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Microsoft's developer conference in Los Angeles this week was heavily focused on the emerging world of tools that support the creation of apps for multiple mobile and PC platforms. Like arch-rival Google, it increasingly sees the cloud - running on its servers and frameworks - as the unifying factor behind a host of different devices and client software platforms. Among other announcements geared to mash-ups, widgets and so on, it showed off Pinpoint, the latest application store template, this one aimed at enterprises looking to run their operations across "three screens and the cloud", as chief software architect Ray Ozzie put it.

Pinpoint works with Microsoft's existing Azure cloud platform, and a new data repository codenamed Dallas, and aims to make Microsoft the company that aggregates, stores and delivers data and services, both to the developer ecosystem and to corporate users. Dallas offers developers access to a wide range of public and paid-for datasets, to help them build apps more easily and target them at mobile and other devices. The repository lives within the Pinpoint store and is currently the showcase app for the platform.

Azure is to go into production on the first day of 2010, while Pinpoint aims to borrow techniques from Android Marketplace and Apple App Store, to arouse enterprise developers' interest in its new cloud systems and in a rejuvenated Windows environment. The store will support Java, PHP, MySQL and Eclipse as well as Microsoft's .Net.

This strategy mirrors Microsoft's bid to become the primary aggregator of information in the consumer world, with products like the Bing search engine, aiming to go well beyond web pages into all kinds of content and web services, accessed from mobiles as well as PCs.

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