Microsoft said the LG deal is the 11th such patent agreement with an Android maker, covering 70 percent of the Android phones sold in the U.S. It previously inked IP agreements with big manufacturers such as HTC, Samsung and Acer. Microsoft said the latest pact builds upon an earlier cross-licensing agreement with LG and is just the latest example of Microsoft’s broad IP licensing program, which has secured more than 1,100 deals.

“We are proud of the continued success of our program in resolving the IP issues surrounding Android and Chrome OS,” said Horacio Gutierrez, corporate VP and deputy general counsel, for Microsoft’s Intellectual Property Group in a statement.

Microsoft has been waging a battle to get Android makers to pay up to get coverage against its patent portfolio. And it’s been largely successful, playing on manufacturers’ desire to resolve IP issues quickly rather than face expensive litigation. Two hold-outs — Barnes & Noble and Motorola — have resisted and will face Microsoft’s patent infringement claims in court. Motorola is in the process of being bought by Google which could bring Google into the Microsoft patent battle.

As we’ve written before, Microsoft stands to gain a lot with its Android licensing business, which could be worth $1 billion at some point. While Microsoft continues to wait for Windows Phone 7 to take off, it’s showing it has a lucrative Android business that just keeps growing.

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The initial ruling, however, whittles away most of the other patent claims of Microsoft against Motorola. The judge found that Motorola did not infringe on six Microsoft patents. The trade commission will now review the finding and issue a final ruling in the coming months.

Microsoft claimed victory in a statement:

We are pleased with the ITC’s initial determination finding Motorola violated four claims of a Microsoft patent. As Samsung, HTC, Acer and other companies have recognized, respecting others’ intellectual property through licensing is the right path forward.

But Motorola also said it also won in the finding, arguing that Microsoft’s case was reduced to just one patent, Motorola General Counsel Scott Offer told AllThingsD.

We view it as a huge win for us. They had originally nine patents in their first case. They are down to one patent effectively

The remaining patent concerns the way in which a device is able to schedule an appointment based on a meeting request using email addresses, contact information and calendar syncing on various devices. Offer told AllThingsD that Motorola is reviewing its option with regard to the remaining patent.

If Motorola, which is being bought by Google, can prevail with the full commission or can limit the claims to single patent, which it can then work around, it will have stood up to Microsoft and its campaign to extract licensing agreements from various Android devices makers. Microsoft has lined up deals with a number of Android makers including Samsung and HTC. It has sued Motorola, Barnes & Noble and others who have resisted striking deals. It’s still possible for Microsoft to get a different ruling from the commission or have some of its invalidated patents put back into play.

Android still faces a lot of attacks from patent holders such Apple and Oracle. British Telecom was the latest to sue Google on Monday after it apparently was unable to get a licensing deal from the search giant. It’s still unclear whether Android can withstand all the legal challenges, but so far, it appears possible for it to work around some of these early defeats. Whether that continues is an open question. Microsoft has about 30 patents in action against Motorola so this is still just early days.

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The launch of the 710 is the opening salvo for Nokia as it works to re-establish itself in the U.S. following its decision to adopt Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 platform. It might disappoint some users who are more anxious to see the Lumia 800, which has gotten positive reviews since it launched in Europe. But T-Mobile said the 710 fits with its strategy of targeting the 150 million Americans who have yet to buy their first smartphone.

“It’s been T-Mobile’s strategy to really upgrade folks who haven’t used a smartphone before to their first smartphone,” said Rhone Rarick, senior product manager for T-Mobile. “The barriers for that are really cost and intimidation of something too complex. From T-Mobile’s perspective we think Windows Phone is a great platform for those folks and from a hardware perspective we need to make certain things happen to get down to great price point of $49.”

The 710 offers a 3.7-inch WVGA display with a 1.4 GHz Snapdragon processor, 8 GB of storage and a 5 megapixel camera. It will be able to access speeds of 14.4 megabits per second on T-Mobile’s HSPA+ network. The T-Mobile version of the Lumia 710 will also get Netflix pre-loaded along with T-Mobile TV, a streaming video service. The Lumia 710 will join two other Windows Phone 7 devices, the HD7, T-Mobile’s first WP7 smartphone, and the HTC Radar 4G.

”The Nokia Lumia 710 is the perfect first-time smartphone: a well-designed product that delivers the most compelling Windows Phone experience in its price range and with access to great content and thousands of applications,” said Chris Weber, president, Nokia Americas in a statement. “This is the perfect first Nokia Lumia experience and the start of our re-entry into the U.S. smartphone market.”

The news was widely predicted after Nokia and T-Mobile sent out invitations to a Wednesday night event. An FCC filing also indicated the upcoming device would be the 710, removing any doubt about a possible Lumia 800 launch. But the choice of the 710 is still a disappointment in some ways considering the mounting pressure on Nokia to show that it’s serious about its new direction with Windows Phone 7. Our reviewer Kevin really enjoyed Nokia’s N9, the design the Lumia 800 is built off of.

Launching with T-Mobile would also seem to be weak choice for Nokia to debut its Windows Phone 7 line in the U.S. But it makes sense in that T-Mobile has been a strong supporter of Nokia for years. And Nokia is familiar with T-Mobile’s bands so preparing the devices for the network was relatively easy. But it still means that Nokia is starting with a struggling fourth-place carrier and will need to move quickly to roll out on the other operators. This is just the first step for Nokia but it will need to do a lot more to really make good on its bet on Windows Phone 7 in the U.S.

