Since the announcement went live yesterday about the Google Marketplace, we've had a number of companies come to us about how its applications will fit with the service.

We'll do a fuller look at these companies this week but for some immediate perspective we decided to take a look at Zoho, a service that competes with Google Apps. So it is it interesting that the company joined Google Apps Marketplace in its launch.

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Buy why would Zoho offer its applications to integrate with Google? Yes, the companies compete. But Raju Vegesna of Zoho says that it is far more important to complement Google Apps. Over the past few years the company has worked to make it simple for Zoho customers to use its services in tandem with Google Apps. Zoho offers Google Sign-in, Google Apps Sign-in and recently it integrated with Google Docs.

Vegesna gave us three reasons why Zoho decided to be part of the launch. His perspectives should provide some insights about the symbiotic relationship Google Apps Marketplace will foster.

Extending The Relationship

For many developers, integrating with Google Apps represents a significant business opportunity. Google announced at its launch that it passed the 25 million customer mark over the weekend.

Vegesna:

"First, we have 50% more apps than Google, especially on the business side (CRM, Project Management, Web Conferencing etc). This means, these additional apps can really complement Google Apps. Google has over 20 million users on G Apps and our Business apps can be sold to those customers. "

Google Dominates The Landscape

To play in this era, you have to play with Google. They dominate as much as any company has in the past 30 years. The domination in large part is now solidified by its investment in its cloud infrastructure.

Vegesna:

"Second, we understand that this is going to be a Google dominated eco-system (IBM dominated Mainframe era, Microsoft dominated PC era and Google will dominate the web era) and we wanted to be an important player in this web era. We talked more about this here and here."

A Platform Built On Email, Not CRM

Yesterday, we touched on why the marketplace makes sense for companies standardized on Google Apps. With all the contacts in one place, people can add applications to fine tune Google Apps. Does a company start with the same foundation if the platform is built on CRM?

Vegesna:

"Third, when someone builds a platform, email is a great app to build the platform around, rather than CRM (which salesforce did). We think it'll be a good and succesful platform for online apps which will move the web app momentum forward and we want to be a key player (the same way Adobe was a key player in PC era)."

For more about the Zoho integration:

Google just launched a new Google Labs product for Google Reader: Google Reader Play. Reader Play is a new, highly visual way to browse your Google Reader subscriptions that is somewhat reminiscent of Google's Fast Flip. It replaces the busy Google Reader interface with an interface that focuses on a single story. Whenever a post includes videos or images, Play with highlight these and give you the option to read more of the text as well. This new interface allows you to browse through the feeds you already subscribe to, but Google Reader Play also emphasizes Google Reader's ability to recommend items from around the web for you based on your preferences.

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Big on Recommendations

As Google notes, Play will learn from your preferences, based on the articles you read and "like." You can also choose from a set of categories (tech, entertainment, arts, business, etc.) and Google Reader will create a personalized stream of items just for you. According to Google, Play uses the same algorithm as the Recommended Items feed in Google Reader.

Play will even work if you don't have a Google account. While you can't star, like or share items, you can still browse interesting posts based on the categories you choose. This should make it a good tool for those users who don't want to go through the effort of setting up a feed reader and subscribing to hundreds of different feeds.

Get Started

To use Google Reader Play, just head over here or look for "View in Reader Play" in the folder settings in Google Reader. You can switch stories by using your arrow keys or choose the slideshow mode that will automatically forward to the next story after a few second.

We've all heard of the big company that started as two guys in their garage, but these days, with startup organizations and incubators, more and more success stories seem to feature companies that built their success from group collaboration. One excellent example of how startups can take advantage of collaboration is to work in a coworking environment with other companies and entrepreneurs.

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Tuesday I had the opportunity to chat with Harry Lin, CEO of Lottay, an online gifting service that has spent a large portion of its short history coworking with outside developers and entrepreneurs. Starting in October of last year, the company spent six weeks working in the offices of San Francisco-based Ruby on Rails development house Pivotal Labs. In December they moved into a space at the Ventura Ventures Technology Center where they work alongside other consumer Internet startups, sharing ideas and resources.

