what is the platform?

As the industry moves towards the Platform, the battle for control of private data between users, governments and vendors intensifies.  Emirati officials have declared BlackBerry smartphones a potential threat to national security because users' data is stored overseas, where local laws don't apply and where analysts say it could be harder for authorities to monitor. http://finance.yahoo.com/news/UAE-says-BlackBerry-is-apf-959472235.html?x=0

HP in the Platform race? They want to be Apple. They want be the makers of high-quality consumer gadgets all connected by way of a digital ecosystem. An ecosystem they own and operate. One tied together by webOS. http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/22/hp-apple-webos/

The Platform is a core service of the future Internet that links individuals, groups, things, content, and services to enable semantically connected global cloud computing ecosystem.

David Siegel is starting up his own Platform company!  http://thepowerofpull.com/pull/blog

Thus Internet applications have so far been developed mainly for fitting to specific networks. Now itís time for a change. Networks should be developed for applications. The universe of these networks might be considered as the Future Internet. The future network ecosystem will be supported by a consolidated, preferably single, platform. This platform needs to include support for services, things and content on both network and application layer. The FI ecosystem has to be sustainable, meaning that applications are supported efficiently, i.e. consuming a minimal amount of required resources, e.g. capacity, electricity, etc., while providing dedicated security and sufficient performance for the applications throughout their lifetime.   3rd Future Internet Symposium 2010 - Call for Papers