DailyTech - Microsoft Buys Mobile Services Firm MobiComp

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IT Microsoft Buys Mobile Services Firm MobiComp
Shane McGlaun (Blog) - June 30, 2008 3:11 PM

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6 comment(s) - last by emboss.. on Jun 30 at 10:43 PM

MobiComp features could be seen in future Windows Mobile version

Microsoft is always looking to improve its Windows Mobile operating system to better compete against competitors like Apple and Symbian. To help improve the user experience on Windows mobile Devices, Microsoft made a new acquisition.

Microsoft announced that it purchased MobiComp for an undisclosed sum. According to eWeek, MobiComp is an open-source cloud computing company that specializes in mobile data backup and restoration.

Exactly how MobiComp will fit into the Microsoft world is unknown but some ideas can be drawn based on services that MobiComp has historically provided. MobiComp provides services that allow data backup services centered on social networking. MobiComp also has a technology called Active mTicker, which is a news feed service that pushes customized information to subscribers through a scrolling ticker on the bottom of the screen when the device is idle. MobiComp services work through a web browser.

It would be easy to see these technologies being integrated into future versions of Windows Mobile. The web based data backup service would on its own be a great addition to a smartphone OS like Windows Mobile. Prior to being purchased by Microsoft, MobiComp had Vodafone and dominant mobile carries in both Portugal and Saudi Arabia as customers.

The purchase of MobiComp is one of the first Microsoft purchases to be made since the software giant walked away from Yahoo.

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Typo

By voodooboy on 6/30/2008 4:07:52 PM , Rating: 2

"MobiComp features could be seen in future Windows Mobile versiosn "

Glad MS cares about WM

By DeepBlue1975 on 6/30/2008 5:05:45 PM , Rating: 2

Having used both WM5 and Symbian s60v3 myself, I find WM much better suited and flexible to my needs.
WM is not perfect, though. They should concentrate on better resource efficiency and stability.
I have wm5 on my hx2790b iPaq which features a 624mhz arm processor and 64mb dram, and it's not exactly fast, a department in which symbian feels more responsive. It hangs quite frequently too, which talks about low requirements to make 3rd party apps compatible enough, or maybe the OS to open to be "harassed" by badly behaving software, something that I find not nearly as frequent on my symbian phone.

Anyway I hadn't the opportunity to test WM6 as of yet, and so I don't know whether the issues I'm talking about (among others less annoying and frequent) have been already sorted out or not.

I hope that for my next smart phone I can find one which uses WM AND can fit in one of my shirt's pocket, which is the main reason I ended up not buying one of the HTC line, which I love in every respect except for their weight.

open source?

By Screwballl on 6/30/08, Rating: -1

RE: open source?

By Chudilo on 6/30/2008 4:54:55 PM , Rating: 2

Any changes to open source code can not be kept closed source, because it would be a copyright violation. They can however add independent parts to the program that they can keep closed.

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RE: open source?

By greylica on 6/30/2008 5:45:14 PM , Rating: 1

If google doens´t give android tools a race trhough it´s competitors, there is possibility for Microsoft to make a competitor inside Pdas and Smartphones Niche.
ANNNDDD, since mobile world is growing faster like PCs worldwide, (paired someday) may Microsoft is trying to create a new chance against google.
If android tools spread faster (opensource and free), the enterprise niche will adopt it faster in order to optimize revenues using mobile services. If Microsoft succeed faster than android, It will be another chance for Windows 7 and Microsoft Visual Studio Tools.

Run Google, Run, we still need competitors that cannot be overtaken so easily.

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RE: open source?

By emboss on 6/30/2008 10:43:50 PM , Rating: 2

First, I'm not sure where eWeek got the idea that MobiComp was an open source company. There's only three hits for the word "open" on their site:
http://www.google.com/search?q=open+site%3Amobicom...
And they're all in reference to open standards.

Second, "open source" <=/=> GPL. There's many open source licences (BSD, MIT/X11, MPL, etc) that allow the use of the code (modified or not) in closed source applications.

Finally, even if MobiComp's code was GPL, they could quite possibly fork off a closed source version as long as they were the ones who wrote all the GPL code (or got the copyright assigned to them for any bits they didn't).

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"Nowadays you can buy a CPU cheaper than the CPU fan." -- Unnamed AMD executive