"The thing about a startup is that you're always under resourced; you never have enough people," Lin told ReadWriteWeb Tuesday. "So the more you can make out of less, the better off your are, the faster you can go, and a startup is all about speed."

Lin, formerly the Vice President of ABC.com and General Manager of Evite, was brought on board at Lottay after the company received Series A funding in the summer of 2009. Below are some highlights from my discussion with Lin on the benefits of coworking environments for startups.

How did Lottay benefit from the Pivotal Labs experience?
We camped out at the Pivotal Labs office for the entire six weeks. We were in San Francisco and sitting in their office everyday with the two developers that were on our contract. The reason this worked better is that it was very intense and very concentrated; you had no other distractions. The other reason it was fantastic is that its a room full of 25 top notch Ruby on Rails developers. We were only paying for two of them in our engagement, but there were the other 23 sitting in that room working on various things.

We would come up with a problem or a hurdle we couldn't get over and we would just shout out, "Hey has anyone ever done this with a library?" and some guy would jump up and say, "Yeah, I've done that!" Voila! Problem solved. And that would happen all the time. So we were getting the benefit of this very open, huge brain trust that Pivotal had even though, technically speaking, we were just paying for the two guys. The third other thing I'd say was great about the environment is that they had other clients in there. So we got to meet, talk to, and get to know some other Internet companies, and that was really cool."

What is the experience like now in Ventura?
There are 12 of us in this incubator here in the city of Ventura; it's a very deliberate ecosystem the city is trying to push, and we're part of that ecosystem. We all speak the same language, the same jargon, the same shorthand. If one of us comes up with a brilliant idea or an interesting strategic question, we'll grab each other, white board it, sit in a room, chat in the hall way - the kind of random things that happen when you're all physically located in the same place. The other thing that we benefit from is that because this is run by the city, we get a lot of support in the form of a fantastic rate on rent, free wifi, marketing and public relations, and they've helped us find recruits when we have openings to hire people. The city is more than just a landlord, they're trying to jump-start this ecosystem.

So you would suggest that early stage startups try to find coworking space?
If possible, I would not do the "in your basement" or "in your garage by yourself". Those are the legendary stories we like to hear about, but I think the majority of successful startups has had some kind of coworking environment. I worked for nine years in the Bay area and I know that while there are official incubators, there are also these offices where nine out of the ten companies there are high-tech companies. Being with other people who are doing the same thing is hugely beneficial.

In the consumer Internet space, especially with how the Web has evolved over the last decade, everything is getting more social and more open, both in terms of the consumer behavior and in terms of the development and how things are produced. So it just stands to reason that in launching and trying to grow these types of businesses, you should be more social as well.

Is there anything startups should avoid when in a coworking environment?
It is tempting to do a lot of partnerships with other startups because you're there, you know each other, you understand each other's pains and trials and tribulations. Resist the temptation unless is makes a lot of sense. Usually what a startup needs by way of partnership is a large established company.

What is your advice to the young startups out there looking to launch or grow their business?
There will be 100 problems to solve every week. I can guarantee you that at least 75 of those problems have already been experienced and solved by someone else. That's the problem with being in a garage or a bedroom by yourself; you'll probably end up trying to solve those 75 problems yourself. When you're colocated and coworking with other entrepreneurs, you can share. "Oh, you've got that problem? I've got that problem, and here's the solution." You can benefit from their learnings and not have to reinvent the wheel, which saves you a lot of time.

As many in the Twitterverse have dubbed this week, the battle of location based apps continues, as both Gowalla and Foursquare release yet another update to their iPhone apps today. And these are some big guns coming out to accompany the various real-life incentives, contests and whatever else these the two companies can do to take the focus at this year's SXSW.

Both apps are showcasing new design features the companies are calling "fresh" and other such things, and while they surely are, some of these other features are what really stand out.

