Angel investor and serial entrepreneur David S. Rose asked the startups of the Incubator at Rose Tech Ventures, "Who owns a customer in today's world of Twitter, iTunes, Facebook and Google?" The debate that followed focused on the rise of APIs and marketplaces and their impact on business transactions. The conclusion? We are heading towards a world where no one owns a customer.

If you are a local publisher still reeling from Craigslist and the collapse of display advertising, grab your helmet. Google is coming to town.

In recent months the search giant has released a dangerous trio of local services that newspapers and local publications should begin planning their counterattack (or their partnership agreements).

Attendees of next month's PayPal X Innovate 2009 developer conference in San Francisco will get a heads-up about PayPal's platform roadmap for the coming year, as well as access to the company's new application programming interfaces (APIs)—exclusive until 2010. The company is leveraging the increased visibility of mobile devices to work with media companies in 13 global markets, creating opportunities to drive paid content, according to Francesco Rovetta, PayPal Mobile’s director of business development.

It’s a given that you need a mobile version of your website in order to deliver a good user experience on a mobile phone.  But does the content itself need to be tweaked as well? You bet it does.

Assuming you have a mobile version of your site, can’t you just strip out the graphics, images, pdfs and flash and call it a day?  If you want to make your content useful on a mobile device, you’ll need to do more.

Here are 5 factors to consider for publishing to mobile platforms: