable since two years after its founding.

Fmyi, which is billed as an “online social workspace,” blends elements of Basecamp, Highrise Facebook and Friendfeed to create a remarkably flexible, natural system for enterprise collaboration. Unlike Basecamp, for example, which creates rigid buckets for projects and teams, fmyi recognizes that users belong to multiple groups, and not only need different access to different individual projects, but may also need to share discussions across parallel projects. The site’s organization and architecture support this (see screenshot below), with filters for how information is shared, profile pages, featured content items controlled by the site admin, and different ways of sorting and organizing the same pieces of content. The system also indexes documents uploaded to the site so the content — not just file names and associated messages — are easily searchable.

As a long-time Facebook user and Basecamp advocate, I was impressed with fmyi’s toolset, which seems to reflect the way many of my friends and colleagues have become used to collaborating — in an ad hoc, dynamic way, with an emphasis on transparency. At the same time, it’s devoid of some of the weaknesses other systems I’ve tried often share, such as a lack of security or robust permissions and a constant tug-of-war between information overload from a firehose-like stream of content and overly segmented pockets that restrict sharing. The question of social context for content is one that Facebook has been trying to answer with new privacy filters — perhaps the team should ask Yuen for some pointers. (The two sites speak a similar design language already, and fmyi users can expect a new UI even more reminiscent of Facebook later this summer.)

In some ways, it’s this relationship to consumer social networking tools that’s driving growth for fmyi. Yuen says he’s seen an uptick of interest in the social media-like aspects of fmyi’s solution, and the company is tweaking its marketing and development priorities in response. The $275 million enterprise social media space (GigaOM Pro subscription required) is growing rapidly, as the success of consumer social networking sites has begun to filter into the business world, with heavyweights like Microsoft SharePoint and smaller companies like Jive all angling for a piece of the pie. But Yuen says he’s not feeling pressure from the influx of new competitors: the company’s revenues for the first half of 2009 have already exceed all of those from 2008, despite the economic downturn.

While the market’s growth has helped make potential customers more aware of the ways such solutions can improve productivity and solve workflow problems, Yuen’s quick to point out that it’s not just overall market growth driving fmyi’s success. There are many solutions on the market, but “no one has really done it well and cracked the code,” says Yuen. From his perspective, fmyi’s main selling point is that its social tools are all organized within workflow, allowing companies to reap significant productivity benefits. (For example, MTV show “Room Raiders,” which uses the system for casting and production schedule management, was reportedly able to cut the length of an average workday to 9 hours from 14 hours after adopting the tool.)

Yuen is also experimenting with using social media as a way to launch and monitor sustainability projects. Through a partnership with the Northwest Earth Institute, fmyi will offer an online discussion course around workplace sustainability within its platform and offer tools for tracking sustainability projects that emerge from the course. Yuen says the company will begin a pilot with two companies “soon” and launch the template for more widespread use later this summer.

The Portland, Ore.-based company, which has been profitable since 2006 without any external investment, currently hosts 6,000 sites. Clients include HBO, Sony, Nike (although it’s using fmyi for product groups, not sustainability efforts these days) and AFLAC (field agents use it for tracking customer relationships). Hyatt is one large company leveraging the company’s sustainability expertise; the hotel chain uses fmyi to coordinate its Global Sustainability Initiative. As far as Yuen is concerned, fmyi’s roots in the sustainability movement may help it work with clients more successfully than its competitors: “Social media and sustainability are both about culture change,” he says.

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Chi.mp gives you a web site to consolidate your contact info and blog/social network content in one convenient location, at a unique URL within the “.mp” top-level domain. It’s a new service, and they’ve only just opened up registration, so you might still be able to sign up and get “yourname.mp” (I snagged darrelletherington.mp). It also serves as an OpenID provider, so you can use your Chi.mp account to sign into other sites that use OpenID. A free domain including a site that requires no HTML knowledge struck me as a fairly attractive package.

Your Chi.mp site is divided into “Profile Items” and “Content Items.” Under the Profile Items tab, you can enter contact information, employment history, education details and more biographical information. Think of it as a plug-and-play web-based CV, complete with links to our work online and an integrated portfolio.

In your Content Items, you can import contacts, updates and other info from a number of popular web services. You can also publish status updates to Facebook and Twitter from directly within Chi.mp, and choose to display your Twitter stream on your profile. All together, thanks to Gmail, Yahoo Mail, and Hotmail support, most people should be able to aggregate a fairly comprehensive address book through Chi.mp with little trouble. Unfortunately, it’s missing the option to import contacts from Facebook, which would make it a lot more useful.