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Foursquare is surely the less notable in this release, in our opinion, as it's list of new features is shorter and less impressive. It's boasting a faster, more efficient check-in and shout flow, a "Places" view that supports categories, a history view of places you've been and a "pull-to-refresh" feature. These are nothing to sneeze at, but we think Gowalla is releasing some functions that blow these away.

First of all, Gowalla is bringing photos to the location based game, allowing users to upload a photo after checking in. Users can also browse their friends' photos and look at any that have been taken at that specific location.

Next, it's bringing some interactivity to the game, with check-in commenting. When a friend checks in at a place down the street, you don't need to change over to your Twitter client and send them a DM, you can just comment on their check-in. And if you forgot to type a check-in message when you checked in to a spot, you can go back and add it.

In addition to these, Gowalla is bringing out new friend browsing features, enabling you to look through friends, friends of friends, and even their bookmarked spots and trips. With "spot details", including address, phone, Twitter name, Facebook page and website, Gowalla is adding that Yelp (or should I say Foursquare) aspect that was really missing - real world connection information.

And one more feature that may be overloaded next week or may be the talk of the town, "Hot Spots", tells you what the most popular spots near your location are. We haven't had time to really play with it yet, but it sure sounds interesting.

The updates just popped up in the App Store right now so go get updated and let us know what you think - who is going to win the location based battle of SXSW 2010? As far as this round goes, we're calling it for Gowalla.

Sony just announced that it is expanding its selection of newspapers and magazines in its e-book store. Starting today, users of Sony's e-readers will be able to subscribe to 20 new newspapers and magazines, including the New York Times, Boston Globe, San Jose Mercury News, PC Magazine and Foreign Affairs. With the newspaper business in turmoil, it only makes sense for these papers to try to get a better foothold on more devices.

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eInk vs. LCDs

For users who don't own an e-reader yet but are looking into getting one, the question right now is to either wait for the iPad and go with a regular LCD screen for reading books, or to choose a more traditional (and cheaper) e-reader like the Kindle or Sony Reader that feature electronic ink. While some users don't mind the blacklit LCD screens of their phones to read, others can't fathom reading any long-form content on these screens.

Fighting Off the iPad

For Sony, Amazon, B&N and others who are currently betting on electronic ink for their devices, one of the best ways to distinguish themselves from Apple is to offer more content over their free wireless connections and to play up the advantages of eInk. In this context, adding a newspaper like the New York Times (which is also a favorite of Steve Jobs and features heavily in Apple's iPad ads and other promotional material) makes a lot of sense. For the newspapers, getting on more devices and selling more subscriptions is simply good business. Sony charges up to $14.99 per month for these subscriptions.

Given that all of these papers could sell their own apps and subscriptions on the iPad as well - and that some of them will be available for free - the availability of newspapers may not be a deciding factor for a lot of potential iPad and e-reader buyers. Hopefully, however, we will also see a lot of innovative newspaper and magazine apps on the iPad. Chances are that these new apps will make today's traditional e-readers seem rather quaint in comparison. The availability of these apps could easily sway a lot of potential e-reader buyers to get an iPad instead.

What is your experience? Do you think e-books and newspapers just look better on eInk? Or are you waiting for the innovative newspaper apps on the iPad that will include video and other interactive content?

Microsoft Outlook has historically been at the heart of document-based environments that for many years have ruled the enterprise.

But the walls that have guarded this document-based world are crumbling fast. Outlook is now more than a message center. It is becoming a collaborative space where the lines between Google Docs and other social applications start to blur.

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Three extensions exemplify this trend. These services are quite similar. Xobni has the longest track record. it started as a consumer-based service, gaining a following for its search capabilities in Outlook. Search is Outlook's inherent weakness. Neither DocVerse nor Harmony have deep search capabilities like Xobni. That may only be a temporary issue for DocVerse. Last week, Google announced that it had acquired DocVerse. We expect that will in some way translate into better search in the weeks and months ahead for the DoVerse service.

