The top at any price

It's as easy as when ladies take their purses and say "let's go shopping".

Google acquisitions history ;)

The latest in the duel:

March 6, 2010. Google Inc. has acquired a company called DocVerse who provides tools that make its possible for people to use the Internet to work together on documents formatted in one of Microsoft's word processing, spreadsheet or presentation programs.

November 23, 2010. CPTN Holdings LLC, a consortium of technology companies organised by Microsoft, is purchasing 882 Novell patents for $450 million cash.

December, 2010. Google (GOOG) announced two new acquisitions in separate blog posts Friday: It has bought speech-synthesis software maker Phonetic Arts and video-distribution technology firm Widevine Technologies.

April, 2011. Google announced it has made its second deal via its subsidiary Google Energy, and the search engine giant plans to buy 100 MW of power from a wind farm that’s under construction in Oklahoma. See whitepaper.

May 10, 2011. Microsoft announced that it was buying Skype for $8.5 B

Just for the record, Google reportedly offered about $6 billion for e-commerce coupon site Groupon.

And new targets are Twitter, Palm and who knows.

A monkey in the chess game

48 hours before I post a help note to save Mono, an interesting article appeared when I was making some Android dev notes.

It seems that Microsoft is the real taker behing Novell adquisition, and Novell is a strategic source of intellectual property related to Unix.

MMMMM. No good news. Maybe its time to evaluate a new alternative for Android development, considering Oracle is pressing Google in the Java front and now this.

Weird.

Don't shock the monkey

When Android appeared, Java wasn´t my target development platform.

I been working with .Net for so long that the first thing I been waiting is .Net for Android, and Mono has it (http://mono-android.net/).

Because of my workload, I ain´t have the time to get my hands dirty, but today I received a newsletter with a RED WARNING: Novell is gone and Mono... don´t know.

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/open-source/is-mono-dead-is-novell-dying/8821
http://www.infoworld.com/d/application-development/uncertain-future-open-source-net-047

I believe its time for Microsoft to get involved if they really want .Net technology spreads. Otherwise we are missing the train.

I seriouslly hope that Miguel de Icaza saves MONO, either is with MS help or Mono claims its independence.

Offimatic suites

MS Office is nice but expensive.

Alternatives (multiplatform):

+ OpenOffice (3.1.X stable; 3.2 crashes with DOCX files (no fix yet); 3.3 in RC phase) download

+ LibreOffice (OO fork in Beta stage; nobody is certain about Oracle intentions) download

Only for Linux:

KOffice
GnomeOffice

For Mac:

NeoOffice

Iterate can save your hand

This is the answer for those who suffer with school punishments like "you must write 500 times {the educational sentence}".

Tablets price will fall

Question: which is the cheapest tablet available/comming?

Mmmmm. Let's see.

iLet mini HAL Android 1.6 $199 USD
Gpad Android $185 USD
Archos Android $178 USD
zenPad Android 1.6 $155 USD
Augen Genbook Android $150 USD
HiVision Android $100 USD
Hott MC500 Android $100 USD (or less)
Eken M001 Android $99 USD
FirstView PC607V Android/WinCE $95 USD
OLPC XO-3(MIT/Mattel) Android $75 USD
Indian tablet Android $35 USD (????)

It's a price war!!!!! Black friday & Chrismas season will show us the winner.

Mobile dev: times & OS changes

For those who develop mobile solutions, times are changing and platforms too.

iPhone provokes a gold rush for Apple developers; its a shame that those policies that limit Flash, Java & other apps that needs a VM or a runtime are kept left.

Microsoft is burning its ships and betting to their new OS Win phone 7; in the VS 2010 no mobile develoment is provided and they are promising a bundle to support development for the new platform.

And the new kid in town, Android, is the one that shakes the market. With smartphones, tablets and other devices targeted, and an open source support this may be the way.

Time will tell.

Image from wired.