SkyDeck Raises $3 Million To Manage, Enhance Your Phone Bill

SkyDeck, the site that uses your mobile phone bills to help you manage and analyze your relationships with your peers, has closed a $3 million Series A funding round led by Saban Ventures. The round brings SkyDeck’s total funding to $4 million, as it had previously raised $1 million in angel funding.

SkyDeck originally launched its private beta in March with a basic set of features that allowed users to automatically pair contacts from their address books to calls in their phone records (we likened it to a Xobni for cell phones). In June the site expanded its social features, giving users the ability to connect with their friends (they can also see how relationships are skewed based on who is calling whom). The site is now available in a public beta, which you can join here

Your Next Computer May Be a Smartphone

With the launch of the G1 from Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) , the coming introduction of the BlackBerry Bold and the maturation of the iPhone, more and more of us will be living off this new mobile platform. A recent study by ABI research is predicting the crossover between notebooks and smartphones will happen in 2013 -- or 5 years from now, which agrees with my own projections. This will mean a significant shift. The last shift like this was when we moved from mainframes to PCs and IBM (NYSE: IBM) was replaced by Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) at the top of the IT pile.

This change is likely to shift the hierarchy as well, and both Google and Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) are shooting for the top spot, but only Google is currently positioned properly to take it and, unlike IBM, Microsoft is planning to put up a huge fight.
Let's talk about the competition for the next platform, why Microsoft is at risk, and why Google is blending Chrome and Android in a Microsoft-like strategy to take out Microsoft.
We'll end with our product of the week, a product I wish I'd thought of that can make sure all those pictures on your PC aren't going to go away if you lose a hard drive or catch a nasty PC virus .

Motorola Building Up 350-Person Android Team. Nokia Also Sniffing Around.

The iPhone may be the only game in town for serious mobile Web developers right now, but that won’t last ling. Next year, the iPhione will see some serious competition from Google’s Android platform. Of course, T-Mobile will start selling the first Android phone, the G1 made by HTC, on October 22. But other cell phone manufacturers are gearing up for a major Android push.

The most significant of these may come from Motorola. One of the original partners in the Open Handset Alliance behind the open-source mobile OS, Motorola already has 50 people on its Android team and is growing that to 350, according to an Android developer approached by a headhunter to join the team. That is a huge commitment that shows how big a bet Motorola is making on Android.

This same source has also seen people from Nokia and Verizon at a recent Android developer conference.