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

• HP made a splash this week in the mobile computing world by launching an iPhone  application that lets users print photos to the company's line of Wi-Fi printers. This move is driven by a dramatic upward trend in the use of mobile computing in our daily lives, with year to year data traffic increasing 463%.

• An insightful eWeek post makes the case that the confluence of cloud computing, wireless access (3G, Wi-Fi, Wi-Max), and robust browsers in mobile devices signal a profound shift away from the anchored desktop with standalone applications.

• TechCrunch reports on an innovative use of Amazon's EC2 cloud computing platform. StaxNetworks is offering a Java application platform built on top of EC2, which is analogous to the Google App Engine application platform which uses Python.

• This fascinating post by by John Casasanta and Phill Ryu describes the ecosystem for the iPhone App Store and makes recommendations on how the App Store can avoid becoming the Crap Store. Programmers are getting rich selling 99 cent applications and the business opportunities are equivalent to the earliest days of computing. Great reading.

• A surprising number of startups are focused on enabling the viewing of documents over the Internet that we have traditionally downloaded and printed, as reported in this Tech Crunch post.

• I love reading the amazing stats on web sites like FaceBook. Would you believe 660,000 developers with over 52,000 applications deployed? Our how about users cumulatively spending 5,000 man years on the site each day?

• Google recently demonstrated how their Native Client technology can enable a first person shooter game like Quake to run in a browser window with almost no loss of performance. This infoWorld post does a great job explaining Google's technical approach to making this possible. If you can run game like Quake in a browser with  Native Client, then there isn't very much you can't do in a browser, which I am sure is Google goal!

More next week...

Jim