Palm's latest product, the Foleo, will be Linux powered. The device is meant to be a companion for other Palm devices such as the treo smartphone, and flawlessly integrates with it.

Palm has just announced that it will use Windriver Linux to power it :

Wind River Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ: WIND), the global leader in Device Software Optimization (DSO), and Palm, Inc. (NASDAQ: PALM) today announced that Palm has selected Wind River® Platform for Consumer Devices, Linux Edition as its open standard Linux platform for future Palm® Foleo™ software releases. Palm selected Wind River Linux for its standard development and deployment environment that will help speed applications to market, while still meeting the requirements for a stable and robust open mobile platform.(Windriver press release)

More interesting is the release of a development suite by Windriver that will allow Palm and possibly others to develop software for the Foleo.

Palm expects Foleo to outsell the Treo smartphone, which is a surprise I think. Looking at Foleo, I don't see the "killer specs" that would make it a popular gadget. Besides that, Palm isn't the company it once was - respected by everyone and it's devices the hottest around....

Google tried to bid on the 700mhz spectrum recently with added conditions to their bid.

Google wanted the regulator to specify the winning bidder must give users freedom to connect any devices to the network, download any software, and the carrier must be prepared to sell of chunks of the spectrum to third parties wholesale.The Register

They got turned down. It is interesting though that google has tried this, as we can clearly deduct from this that the search giant is hunting for their own cellular network.

More about the subject on my other site.

Years ago I was working in an office environment on a high security level. As a consequence, we had no internet access. In order to be able to find stuff on the net anyway, I developed a little script on one of my servers which I could feed commands by e-mail and would then send me back relevant google results by mail and/or sms. Quite a nice, working solution which was far from perfect but did it's job fine.

Today things are completely different. Internetaccess on a mobile device is slowly becoming standard operation. The current UMTS highspeed connection is good, I am even considering a UMTS receiver to go with my macbook.

There is an interesting article on the subject @ E-Commerce Times.

One of the hottest things around in IT is the environment, or how to act as if you care about it. Even companies that don't care at all play the game - as being green will generate money, and money will attract even more money.

IBM makes clever use of this by claiming their mainframes are greener than their servers. The interesting thing is that nobody tries to invent a really green product, but everybody keeps comparing it to other products and make it look better that way.

Anyway, the point is not that mainframes are green (we know they're not), but the cleverness to use the green argument as a sales pitch. People claimed the mainframe would disappear 20 years ago, yet mainframes are still being sold as middleware unix servers simply don't have the scale or scalability a mainframe offers. In simple words, you can't beat a dinosaur. And that's exactly what IBM says : Dinosaurs are green. Duh !

When Novell adopted linux, we all thought this was not going to last. But it seems that it is a (relative) success, as Novell has made SUSE Linux grow up and they've accomplished selling it to lots of customers.

After their deal with Microsoft, which has given Novell the reputation of a traitor - they have struck a deal with the enemy. Although opinions differ on this matter, Novell seems to be doing unexpectedly well in the Linux business. Today Novell launched a video/blog site to promote it's enterprise Linux. Your linux is ready, they call it.

Read more about it on the Linux Enterprise Log.

SUN Microsystems is doing well. It has been troublesome for quite some time, after the rise of Linux which was more flexible from the beginning. Where SUN tried to gain ground by trying to convince customers to buy their thin clients (nice stuff but too expensive compared to abilities), Linux moved into SUN's former spot in the data center.

For the full year, Sun reported a 6.2 per cent rise in revenue to $13.87bn and a profit of $473m, which compares to a $864m loss last year.(The Register)

Although I am not a financial specialist, it may be easy to guess how they've accomplished this. Besides costcutting measures, they have also managed to release newer and more flexible version of their famous operating system, Solaris. I believe SUN has made a succesfull attempt to become a dominant player in the unix market once again.