An organisation founded in 2010 to define the future of Linux on low power mobile chips from ARM has won support from social networking giant Facebook.

China Unicom has announced the development of its own smartphone operating system built on a Linux core. The ‘Wophone’ OS, which reports claim will not be based on Android, will run on a new brand of devices which, it is hoped, will help China Unicom expand its handset offering in order to grow demand for its 3G services.

Mobile operator Orange got behind the Nokia-Intel founded Linux initiative MeeGo on Wednesday, anticipating the creation of a new channel for the delivery of consumer multimedia services.

Vodafone 360, the UK operator’s social media interface and aggregation platform is making some headway. The UK firm said Tuesday that more than 7,000 apps have been made available to customers across eight European markets in the three months since the service launched.

Open source specialist, consultant and Harvard fellow David “Doc” Searls writes about why he believes openness has to be the future for mobile.

The driving forces behind Google’s foray into the mobile platform space – The Open Handset Alliance and the Android Open Source Project – have shown off developments for the operating system which will allow handset builders to deploy the platform on yet more devices, even as it is gaining some significant traction in the market.

There was a report on the news in the UK this morning that this autumn will be a bumper season for spiders in this country. This is terrible news for just about everybody, because spiders are horrible. The Informer once spent a month in Costa Rica, a glorious country, and encountered some of the biggest spiders in the world. But that hasn’t helped him overcome the panic he experiences when even the most unprepossessing common-or-garden UK spider scampers into view.