In less than 24 hours, Oracle announced that Mark Hurd would be co-president of Oracle, and HP quickly reacted with a lawsuit.   Mark Hurd had resigned from H.P. after allegations of sexual harassment surfaced earlier this summer and the company’s board pressured him to step down.   “In his new positions, Hurd will be in a situation in which he cannot perform his duties for Oracle without necessarily using and disclosing H.P.’s trade secrets and confidential information to others,” H.P. wrote in its lawsuit. Although HP and Oracle work together as partners on database project, Oracles acquisition of Sun Microsystems makes HP more than a little nervous because of its competing line of computer servers, business software and storage products.

As officially sanctioned Twitter mobile apps were released on Android, iPhone and BlackBerry smartphones, there has  been a 62 percent growth in Twitter mobile user since the middle of April.  "As we had hoped in April, these clients are bringing more people into Twitter, and, even better, they are attracting and retaining active users. Indeed, 46 percent of active users make mobile a regular part of their Twitter experience," blogged Twitter CEO Evan Williams on Thursday.   Previously there many unendorsed mobile applications that brought a level of confusion into the marketplace.   The company’s mobile site remained the most popular means of accessing Twitter with 14 percent of all users.  Twitter for iPhone and SMS service had 8 percent each, followed by Twitter for BlackBerry which had 7 percent.

As  iPhones, Android Phones and BlackBerry’s sell by the millions, Microsoft reached a major milestone of its own this week for its forthcoming Windows Phone 7 Smartphone platform.    The company plans for a multiple Window Phone 7 smartphones to be available in time for the coming 2010 Christmas shopping season.   The latest mobile operating system from Microsoft features aggregated Web content and apps that are organized into category specific Hubs that include “Games” or “Office”.    “Windows Phone 7 is the most thoroughly tested mobile platform Microsoft has ever released,” Terry Myerson, corporate vice president of Windows Phone Engineering, blogged on Sept 1st. “We had nearly 10,000 devices running automated tests daily, over a half million hours of active self-hosting use, over three and a half million hours of stress test passes, and eight and a half million hours of fully automated test passes.”

As August draws to a close, Google made its 5th acquisition of the month with its purchase of the Canadian social gaming company SocialDeck.  "We started this company with the goal of connecting friends through social games on all kinds of exciting new mobile devices," SocialDeck wrote on the company’s web site. "We've been amazed and humbled by all of the stories and experiences our customers (you!) have shared with us."   Recently Google acquired other social gaming companies such as Jambool and Slide, and has vested $200 million in Zynga which popular on Facebook.  A week ago Google bought Angstro which makes social-media applications, and it also recently purchased iLike, the e-commercial visual search company. Google has not disclosed its plans for the SocialDeck, however the social focused acquisitions has fueled much speculation about Google’s plans to expand in the social arena.

 SocialDeck is known for a number of games that include Pet Hero Puzzle, Shake & Spell, Shake & Spell 3D, and Color Connect.    The company distributed the games through iTunes and made Shake & Spell available through Facebook and Blackberry.   The company offered both free and 99 cent versions of their applications.   The company also developed Spark, a social-gaming platform that works on Facebook, iPhone and Blackberry to connect players across social games.

Related Links:

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2368513,00.asp

http://www.develop-online.net/news/35739/SocialDeck-buyout-next-in-Google-spending-spree

http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/netsys/article.php/3901371/Google-Continues-Social-Buying-Spree-With-SocialDeck.htm

The 3Par acquisition saga continues as HP raised its bid to $2 billion or $30 per share.   The company was initially sought by Dell for $1.13 billion when it made its first offer on August 16^th.   The latest $2 billion offer is HP’s second bid and eclipses Dell’s second bid of $1.6 billion, which was also made this week.   3Par has become a much sought after prize as both companies try to bolster their storage portfolios as they compete in the growing cloud computing marketplace.    3Par’s thin client approach makes it easier and less expensive to store information than the traditional storage approach.   Storage products have become an essential piece of the puzzle as the data-center equipment market continues to expand.

Novell’s newly announced Cloud Security Service is open for business with general availability in the U.S marketplace.    As Novell rolled out the new service product, it became one of the first companies to provide a multi-tenant system that is cloud-focused which has been designed from the ground up.   Dipo Chachravarty, general manager for Novell cloud security described the Novell Cloud Security Service  as a framework that provides for just in time provisioning of access management for private and public  and cloud computing environments.  Customers of the new service can control the provisioning, authentication and authorization of users on local or hosted cloud computing systems.  The service allows IT managers to provision identity management tokens in real time.  The scalability of the service makes it possible for IT managers to have scalability based on demand requirements as a large volume of users access files on in-house or remote cloud computing environments.    To efficiently manage application workloads the new service utilizes RESTful API’s which can be integrated with various applications.