Lately one of the most popular topics for tech industry watchers to debate is the mobile operating system landscape.  Is it too fragmented?  Is there not enough competition?  Are there too many competitors?  Is this an issue for developers…or not?

(In fact there’s a whole Techmeme discussion from today led by Stephen Shankland’s CNET article “Angry Birds spotlights Android fragmentation”…more on that app and how it was ported to webOS below)

A new data point

The smartphone market is still in its early stages and it’s probably still too soon to have any hard and fast opinions on this matter.  But earlier this week, one of the leading investors in web and mobile startups, Fred Wilson, did contribute some meaningful new data and perspectives in a post titled “Fragmentation.”  Fred writes:

“Building web apps is not getting easier.  The fragmentation of operating systems and browsers is getting worse, not better.  Here’s a chart of the past thirty days of activity at AVC.com” [visitors to Fred’s blog]

He goes on to note that no OS/browser combo has more than a 17% share, and that there are five with more than 10% share.  That means that visitors to his blog are using a very wide variety of tools to read his posts.  If you’ve ever developed even the simplest of websites, you know that debugging them so they work perfectly for all your users (whether they use Internet Explorer on a PC or iOS on a iPhone) is a difficult – and often frustrating – task.  The same dynamic holds true for ‘apps’.

Palm GM shares his perspective at Web 2.0

Jon Rubinstein touched on this dynamic at a high level in his keynote interview at the Web 2.0 Summit this week, saying “to really innovate, you have to do the whole user experience…hardware, software, cloud services, marketing, packaging” and so on:

How hard does porting Angry Birds really need to be?

Today’s discussion regarding Angry Birds developers is a meaningful one, for all the history and reasons Shankland reports in his post (go read it).  A thriving app ecosystem is clearly a key strategic differentiator in the mobile market going forward.

The only thing left missing from the conversation?  How easy it was to port Angry Birds to webOS.

As Peter Vesterbacka (of Rovio, the company developing Angry Birds) noted after the webOS launch back in August:

"We made the decision [to port to webOS] because it was so easy."

"It just took us a couple of days to get the first port done and then we had it up and running…I would say [it was] trivial to get the port done.”

Check out the full thirty minute interview with Peter here (the comments above come at about 18:50).

Finally, if you're a developer in the New York City area, please do come out to webOS Developer Day today and tomorrow, November 20, for a fun filled day of HP webOS education and training.

Just as President Obama’s 2008 campaign demonstrated the possibilities of social media in politics, the 2010 midterm elections saw a continued emphasis on online communications from those in Congress.

With the elections now passed, the Social Computing group at HP Labs applied a new algorithm to measure which members of Congress have the most influence on Twitter.

The difference between popularity and influence

After analyzing 22 million tweets, researchers at HP Labs (D. Romero, W. Galuba, S. Asur and B. A. Huberman) calculated a novel measure of influence and developed a corresponding algorithm that automatically identifies particularly influential users.

According to their research, it is important to separate the concept of “influence” from “popularity.” While a user on Twitter may have a large number of followers, his or her influence is more strongly associated with their engagement with the network, rather than the raw number of followers or retweets.

In short, influential users are those that are best at inspiring their followers to overcome their predisposition to remain passive.  You can learn more about the algorithm and other HP Labs social computing research by reading our announcement post here and watching the above video interview with Dr. Bernardo Huberman.

Analyzing members of Congress on Twitter

Using this algorithm, HP Labs was able to determine the 100 most influential members of Congress on Twitter. A few observations:

- 70 of the top 100 most influential members of Congress were Republicans.

- The average age of those on the list is 57, which is about the same as the average age of members of Congress and Senators.

- 13 of the top 100 are from Generation X, 69 from the Boomer generation and 18 from the Silent generation.

- Of the 86 that engaged in a recent campaign, 79 won, 7 lost and one remains outstanding.

Below is a list of the top 10 most influential members of Congress on Twitter.  The list shows their rank, the member’s name, their Twitter username, the number of followers, and their party and state (“R” for Republican, “D” for Democrat, and “I” for independent).

For the full list of 100 members, download the PDF.

And don't forget to follow HP on Twitter @hpnews and @hplabs!

*UPDATE 11/20/10: an earlier version of this report mistakenly omitted Eric Cantor (@gopwhip) from the list and ranked John McCain 7th.  Cantor should have been 7th on the list, with McCain ranked 8th.  The list below is now corrected.

