I’ve written before about the struggle between Sony and Amazon over formats for eBooks and the eBook reader market.  Increasingly, this is becoming a three-handed game as the battle moves over onto other platforms and Sony is sneaking up in stealthy, if not entirely mysterious, ways.

When you talk about the future of computing, there are generally three schools: those who focus on the TV merging with the computer, those who focus on laptops becoming slightly smaller and more powerful and those who focus strictly on handhelds and mobile devices taking over.  While we haven’t seen the television-meets-computing device yet (let’s face it, WebTV was lame), those laptop and mobile devices are around, and all three schools of thought are focused on the convergence of media consumption and computing. (more…)

A lot of people have hailed mobile application downloads as the new way to get rich quick.  We’ve all heard stories about the iPhone and the App Store.  While not as popular, Google’s Android platform has its own “Android Market” and Microsoft has their “Windows Marketplace for Mobile.”  Blackberry has “Blackberry App World.”  Nokia has “Ovi.” Let’s take a look at the available numbers and try and make a little sense of where this new gold rush is coming from. (more…)