“Mention the name Google in cell-phone software circles these
days and you’re likely to get a lot of blank stares and awkward
silence. It’s not that these Silicon Valley startups have nothing
to say about the world’s largest Web search engine. The problem is,
they can’t. Many mobile-software developers in the Bay Area and
beyond are hard at work cobbling together services and tools they
hope will be packaged with a wireless operating system under wraps
at Googleplex–and they’ve been sworn to secrecy.“Word’s getting out. Among the companies jockeying for a place
on Google’s platform, BusinessWeek.com has learned, are Plusmo, a
Santa Clara (Calif.) company that pulls together blogs and news
items and sends them to cell phones, and Nuance Communications, a
Burlington (Mass.) maker of speech-recognition software used in
mobile directory assistance services…”