OStatic

As GigaOm and this Reuters report note, there is talk that Nokia will show a Maemo phone at next week's Nokia World show in Germany. Maemo, of course, is Nokia's long-standing operating system for its line of Internet Tablets, and is based on Debian GNU/Linux. However, some are interpreting the possibility as yet another sign that Nokia's focus on an open source Symbian OS is wavering.

The Symbian OS has half the global smartphone market, but Reuters quotes Neil Mawston from Strategy Analytics as saying: It looks like Maemo, or at least a Linux derivative of some description, will play a key role for Nokia in high-end (products) over the next year or two. If that's true, I have to question Nokia's overall prospects in the smartphone market.

We've written before several times about Hadoop, an open source software framework for highly scalable queries and data-intensive distributed applications. The ecosystem of companies and organizations using Hadoop has grown dramatically in recent years, and we've also written about Cloudera, a well-funded company that is focusing on providing support and services for Hadoop, in addition to offering its own Hadoop distribution.

Today, Cloudera announced the first ever Hadoop World conference, to take place at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York City on October 2nd, with registration available here. A look at the companies and institutions organizing and participating in the event shows just how far Hadoop has come, and how it has extended well beyond just search applications.

While competition among smartphone operating systems is raging, with the Symbian OS, the BlackBerry OS, the iPhone OS, and Android getting top billing, Windows Mobile is seriously teetering. As GigaOm suggests, Android may very well kill Microsoft's mobile operating system. Mototorola has a huge bet on Android in the works, and appears to have little interest in Windows Mobile, and Microsoft's own top executives are acknowledging mobile missteps. Check out the details here.

September is almost upon us, and it will mark the first anniversary of Google's Chrome browser. The very first post I ever wrote on Chrome appeared on September 1st of last year, and I can remember the initial thoughts that came to mind when I considered its prospects: Won't it require extensions, like the great ones available for Firefox, to succeed? What kinds of resources will be available for customizing it? What it will mean in terms of the substantial financial support that Google gives to Mozilla Firefox? Will it be cross-platform?

Almost a year after the arrival of Chrome, it's doing reasonably well, although not shaking the Earth. Net Application's latest browser market share data shows Chrome at 2.6 percent of the market, and growing, not far behind Safari's share of 4.1 percent. I continue to believe, though, that an ecosystem of useful extensions, and good versions of Chrome for the Mac and Linux, are essential for its long-term success. On that last front, there is good news emerging.

Google's announcement yesterday that it is acquiring video compression company On2 Technologies for $106.5 million may appear to be just another acquisition in a buyer's market, but there is a strong chance that it could dramatically affect video standards online. Because of the enormous share of online video viewing that Google's YouTube commands, the company can swing a bigger stick in setting online video standards than many people realize, and the company has already been frustrated by the refusal of leading browser makers to agree on a central, shared codec to mutually support.

Ars Technica suggests that the On2 acquisition will have a big impact on web video standards, and The Register comes right out and speculates that Google will quickly open source On2's video compression codecs. I lean toward the latter scenario.