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According to an article at BusinessWeek, plenty of people buy the iPhone as a portable computer for Web surfing, video, and music. But they carry a second phone to make calls. "People use the iPhone as a PC in their pocket" according to one analyst. Moreover, according to a July comScore survery, 70 percent of iPhone owners send and receive email with the iPhone.

It looks like the iPhone is getting used more frequently as a mobile internet device than as a phone. For some, the iPhone’s screen is rather small for web surfing and the like. As a result, the guys at TechCrunch are planning on a web tablet with touchscreen and WiFi support. This is kind of specialized and will find a niche eventually if it goes into production. Supposedly, it would fetch for around $300, yet for that same amount, you could buy a subnotebook with much more functionality than the web tablet. Add some 3G support and you’ve got a killer combo. Now the only thing left is for mobile carriers to get its act together and serve the market.

Of the 10 online mapping tools mentioned by the HotelClub Travel Blog, I find Google Maps to be the most interesting as far as street view is concerned. Although MultiMap from Microsoft Live Search provides bird’s eye and aerial views for most of Europe and the US, it’s Google Street View that provides a detailed and useful view of a certain place (though it’s limited to US, France, Italy, Japan and Australia as of this writing). If you have a decent DSL connection (read: fast internet connection, I mean really fast!), just typing a complete address will take you to a leisurely tour across some of the interesting places in the US, boast your mansion at Malibu or simply finding what it looks like at your brother’s home in Austria. Amazing…

Ok, so it’s official. Sprint Nextel and Clearwire will form a new venture to be called Clearwire and expected to be finalized by fourth quarter of this year. The company which also includes Intel, Google, Comcast, Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks will invest a total of $3.2bn and take another 22 per cent chunk in the company. Sprint will hold onto the remaining 51 per cent.

For ordinary Joes, that means mobile video on your laptops and smartphones, mobile broadband, a default Google search on your Sprint cellphones, a WiMax version of Amazon Kindle perhaps and ads, ads, ads on upcoming Android-based phones. With Comcast in tow, your P2P habits may well become mobile too. Though Comcast may limit your broadband use just the same as it does with BitTorrent.

As GigaOM notes, WiMax may have a head start over LTE of AT&T and Verizon Wireless though that still remains to be seen. And oh one more thing, we might see WiMax-powered iPhone clones too. More on New York Times and GMANews.tv.

Wow! It still doesn’t sink in. The potential of Microsoft’s "software plus services" strategy dubbed Live Mesh is the latest reincarnation of the software giant to capitalize on the power of the internet and synchronization of data among devices, applications and people. To date, this is Redmond’s most ambitious project I know of besides battling Yahoo! to capitulate on Microsoft’s hostile takeover bid.

Anyway, ReadWriteWeb pointed out correctly that Live Mesh is up against FriendFeed and Google Gears. But there is more. It is up against Soonr for file sync, Funambol for data sync and device management, and Yahoo! and Google for computing and storage of your data in the cloud.

From Ray Ozzie’s memo, he emphasized the importance of "3 Cs": content, commerce and community. All three lives and breathes on the web. Since the web is the hub of the action, data and programs will flow seamlessly across the "mesh" or the "cloud" if you will. The mesh doesn’t care if it’s talking to a PC, a mobile device or any internet-connected device. It’s all abstracted from the outset. From the user’s point of view (consumers and businesses alike), content may take different kinds of representation but underneath, it’s FeedSync. Microsoft’s Live Mesh is essentially a kind of "virtual machine" for the web. If Java rightly justified the network as the computer, Microsoft is well poised to take the web as the computer.

If that sounds like Greek, well we will translate it to English. Basically, Microsoft laid out the goals of Live Mesh to have

• …your devices work together
• …your data and applications available from anywhere
• …the people you need to connect with just a few clicks away for sharing and collaborating
• … the information you need to stay up-to-date and always be available

To meet those goals, these are Microsoft’s guiding principles:

• Services Are the Core of the Platform – the Live Mesh platform exposes a number of core services including some Live Services that can all be accessed using the Live Mesh API; these include Storage (online and offline), Membership, Sync, Peer-to-Peer Communication and Newsfeed.
• Same API on Clients and in the Cloud – the programming model is the same for the cloud and all connected devices, which means a Live Mesh application works exactly the same regardless of whether it’s running in the cloud, in a browser, on a desktop, or on a mobile device.
• Open, Extendable Data Model – a basic data model is provided for the most common tasks needed for a Live Mesh application; developers can also customize and extend the data model in any fashion that is needed for a specific application.
• Flexible Application Model – developers can choose what application developer model best fits their needs.

For now, Microsoft’s Live Mesh is on beta or in Redmond’s parlance: "technology preview". When the finishing touches are laid out, I bet online advertising is sure to follow. Now, it’s getting clear why Microsoft is so desperate to get Yahoo! The advertising-supported cloud computing dominated by Google is up for grabs, and Microsoft wants to take a monster piece of the pie!

If Apple has its iPhone and the SDK, and Google with Android and OpenSocial, Live Mesh is Microsoft’s turn to innovation and that the giant has awaken from its deep slumber.

Ok, so Netvibes went down due to system upgrading but this simply fuel my desire to import my OPML file to Pageflakes but it didn’t work. So I tried the trusty Google Reader and it worked seamlessly. Google Reader improved a lot with a new feature called Trends where you visualize your reading and subscription trends. And it’s getting a little bit social too where you can share your read items akin to del.icio.us, and make it available through Google Chat or Google Talk.

Btw, if you are using FriendFeed, you may find MySocial 24×7 a great tool in the form of Firefox extension. But the news of the day is that of Microsoft’s Live Mesh. Looks like Soonr is getting a hefty competition from Microsoft though this information access anytime, anywhere is still years away from operating seamlessly. The mobile side of the equation is still nascent at best.