The most interesting news on the digital entertainment front comes out of Barcelona, Spain today. That's the site of the Mobile World Congress where there have been two very interesting and related developments.
First, Microsoft announced its acquisition of Danger, a mobile phone operating system. The Danger software is especially adept at facilitating social networking through mobile devices. This is clearly a part of the MS strategy to dominate the entire digital media environment. I view the acquisition of Danger as being equally important to that strategy as the proposed acquisition of Yahoo. Certainly not as high profile, but an equally important piece of the puzzle.
At the same conference, the new Google-enabled cellular device was unveiled. The phone runs on Google's Android operating system.
So the fight between MS and Google has officially extended onto the mobile front, and it will be a battle royale. The mobile advertising business should be worth double-digit billions of dollars by the end of the decade, or not long thereafter. Mobile media is the portion of the business that truly frees consumers from their desks and facilitates the "whatever I want, whenever and wherever I want it" paradigm that is the current goal of media technology development.
And the big winner at this point appears to be Andy Rubin. Andy is the co-founder of Danger who is now running Android for Google. That's right, the entire mobile operating system battle can be traced back to one guy (who I'm sure had a lot of help from dozens of other talented people). I guess when they make the list of most important people in the world of mobile technology, Andy's name will be near the top.
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