What do ICanHasCheesburger, 3M, WordPress creators Automattic and U.S. CIO Vivek Kundra have in common? They were some of the people and companies trotted out by Microsoft today at its Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles, as it prepared for the launch of its new Azure cloud computing system.

Here's a roundup of news items and links related to the conference.

Kundra appeared via satellite to talk about the importance of open government data, including the Pathfinder Innovation Challenge, and the related Be A Martian site, on which Microsoft and NASA are partnering. As another example of the type of innovation he hopes to see, Kundra showed an iPhone app that was built using the data.gov platform to provide information from the U.S. Department of Labor for job-seekers.

Speaking of the iPhone, Microsoft's Ray Ozzie stirred a debate by telling a group of bloggers that he doesn't believe apps will ultimately be the differentiating factor for smart phones. “All the apps that count will be ported to every one of them,” he said, according to this VentureBeat report.

Automattic's Matt Mullenweg appeared on stage to show Azure's support for the MySQL database, PHP scripting language and Apache web servers -- including the ability to scale a WordPress blog across multiple servers in Azure to cope with unexpected spikes in traffic. The idea was to demonstrate that Azure can work not just with Microsoft's software and development technologies but also with rival offerings.

Seattle-based Pet Holdings Inc., which uses WordPress to publish ICanHasCheezburger, Fail Blog and other sites, said it was using Azure as the back end for a new site called OddlySpecific.com, about "really strange signage." It was inspired by sign submissions for Fail Blog that didn't quite fit the theme of that widely read site.

For people who track Microsoft code names, this morning's presentation brought out three new ones: Dallas, Sydney and AppFabric. ZDNet blogger Mary Jo Foley explains what they are, and how they fit in to the company's plans.

People at the conference got to see inside one of the large "containers" that Microsoft is using to make its data centers more modular and portable. Neowin has pictures.

Another company already working with Azure is 3M, which released a new offering called the Visual Attention Service that uses the Microsoft cloud-computing platform. The service analyzes uploaded photos and other images using algorithms that can predict where a viewer will look inside the image. The company is also looking at using Microsoft's newly announced 'Dallas' data catalog to add additional context, such as weather for predicting how a billboard will look to someone viewing it outdoors.

Microsoft's BizSpark Program, which offers the company's software free of charge to eligible startups, announced at PDC that it has signed up more than 25,000 startups in its first year, exceeding the company's expectations. BizSpark is also expected to provide a significant supply of users for Azure, offering companies in the program receive 750 free compute hours per month for eight months, in addition to the ability to access Azure offerings through an MSDN subscription that comes with the BizSpark program.

Companies looking to capitalize on the Azure rollout include Seattle-based Avanade, the IT consulting joint venture of Microsoft and Accenture. Avanade cites examples including Origin Digital, an Accenture company, that has built a video transcoding application on the Azure platform.