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But Mono’s Founder and Lead Developer Miguel de Icaza was not about to let that be the end of the road. Fewer than two weeks after Novell swung the axe, de Icaza announced the launch of Xamarin, a startup calling itself “the new home of the engineers that created Mono” with a strong focus on mobile products. It was inspiring news, but it was clear Xamarin had its work cut out for it: Moving an open-source project like Mono away from the cushy corporate parent company in which it lived for nearly eight years would not be a walk in the park.

The challenge was big, but today, Xamarin is going strong: The company is generating self-sustaining revenue and is on a steady product launch schedule. (Last week it rolled out Mono for Android 4.0, which lets developers make apps that work with the latest version of Android, Ice Cream Sandwich.) We caught up with Miguel de Icaza, who serves as Xamarin’s CTO, a few days ago to get a few more details on how things have been going since he and his team decided to go it alone.

Xamarin founder Miguel de Icaza

A wild summer leads to a profitable fall

“It was a wild summer,” de Icaza said. Back when Xamarin was born in mid-May, the team had to kick into overdrive to make sure it could get off the ground as an independent company. “After the Novell layoffs, one option would be for everyone to go home and just find a different job. But we love this project, and we love what we’re doing,” he said.

That early hustle soon brought results. Xamarin landed a couple of large clients, which allowed the company to hire all the people who had been laid off from the Mono team at Novell. Then in July, Xamarin inked a partnership with SUSE (the Attachmate business unit that now houses all the old Novell assets) to obtain all the rights to Mono. In exchange, Xamarin agreed to provide support for all of the old Mono customers. “We got ten years’ worth of intellectual property, and Novell got all its customers taken care of,” de Icaza said.

Funding is no longer a must-have

As a result of garnering the rights to Mono and a solid customer base, Xamarin wound up with self-sustaining revenue that covers its staff of some 50 people — without having taken on any venture capital. According to de Icaza, Xamarin may still take on outside investors, but it’s not a must:

“During week one of the layoff [taking funding] was the only option on the table. Now we have a product that brings self-sustaining revenue. Taking on outside money is still a discussion we can have, and it’s something we’ll consider, but it’s not a pressing issue.”

The new year and beyond

Xamarin has no plans to start resting on its laurels; according to de Icaza, the company has plans to be busy for many months ahead. “We want to make it easier for people to share code between Windows, iPhone and Android, and we believe we can make this the one language that can do that. We want to make people incredibly productive with our stack for mobile development,” he said. “All these people trusted that we could deliver these tools, now we need to keep making the product better.”

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According to one source, the Windows Store represents a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it’s necessary to transition Microsoft into the age of tablets and other devices for which programmers — often younger and not very fond of Microsoft — want to use lightweight languages and write new kinds of apps. The Windows Store — the outlet to the world of potential customers on devices other than PCs — encourages C#/XAML and HTML5/JavaScript “Metro-style” applications that have an iPhone-style user interface.

On the other hand, the new process might alienate the 5 million existing .NET developers. Their .NET skills will still work in Windows 8 — especially on the server side or for writing straight desktop applications — but their old applications won’t work, and they’ll have to learn the extensions for the new WinRT runtime. They’ll have to learn HTML5 or use XAML if they want to show up in the Windows Store, which is where all the action will be in a post-PC world.

If developers are going to learn something new, there’s an argument they might as well go with the proven iOS or Android platforms and not risk Microsoft either failing once again in mobile or deciding to kill yet another app strategy like it did with Zune and Silverlight. One could argue it’s also an ideal time to just learn PHP, Python or Ruby on the server side, too. For a good list of developer concerns, check out this TechRepublic article.

Former .NET programmer Karthik Hariharan told me via email, “If HTML5 fulfills the original promise of Java (write once, run anywhere with a consistent experience), then Microsoft is poised to be at the forefront of that new trend with the first viable commercial implementation of it. However, they will do this at the cost of their current developer base which is the large .NET community, who has, in general, responded negatively to the announcement.”

Hariharan added, “due to the consumer and enterprise shift to mobile devices, many former Windows developers have started writing Android and iOS apps. Much of their existing knowledge still applies here, but the apps they build on iOS and Android have larger audiences than those they could reach using Silverlight and .NET for Windows Phone 7.”

In a world of walled gardens, however, that run-anywhere vision rarely pans out. Platform providers like Microsoft, Apple and Google don’t win anything if apps can run anywhere like web sites do, which is why there’s always a hook. Aside from a profit-sharing model designed to lure developers, Microsoft’s hook is WinRT. Former .NET product manager Scott Barnes, now with Riagenic, said it’s designed to provide a native app experience on Windows devices (much like .NET was back in the day), but also limits the portability of even HTML5 apps.

One thing Microsoft definitely has in its favor, he thinks, is the ability to make Windows Store a cross-Microsoft experience that embraces everything from phones to PCs to the Xbox. Microsoft touted its vast consumer footprint during the Windows Store launch, and even said it will leverage Bing to push apps, so it appears to get that message.

Developers come before users, though, so Microsoft has to play its cards right. Ensuring .NET developers have a relatively pain-free transition to the world of Windows 8 and app stores might be critical, because new mobile developers haven’t been flocking to Windows (although Microsoft has paid some to come), and there’s no guarantee they’ll do so now despite Microsoft’s clear courtship.

