A weekly summary of the more interesting technology trends to come across my desk...

• With the move to digital TV transmission, there has been a big push to open up the "white space" between channels for unlicensed use, which the FCC just approved. An interesting blog post on cnet comments that this FCC ruling will trigger massive technical innovation including "Wi-Fi on Steroids".

• The Android mobile phone OS running on the T-Mobile G1 has already been "jailbroken" giving developers complete control of the Unix OS running on the phone. This opens up some pretty amazing possibilities for home brewed phone network applications.

• A blog post on eWeeks Microsoft Watch notes some fascinating trends on the demographics of iPhone buyers. The data points to a lower income demographic flocking to the iPhone as their primary Internet access device. A slide show on eWeek provides some hard data on the staggering growth of the iPhone ecosystem. How about 7 million iphones sold and 200 million applications installed in the first 3 months of the 3g iPhones release!

• Although the iPhone is in its 2nd generation, there is no system wide support for printing. An insightful post on databazzar outlines the reasons, which include lack of demand, however some comments following the post strongly disagree.

• Browser compatibility is a huge issue for web site developers. Although there is an industry standard baseline test (Acid2) for browser compatibility, a blog post by Microsoft watcher Mary Jo Foley describes Microsoft's contribution of thousands of test cases to the standards community to try to flush out ambiguities in the standards for browsers.

• This post is good for a laugh, where poster Pete Cashmore attempted to add 200 Facebook applications to his home page(scroll down to see the screen shot of the page). All joking aside, performance hits are a real testing issue relative to social networking applets.

• You may not realize this, but Microsoft has made a considerable investment in robotics software development environments, and sees a mass market potential in 3 to 5 years as outlined in this ExtremeTech article.

• Although the release of Windows 7 is still at least a year off, Microsoft has already published a 45 page  book on application compatibility issues related to its release. Check out this blog post for a synopsis of the biggest issues likely to impact applications.

• The popularity of social networking sites was really brought home to me when I browsed the Wikipedia page for this topic, which provided a table of data for the most popular sites. I sorted on registered users and was somewhat amazed to see over 40 social networking sites with more than 10 million registered users, some with more than a 100 million users.

More next week...

Jim