Editor’s Note: This post comes from Olivier Bloch, Senior Technical Evangelist for the MS Open Tech Team.

Besides being two of the most heavily used buzz words of 2013, cloud and mobile also have Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc. (MS Open Tech) in common. MS Open Tech is a wholly owned subsidiary of Microsoft that strives to bridge open source technologies with Microsoft technologies, including Windows Azure. Over the last several months, MS Open Tech has partnered with Windows Azure Mobile Services to enable developers utilizing open source technologies deliver new cloud-based experiences in mobile and web apps across devices.

In March, MS Open Tech built the Android SDK for Windows Azure Mobile Services to complement the support for Windows Store, Windows Phone, iOS and HTML5 apps.  That SDK gave Android developers access to a range of advanced cloud-based services for storage authentication and notifications. MS Open Tech also contributed the Android SDK for the Windows Azure Notification Hubs, which lets you broadcast push notifications to millions of devices across platforms from almost any backend hosted in Windows Azure.

Recently, MS Open Tech also created a Backbone adapter for Windows Azure Mobile Data Service, letting you seamlessly sync your data with the Cloud using your usual favorite Backbone APIs. After this update, developers using the popular JavaScript framework Backbone.JS to structure their web apps now only needed to add a couple values indicating the table name and location to offer their customers brand new experiences leveraging the cloud.

We’re excited to continue with these projects, but also hope to bring a few more exciting updates shortly.  Feel free to email MS Open Tech or leave a comment to suggest other open source technologies supporting Windows Azure.

Olivier