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But did anyone think it was this tough?

Even the company’s most hardcore supporters — that is, users in its home territory of Finland — seem to be defecting to rivals, with new figures from IDC showing that it has lost more than half of its smartphone market share there over the last 12 months.

According to a Finnish language report from Helsinki’s Taloussanomat, Nokia’s share of the smartphone market for the third quarter of 2011 has dropped to 31 percent — that’s down from 76 percent the same time last year.

The company’s main challenger is Samsung, which now has a quarter of all smartphone sales in Finland — rocketing up from just 3 percent for the same quarter in 2010 and putting it narrowly behind Nokia itself. In third place is Apple’s iPhone, which has traditionally received little support from many of the Finnish operators. It rose by five points to take 16 percent of the market.

Of course, in broader terms, this doesn’t mean a great deal to Nokia’s bottom line — after all, Finland’s entire population is little more than 5 million and the company shifted more than 100 million handsets worldwide in the quarter in question. And since the Lumia was not yet on the cards during the quarter in question, sales may have been affected more than usual.

Yet this low blow will hurt, not least since Nokia’s dominance of the Finnish economy is hard to overstate. Its tentacles are everywhere, and the company has traditionally enjoyed a level of dominance at home that is unprecedented.

As Taloussanomat notes:

Smartphones only represent one part of the global mobile phone market, and Finland itself is a small market area.

But Nokia’s collapse is relevant, however, since the company’s position in its home smartphone market has traditionally been very strong. 

The rest of the field, if you’re interested, is made up with Sony Ericsson (11 percent), Huawei (11 percent) and ZTE (6 percent). It seems the Asian manufacturers are really making inroads, even in unfamiliar markets.

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The “it” is Yahoo’s very public auction of itself to the highest private equity bidder. In case you were hiding under a rock, here is a recap of rumors around Yahoo’s possible sale:

• Silver Lake Partners wants to buy a minority stake in Yahoo for about $16.60 a share (valuing Yahoo at $20.6 billion or about 6 percent higher than yesterday’s closing price.) Silver Lake is working with Microsoft and Andreessen Horowitz.
• The transaction is going to use PIPEs, private investment in public equity — a type of transaction long reserved for somewhat dubious companies.
• Jerry Yang will stay on the board, but the investors will get three seats on the board, reports say.
• Some folks believe that Jeff Jordan, former CEO of OpenTable, will become the chief executive of Yahoo and VC Marc Andreessen will become the chairman.
• TPG Capital is considering offering a $1 per share more — aka $17.60/share.
• Others are also eyeing the company including KKR and Blackstone Group.
• Thomas H. Lee Partners is thinking about a bid.
• Alibaba Group wants to buy Yahoo. Yahoo owns 40 percent of the Chinese company. Kara Swisher says they are thinking about teaming up with Softbank and Blackstone for their own bid.

600 million

Last time I wrote about Yahoo and its dismal and disastrous board of directors, I pointed out that 600 million users make up Yahoo’s biggest asset (and biggest stumbling block) and that company needed to clean house and then go shopping. Most of the people in comments disagreed and said that no self-respecting startup would want to be part of Yahoo.

Instead, most felt that the company should clean house and focus on a few pockets of growth inside the company — communications and shopping for example. I am betting buyers will be thinking along those lines, but will that be enough?

Whatever comes of these moves, the question is, can Yahoo be saved, and if yes, what is the value that can be retrieved? More importantly, will these private equity investors meet their own tech Waterloo in the fallen Internet star?

Dead Fish

As far as I am concerned, Yahoo is pretty far gone and is essentially a hollow shell of its former self. Its board – probably the single worst group in business – has managed to drip every last drop out of its body. There are few bright spots — Flickr, Yahoo Mail and Yahoo Shopping — but they cannot make up for the singular reality that the Internet that helped Yahoo thrive is no longer the Internet most people use.

Behavioral shifts in the Internet are so strong that Yahoo has no chance. The average U.S. Facebook user is spending over six hours a month day on the social network, Twitter is becoming the new news network and photos are thriving on mobile platforms.

The Internet of today is one of many screens. Yahoo, despite its mobile products and wonderful experiments with Yahoo TV, is still a one trick pony — online advertising.  More accurately, the classic CPM-style advertising depends on large audiences, lots of page views and well, you get it, an old-fashioned way of thinking. When I think of Yahoo, I am reminded of a salmon farmed on carcinogens that is trying to move upstream in order to find growth.

Smart guys, but…

The consortium that is making a push for Yahoo is the same group that went out and bought Skype from eBay and turned around and flipped it to Microsoft, and in the process they made a lot of money.

However, this is not the same case. Skype was and still is on the right side of history. Usage behavior favors Skype, which continues to grow despite the company having ruined a great user experience. Skype is thriving despite all the meddling from the previous owners. Microsoft can’t do anything because Skype provides value.

What does Yahoo do that you and I can’t live without?

That’s right … nothing!

I have a lot of respect for Jeff Jordan (who would actually be one of my choices to run Yahoo), but I am sorry even he cannot do the impossible. Yahoo’s brain drain is legendary and it continues. There are more resumes going out of Yahoo than there are folks lining up to work for Yahoo.  Unless there is a tech/broad economy collapse, that situation isn’t going to change.