1. Nancy Pelosi (@nancypelosi); D-CA; 15,964 followers

2. Paul Ryan (@reppaulryan); R-WI; 21,378 followers

3. Michele Bachmann (@michelebachmann); R-MN; 22,967 followers

4. Thomas Allen Coburn (@tomcoburn); R-OK; 17,631 followers

5. Bill Nelson (@senbillnelson); D-FL; 12,503 followers

6. John Boehner (@gopleader); R-OH; 48,604 followers

7. Eric Cantor (@gopwhip); R-VA; 20,384 followers

8. John McCain (@senjohnmccain); R-AZ; 1,718,288 followers

9. Joe Barton (@repjoebarton); R-TX; 4,091 followers

10. Sherrod Brown (@sensherrodbrown); D-OH; 4,947 followers

HP has been selected by the Mexican government to provide over $8 million of low-carbon IT solutions for the 2010 UN Climate Change Conference (COP16).  

The agreement includes solutions from a wide range of HP’s businesses, including notebook and desktop PCs, printers, data center and networking equipment, and supplies.  HP will also be supplying desktop systems to deliver high-definition video communications, transporting executives from the UN in Bonn, Germany to Cancun without a plane ride.   By using HP’s visual collaboration solutions that were announced today, we are truly minimizing travel-related emissions for COP16.

The COP16 IT team chose HP in part for its commitment to support environmental sustainability as a global business strategy and as a catalyst for technology innovation. HP has applied the collective influence of its products, operations, supply chain and partnerships to deliver low-carbon alternatives and solutions - optimizing resources, building intelligent infrastructure, and driving sustainable transformation for the 98 percent of businesses outside of the IT sector.

As a company that is committed to environmental sustainability, we’re honored to be able to play an important role in reducing the overall carbon footprint and emissions through the innovative use of technology at this year’s Climate Change Conference.

If you follow technology trends and have never heard of cloud computing, you may have spent your last two years living under a rock. What’s odd though is that if you ask a dozen people about the cloud, you’ll get a dozen definitions. That said, most of us can agree that any IT delivery model that brings greater agility, shorter projects, reduced admin overhead, lower risk of failure and reduced capital expenditure has strong potential to be A Good Thing.

At HP we strongly believe that cloud is the most important change to managing IT since client/server computing. But the challenge in managing through this change shouldn’t be understated; a new set of tools and skills will be needed. To help customers (and other researchers) understand some of this challenge, HP Labs Bristol has built the G-Cloud Theatre.

The G-Cloud Theatre is a room designed to demonstrate systems management in a mission-critical environment. The ‘G’ in G-Cloud stands for “government” and the demonstration in the theatre shows how a cloud hosting many virtual services could automatically resist even a sophisticated security attack intended to destabilise core data and programs (or generally cause mayhem).

The theatre demonstrates a futuristic vision of a console where human administrators could use a touch-sensitive interface to administrate services dynamically and in near real time. Think of it as HP’s nod to today’s computer games or movies like Minority Report and The Matrix. But also think of the G-Cloud demonstration as showing the way systems can be built that react to pre-written scripts or ‘playbooks’ in order to automate security and other management chores. This level of computer intelligence will be needed to rebuff the hackers and other bad guys of the future and will ensure that the Cloud is not some short-lived phenomenon confined to niche applications.

If this blog has piqued your interest, you can learn more about HP’s approach to cloud computing (and related HP Labs research) here and here.

Today, Computer magazine published an industry perspective on innovation, featuring insight from HP Labs’ Prith Banerjee, Rich Friedrich and Lueny Morell.

HP Labs’ researchers are currently working on 24 projects spanning eight themes, each of which is defined as a “big bet,” meaning that it must advance the current state of technology and also have the potential to positively impact HP’s business and customers.  When conducting research within this overarching framework, HP Labs uses a portfolio approach:

- One third of all research projects are basic or exploratory, with possible applications five to 10 years in the future;
- One third is related to current products and services with possible applications five to 18 months in the future;
- The remaining third is applied in nature but not specifically product-related, with possible applications two to four years in the future. 

The team goes on to explain the need for open innovation:

“With the best technology talent still in short supply and far more mobile than ever, organizations must optimize their ability to attract and collaborate with top talent.  This demands a clear strategy, an overt high-level sponsorship, and an entrepreneurial culture that values experimentation and creativity.”

Open innovation is a fundamental component to HP Labs, whose innovation programs focus on three specific strategies:

1.       Innovation Research Program

2.       Open Cirrus Cloud Computing test bed

3.       Government and University Partnerships

(image above right: Prith Banerjee [right[ and Senior Fellow Stan Williams show off a new sensor design)

The benefits of an open innovation approach are numerous and wide-reaching.  Prith, Rich and Lueny highlight the impact among key stakeholders:

“For companies, it represents a core strategy to augment and accelerate knowledge creation and technology transfer.  The concept allows universities to leverage corporate research and amplify the innovation process, helps to build capacity in emerging areas of science and technology, and aids in identifying skills and competencies needed in graduates to assist in renovating curricula.  For governments and nongovernmental organizations, an open innovation culture fosters entrepreneurship, catalyzing technology transfer and new business creation for sustaining and expanding knowledge-based economies.”

Subscribers to Computer magazine can access the full article here.