Harmony

Harmony is the newest of the group. The Mainsoft service is a mash up between Google Docs and Outlook. It also puts SharePoint directly into Outlook. Like most Outlook extensions, Harmony pulls Google Docs or Sharepoint into an Outlook sidebar.

The service is intended to ease attachment overload by creating a central place where people can access Google Docs. It's a drag and drop environment that allows people to drag email attachments into the Harmony sidebar.

A document may also be dragged into an email where it appears as a link for the recipient. The recipient may access the document by signing into their Google Docs or Google Apps account.

The service is now available as a free download. It is compatible with Sharepoint 2007 and Sharepoint 2010. It will be available later this year as an extension for Microsoft Office.

DocVerse

DocVerse plays a similar role to Harmony. The service synchronizes in the Outlook Sidebar. The widget associates a link to the document that is getting the edit. Every modification is synced. When multiple people work on a document, the updates are made through the plug-in and versions are stored online.

Xobni

Xobni provides what Outlook really needs. Great search. It will search Outlook and external social networks and third party applications to get a fuller profile of the contact. In November, the company released Xobni Enterprise. The service gives I.T. administrators the ability to deploy and manage the plugin across the enterprise. it also offers integration across services such as Salesforce CRM and Sharepoint.

Outlook Has Come A Long Way

The old days are over for Outlook. It's now entering an era where the degree of collaboration will center around a hyperlinked environment more so than document-based systems. The enterprise is becoming more web-oriented and Outlook is no exception to the change.

For power users, the Twitter website is often just a thing of the past. We've moved on to third party interfaces with multiple columns, special user list navigation, search, and so on. But what about the novice user that wants something more than Twitter.com?

For that, there's Brizzly, a web-based Twitter client that today is announcing the release of its awaited iPhone app, along with a neat feature or two.

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The web-based version of Brizzly takes the Twitter stream and opens it up for the average user. It expands shortened links into full URLs, making it easier to know what you're clicking on, and turns links to YouTube videos or images into just that - embedded images and videos. In a way, it takes the guess work out of Twitter.

Today, the company is releasing a full-featured iPhone app that was built off of the skeleton of Birdfeed, the company acquired by Brizzly last fall. The app is a simple and doesn't offer some of the opening up of Twitter that you find on the website, but that would be difficult for an iPhone app to do, with it's limited real estate. Links are shortened and images hidden behind links, but that's as expected. Still, it handles multiple accounts, each of which you can view in its own stream. It also supports lists, mentions and DMs - all the standard stuff you would expect.

As we mentioned the last time we wrote about Brizzly, when the company added Facebook to its stream, the tool tries to make the experience of twitter simple for the non-geek. In that way, it interprets and explains Twitter Trends, the hashtags that are most popular at a given time. The Brizzly staff looks at hashtags and writes up a quick little blurb that explains what the Trends are that day and why. The iPhone app prominently contains these guides as a separate tab called "News".

Brizzly is expanding on this trend explanation feature with its launch of the Brizzly Guide on its website. The Guide gives each of these trends its own page, which is a "permanent source for up-to-date information on topics people are talking about," it says in its press release. In addition giving these explanations a permanent home, Brizzly has acquired WikiRank, a visualization web application based on Wikipedia data. It will be "integrating WikiRank technology into the Brizzly Guide" the company says in its press release. We can only wonder what will come of that, but it sounds interesting.

Urban Airship, a Portland, Oregon based iPhone "push notifications as a service" company, announced this morning that it now offers push notifications for BlackBerry applications and will soon offer Android push as well. "We are going to see at least four, and potentially five, extremely relevant platforms for mobile applications in the near future," the company said, "and we intend to provide the push messaging and content delivery infrastructure for all of them."

If you've seen push notifications from Gowalla (a great use case, by the way), Tap Tap Revenge, Yowza or Urban Rivals, then you've seen Urban Airship's service on the front end. On the back end, the company is developing push and in-app purchase infrastructure for numerous apps and devices, including the forthcoming iPad.

