HP announced Friday that its WebOS mobile platform would be made open-source. It’s a major decision that essentially sends the software to a slow, quiet death. The decision came during an all-hands meeting on Friday morning — this after months of speculation that the platform’s life was hanging in the balance. The goal, says HP, is to accelerate the development of webOS by putting it in the hands of as many open-source enthusiasts as possible. “WebOS is the only platform designed from the ground up to be mobile, cloud-connected and scalable,” said Meg Whitman, the newly crowned president of HP. “By contributing this innovation, HP unleashes the creativity of the open source community to advance a new generation of applications and devices.” Her message sounds ... Continue reading →

The whittling away of HP’s webOS team continues as Google has hired away the team leading the Enyo HTML 5 development project, sources say. Approximately a half dozen people–the core of what remained of the Enyo engineering team–have been hired by Google and will start at the company next month. Enyo is the HTML5 app-creation framework that HP is in the process of turning into an open-source project. Google didn’t strike a deal with HP to acquire the technology, according to a source, but has been talking with individual workers over the past month. Rather, each of the workers making the move was hired individually by Google, with the team set to regroup at their new employer next month. While it’s not 100 percent clear ... Continue reading →

We’ve known Facebook is serious about photos: Heck, it dropped a cool $1 billion on Instagram, the immensely popular mobile photo sharing app. What we didn’t know, however, is that Facebook was essentially building its own version of a stand-alone mobile photo sharing application, ostensibly to compete with Instagram before it took over the mobile photo sharing world completely. How do I know that? Because Facebook will launch the product this afternoon in Apple’s App Store. It’s called Facebook Camera, and it’s essentially Instagram redux. One, it’s a standalone Facebook application, separate from the Facebook app proper, much like the company’s Facebook Messages app. Facebook Photos product manager Dirk Stoop told me in an interview this morning, it’s an instant portal to one of Facebook’s ... Continue reading →