All of your imported contacts are stored in your “Ultimate Black Book” located under your Contacts tab. You can add new contacts and edit existing contacts from this page as well. You can also tag contacts for easy searching and grouping, and merge the duplicates that are bound to occur if you’re importing from a variety of address books. Chi.mp helpfully auto-detects duplicate contacts.

Like Facebook, Chi.mp offers you the ability to control the level of access people have to your profile. It does so through “Personas,” which are divided in to three categories. You have “Public,” “Work” and “Friends” Personas, each of which can be customized completely according to your taste.

Aside from integrating many outside services, Chi.mp also offers its own blogging and photo uploading features. These are very nice features to have if you’d like your Chi.mp profile ito be the go-to spot for all your online activity. Chi.mp’s blogging service is rudimentary, but completely adequate for most people’s usage. It works like Posterous and other mini-blogging services, giving you just the basics without the non-essential frills of more complete blogging systems.

In addition to offering customizable content and service integration, Chi.mp also gives you some control over your site’s look and feel. Design options include the ability to choose from a number of pre-set themes, and you can even design your own (limited) theme from scratch if you feel so inclined. You can also add your very own favicon, which many comparable services don’t allow.

It’s a very impressive service overall, and clearly designed to be completely user-oriented. You can even export your entire site with the click of a button, which includes your contacts as a vCard file, your blog posts as HTML, and more. Best of all, it’s completely free. Web workers could definitely do much worse for a comprehensive identity management platform.

What do you use for online identity management?

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There might be a lot of collaboration portal web applications out there, but few work as well or offer as simple a setup as Onehub. I’m not sure how long it took me to get everything ready, but I’m fairly sure that the same song was playing on iTunes when I finished as when I started. And no, my 40GB music library had not completely cycled.

Sign-up is a snap; just provide an email and a password and you’re good to go. Once logged in, you’ll be prompted to create a “Hub,” Onehub’s name for your intranet/extranet/project space. If you’re really in a hurry, and just need to get file sharing up and running without delay because you have a client waiting impatiently to see your work, just select the “Quick Hub” option and you’ll bypass the usual set-up procedure.

Even if you are in a hurry, building out a standard Hub won’t take you very much more time. You pick a title, a description, and a custom, unique URL (Onehub will generate one automatically from your Hub’s title if you’re not fussy). Then you can choose from a selection of preset Hub templates, which automatically includes certain widgets depending on the package you choose, so that your Hub will be ready to use as soon as it’s deployed. If you’d rather build your Hub from scratch, you can choose a blank template and add widgets yourself from the dashboard.

There are plenty of widgets available, including things like News & Events, Tasks, Files, Contacts, etc. You can add, delete, rearrange and customize the widgets depending on your needs.  Beyond changing which widgets you’re using, you can also customize the look and layout of your hub, choose a different theme, and upload your own custom logo. With a storage limit of up to 1024MB, you could even make your Hub a public-facing web site should you so desire.

Onehub offers you a lot of settings as administrator. You can control who has access by inviting specific people, set up custom login settings that allow anyone to request access, and enable FTP access and advanced security options. In fact, I’d even go so far as to say that it’s the easiest app to customize of its kind that I’ve come across.

Onehub is the perfect solution for those looking for collaboration software that can be set up quickly and easily, but that can also grow and change as needed as the project progresses. It doesn’t hurt that it’s free for one Hub with up to 1GB of storage, either. For more Hubs and more storage, Onehub has a range of paid plans.

Have you used Onehub? What did you think?

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The brains behind the Google Android platform have announced the addition of 14 new members.  The Open Handset Alliance states these new members will “either deploy compatible Android devices, contribute significant codeto the Android Open Source Project, or support the ecosystem throughproducts and services that will accelerate the availability ofAndroid-based devices.”  This is pretty big news when you take a look at the new members joining the alliance:

• AKM Semiconductor Inc.
• ARM
• ASUSTek Computer Inc.
• AtherosCommunications
• Borqs, Ericsson
• Garmin International Inc.
• HuaweiTechnologies
• Omron Software Co. Ltd
• Softbank Mobile Corporation
• SonyEricsson
• Teleca AB
• Toshiba Corporation
• Vodafone

These new members plus the existing membership represent most of the carriers and hardware players in the field so this is getting quite exciting.  Of particular interest to me is the addition of Sony Ericsson, Toshiba and ASUS to the alliance.  Sony Ericsson just recently dropped the UIQ platform they have been using and now this would indicate they are going to focus on Android.  ASUS and Toshiba have long been PDA and phone makers and it would appear they are firing that sector of their businesses back up again.  It’s a good time to be a geek.

(press release)

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