Frankly, if you were a smart engineer or a product guy, why would you go work for a company, which is going to be owned by buyout guys who essentially nickel-and-dime your creativity to death? Why not go and work for a startup, where the chances of an upside, however remote they might be, are still there.

Or better yet, take a flyer and start your own company. Hell, if you need a job, these days even Google is pretty lax about hiring. The fact is that the buyout philosophy might work on old industrial-age companies, but I am not sure it would translate to Internet companies.

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Talking about “the cloud” is a pretty popular thing to do, at least in technology circles. We have a whole stream within GigaOM devoted to cloud-related topics, and everyone from Google to Microsoft — and of course Amazon, which more or less pioneered the cloud — is selling cloud-based platforms. Apple even launched something called iCloud as part of its latest update. But will we always talk this way? If history is any guide, eventually the idea of the cloud as something separate from the web will disappear as more people get used to the concept — although when that day will come is anyone’s guess.

The arrival of the cloud as a mainstream phenomenon is one of the topics we’re going to be talking about at the upcoming Net:Work conference, which GigaOM is presenting at the Mission Bay Conference Center in San Francisco on Dec. 8. Among others, we’ll be talking to and hearing from people like Box.net founder and CEO Aaron Levie, Tim Young of Socialcast, and senior executives from companies like Jive Software, Rypple and Elance. Many of these companies are leaders when it comes to changing the way that we work, including the use of cloud services.

Do we really need to know there’s a cloud?

Box.net and similar companies such as Dropbox use the cloud for file hosting and syncing, so you never have to remember which computer you left a specific file on, or use cumbersome remote-access apps to get to the document you need. They have become such an integral part of the way many people work (including me) it’s hard to imagine a time when they didn’t exist. And in many ways the fact that they use “the cloud” is irrelevant — all that users really need to know is that their files are available whenever and wherever they want them.

If I was explaining either service to my parents, for example, I would try not to use the term “cloud” at all. It wouldn’t really make any sense to them without an explanation, and once I started explaining it — how the cloud is a bunch of servers that Amazon or Google maintains in giant buildings that hold billions of individual files — it would actually make things worse. If I just pointed out that any files placed in a specific folder would automatically show up in other folders on different computers, then they would understand everything they need to know.

Of course, this kind of feature would probably seem like magic to my parents — but then, much of modern technology falls into that category for them, I think. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

Geeks and technology fans used to like to talk about their computers and what processors they had, and how much RAM, and even what kind of cooling system they had in them — as well as which operating system was better. As computers have become more powerful and ubiquitous, with mobile devices like smartphones and tablets taking over a large share of the market, I seem to hear fewer of those conversations. And because so much of what we do now involves the web and the “cloud,” things like operating systems and processors and specific PC features are becoming increasingly irrelevant.

The cloud is like the atmosphere — all around us

In the same way, I think the whole idea of a “cloud” will eventually cease to be remarkable — just as computing power is gradually disappearing into the environment around us and becoming part of everyday objects like mirrors or jewellery, even as computers become more powerful every day. Already, hundreds of millions of people use cloud services without even realizing it or talking about it as the cloud. Web-based email is the norm now rather than the exception, and services like Facebook have hundreds of millions of users who likely never stop to think about where their content is being hosted.

That’s not to say there aren’t important issues involved in the cloud, including what rights your cloud provider has to simply delete data (as Amazon did last year with the files hosted by WikiLeaks) or what legal liabilities you undertake when you host your files, photos and other data on a U.S.-based server — something that companies based in other jurisdictions need to be aware of. And in many cases, users themselves need to be aware that their files or content can easily disappear, making backups a necessity.

But in the not-too-distant future, we will all be living and working and exchanging files and services via the cloud, to the point where it won’t really even make sense to talk about the cloud as something separate. It will be like the atmosphere: all around us, invisible, and only important when we don’t have access to it. For more on how the cloud and other technologies are changing the way we live and work, join me at GigaOM’s Net:Work conference on Dec. 8.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users Satoru Kikuchi and Argonne National Laboratory

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In February 2008, Microsoft made an unsolicited, $44.6-billion cash and stock bid that was turned down and eventually pulled by Microsoft. In a recent interview with John Battelle at the Web 2.0 Summit, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer expressed relief that deal never went through, saying, “Sometimes, you’re lucky.”

Of course, Microsoft didn’t give up its pursuit of Yahoo. A few months after it was spurned for an all-out acquisition, it made a $1-billion offer for Yahoo’s search business, which would have included an additional $8-billion investment for 16 percent of Yahoo stock. Yahoo again turned that offer down, striking a search and advertising deal with Google  instead. A year later, in the summer of 2009, Microsoft and Yahoo were finally able to come to terms with a search pact that made sense for both companies.

Now it seems Microsoft might take another stab at acquiring Yahoo outright, at a fraction of the price it proposed just a few years ago. When Microsoft first began its pursuit of Yahoo, it reportedly offered up to $41 a share last year in 2007. Yahoo then turned down the $44.6-billion bid, which valued Yahoo stock at $31 a share — and Yahoo’s stock price has been cut in half since then, trading today at about $15 a share.

Of course, just because Yahoo is a lot cheaper doesn’t mean it’s a better value, especially since Microsoft has already struck a deal for the most important part of the business — search. What Microsoft always wanted out of Yahoo was to increase the scale of its Bing search engine and to create a more viable alternative to Google’s massive search business. Now that it’s in the midst of a 10-year exclusive agreement, there’s little incentive for Microsoft to purchase Yahoo outright.

