Tim Conneally

Mint, the elegant personal financial management app owned by financial software company Intuit has finally released a version of its application specifically for Android tablets. Mint's app has been available on Android-based smartphones for over a year, but with the growing prevalence of tablets, and Ice Cream Sandwich promising to unify Android's smartphone and tablet interfaces, the time was right for a Mint tablet app.

Because Mint is so UI-centric, the tablet app doesn't try to cram more information into the larger screen real estate, but instead provides a clearer, easier-to-navigate interface.

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Microsoft on Wednesday launched its Kinect for Windows commercial program, allowing businesses to build for-profit applications and solutions using Microsoft's popular free-space interface.

More than 300 companies are already developing their own solutions using Kinect for Windows, Microsoft said on Wednesday, including United Health Group, American Express, Mattel, Telefonica, and Toyota. So we expect to see a whole family of new Kinect applications hitting the market in the next year for health care, education, and industry.

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Salesforce, the gold standard of cloud-based CRM, launched on Tuesday a new customer support application called Desk.com, which gives small and medium-sized businesses a "social help desk" designed so ultraconnected, smartphone-toting employees can appropriately connect with the ultraconnected, smartphone-toting customer.

Desk.com grew out of Salesforce's 50 million dollar acquisition of Assistly just five months ago. The Assistly application was notable because it took customer relationships on social networks such as Facebook and Twitter and then integrated them with "traditional" support channels such as e-mail and telephone, making social network relationships among the most important methods of communication for companies.

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Symantec on Tuesday launched the public beta of Norton Identity Safe, a free password management application for mobile and desktop devices. The software was originally a feature built into Norton Internet Security and Norton 360, and is now available for the first time as a standalone application.

Norton Identity Safe beta is designed to be a simple and secure way for users to store and manage their logins and passwords for all their different applications and services. With the application installed, the user only needs to remember their master password, and then they can launch any of their stored services. This login information can be synched across the users' different devices as well.

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Today, the Bluestacks team put out a quick announcement that they are accepting their first round of Beta testers to have a look at the next version of App Player, the Android virtualization environment for Windows and beyond.

This round of testers will be limited to just 100 who manage to sign up and get accepted into the program.

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Monday, Microsoft began the technical preview program of "Office 15," the next generation of Microsoft's Office ecosystem, which will include cloud services, servers, mobile and desktop clients. The big thing about Office 15 is that all these separate forms of Office will be simultaneously updated.

The Technical Preview period is when a very small group of users have access to the software in the understanding that they will not disclose any information about the early software. The beta testing period is expected to roll around some time in the summer, so somewhere in the range of four to five months from now.

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Even though Yahoo remains one of the most popular sites on the Web after nearly seventeen years in the business, the company faces an uncertain future with nebulous branding, improper monetization, and unsteady restructuring efforts.

Yahoo has been attempting to streamline and reorganize in various ways to stay on top, but on Friday it announced it will be ending support for ten of its mobile apps for iPad, iPhone, Android and BlackBerry.

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Intel may still be a rookie in the mobile space, but its security software subsidiary McAfee has got Intel's Android project covered. On Monday, the security company launched its second-generation McAfee Mobile Security suite for smartphones and tablets, which includes compatibility with Intel-based Android devices.

The $30 subscription-based application supports Google Android 2.1–4.0, BlackBerry 4.5, 4.6, 4.7, 5.0, 6.0, 7.0, and S60 3rd and 5th Edition, as well as Symbian ^3, and provides a suite of anti-virus, anti-spyware, and anti-theft, tools for mobile devices.

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According to a number of reports on Friday, the head of HP's mobile efforts, Jon Rubinstein, has left the company.

Hewlett-Packard acquired Palm in 2010 as a move to advance in the smartphone business. But after a little more than one year and a just a few new mobile devices, HP killed the Palm brand, dissolved its mobile business unit, and turned webOS into an open source project.

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World-famous microblogging service Twitter has changed its policies and will "reactively withhold" (read: censor) tweets deemed illegal or harmful in countries with laws concerning such things.

On Thursday, the policy change was announced in the official Twitter blog, where it said:

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After a couple of private trial runs, nivio (the name is intentionally all-lowercase) has opened in limited beta to United States users. The service lets users have remote access to their own cloud-based Windows desktop, complete with app store-style access to premium applications for a monthly fee.

Nivio is made up of three parts: nDrive, nDesktop, and nApps. As the names may already suggest, they are a cloud storage platform, a cloud-based Windows desktop, and a platform for renting applications for your Windows desktop.

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Last October, Motorola Mobility unveiled the 4G Droid Razr, the Android-powered smartphone that combined Motorola's strongest phone brand names in a single device. When the device went up for sale in November, it faced some negative reviews because of its weak battery life.

To remedy this, Motorola today released the Droid Razr Maxx, which is essentially the Droid Razr with a much bigger battery.

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Hewlett-Packard announced on Wednesday that it has begun the great open-sourcing of mobile operating system webOS with the release of the Enyo 2.0 core application framework.

Just a little over one month ago, HP announced it would be turning over webOS software development to the community, and open sourcing its components while participating in the project as an investor and controlling interest.

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Financial software and services company Intuit launched its redesigned GoPayment Card Reader on Wednesday, after debuting the new design earlier in January. The free device plugs into a smartphone's or tablet's audio jack and lets users scan credit cards for payment.

Mobile payment systems are a hot business where lots of different standards are competing, with no clear "winner" in the space.

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In 1968, NYU professor Edward Altman devised a statistical method for determining the financial health of a company called the Z-score formula for predicting bankruptcy, and since its publication, it has become a common statistical model used in loan evaluation.

Now a Director of Research in Credit and Debt Markets at the NYU Salomon Center for the Study of Financial Institutions, Dr. Altman has turned his formula into a hundred dollar mobile app for iPhone, iPad, Android and BlackBerry called "Altman Z-Score Plus."

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