Last week Samsung Mobile Innovator announced that the Samsung Innovation Quest 2009 would be about widgets for the home screen of the S60 based Samsung i8910 HD. Adobe also provided hints that its BrowserLab would cover mobile browsers and Digital River expanded its e-commerce offering to enable application sales to mobile devices.

After a year off, the Samsung Innovation Quest (IQ) returns for 2009, challenging developers to create widgets for the home-screen of the Samsung i8910 HD. The competition opens on 24 June.

Information on the specifics for creating these widgets are to be provided by Samsung as the competition rolls out. However, it is worth noting that Samsung has started an alpha test of their widget support area. This not only provides developers with access to API documentation and examples, but also shows that Samsung will be releasing a widget SDK. Information on signing up to the alpha is available on innovator.samsungmobile.com.

Also of interest in the web arena is a comment from Scott Fegette of Adobe in an article on TidBITS that Adobe’s BrowserLab service may include mobile web browsers. Still in limited preview, BrowserLab is designed to help web developers see how their pages perform on different browsers. The reason for including mobile browsers, according to Scott, is that while many mobile browsers are based on WebKit, "they're all using different builds." 

There has also been continued development in the application store space. For those companies who see opportunities in using their own storefronts, rather than relying on aggregators, Digital River has introduced a mobile commerce extension to its PC based e-commerce solution. The solution will help existing Digital River customers move to mobile device sales. However, the extension should offer mobile developers the opportunity to explore whether their own software sales presence may be a more lucrative option compared to paying a large percentage of revenue to a store operator.