With Apple, you never know who is going to be evil next. Microsoft usually gets the grand prize, but as of late it appears that Google may be getting the cold shoulder for its forays into the mobile word. Apple and Google have historically been very friendly. But in recent months, the tenor of that relationship has changed. Apple rejected Google Voice for the iPhone. And now it appears that the relationship may get a bit cooler with all the talk of a Google phone. As that relationship becomes more distant, it appears that Apple and Microsoft may be warming up a bit, which may prove fruitful for the future of the iPhone in the enterprise. It may also prove beneficial for Microsoft, too, as it is also fighting off Google's efforts to win over the enterprise with its Google Apps productivity applications. Sponsor As PCWorld points out, Microsoft may be smart to team up with Apple. The iPhone is a solid, smart phone. Microsoft could do well by developing applications for the iPhone that serve its customers. Its Exchange Server and Office products still dominate the enterprise. As it is platform agnostic, Microsoft can develop applications for the iPhone that support its customers and protects its market base. Apple needs a good partner like Microsoft to make any significant dent in the enterprise. It does not have the enterprise infrastructure like Research in Motion does with the Blackberry Server. Without an enterprise management service, Apple will find it tough for the iPhone to make any deep play into the corporate world. Further, Google is showing signs that its plans to dominate the Internet is dependent on having hardware to go with its enterprise services and cloud-based operating systems. Google is reaching out to handset and netbook manufacturers. This suits Google's designs on the enterprise. Google Apps are gaining acceptance as a enterprise suite. The Android OS finally seems to be gaining some momentum. And the Chrome OS is a strong contender for the netbook market, especially as Windows 7 shows yet more signs of delays. We expect the enterprise will serve as the place where the battles intensify between Apple and Google. Microsoft has nothing to lose in teaming with Apple to fend off Google, a common rival and current evil force du jour. Discuss

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Will Apple and Microsoft Join Forces To Fight Google?

The latest quarterly survey by comScore reports that the iPhone just passed Windows Mobile phones in US market share, though it remains at just over half the level of the Blackberry. The iPhone has been outselling Windows Mobile for some time, so it was only a matter of time until there were more iPhones in peoples' hands. Android is still at the back of the pack but is showing signs of significant momentum. Sponsor Tracing links back from blog to blog the comScore phone survey of users about what types of phones they have in their hands appears first on FierceDeveloper ; comScore's press contact was unavailable for comment but mobile developers say the numbers are unsurprising. Android growth has been steady but that platform remains below Windows Mobile, Palm's WebOS and Symbian. Another report by comScore this morning though found that consumer interest in Android is growing fast and now rivals consumer interest in the iPhone. "Of those American consumers in the market for a smartphone," comScore writes, "17 percent are considering the purchase of an android-supported device in next three months, compared to 20 percent indicating they plan to purchase an iPhone. Android's prospects may fare even better in the global marketplace. "Android will continue to pick up market share, especially in the global smartphone market, because of Symbian's lack of innovation in the last 3-4 years," mobile blogger Jason Harris told us today. "Symbian is said to have 37% worldwide market share, and this will further erode as more folks give Android a look. Especially with the Nexus One coming out - a phone that is sold directly from Google and not from your carrier - that's very cohesive with the European model. Right now Android has only been available from carriers, leading to OS fragmentation. Now with the Nexus One, the phone will come from Google itself, meaning your OS updates will be direct from the source, not via the carrier, who has customized the Android OS to their liking. That might work in the US, where we are carrier-centric, but not in other markets, especially emerging markets." Discuss

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More People Now Use iPhones Than Windows Mobile

We're down to the final day of voting for ReadWriteWeb's reader-selected Top 10 Web Products of 2009 . You can vote for up to 10 products, from a list of 100 selected by the ReadWriteWeb authors over December. Make your picks in the poll embedded below. You can cast up to 10 votes. If you don't see one of your favorites in the list, note it in the comments and we'll count that as a vote too. The year's top 10 products, as selected by the RWW community, will be announced tomorrow. Here is the current top 10, in alphabetical order: Sponsor Adobe AIR Facebook Feedly Google Apps Google Chrome Google Maps Hulu iPhone platform Twitter WordPress What are your favorite products of 2009? (multiple choice) ( polling ) Top 100 Web Products of 2009, Alphabetical Aardvark ActivityStreams Adobe AIR Amazon EC2 Android platform Appsfire Apture Arduino Basecamp BBC's Semantic Music Project Bing Blip.fm BNO (Breaking News Online) box.net Boxee Brightkite ChartBeat Cisco Collaboration Citysense Clicker Cliqset Collecta Data.gov DBpedia Echo (JS-Kit) Evernote Evri Facebook Facebook iPhone app Fedex SenseAware Feedly Fever Foursquare Freebase FreshBooks Glue Google App Engine Google Apps Google Chrome Google Maps Google Search Options and Rich Snippets Google Voice Hootsuite HP CeNSE Hulu IBM's sensor solutions ioBridge iPhone platform Jimdo Jive Software SBS 4.0 Jolicloud Layar Microsoft Windows Azure MindTouch Mint Mir:ror MOG Moshi Monsters Mozilla Raindrop New York Times APIs OneForty Open Calais OrSiSo Outside.in Pachube Posterous Postrank present.ly PubSubHubbub Rackspace Cloud Drive Regator Ribbit RSSCloud Salesforce.com Seesmic Shazam SocialCast Socialtext Spotify StockTwits Superfeedr Tornado (FriendFeed framework) Tumblr TweetDeck Tweetie Tweetmeme Twidroid Twingly Twitter Vuze Wetoku WideNoise Wikitude Wolfram Alpha Woopra WordPress Yahoo Query Language (YQL) Yelp Zemanta Zoho CRM Discuss

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Reader Poll: Top 10 Web Products of 2009 (Last Chance to Vote!)

The Twitterati have spoken! Throughout 2009, a few tech topics got so much attention that they managed to make Twitter's trends. Google Wave was one of the most notable of these, obviously, but what were the other subjects of such interest to Twitter-using geeks? Twitter has just released a list of the top 10 technology-related trending topics of the year; here's what tweeps have been talking about. Sponsor 1. Google Wave The most-talked-about app of the year - on Twitter and likely in many other circles, was Google Wave. As invitations rolled out in waves, each initiate was given a limited number of invites to pass on to friends and colleagues. This left the twittersphere clamoring for Wave invites and drove the keyword into Twitter's general trending topics on multiple occasions. If Wave did nothing else right, they certainly mastered the art of the viral marketing campaign. 2. Snow Leopard Apple fanboys (and girls) the world around rejoiced when the newest Mac operating system was released this year. Snow Leopard was announced at Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference in June 2008, which meant that Mac geeks had been waiting to buy their copies for more than a year by the time the OS hit shelves in August of this year. 3. Tweetdeck This Twitter app became wildly successful this year and made tech headlines for its Facebook and LinkedIn integration, its iPhone app (a strong competitor to challenge Tweetie 2), its themed interfaces, and more. 4. Windows 7 The longsuffering Windows users among us had long been suffering when Windows 7 was released this year. Better, smarter, faster and less buggy, the OS promised to be the answer to our prayers and a reason to hold our heads up in front of Mac users. Windows also had an interesting marketing campaign that kept their OS on the tips of tongues - and the top of trends - for several months running. 5. CES The Consumer Electronics Show, held each year in Las Vegas, is a gadget geek's version of the AVN Awards, also held each year in Las Vegas. Coincidence? Most definitely. 6. Palm Pre Several years ago, geeks fell in love with the Treo. Then Palm devices kind of fell off the face of the earth and out of public favor until this year, when the company released the tiny touchscreen device known as the Pre. The first iteration of the device hasn't yet become overwhelmingly popular, but the Pre definitely has its fans. 7. Google Latitude In 2005, location-based app Dodgeball was bought by Google. The Dodgeball creators went on to make Foursquare, and this year, Google replaced Dodgeball with Latitude, which very simply shows you where your friends are on Google Maps. Latitude could be the basis for more tricky applications in the future, but location tech in general can be a difficult technology to master. 8. #E3 Another yearly holy-grail-of-its-industry conference, E3, the Electronic Entertainment Expo, is held in Los Angeles. This con is where gamer geeks die and go to heaven. 9. #amazonfail Amazon suffered public criticism this year when certain gay and lesbian books were removed from sales rankings for containing adult content. The trouble was, most of the titles in question weren't "adult" in nature at all, leading media and the general public to the conclusion that Amazon execs were deeply and terribly homophobic. In the end, it turned out that a single Amazon employee in France set a Boolean flag on adult content from False to True, taking out 57,000 books in his wake. Whoopsie! 10. Macworld And finally, there was MacWorld. Steve Jobs was unable to make the event, and Apple announced that the 2009 con would be the last year the company would participate in the show. The company announced a few modest treats, including new versions of iLife and iWork, as well as a 17-inch MacBook. Apple further announced that music sold on iTunes would be DRM-free. And that's it for Twitter's top trends! Do you think the right topics got the most attention? What do you think would have been trend #11? Let us know your thoughts in the comments! Discuss