As for the rest of what Yahoo has to offer, there’s considerable overlap between Microsoft and Yahoo’s media entities and social utilities. That includes news and entertainment sites like MSN and Yahoo’s homepage, email properties like Microsoft’s Windows Live Hotmail and Yahoo Mail, and communications apps like MSN Messenger and Yahoo Messenger. Microsoft’s recent acquisition of Skype provides even more overlap in this latter case, as the VOIP and video chat app also shares some functionality with Yahoo messenger, particularly for mobile video chat.

Most importantly, however, there’s little evidence a Microsoft-run Yahoo will fare any better than one with a new CEO or one taken over by private equity. Microsoft has already spent multiple billions on its online division, and continues to lose money quarter after quarter. Adding Yahoo’s distressed online properties is not likely to reverse that trend. The best Microsoft could hope to achieve is realizing a certain number of “efficiencies” by essentially combining and streamlining its duplicate products — which is just corporate speak for cutting a bunch of jobs.

Photo of Yahoo! billboard courtesy of Flickr user Chris Makarsky

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Digitimes said according to talks with Taiwanese smartphone makers, the number of NFC-equipped smartphones will grow from less than 10 percent now to more than 50 percent within three years. Sources, however, told Digitimes the industry still needs to work through a number of issues, including standardizing specifications, the ecosystem and commercial operations.

The NFC wave grows

It’s not that surprising that Microsoft and Apple want to jump on board with NFC next year. Andy Lees, president of Windows Phone, said at the AsiaD conference last month that consumers can expect to see NFC WP7 phones in the next year. And earlier this year, reports telegraphed Apple’s decision to forgo NFC in the latest iPhone but indicated the tech would likely be included in 2012.

If this all comes to pass as expected, the future of NFC will really start to come together. But it’s not just about getting all the platforms aligned behind NFC, it’s about really showing what the technology can do. I think that Apple is especially well positioned to do that.

Right now, consumer awareness isn’t really there, because NFC chips are shipping only on a handful of devices, and the things you can do with NFC are very limited. But if Apple and Microsoft can not only include NFC in their upcoming phones, but also create some compelling applications that use it, it could really accelerate NFC’s adoption and turn it into an essential radio tech, like Bluetooth or Wi-Fi.

Apple as NFC catalyst

I think Apple in particular could come up with some great applications for NFC, which is a very versatile way to transfer data quickly over short distances. It can be used to let people check-in to a location or obtain a coupon from a poster or sign. It can help deliver personalized marketing offers to users. This is something Apple could leverage in its Apple Stores, which can be a powerful showcase for NFC Google or other rivals can’t match. By letting people tap their phone to check-in when they arrive at a store or to see what’s new or what the wait is like for a Genius Bar appointment, it can be a simple way for people to understand how to use NFC.

Checking-in for Genius Bar reservations is available now through a Concierge feature on the Apple Store app, but that works over Wi-Fi, which can mean more steps than simple device-to-device NFC interaction. And tapping a phone could pull up more information for everyday visitors, perhaps showing them special offers on apps for in-store shoppers. Apple is already simplifying its retail experience with its Apple Store app with in-store pick-up and self-checkout and NFC could provide a good complement. Other digital wallet providers will need to work with merchants to integrate their payment and offer systems at the point of sale, but Apple will be able to configure everything end-to-end to best highlight the new technology.

Apple’s digital wallet

Apple can obviously use NFC to pursue its own digital wallet. It has already applied for patents that could lead to an end-to-end system that would include mobile marketing, mobile payments and mobile retailing. Apple could build an NFC mobile payments system that ties into users’ credit card accounts on file with iTunes. Apple users are already very comfortable running transactions through iTunes, which has more credit accounts than any other retailer. An Apple digital wallet could be another formidable challenger against other NFC payments systems such as Google Wallet, the carrier-led Isis joint venture and Visa’s V.me digital wallet, which will eventually incorporate NFC.

But NFC doesn’t have to be used for mobile wallet applications in order to spur greater adoption. As I’ve pointed out, there’s more to NFC than payments, and this coming year probably won’t see things settle down in mobile payments enough for NFC to really take off in that regard.

But we can still see some interesting apps like BlackBerry’s Tag and Android’s Beam, which allow data sharing between NFC-enabled devices. Those apps provide Bump-like features, enabling users to share things like contacts, apps, web pages, multimedia content, YouTube videos, maps and other information simply by touching two phones together. I’d be interested to see how Apple can make sharing of content and data even more seamless and natural.

An Apple NFC iPhone patent

Kick-starting a range of NFC apps

Also, as the first platform for many developers, Apple could help encourage a lot of support for NFC-based apps. If developers can get access to the chip, it would spawn a lot of interesting ideas utilizing NFC. It wouldn’t just be payment applications, but all sorts of innovating takes on contactless interaction.

As I pointed out with Social Passport, a startup in New York, it’s possible to enable a lot of social actions through NFC that make things like checking-in, tweeting or following someone almost effortless, without even waking up a phone. And PayPal is showing how NFC can be used for person-to-person payments. There’s also a big opportunity in using NFC for physical access to buildings, something RIM is working on with HID.

