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Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Motorola and NTT DOCOMO announced today their intent to unite Symbian OS™, S60, UIQ and MOAP(S) to create one open mobile software platform. Together with AT&T, LG Electronics, Samsung Electronics, STMicroelectronics, Texas Instruments and Vodafone they form the Symbian Foundation. Members will be able to use the components of this platform for free from the beginning and selected features will be open sourced over time.

This is an alternative development to Google’s Open Handset Alliance Android program, that recently was said to be delayed and then not to be delayed. WSJ also considers this an iPhone thread.

Nokia recently also acquired Plazes, a Berlin based location based social network platform operator.

This is a playful approach to designed tag clouds. It lacks the real time aspect, but it is perfect in layout and typography. This cloud is based on my del.icio.us entires. Check it out.

Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.

Forrester Research’s Stephen Powers just released their report “Web Content Management And Open Source“.

As organizations embark on next-generation Web content management (WCM) initiatives, they want to avoid the mistakes made in earlier, more costly WCM projects. As a result, information and knowledge management professionals increasingly show an interest in open source WCM as a way of controlling software costs and increasing their access to product-specific expertise in the marketplace.

Later on Powers concludes that only Alfresco and Drupal have a satisfactory product offering, proven enterprise-level implementations, and a large — and passionate — community of developers and service providers.

Sounds like a good deal, right? All you have to do to help us set the record for the most software downloaded in 24 hours is get Firefox 3 now – it’s that easy. We’re not asking you to swallow a sword or to balance 30 spoons on your face, although that would be kind of awesome.

Please download Firefox 3 by 11:16 a.m. PDT (18:16 UTC) on June 18, 2008. That’s 11:16 a.m. in Mountain View, 2:16 p.m. in Toronto, 3:16 p.m. in Rio de Janeiro, 8:16 p.m. in Paris, Madrid, Berlin, Rome and Warsaw, 10:16 p.m. in Moscow, and June 19, 2008 at 2:16 a.m. in Beijing and 3:16 a.m. in Tokyo.

This IDC study contains a five-year forecast for worldwide revenue from standalone open source software.

“Revenue from standalone open source software is growing significantly,” said Matt Lawton, program director of IDC’s Open Source Software Business Strategies research program. “This is particularly important for independent vendors of open source software. However, we need to also provide some context. Standalone open source software is an important but small segment of open source software. Large vendors are realizing significant revenues indirectly from their activities with and support of embedded and complementary open source software. In addition, unpaid open source software adoption is significant but not included in our revenue estimates.”

Albeit all the preaching we do and all the common sense you think people would/should apply, Outlook is today the most popular e-mail tool in the world. And some Frisco based guys think that the program is so poorly suited for most people’s intensive e-mail habits that they have founded a company, Xobni, intended to fix it.

Xobni (“inbox” spelled backwards) has produced free software that indexes all Outlook e-mail and makes messages quickly and easily searchable.

You might think Google Desktop would do the same for you (does for me for years now), but Xobni, which its creators call an “intelligent filter,” adds a few more features. When it scours the inbox, it extracts phone numbers it thinks are associated with the sender. So when a user searches for a person, Xobni presents the number in a side panel. The software also interprets the social relationships between people who are sending messages to each other by interpreting the to: and cc: headers of each message.

In addition, the data collected are visualized during normal action per user or per object, and can also be analyzed in details through Xobni Analytics. Interesting stats like most frequent mailer or mailee, fastest responder, mails per timeframe etc. can be easily and in a Google Analytics type way be retrieved for whatever purpose you might have.

The company raised $4 million from the investment funds of Vinod Khosla, a Sun Microsystems co-founder, and Niklas Zennstrom, one of the creators of Skype. In February, Bill Gates demonstrated the program at Microsoft’s San Jose developers’ conference and called it “the next generation in social networking.”

The idea is to sell the tools to companies later in time and Xobni now has ambitions that extend well beyond Microsoft Outlooktowards the popular Web-based services Yahoo Mail, Google’s Gmail and Microsoft’s Hotmail as well as social networks like Facebook and Linkedin. Apple Mail is also on the list.

While discussing Xobni I was also pointed out to ClearContext, which seems to do similar things. Did not try it though.

EU-Wettbewerbskommissarin Neelie Kroes hat die Regierungen der Mitgliedsstaaten aufgerufen, frei verfügbaren Software-Lösungen den Vorzug vor kommerziellen Angeboten zu geben. Die Nutzung von Open-Source-Formaten sei “eine sehr kluge Geschäftsentscheidung”, sagte Kroes am Dienstag in Brüssel auf einer Konferenz der Organisation OpenForum Europe, die sich für offene Standards einsetzt. “Kein Bürger und kein Unternehmen sollte durch Entscheidungen einer Regierung gezwungen oder ermuntert werden, eine geschlossene Technologie statt einer offenen zu wählen”, sagte Kroes. Auch die EU-Kommission werde ihren Teil dazu beitragen, wenn es um die Verwendung von Software-Standards gehe.

http://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/web/0,1518,558801,00.html

Matthew Aslett from the 451 group has a little post on open source adoption, the Euro Cup and Optaros in Switzerland. Find it here.