Urban Airship, a Portland, Oregon based iPhone “push notifications as a service” company, announced this morning that it now offers push notifications for BlackBerry applications and will soon offer Android push as well. “We are going to see at least four, and potentially five, extremely relevant platforms for mobile applications in the near future,” the company said, “and we intend to provide the push messaging and content delivery infrastructure for all of them.”

If you’ve seen push notifications from Gowalla (a great use case, by the way), Tap Tap Revenge, Yowza or Urban Rivals, then you’ve seen Urban Airship’s service on the front end. On the back end, the company is developing push and in-app purchase infrastructure for numerous apps and devices, including the forthcoming iPad.

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Airship developer Michael Richardson put the company’s cross-platform efforts into context for us this morning:

We want to make it extremely simple for mobile publishers to communicate in a real-time fashion with their users. The mobile phone is the perfect channel for that and we want to provide the ability to reach any user, any time, immediately, without the high cost or difficult implementation of SMS.

Bringing that paradigm to BlackBerry and Android will open up big new markets for the company and easy new functionality for developers. The company is offering BlackBerry push right now by integrating with BlackBerry’s own API. Android push will be handled end to end by Airship and isn’t ready yet. “We’ll handle the details of managing the persistent socket connections from the device and sending the notifications as needed along that connection,” the company says. That’s easier said than done. Richardson: “We’re taking it slow to make sure that we do it right.”

The downside to using a service like this of course is that it’s a form of reliance on a small outside service provider. Quite a few companies have been willing to forgo building this kind of tech in-house to date, though. Urban Airship reports that it delivered 100 million push notifications in its first 6 months and 60 million more in just 4 weeks after that.

Into mobile? Check out the ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit 2010.

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The U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission is okay with the idea of Google dealing in energy.  Yesterday, it granted "market-based rate authorization" to Google Energy and designated the entity a Category 1 seller in all regions.

Google may well view this development as a bit of a victory.  More than a few people became uneasy when it first applied to become a power marketer; the move generated a lot of fresh jokes about Skynet and global domination.

The California Public Utilities Commission and something called the Mabuhay Alliance ("the leading resource and service provider to the Pan Asian and other underserved communities for home ownership retention and small business growth and development") even formally expressed concerns about Google’s latest outside-the-box effort.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s authorization is effective February 23rd, though, meaning Google won’t have to face some sort of investigation or appeals process.

Here’s the only hitch: at least three times in the document granting the order, the Commission noted that Google doesn’t have any wholesale electric generation or transmission facilities at the moment.  So, despite all the paperwork being in order, Google isn’t going to be buying or selling much electricity in the near future.

Oracle is launching a worldwide, cloud computing tour. It’s a 50-stop show for developers and system administrators.

But is the tour really about cloud computing? It seems more like virtualization with a touch of focus on how to leverage public cloud environments from providers like Amazon Web Services.

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The tour will focus on three topics:

• How IT can become a private cloud service provider for your users.
• How to evolve existing enterprise architectures to a cloud model.
• How to leverage public clouds from providers like Amazon Web Services.

The premise of private cloud computing is to get more out of an enterprise data center. Virtualization technology makes this possible to some extent. But is it really cloud computing? Is private cloud computing just a glorified data center?

The question is the focus of our weekly poll. So far, the question is eliciting responses that question what private computing really means.

Jonathan Lambert has this to say:

“Utility computing is an old model, and on demand resources and APIs are the core of what makes a cloud more than just (usually) virtualization.

The key differentiator here is how organizations approach clouds: how do they do their accounting of resources. If organizations are moving their opex spending to utility resources and on-demand compute resources, that’s a significant move that really indicates a willingness to move to this kind of external resource as they mature.

If they’re simply building programatic extensions of their regular business operations, you’re just looking at another move to gain IT efficiency in the in-house datacenter. The only real difference there is the management approach.”

But this tour may be more about the Sun Microsystems acquisition than anything else. Sun invested heavily in cloud computing. The tour is a chance to talk about Oracle’s new ability to provide infrastructure for companies that seek to build private and public cloud infrastructures.

Perhaps after we will not see the shuttering of the Sun open cloud.

In any case, it’s always fun to write about Oracle. So, why not show our favorite cloud computing video: Larry Ellison doing his most awesome tirade about the folly of cloud computing.

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A couple of the mysteries surrounding the forthcoming Nexus One/Google phone may have been solved.  Information related to the price of the phone and its plan has leaked, and assuming the details are accurate, the device should line up pretty well with the existing marketplace.

Here’s the bad news: rumors that Google would offer a cheap or free phone weren’t confirmed.  The standard monthly fee doesn’t look like it will be trivial, either, meaning the Nexus One may not be as revolutionary as many people expected.

Instead, according to Jason Chen, consumers will be asked to pay $179.99 for the Nexus One if they lock into a two-year contract with T-Mobile for $79.99 per month.  Or they can choose their own service provider, but they’ll have to fork over $529.99 for an unlocked phone.

Still, these prices aren’t so high that ordinary people wouldn’t be able to get their hands on the Nexus One.  Indeed, the T-Mobile prices should make the Nexus One competitive with the iPhone, so if the hardware measures up, Apple may find itself with a serious rival.

Hopefully we’ll get firm numbers and a much more solid idea of the Nexus One’s capabilities on Tuesday at the Android press gathering.

Related Articles:

> Google Phone Excitement Builds Ahead Of Jan. 5 Event

> November Showed Significant Growth For Android

> Android Crowds iPhone In New comScore Report

Craigslist is reportedly being sued for trademark infringement. A real estate company in Texas called First Call Properties is saying that it began posting ads on Craigslist in March, and that after that, a competitor called AAA Apartment Locating began posting ads using phrases like "first call," "call first," and "call us first."

According to MediaPost, First Call named Craigslist, AAA and two individuals as defendants. The case has been sent to Federal Court.

Clearly, this is not the first time cases like this have made the news. It’s just the first time that Craigslist has been on the receiving end of such a suit. Google has certainly been there. MediaPost’s Wendy Davis points out that these cases don’t usually get too far in court, but one between Google and Geico was settled.
 
"This is misguided in any number of ways: first, as long as the ad itself is not confusing such that the reader (or a moron in a hurry reader) would think that the ad is from the original company rather than the competitor, there’s not likely to be a trademark violation," says Mike Masnick at TechDirt. "More importantly, even if there is a trademark violation, it should not be Google’s liability, since they’re simply the service provider. The liability (if there is any) would be on whoever created the ad."

There is another interesting aspect to the Craigslist case. According to MediaPost, First Call also says the AAA ads are libelous, and say things like "First Call Properties is a Scam," but Davis points to a section of the Communications Decency Act, which says sites can’t be sued for libel based on user-generated content.

It will be interesting to see the outcome of this case. Craigslist could settle, but based on past Google experience, it will probably just disappear.