Championing of emerging technology

I’m not sure what Apple will pursue first, but regardless, the company could do a lot in terms of putting NFC in the hands of more active users. All of these other NFC initiatives can also help raise awareness of NFC, but no one seems to help champion and popularize emerging technologies like Apple. It has done it with video chat with FaceTime; it has taken over the MP3 market with the iPod; and it has breathed life into voice-recognition with Siri. Apple has a way of making wonky technology very usable and elegant. It’s not clear Apple wants to take up that role right away, but that’s exactly what NFC needs to gain traction.

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Overall, the smartphone market grew 42 percent year over year to 115 million smartphones sold in the third quarter. But with Android outpacing the market, other competitors are having a hard time keeping up. IOS grew by almost 4 million unit sales in the third quarter to 17.3 million iPhones, but its share of the market slipped to 15 percent, down from 16.6 percent a year ago and 18.2 percent in the second quarter, when it sold 19.6 million units. Apple lost some momentum with the later-than-usual fall introduction of the iPhone 4S, but it should rebound in the coming quarter now that the 4S is out with expanded distribution. Samsung’s Bada was actually up to a 2.2 percent market share, up from 1.1 percent a year ago, putting it ahead of Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7.

The rest of the market fared far worse. Symbian continued an ungraceful decline with its market share plummeting to 16.9 percent from 36.3 percent a year ago, with unit sales dropping by about 10 million devices. The platform was expected to suffer with Nokia’s move to Windows Phone 7, but the quick abandonment of Symbian by consumers is still pretty stunning and raises questions about how many Nokia smartphone users will be around when the company starts really cranking out WP7 devices.

Research In Motion’s BlackBerry OS was also down, with its market share slipping to 11 percent, down from 15.4 percent a year ago. Unit sales were basically flat over the past year, meaning that while the smartphone market has been on fire, RIM is just treading water. With more BlackBerry 7 devices coming out now, RIM might see some better performance. But with the transition to BBX phones next year no big secret, customers may well hold off to get their hands on the next operating system.

Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 has its work cut out for it. Microsoft sold just 1.7 million devices in the third quarter, representing a 1.5 percent share of the market, according to Gartner, down from 2.2 million units a year ago. Now with the Mango update available and Nokia starting to release Windows Phone 7 devices, we should see some lift for Windows Phone 7. But at this point, Microsoft has a lot of catching up to do.

Gartner said Samsung was the top smartphone maker, with 24 million units sold to end users, thanks to strong sales of Galaxy S devices. There have been some questions about how many smartphones Samsung has actually sold, because the company didn’t report those numbers.

The smartphone market continues to look like a two-platform race, with Android setting a torrid pace with its vast collection of devices and iOS the only challenger that can hold its own. This quarter should see a lot more iOS sales, but the big test will be next year for rivals like Microsoft and RIM. They need to turn things around and start to see some real progress with their new operating systems. Android and iOS are not waiting, and the market is now turning away from early adopters and tech-savvy consumers to more basic, price-conscious mobile users.

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Microsoft is pushing out new Bing for Mobile apps this week that are built on HTML5 and blend the best of native apps with a robust mobile web experience. Bing for Mobile Hybrid Apps will allow user to get a consistent experience across all platforms, because the core Bing app is written in HTML5 and will be essentially the same across all native clients and the web. But it will be able to tap specific hardware features on each device so users will be able to take advantage of services such as Bing Vision and voice search.

Microsoft gets a lot of advantages by leveraging HTML5. It can launch features on various platforms quickly because they’re built off the same base and it can keep a consistent experience between different platforms. And it eliminates the need to keep downloading updates for native apps because Microsoft can keep the core of the apps up-to-date. Some improvements that first appeared on the mobile web version of Bing, such as Bing Deals and transit directions, should appear faster on the mobile apps.

Bing for Mobile Hybrid Apps also utilizes HTML5 because it can better fulfill user searches. Instead of answering queries with information or an app, Bing for Mobile will be able to integrate outside services more easily so users can complete tasks without leaving the app. For instance, a ticketing service can be integrated right into Bing for Mobile to fulfill a user’s desire to buy tickets.

“We think it’s an interesting model to think about how to expose the things you can do with a product or service in ways that engines like Bing can consume them, so we can do a better job,” said Stefan Weitz, senior director of Bing. ”That’s the idea, how can we begin to unlock the power of these applications so engines like Bing can use them to fulfill a request.”

The hybrid apps also offer other improvements including:

• Maps/List Split View. Users can see a list view alongside a map on one screen, making it easy for people to see what they’re searching for. This can also work for driving directions and transit.
• Search History. Users can see a history of their search queries to get back to recent searches.
• Deals. Bing for Mobile offers local deals aggregated from Groupon, LivingSocial, Tippr and other major deal providers.

Bing for Mobile Hybrid Apps will first appear on the iPhone in the U.S. and the U.K., as well as on certain Androiddevices in the United States. Microsoft is also working on hybrid apps for BlackBerry and Windows Phone 7 devices.

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After watching big companies aim products at the home consumer and talking to venture firms trying to see which business models might have the most success, the question seems to boil down to whether applications or hardware are better way to deliver connected home services? Fundamentally, every entrepreneur should realize that in a broadband world, what they will deliver is a service, and the rest is just the wrapping.

Hardware makes consumers happy

The Nest thermostat (in cooling mode).

