Mikz - How different is it from httpd4mobile and mymobilesite?

TechCrunch reports this story today:

Conveneer, a Swedish mobile startup with offices in Lund, Sweden and Palo Alto, California, closed a $4.5 million venture round, led by the Swedish foundation Industrifonden. Broken Arrow Venture Capital also participated. The company previously raised seed money from the founders and Teknoseed. Conveneer is building a mobile platform called Mikz, which will be able to assign a URL to your mobile phone, making the content on your phone accessible on the Web. In essence, it turns each mobile phone  into a Web server. Once your phone has a URL like http://joe.mikz.me, other Web applications and services can ingest the data that is locked in your phone, and also your phone can take advantage of common Web APIs. Mikz can pull information off your phone such as your contacts, GPS coordinates, photos, music, ringtones, and other files. It creates a Web interface for your phone.

I haven't gone too deep into how they do it, but I see that httpd4mobile also does something similar. Httpd4mobile is an HTTP mobile server for Java J2ME mobile devices that enables you to access and control various features such as Camera Picture function, Audio Record function, Contact List, SMS Send, File Download, File Upload, etc.

See also mymobilesite that works on Nokia S60 devices, that allows users to create, share and access contacts, calendar appointments, SMS text messages, emails, phone logs, share pictures, etc.

What do you think?

Microsoft Planning Ad-Supported Model For Office 14?

Money.cnn.com reported:

An ad-supported Microsoft Office 14?

That's what Microsoft Business Division Chief Stephen Elop said was coming at a presentation to analysts at the Morgan Stanley Technology conference today.

Here are my questions :-)

Is this the online-version of office? Would Microsoft do contextual analysis of the documents to put the ads on Office 14? If yes - then the content is no longer private; Microsoft would know all the content (maybe a software pirate would care less). If not - how would they put ads, how would they target a user?

Looking at the top 20 countries that have highest piracy rates, I can't think if there can be relevant ads for those geographies. See the list yourself here.

Interesting.

Contribute to a Map-Reduce job by simply pointing your browser to a URL

Igvita.com has published an interesting way of running Mapreduce jobs:

After several iterations, false starts, and great conversations with Michael Nielsen, a flash of the obvious came: HTTP + Javascript!

What if you could contribute to a computational (Map-Reduce) job by simply pointing your browser to a URL? Surely your social network wouldn't mind opening a background tab to help you crunch a dataset or
two!

Instead of focusing on high-throughput proprietary protocols and high-efficiency data planes to distribute and deliver the data, we could use battle tested solutions: HTTP and your favorite browser. It just so happens that there are more Javascript processors around the world (every browser can run it) than for any other language out there - a perfect data processing platform.

Some really interesting comments in there too. Read full text here.