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Twitter's Top 10 Tech Trends of 2009

TechSmith , the makers of powerful screencast recording software Camtasia and screen capture app SnagIt, announced this morning that a beta version of SnagIt is now available for the Mac . The Windows version costs $50 but the Mac beta is free for now. It's great. If you've used Skitch or Little Snapper , SnagIt seems much more full-featured. The best parts I've seen so far are far more font options and really easy composite image creation. Sponsor The company's demo video is below. This is just beta software and hopefully it will be more stable and less clunky than early versions of TechSmith's free cross-platform video and image product Jing Project. The recently released Camtasia for Mac was very well done and appears quite stable. One thing that's missing is the ability to quickly post an image to Flickr or any other online site. That would be nice and is a feature that competitors offer. Easy click and drag resize is something that SnagIt could pick up from other services as well. All in all, though, this looks like a very nice product. Discuss

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SnagIt Goes Mac: Check Out The Best Screen Capture App Available

Over December we have published our best Web products of 2009 over ten posts. This week we've opened up our selections for you to vote on . The poll is embedded below and we invite you to select your favorite web products of 2009. You can vote for up to 10 products. If you don't see one of your favorites in the list, note it in the comments and we'll count that as a vote too. We will announce the final top 10, along with the full results, this Friday . After one day of voting, here is the top 10: Sponsor 1 Twitter 2 Google Maps 3 Google Chrome 4 Facebook 5 Hulu 6 Adobe AIR 7 WordPress 8 TweetDeck 9 iPhone platform 10 Evernote Note: the poll is randomly ordered, but you can also view an alphabetical list below. What are your best products of 2009? (multiple choice) ( polling ) Top 100 Web Products of 2009, Alphabetical Aardvark ActivityStreams Adobe AIR Amazon EC2 Android platform Appsfire Apture Arduino Basecamp BBC's Semantic Music Project Bing Blip.fm BNO (Breaking News Online) box.net Boxee Brightkite ChartBeat Cisco Collaboration Citysense Clicker Cliqset Collecta Data.gov DBpedia Echo (JS-Kit) Evernote Evri Facebook Facebook iPhone app Fedex SenseAware Feedly Fever Foursquare Freebase FreshBooks Glue Google App Engine Google Apps Google Chrome Google Maps Google Search Options and Rich Snippets Google Voice Hootsuite HP CeNSE Hulu IBM's sensor solutions ioBridge iPhone platform Jimdo Jive Software SBS 4.0 Jolicloud Layar Microsoft Windows Azure MindTouch Mint Mir:ror MOG Moshi Monsters Mozilla Raindrop New York Times APIs OneForty Open Calais OrSiSo Outside.in Pachube Posterous Postrank present.ly PubSubHubbub Rackspace Cloud Drive Regator Ribbit RSSCloud Salesforce.com Seesmic Shazam SocialCast Socialtext Spotify StockTwits Superfeedr Tornado (FriendFeed framework) Tumblr TweetDeck Tweetie Tweetmeme Twidroid Twingly Twitter Vuze Wetoku WideNoise Wikitude Wolfram Alpha Woopra WordPress Yahoo Query Language (YQL) Yelp Zemanta Zoho CRM Discuss

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Interim Results: Vote Now For Your Favorite Web Products of 2009

Outlook users can now use email plug-in Liaise to automatically extract action items, delegation and priority levels from the free text of email conversations. This is software that's so cool it makes me jealous of Windows users. Liaise launched in September and won the Peoples' Choice Award for Enterprise Products at DEMO but is available to the public at large for the first time today. Sponsor In removing its Beta label, Liaise has added a few new features, including calendar integration, group collaboration and more user control over the UI. Check it out, I think if you're an Outlook user this is something you could really find useful. Discuss

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Use OutLook? Liaise Intelligent Assistant Available Now