Earlier this week, we saw the launch of Nest, a smart, connected thermostat, which is both beautiful and simple to use. All its complexity is hidden in the simplistic touch wheel design, but it aims to control the heating and cooling in your home in a manner that will save consumers up to 30 percent of their energy consumption. At $250, this isn’t a cheap thermostat, but what people are buying here is the intelligence that rests in the service (and a pretty thermostat).

A similar example is the Sonos system, which is awesome-sounding hardware that acts as a music delivery service. Again, the Sonos system isn’t cheap, but it does offer consumers aesthetically pleasing (in terms of sound, the boxes aren’t all that attractive) hardware with the true purpose of delivering music services from the web. The box is also easy to set up and manages to mask any problems with the quality of a user’s home Wi-Fi network, so the consumer doesn’t need to worry about allocating bandwidth to the box.

The list goes on with devices such as the Roku, which, like Sonos, is easy to set up and helps ensure a solid experience. And I can’t avoid mentioning Apple, which might be the king of building out hardware that hides its complexity and is heading toward becoming a means of delivering services such as iTunes, iCloud and MobileMe. It’s not quite there on the services side, yet, but I have no doubts it will get there.

The app-ortunity is unclear

Comcast's Xfinity app

While the app economy is huge on mobile devices, its ability to deliver services designed to be consumed at home are unclear. So far, apps designed to help consumers manage network-based services inside the home have faltered. On the energy management side, Google’s PowerMeter and Microsoft’s Hohm products were shuttered after low adoption. That may be a lack of interest in home energy monitoring, so we’ll have to see if Nest makes an impact where these services failed.

The television industry hopes to build apps for its screen, and pay TV providers are offering apps in the form of TV Anywhere products that might count as an example of success. But it’s hard to pinpoint specific apps that provide a connected experience tied to the home or gadgets residing in the home. I wonder if services such as security and TV apps might be the best way to hide a service in the form of an application.

With TVs and TV content, an app strategy makes sens,e because the content will come via IP to a multitude of devices from different manufacturers, (although for traditional TVs, a set-top box might work too). For security, which would require a professional installation of equipment (or people are more willing to buy professionally installed equipment) an app strategy may also work.

The other area where I’d love to see some sort of user-centric app or device is for managing the network. Right now, I don’t have the ability to easily allocate bandwidth to certain areas of my home or to certain applications. I think as more devices compete for limited Wi-Fi, such services make more sense. It could be built into a router or perhaps managed through the web via an ISP-provided app.

Either way, consumers are beginning to get frustrated with the toll of maintaining, updating, troubleshooting and having mediocre experiences on their connected devices. Instead of bringing the glitchy-PC experience to homes, let’s get it right this time around with something that looks more like electricity. I don’t care if it’s hardware or an app; I just want to be able to flip a switch and have it work.

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Startups want to lure student interns from universities like MIT (pictured).

Exclusive. If you’re a college student, a summer internship at a top Silicon Valley tech company can be a pretty sweet deal: The pay is good, the perks are many and perhaps most importantly, you get a reputable name to anchor your resume — which at this point in your life, is probably pretty short.

Of course, there are lots of great technology startups that offer great internships as well. But top engineering students often pass those opportunities because they want the money and name recognition that such companies as Google and Microsoft can provide.

That’s why Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers is lending its startups a hand with a new initiative aimed at attracting top-tier engineering students to summer internships. The storied Silicon Valley venture capital firm has partnered with InternMatch to launch a new program called the KPCB Fellowship.

Leveling the playing field

Essentially, the KPCB Fellowship aims to provide students with all the benefits they would receive from a summer internship at an established tech company — but while working at a startup. The fellowship will accept up to 25 graduate and undergraduate engineering students, and each will be employed for the summer at one of Kleiner Perkins’ portfolio companies (Flipboard, Groupon, Chegg and Klout are among the startups participating). In addition to their day jobs, the summer interns will be assigned an industry mentor and receive invitations to private speaking events with people in Kleiner Perkins’ impressive Rolodex. The students will all receive competitive wages and housing relocation assistance.

InternMatch is helping to promote the KPCB Fellowship on its website, which is focused on giving students an in-depth look at the internship opportunities available to them. The deadline to apply for summer 2012, the inaugural season of the KPCB Fellowship, is approaching fast: Applications for the program are due on Oct. 31.

What’s in a name? A lot.

The Kleiner Perkins name serves as a huge draw in itself, InternMatch co-founder Nathan Parcells tells me. “Startups like Klout have great brand recognition in the Silicon Valley community, but that doesn’t always reach to top schools that great engineers are coming out of, particularly the ones on the East Coast like MIT. This fellowship offers the full Silicon Valley experience, and it also says you can get the great brand name recognition of having one of the top venture capital firms in the world on your CV.”

Now, Kleiner Perkins is not the only venture capital firm to do such a thing: True Ventures, for example, has held a similar program called True Entrepreneur Corps for the past few years (please see the disclosure below). InternMatch also has a partner page with Sequoia Capital to help it promote internship opportunities at the firm and its partner companies.

In all, I think, initiatives like these are positive any way you slice it: They can help startups recruit top-notch young engineers as full-time employees — and ultimately foster more innovation in technology overall.

Photo of MIT Building 10 and the Great Dome courtesy of John Phelan via Creative Commons license

Disclosure: True Ventures is an investor in the parent company of this blog, GigaOM. Om Malik, the founder of GigaOM, is also a venture partner at True.

