Despite their unforgiving reputation when it comes to the App Store, it turns out that Apple is helping Kickstarter projects get around their own rules by giving away more free apps to supporters. Read more…

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Sprint is now offering $ 100 off the purchase of a new iPhone 4S if you trade in an iPhone from a competing wireless carrier such as Verizon Wireless and AT&T until July 1st. Read more…

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Some newly leaked screenshots seem to show that Nokia is working on a new camera app for its Lumia smartphones called Camera Extension, which will add a number of camera features. Read more…

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The newest Microsoft Store retail location has opened in Bridgewater, New Jersey and will play host to a concert by the band OneRepublic on Saturday night and quarterback Eli Manning on Sunday. Read more…

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The makers of the upcoming indie biopic of the late Steve Jobs will film some scenes in the garage where Jobs and Steve Wozniak launched Apple, located in Jobs’ childhood home. Read more…

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The $ 12.5 billion merger of Google and Motorola Mobility could officially close early next week as the Chinese government has now given its approval for the deal. Read more…

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With news that Google and Microsoft plan to take on the Amazon Web Services monolith with infrastructure services of their own, you have to ask: How many clouds do we need?

This Google-Microsoft news broken this week by Derrick Harris,  proves to anyone who didn’t already realize it, that Amazon is the biggest cloud computing force (by far) and as such, wears a big fat target on its back. With the success of Amazon cloud services, which keep started out as plain vanilla infrastructure but have evolved to include workflow and storage gateways to enterprise data centers, Amazon’s got everyone — including big enterprise players like Microsoft, IBM and HP worried. Very worried.

These vendors are betting big that they can give Amazon a run for its money and that their cloud services will help them retain existing customers and (knock wood) win some newbies.

Amazon as enterprise apps platform? Don’t laugh

Take the news late this week that IBM is working with Ogilvy and Mather to move the advertising giant’s SAP implementation from its current hosted environment to  ”SmartCloud for SAP Applications hosted in IBM’s state-of-the-art, green Smarter Data Center.” (Note to IBM: brevity is beauty when it comes to branding.)

Don’t think that little tidbit is unrelated to news last week that SAP and Amazon together certified yet another SAP application — All-in-One — to run on Amazon’s EC2.  This sort of news validates Amazon as an enterprise-class cloud platform and that’s the last thing IBM or HP or Microsoft wants to see happen.  So every one of these players — plus Google — are taking aim at Amazon.

For some hardware players, including HP, which is reportedly about to cut 30,000 jobs see the cloud as a way to stay relevant, and oh by the way, keep customers workloads running on their hardware and software.  HP’s OpenStack-based public cloud went to public beta earlier this month.

Case in point: Along with the SAP migration news,  IBM also said its SmartCloud Enterprise+, IBM’s managed enterprise cloud infrastructure offers:

“unprecedented support for both x86 and P-Series [servers] running … Windows, Linux and AIX on top of either VMware or PowerVM hypervisors….

and

SCE+ is designed to support different workloads and associated technology platforms including a new System z shared environment that will be available in the U.S. and U.K. later this year.

Hmmm. P-Series and System Z —  not exactly the sort of commodity hardware that modern webscale cloud companies run, but they are integral to IBM’s well-being.

Vendor clouds to lock customers in

This illustrates what all prospective buyers should know: Despite all the talk about openness and interoperability, a vendor’s cloud will be that vendor’s cloud. It represents a way to keep customers running that company’s hardware and software as long as possible. But legacy IT vendors are not alone in trying to keep customers on the farm once they’re there.

Amazon is making its own services stickier so that the more higher level services a customer uses, the harder it will be to move to another cloud.  As Amazon continues what one competitor calls its re-enactment of “Sherman’s march on Atlanta” by adding more services, legacy IT vendors are building cloud services as fast as they can in hopes that they can keep their customers in-house. For them, there had better be plenty of need for at least one more cloud.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock user Ohmega1982,

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Google has finally received approval from China to complete its purchase of Motorola Mobility, Google said Saturday. That paves the way for Google to integrate Motorola, though it remains to be seen exactly how it wants to use the phone maker. The deal is expected to close in the next week.

Google made huge waves when it announced it was buying Motorola for $ 12.5 billion in August. After getting the U.S. Justice Department and EU approval in February, the process ground to a crawl as China took its time weighing in on the acquisition. Now, all eyes will be on how Motorola proceeds with its biggest purchase ever.

Android manufacturers have been nervous about Google giving Motorola an advantage. But Google may be taking some steps to try and allay those fears. The Wall Street Journal reported that Google was preparing to work with multiple manufacturers to launch the next version of Android, instead of picking one device maker. The report also said that Google would sell the devices directly through its Web site and through some unnamed retail partners. That would allow Google to take more control of the Android experience, something my colleague Kevin Tofel has urged Google to do.

While Google has been a leader with its Android smartphones, its operating system has not had as much success on tablets. The Motorola pick-up could be critical in helping improve that situation for Google, which is losing out on search revenue on tablets because of the popularity of the iPad and Kindle Fire, which don’t provide as much direct revenue to Google.

Google still faces a big challenge in incorporating Motorola, while still keeping its other Android partners happy. And it’s also got to show that the acquisition makes sense from a financial stand point. Motorola has struggled like many other Android makers in the face of Samsung, the leading Android manufacturer. At the very least, Google gets more than 17,000 patents, which should provide some more protection in the smartphone patent wars.

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Microsoft has confirmed that PCs with Windows 8 installed will receive the anti-bloatware “Signature” treatment from Microsoft Store locations when the OS is officially launched. Read more…

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Preserving consumer trust gets a lot of lip service. But a new report from the World Economic Forum actually attempts to translate its value into dollars and cents.

In a study on personal data released this week with the Boston Consulting Group, the report said that while online retail in the Group of 20 countries could reach $ 2 trillion by 2016, consumers’ perception of trust plays a significant role in enhancing or eroding that value. With more trust, online retail could grow to $ 2.5 trillion by 2016; with less, it could reach just $ 1.5 trillion by the same time, they said.

“Given that this $ 1 trillion range is from just one small part of the broader personal data ecosystem, it provides an indication of the magnitude of the potential economic impact when other sectors (health, financial services, etc.) are considered – potentially in the tens of trillions of dollars,” the report says. That ecosystem includes individuals, as well as data collectors, marketers, data brokers, publishers and other organizations with an interest in using personal information.

As our volume of digital “exhaust” grows (currently, 10 billion text messages and 1 billion blog and social network posts, according to the report), so does consumer concern around privacy. Just this week, (now public) Facebook was hit with a lawsuit over privacy and, over the past few years, regulatory investigations over privacy violations have climbed.

In this report – and a highly cited report on the topic last year – the World Economic Forum calls personal data “an emerging asset class.” But to really extract its value, the organization argues, public and private institutions need to rethink how they do business so that consumers get more protection, rights and opportunities to hold organizations accountable when it comes to their data.

For a data industry making billions of dollars from personal information ($ 2 billion from third-party consumer data alone, according to Forrester Research) that’s a tall order. But a handful of companies, from startups like Personal and Azigo to industry giants like Experian, are testing new business models that give consumers more ways to control – and, in some cases, receive compensation for – their data.

As Personal’s Shane Green told my colleague Ryan Kim  earlier this month, “A new model is emerging for personal data. You’ll want a simple, clear answer about what data companies are capturing about you, how they’re using it and what’s in it for me.”

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