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

• Two tragic posts this week note the death of a salesman China when his cell phone exploded and the near demise of a social-bookmarking site whose database and only backup became corrupted.

• All of us can learn something from this interesting post about how Microsoft dramatically improved their release cycle time for Windows 7.  How about not allowing buggy code in the core?

• eWeek reports on an effort by the WC3 consortium to deal with the interoperability between social networking platforms, with the goal of developing standards to enable users to share profiles and data across sites. With big players like Yahoo, YouTube, over 50 others, this should be interesting to watch.

• ars technica had an interesting post on the launch of a SourceForge like portal for the Department of Defense's open source effort. Some how my perception was that everything our military did was proprietary, so this was a pretty enlightening post.

• Motorola's cell phone group is counting on open source OS Android to drive it's turn-around, as reported on Internetnews. This OS is certainly getting some traction!

• I found this rather lengthy cnet interview with the CEO's of Microsoft and storage giant EMC fascinating. Topics included partnering, the economy, and Google presence in the enterprise space.

• This thought provoking dicussion  discussion by HP's Russ Daniels on the topic of of computing is a must read. His key point was the the combination of horizontally scalability in the cloud, SOA, and Web 2.0 would enable solutions not typically envisioned today.

• I'd sure buy one of the cool energy monitoring appliances described in this ZDNet post, if only I didn't need an electrician to hook them up. I'd love to see the real time impact on my electric bill by turning off my spa heater.

• Finally, a few unrelated posts.  Internetnews reports that Amazon's Kindle ebook reader is a billion dollar baby (FYI, Kindle 2 was released today). TechCrunch posts on the outrageous copyright infringement lawsuit filed by AP against the artist responsible for the iconic Obama image seen throughout the campaign.

More next week...

Jim