News to know: Google, SAP, Rimini Street; Symantec, Android

Google's I/O conference, SAP Sapphire, Symantec and Microsoft's smartphone prospects are the key themes for today. Get the day’s rolling posts via Twitter,RSS, or email.

Here's a look at Thursday, May 20:

Google I/O dominated the tech news landscape. There's a laundry

list of news, but perhaps the biggest item was the formation of WebM, an open source video codec project based on Google technology acquired from On2. In a nutshell, most major players---with the exception of Apple for now---are on board with WebM. It's not too often you can get Microsoft, Google and Mozilla to agree on something. Also see:

Video: Google announces open-source video format WebM

• The time is right for the WebM video project
• Google I/O: The effects of luring the Enterprise into the cloud
• Google I/O: App Engine, VMWare partnership further boosts enterprise offering
• Google I/O: Show kicks off with push for HTML5, browser computing
• Live: Google I/O 2010
• Google I/O: The relaunch of Wave - no invitation necessary
• Highlights from Google I/O

SAP's Sapphire powwow wound down. On the last day of the conference, SAP broke out a few interesting technology developments. The most notable item was SAP's focus on in-memory databases as a way to speed up analytics queries. Indeed, SAP and HP are cooking up an analytic appliance aimed at Oracle.

Related to SAP Sapphire is Rimini Street, which is a third party support provider. We had a sit-down with Rimini Street CEO Seth Ravin to talk about big customers, supporting legacy apps, how experienced IT folks create ROI and other fun topics.

Symantec wants to put identity management at the center of its security universe and it's willing to pay $1.28 billion to do it. Symantec acquired VeriSign's identity and authentication service. Also on the security front check out Zero Day's malware watch.

In the smartphone wars, Gartner is out with its latest standings. The short version: Android surges and Windows Mobile share tanks. Microsoft can't launch Windows Phone 7 fast enough.

And gallery of the day:

NASA eyes tomorrow's passenger planes (images)