Tim Conneally

Leading Web retailer Amazon.com has declared the Ides of March to be the beginning of its Android App Store's anniversary. The app store launched one year ago with approximately 4,000 different applications available for download, and it has grown to more than 31,000 at the end of its first year.

A major push for Amazon's Android content delivery platform came in September with the launch of the Kindle Fire Android tablet. The device is closely tied to a user's Amazon account, and the interface revolves around the Amazon ecosystem, with the MP3 shop/cloud player, Kindle reader app and bookstore, Amazon Video on Demand, and Amazon Prime.

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Since I am a full-time multi-display PC user, using a standard, single-display notebook on the road always makes me feel like I'm working with one hand tied behind my back. I've grown so accustomed to the additional screen real estate that it has become integral to my work flow.

If you look through my history here at BetaNews, you can see I've tried many of the mobile solutions designed to bring extra monitors to the mobile office…portable mini-monitors, tablet-based screen extenders, and so forth. Unfortunately, none of them have stuck.

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Dell announced on Tuesday that it will be acquiring firewall and network security management company SonicWall Inc. for an undisclosed sum. Analysts estimate the transaction to be valued at more than a billion dollars.

Dell, which led the consumer personal computer market in the late 90's and early 2000's, is repositioning itself as a systems and solutions provider for government and private enterprise. In February, the company unveiled new storage arrays, virtual network architecture framework, private cloud deployment services, and data warehousing appliances along with a message from founder, chairman, and CEO Michael Dell that Dell "isn't really a PC company."

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Though it doesn't identify exactly what "cloud computing skills" actually are, business intelligence firm Wanted Analytics on Tuesday said more than 5,000 U.S. cloud computing job openings were listed online in February alone. This is up 92 percent from February 2011, and an impressive 400 percent from February 2010.

Software Engineers, Computer Systems Engineers and Architects, and Network and Computer Systems Administrators are the three jobs that most commonly listed cloud computing skills. However, Wanted Analytics said 2011 job listings weren't just in the engineering and administration sector. Jobs in marketing, sales, and financial and marketing analysis also demanded experience with cloud computing at much greater rates than previous years.

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Project management software-as-a-service LiquidPlanner on Monday launched its first Android app after offering an application on iOS for more than two years.

"Internally we are jumping up and down about this latest release because it’s been such a long time coming," said Liz Pearce, LiquidPlanner's VP of sales and marketing. "We were so glad to finally get a chance to work on this because we are truly committed to making LiquidPlanner work for mobile."

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There are a ton of companies jockeying to become the "Dropbox of the enterprise world," with a managed solution for cloud file sharing, storage, collaboration, and backup with cross-platform mobile compatibility.

Monday, file sharing and collaboration solutions company Accellion Inc launched its own take on this popular niche with Kitedrive, which it bills, predictably, as "Dropbox for the Enterprise." The cloud file sync service first saw the light of day about four months ago, at the tail end of 2011, and it is now integrated with Accellion's mobile file sharing solutions.

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Friday's big U.S. news might be that more than 220 thousand jobs were added in the month of February, but not everything is as bright and shiny in the world of communications.

The nation's largest mobile network operator Verizon Wireless announced it will be shutting down several of its U.S. support centers and eliminating as many as 3,175 non-union jobs by the end of the third quarter of 2012.

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With the domination of Apple's iPad, the Android-based tablet market has lots of mid-range competition, with different companies jockeying for differentiation.

Archos has a pretty big line of Android-powered tablet products, and today the company announced its G9 family of Android tablets will begin receiving over-the-air upgrades to Android 4.0.3 "Ice Cream Sandwich" today. This line is easily differentiated from the pack of Android tablets because they can be outfitted with a 250GB HDD, giving them vastly more storage than most Android-powered tablets, which tend to utilize flash-based storage and max out at 64GB.

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Apple's latest version of the iPad, announced on Wednesday is an incremental upgrade to the fantastically popular mobile tablet computer that adds a higher resolution screen, 4G LTE mobile wireless connectivity, higher resolution cameras, and a handful of other new features.

But these combined upgrades have taken a slight toll on the chassis of the device, making it slightly thicker and heavier to accommodate the bigger battery, which has been increased in capacity to provide Apple's now standard "10-hour/9-hour" battery life promises.

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At its iPad-centric event on Wednesday, Apple announced an update to its sleeper 'post-PC' set-top box product, the Apple TV.

The device, which Apple said last January has sold in excess of 4.2 million units, has been upgraded to 1080p resolution with a new user interface to take advantage of the higher definition output. It also includes iTunes Match support and iCloud integration, Photo Stream support (most recent 1000 photos automatically appear on all iOS devices — now including Apple TV,) Genius movie recommendation, and "TV Shows the day after they air."

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In advance of the SXSW Interactive festival which begins on March 9, Adobe has introduced a new product in its software lab called Adobe Shadow, a Web development tool that is meant to simplify the creation of mobile-customized sites.

Adobe Shadow Labs Release 1 is a wireless client/server tool that lets developers pair multiple smartphones and tablets with their workstation so they can view previews of their content in real-time. As the developer works on sites locally or even browses live sites, the content is simultaneously retrieved and rendered on the paired mobile devices. It also allows for remote inspection and debugging so HTML/CSS/Javascript bugs can be fixed instantly on these paired devices.

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Google on Tuesday unveiled a major change to the Android Market: a name change.

Since Google's content market is for Android devices and beyond, the destination formerly known as the Android Market, is now known in the United States as Google Play.

Last year, Google completed its upgrade of the Android market, adding video, music, books, and a rich browser-based interface to the store which had previously only offered Android applications and games.

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Microsoft on Tuesday announced the RTM of SQL Server 2012, the latest version of the company's widely-used relational database server platform, which will launch to the general market on April first.

The trend in SQL Server this time around is "Big Data," the enterprise buzzword that seems to be gradually encroaching on the cachet of "cloud." In short, Microsoft is positioning SQL Server 2012 as the way businesses can take advantage of the unfathomably large amounts of data created every year --1.8 zettabytes of information (aka 1.8 trillion gigs,) for example, was created in 2011 alone.

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eBay's payment processing subsidiary PayPal is no longer relegated to online purchases and auctions. Mobile payment app Tabbedout on Tuesday announced it now includes PayPal as an option to let users pay their bar tab or restaurant bill if they happen to be in Austin, Texas. And in just three days, a lot of people are going to be happening through Austin for the SXSW Interactive, Film, and Music Festival.

The Tabbedout mobile application is available for free on Android and iOS, and it lets bar and restaurant patrons open, view and pay their tab with their credit card on a smartphone. By doing this, the idea is that servers can more quickly and easily collect payment without actually having to process cards, come back for tips, and so forth. Within the app, the tab is kept, a tip calculator is included, and credit card data is stored locally and password protected. The system, of course, only works if a restaurant or bar has partnered with Tabbedout, and the startup has about 400 partnerships thus far.

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Google's new privacy policy pulls together usage data from all of its different services: YouTube, Gmail, Docs, etc. and uses it to create a more clear picture of its users. If you have the "Web History" feature of Google Search turned on, Google can collect information about your browsing activity, including pages you visit and searches on Google, information about your search results including personal results, Internet Protocol address, browser type, browser language and more unique identifiers.

"Web History uses the information from your web history or other information you provide us to improve your Google experience across many of our products, such as by improving the quality of your search results and providing recommendations," Google's Privacy FAQ says.

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