We’ve gone back and forth on the existence of a Google (GOOG) phone for a long time now. In the beginning, there was a talk of a Google Phone that turned out to be Android, Google’s mobile operating system targeting handset makers such as HTC (HTC), Motorola (MOT) and Samsung. Now there is word that Google might actually be looking to make its own handset.

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If I were to tell you that Apple’s (AAPL) app economy was worth more than $2.5 $2.4 billion a year, you would laugh hysterically, shake your head and walk out of the room, yes? Surf on over to some other web site? But here I am telling you exactly that!

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Dave Winer’s ability to peer into the future is uncanny. He was talking about a river of news long before the current activity streams became popular. He was evangelizing RSS long before there were blogs. I could go on and on about his prescient observations, but it’s his warnings that are especially prophetic.

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Late last week, a day before the Federal Communications Commission started to investigate the Google (GOOG) Voice App fiasco, I spoke with the new FCC chairman, Julius Genachowski. He managed to carve out a few minutes from what has been a very busy first month on the job.

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We all know that in a few years, Long Term Evolution (LTE), the 4G wireless broadband technology being embraced by mobile carriers across the world, is going to rule the airwaves, becoming an important way for us to connect to the Internet. But for now, it seems HSPA, aka High Speed Packet Access, the 3G wireless broadband technology, rules the planet. HSPA is a common term used to embrace all acronyms for HSDPA and HSUPA as well as HSPA+.

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Can Google (GOOG) be your phone company? The answer is yes. I came to that conclusion after I met with Vincent Paquet, co-founder of GrandCentral (a company acquired by Google) and now a member of the Google Voice team.

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For much of this decade, Mozilla and its Firefox browser were the upstarts, out to beat the big, bad Microsoft (MSFT) and its Internet Explorer browser. Firefox, the descendant of Netscape, the browser that helped jump-start the web revolution, was nimble and it was secure–something Microsoft’s IE wasn’t.

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If the growing number of games being played on it are any indication, then San Francisco-based micro-messaging service Twitter has the potential to become the next major casual gaming hub. The thought first came to me a few weeks ago, when I discovered Spymaster, a game that allows you to run your own spy ring.

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As investors and analysts digest this morning’s Oracle-Sun news, some are wondering what will happen to Sun (JAVA)-owned MySQL, and whether combining the Oracle (ORCL) and MySQL database businesses would represent an antitrust concern.

While MySQL would be a small part of Oracle’s overall business, it’s a popular open-source database that competes with other Oracle offerings. The deal, writes Seeking Alpha’s Mike Butcher, “has massive implications for the future openness of Java and MySQL.”

“MySQL is clearly a big prize for Oracle,” writes Om Malik on GigaOm, who says that the acquisition takes out Oracle’s No. 1 threat.

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Yesterday, New York-based start-up incubator Betaworks raised $2 million in funding for its URL-shortener project, Bit.ly, and spun it out as an independent company. The funding raised some eyebrows, with some speculating if Bit.ly, one of the dozens of link-shortening services, was worth a rumored $8 million. I fall in the camp of those who think Bit.ly is worth the money.

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Earlier this week, comScore (SCOR) reported that daily web usage on mobile devices had doubled in the last 12 months, with nearly 22.4 million U.S. mobile users using their devices to go on the web.

Today, another research firm, Infonetics Research reported that despite the global economic downturn, the demand for mobile broadband is only going to increase. They expect that there will be more than 1 billion mobile broadband users by 2013 vs. 210.5 million at the end of 2008. These are connections that use 3G technologies such as W-CDMA, HSPA, CDMA 2000 and EVDO. The sales of mobile broadband PC cards (and embedded 3G modules) were around $4.1 billion in 2008 and show no signs of slowing down.

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Five major U.K. carriers are banding together to pool customer data so that it can be put into a giant database and then be used to sell advertising, The Register reports today. How long do you think it will take before this “database” idea lands on American shores? First they charge you hundreds of dollars for calls, then they sell you for pennies.

This is no different than, say, Phorm, NebuAd or any of the other tricks being cooked up by service providers in a desperate attempt to recreate Google’s business model. In the process, they are playing loose and fast with people’s privacy. Jeez, no wonder people hate their phone companies.

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With nearly 2,000 “friends” on Facebook, I should be a regular visitor to the site. I am not. Instead, I prefer to use Facebook’s mobile application on my iPhone to send messages, update my status, upload photos taken on the go and sometime even scroll through the news feed to see what my friends are up to. The ad- and clutter-free interface has fewer distractions and makes using Facebook a breeze.

Apparently, I am one of 25 million Facebook mobile users and one of four million who access the service on a daily basis. That’s a sizable portion of Facebook’s 150 million (and growing) registered users, and with them lies Facebook’s future. With the rise of superphones such as Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone, the BlackBerry Bold and Nokia’s (NOK) E71 and N96 devices, we are at the cusp of a new era in which the mobile and the wired Web converge. This convergence, when married to location-based services, would create a new real-time and highly contextual Internet experience.

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You know that saying–if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it must be a duck. Same goes for portable personal computers–whether you call them netbooks or laptops. Jen-Hsun Huang, CEO of Nvidia (NVDA) agrees. “Netbooks are not a new category, instead they are just cheap PCs,” he said at a dinner last night with a handful of technology journalists. “It has [an] Intel (x86) processor and runs Windows XP, and to me that is a PC.”

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Americans, by nature, are an optimistic bunch. Even in tough times, there is something to be optimistic about. Where others see the glass half empty, we see it as half full. That is probably the only reasonable explanation for the findings of this survey conducted by Glassdoor, a Sausalito, Calif.-based start-up that ranks employers by taking anonymous feedback from their employees.

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