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“People like Nokia,” he said. “We’re reliable. We’re durable.”

“We comb our hair each morning. We pick you up from school. We would always send you a birthday card.”

“But it’s not enough.”

In order to get where it needs to be, Elop said that Nokia needs to be adored. It needs to be exciting. That’s why the company unveiled a slate of new devices, spearheaded by the Lumia 800 and 710 — a pair of shiny Windows phones that it hopes can be enough to turn the company’s flagging fortunes around.

Elop called Lumia “the first real Windows Phone”, presumably a slap at HTC, and then handed over to Kevin Shields — a former Windows Phone engineering executive hired by Nokia to help it get shipped — who ran through the product.

By and large, the announcements seemed to be roughly in line with what was expected. And visually it wasn’t a shock either: the Lumia 800 seems pretty close — almost identical — to the previously seen N9, which our own Kevin Tofel said is “among the nicest and well-designed smartphone hardware I’ve ever used”. The specs, too, are familiar: the Lumia 800 has an 3.7 inch AMOLED screen, 1.4 GHz processor, Carl Zeiss lens camera, 16GB memory and 25GB free cloud storage.

Under the hood, the handsets run Windows Phone Mango and from the outside appear smartly done and really usable. On top of what you already get with Mango, the devices come with added extras such as satnav; music and radio player; and a partnership with ESPN to deliver sports content.

Availability

More to the point though, it’s coming soon — perhaps very soon, depending on where you live. The Lumia 800 is being made available in the main European markets first, rolling out across Germany, France, the U.K., Spain, Italy and the Netherlands in November. Russia, India and (along with Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan) will see the Lumia 800 before the end of the year. North America, on the other hand, won’t get it until early 2012, shortly followed by mainland China.

Pricewise? Well, on launch, an unsubsidized Lumia 800 will cost €420; the 710 is priced at €270.

Success?

Make no bones about it, this was a big deal for Nokia. You could almost hear the tension, the eagerness that sometimes slipped toward hysteria. And for good reason, the presentation was an attempt to make a big point: the future for Nokia has arrived. The N9, based on MeeGo, was a place marker — a way of showing that Nokia can actually get products out — and the Lumia is where they’re going.

Still Symbian

The biggest surprise for me, though, was the amount of emphasis put on another range of devices being launched today. Kevin had suggested Symbian would get sidelined entirely, but before the Lumia was shown, Elop spent a long time pushing another line called Asha — featurephones that incorporate both a touchscreen and keyboard… and run Symbian S40.

This is clearly an attempt to push from both ends of the market, and the company is trying to capitalize on its hard-fought reputation in fast-growing markets. But it’s also worth remembering that Nokia is far from unassailable in those countries — it’s under threat there, just like it is everywhere else.

Look at India, where revenues are flat and (perhaps more importantly) its share in the feature phone and smartphone market — precisely where Asha is targeted — has dropped from 49 percent in 2010 to 37.5 percent in the first half of 2011.

Whether or not the burning platform is on fire any more remains to be answered. But even if the flames have been quenched, there’s still been a vast amount of damage done. Can Asha turn that around? Can Lumia?

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IBM’s outgoing CEO, Sam Palmisano, divested some of the thinner-margin stuff like PCs to focus more on the richer realms of software and services. Rometty worked with Palmisano on this services-fed strategy for some time, and if it’s succeeding, continuity is the best policy, said several IBM watchers.

“Why should she change the strategy when she helped build the strategy and it’s working so well?” asked Bob Djurdjevic, the president of Annex Research, who has followed IBM for more than 20 years.

“Cloud services have been a distinguishing characteristic of IBM for years and it’s been interesting to watch other companies poo-poo this strategy — companies like Oracle, like Microsoft, like HP, who have since announced their own cloud strategies,” he added.

Indeed, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison used to scoff that IBM offered so much hardware and software just so customers would have to write checks to IBM services to integrate them. But once Oracle bought Sun Microsystems, he started holding up the IBM of another era as the ideal prototype of a company. Oracle unveiled its cloud computing earlier this month at its OpenWorld conference.

Judith Hurwitz, the president of Hurwitz and Associates, concurred that Rometty will stay the course. Rometty has been transitioning to this role for some time, Hurwitz said.

“Naming her CEO is the board endorsing [both] the cloud strategy and [Palmisano and Rometty's] policy of bringing the threads of IBM together in a very flexible way,” Hurwitz added. “The usual problem with these big companies is they have all these little fiefdoms fighting each other rather than working together.”

In 2002, Rometty helped engineer IBM’s $3.5 billion buyout of PricewaterhouseCoopers‘ consulting business before going on to lead IBM’s global sales effort. IBM now derives a big chunk of its revenue from both professional services (via IBM Global Business Services) and infrastructure/outsourcing services (IBM Technology Services). In its most recent quarter, IBM logged $10.3 billion from Global Technology, up 9 percent from the year-ago period, not figuring in currency changes. Global Business Services were up 6 percent, to $4.8 billion. IBM also said its cloud revenue for the first three quarters of this year was double its cloud revenue for the full previous year.

Rometty started at IBM in 1981 as a systems engineer, so she’s done her time in the tech trenches as well. She is known to be a very good communicator — both one-on-one and before large audiences.

“I give Palmisano credit. He picked someone who is more charismatic than he is. In fact, more charismatic than any tech CEO I’ve seen,” said Djurdjevic.

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