Since it was publicly announced in January 2007, the LiMo Foundation has been steadily adding new names to it’s membership roster. Today, it announced that eleven new companies have joined the foundation, bringing its membership total to more than 50.

All eleven listed companies joined the foundation as Associate Members. Some of them - Esmertec, Telecom Italia, and PacketVideo Corporation (PV) , are also member-companies of the Open Handset Alliance, the organization overseeing the development of the Android platform. In addition to Esmertec, Telecom Italia, and PacketVideo Corporation (PV). some of the core members of the Android platform - NTT DoCoMo, Samsung, and Motorola, are founding members of the LiMo Foundation.

So while the LiMo Foundation’s members list has been growing, the Android platform has yet to add a new member since the first or second week after it was launched in October, 2007.

Several bloggers have already reported on the Open Source Security Study released by Fortify’s Security Research Group (and Larry Suto), but we are yet to see anyone take an in-depht look at the study itself. This is our attempt to take a closer look at the study titled “How Are Open Source Development Communities Embracing Security Best Practices?”. The study which was released as an 11-page report, is free to download from the company’s website.

We’ll analyze some of the statements and conclusions made in the report, and also look at a couple of the “Open Source Development Communities” that the study surveyed.

If you want to undertake a study of a certain group of applications, and given the sweeping and misleading conclusions that the report reached, I think it makes sense to make a comparative study of their closed source equivalents. But, no, Fortify chose to exclude “Freeware projects that are not open source”. And for the open source applications that they studied (see the list above), Fortify found that “few open source projects provide” access to security resources, which the study identified as:

The Symbian Foundation, which was formed by Nokia and a few other mobile industry firms in the last week of June 2008, has added more names to its members list. The new companies that just joined are: “mobile operators 3, América Móvil and TIM, semiconductor manufacturer Marvell plus services and software providers Aplix, EB, EMCC Software, Sasken and TietoEnator”.

At the end of business day on June 24, 2008, the day the Symbian Foundation was formed, its membership count stood at 21. And that was made up of 10 initial board members, and 11 additional companies. With the new members listed above, the membership count 30.

In addition to the nine new members, Nokia also indicated that “more than 150 organizations have registered their interest in joining” the Symbian Foundation. The foundation will be built around the Symbian OS and S60 software, both contributed to the foundation by Nokia. Members of the foundation will have royalty-free access to contributed software from the “first day of Symbian Foundation operations, expected 1H 2009″, and the platform will become open source by June 2010.

GSMA Mobile World Congress (formerly 3GSM World Congress) is the largest annual gathering of industry experts, and the movers and shakers in the mobile industry. The 2009 Mobile World Congress will be held in Barcelona, Spain, from February 16 - 19. Two themes have been developed for next year’s event:

• Open mobile ecosystem: with emphasis on open standards, open access, open development platforms and open source
• Environmental impact: this will try to look at the influence of mobile usage on society

Other areas that will be of special interest are location based services, open source in mobile, Mobile 2.0, M-Finance entertainment, advertising and network evolution. Google’s Android mobile platform generated much of the buzz at last year’s event, but we don’t think that’s going to happen this year. And that is due to the fact that Android has not delivered anything to the market, and other Open Source mobile platforms - OpenMoko, the LiMo platform, and Symbian, have - to some extent - overshadowed Android.

Most mobile phone users would be surprised to learn that they can run a web server application on their mobile phone. That’s right, run a web server, and hence your own website right from your (mobile) phone. Running a Web server on a mobile phone transforms it from being just a client device, to being a server that provides services to other internet connected devices.

The Web server application provides another use for your mobile phone at no cost to you - except, of course, for the cost of data traffic, and doesn’t run on all mobile phones. You will need the following:

• a compatible Nokia handset
• A free account at Mobile Web Server
• Internet connection to your compatible Nokia handset
• Mobile Web server application which you need to download and install on your device

OpenMoko, developer of the open mobile platform that goes by the same moniker, has made its first product, the Neo FreeRunner, avialable for sale at its online store. Customers may purchase the Neo FreeRunner starting today July 4, 2008, with shipment to customers beginning July 7, 2008.

The Neo FreeRunner is the latest in a series of mobile devices powered by the Open Source Linux operating system. Earlier this year, Purple Labs released its Purple Magic reference platform. The software that ships with this release of the Neo FreeRunner does not have all the features we’ve become used to in a mobile phone, but OpenMoko intends to provide periodic feature updates beginning with “a software suite that takes full advantage of the phone’s hardware platform”.

OpenMoko has indicated that two versions of the Neo FreeRunner with the following specifications will be avilable for sale:

Tele Atlas, a Tier 1 “provider of digital maps and dynamic content for navigation and location-based solutions” has signed a multi-year with Google, the search engine giant and leader of the Open Handset Alliance. The 5 year deal is a comprehensive one that gives Goolge access to Tele Atlas’ map services across the digital triangle - mobile, online, and desktop environments.

Prior to this deal, Google’s digital map services were provided by Navteq, another top tier digital map services provider. However, Nokia, the cell phone manufacturer, acquired Navteq late last year, and the deal is set to close within the next few weeks.

We think this map deal with Tele Atlas is Google just saying that it does not want to rely on a key part of its business from a major competitor. Since Google announced the formation of the Open Handset Alliance and the Android mobile platform, Nokia, with a number of acquisitions - Trolltech, Symbian - has been deftly positioning itself to better compete with Google.

At same time that it announced an offer to acquire the remaining shares of Symbian Limited that it does not already own, and one day after it announced the acquisition of Plazes, Nokia teamed up with Sony Ericsson, Motorola and NTT DOCOMO to announce the formation of the Symbian Foundation.

The Symbian Foundation brings together technologies from all four companies (and other member companies) to provide an open (source) mobile software platform that will be released under the Eclipse Public License (EPL) 1.0.
The Symbian Foundation is an obvious counter to the Android Foundation, another open source mobile platform led by Google, Inc.

The Android platform, a Linux-based platform, has hugged the headlines since it was announced late last year, but no publicly available device has been released for the platform yet. NTT DOCOMO is also a founding member of the Android Foundation, and has plans to release Android devices next year.

Nokia, which announced an agreement to acquire Plazes yesterday, has made another acquisition announcement. In this latest acquisition attempt, Nokia, which already owns about 45% of Symbian Limited, made a “cash offer to acquire all of the shares of Symbian Limited that Nokia does not already own”.

Nokia, the mobile phone giant, has announced an agreement to acquire Plazes AG. Plazes AG, based in Zurich, Switzerland, operates Plazes.com, which is a social networking website that allows its members to “update their location through their laptop or mobile phone, and update their online presence with their current, past and future whereabouts”.

“LiMo Foundation, a global consortium of mobile leaders delivering an open handset platform for the whole mobile industry, and Verizon Wireless, the builder and operator of the most reliable wireless network in the U.S., announced today that Verizon has joined LiMo as a Core member and will fill the final seat on LiMo’s board of [...]

We all know that for months, Microsoft tried to gobble up Yahoo, and that Google, the reason Microsoft went after Yahoo in the first place, was not going to sit by and let that happen. Ultimately, Microsoft walked away from it all. But what role did Google play in thwarting Microsoft’s bid?