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You will be excused for not knowing what the Eclipse mobile Pluginfest is and that it happened in the first place... But you will not be excused next time for having missed this historical moment of mobile  development tool's history : 2007 the first mobile pluginfest..

Throw yourself back in 2007! I know it's kind of hard so I'll paint a quick portrait of the days, Symbian is the most innovative and widespread mobile OS on the planet, WindRiver and IBM are 2 different companies, J2ME is still an important part of Mobile development (even though the Mobile Tools for Java project is struggling a bit), Doug Gaff was still at WindRiver, Doug Schaefer still at QNX, Christian Kurzke still at Motorola, Lars Kurth and I still at Symbian. The only sign of stability in this world is Ian Skerrett who's still heading marketing at Eclipse Foundation and should be thanked for his efforts to get the pluginfest sparkle back!

Back in 2007 we (as in the team of people named above) realized...

Google announced yesterday that it's added iPhone and Android apps to its search results when users search from a mobile device running one of those platforms. So, for instance, if a user searches for "download shazam", the top search result should be a link to the relevant app in the Android Market or iTunes App Store. In theory, anyway -- Marshall Kirkpatrick from Read/Write Web says there are still some kinks that need to be worked out (indeed, I can't seem to get it to work on my Droid Eris running Androind 2.1 yet).

One of Thibaut's current interests is what he calls "App Store Placement Optimization", or APO for short. Just like search engine optimization, APO is concerned with making apps appear at the top of search and other listings in app stores. As the number of apps grows and grows, APO will become an important skill for companies and people trying to drive downloads and sales of their apps.

The question then becomes, how will Google's app results work, and how will...

I was up in San Francisco earlier this week for the Google I/O event, and as expected, Android played a big part in the proceedings. A number of big announcements involving the platform were made, and it was also interesting to see that at the I/O Developer Sandbox (the closest thing the event has to an expo floor), the section showing off Android tools, services and devices was bigger than any of the others focused on other Google areas of interest.

There were three big pieces of Android news:

• Version 2.2 of the platform, named Froyo, was formally announced. Many of the features of 2.2 had been going around the web for a few weeks, but this was its formal introduction. Engadget has a good rundown of all the new features, including Flash support in the browser, the ability to store apps on external memory. Froyo also supports tethering and mobile hotspot services, and is significantly faster, both in UI and the browser, than earlier versions. It should be available for the...