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Airship developer Michael Richardson put the company's cross-platform efforts into context for us this morning:

We want to make it extremely simple for mobile publishers to communicate in a real-time fashion with their users. The mobile phone is the perfect channel for that and we want to provide the ability to reach any user, any time, immediately, without the high cost or difficult implementation of SMS.

Bringing that paradigm to BlackBerry and Android will open up big new markets for the company and easy new functionality for developers. The company is offering BlackBerry push right now by integrating with BlackBerry's own API. Android push will be handled end to end by Airship and isn't ready yet. "We'll handle the details of managing the persistent socket connections from the device and sending the notifications as needed along that connection," the company says. That's easier said than done. Richardson: "We're taking it slow to make sure that we do it right."

The downside to using a service like this of course is that it's a form of reliance on a small outside service provider. Quite a few companies have been willing to forgo building this kind of tech in-house to date, though. Urban Airship reports that it delivered 100 million push notifications in its first 6 months and 60 million more in just 4 weeks after that.

Into mobile? Check out the ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit 2010.

In a recent interview, Hulu CEO Jason Kilar told technology reporter Om Malik that his company was "very bullish" on mobile, even going so far as to say "we will embrace every device." That's a funny statement, considering that the company has been touting that same sentiment for years but has yet to launch anything for mobile, be it an app or simply a mobile-ready streaming site.

Now, with the launch of the iPad just around the corner, the rumors of an iPhone/iPad Hulu app are rising up again. But there's a bigger mobile web than just the one accessible via Apple products, and that may be what Hulu has its eye on now. "We don't think about one device only," Kilar said.

However, going mobile is going to be a challenge for Hulu. And it's not as simple as re-encoding a few videos, no matter what you may have heard.

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Problem A: Hulu's Business Model Needs Work

The fact that Hulu exists at all is somewhat of an amazement. Through tenuous connections with major studios, the collaborative, experimental effort to bring streaming TV to web (and make it profitable) has managed to attract a number of users in the U.S. Although the audience size varies widely depending on who's counting, the company has managed to become a household name thanks to eye-catching commercials on NBC featuring actors from the network's top shows.

But there's a problem facing Hulu: in-video advertising is, apparently, not as profitable as once hoped. In fact, it's just too expensive, says Marc Ruxin, the Chief Innovation Officer for ad agency network McCann Worldgroup. Hulu has been aware of this problem, though, and has been hinting towards the launch of a subscription service, with News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch telling an investor conference last fall that the company, was looking at "adding subscription services and pay per view" options. Through the subscription model, Hulu could potentially generate enough revenue to keep the studios happy and maybe even encourage them to offer up more programming.

Unfortunately, the subscription model has yet to launch and the profits from video ads have been far too lean for some Hulu participants. Recently, for example, Viacom pulled two of the top shows - The Daily Show and the Colbert Report - from the site, claiming that they simply weren't earning enough money via the advertising model currently in place. Viacom Inc. Chief Executive Officer Philippe Dauman said that "on the current economic model for Hulu, there's just not much in it for us to continue at this time."

And so the situation degrades.

So what is Hulu doing now? It's trying to attract more viewers to its site with the launch of "If I Can Dream," an original series that premiered earlier this month. The fact that they're now making the foray into this sort of online programming is somewhat worrying. After all, if hit video webisodes alone made for a profitable service, then YouTube would have achieved profitability ages ago, instead of (maybe) getting there this year, five years post-launch. Let's face it, original programming is a bonus for Hulu users, but it's not going to take the place of hot shows like the now-departed Comedy Central fare.

Problem B: Will Apple Allow a Hulu App on the iPhone/iPad?

Another problem? Hulu has been planning to delay its iPhone app launch until a subscription model was in place, according to earlier reports. But with the biggest names pulling out, subscriptions could be a harder sell. Still, even if Hulu was able to make subscriptions happen, there are no guarantees that Apple would ever allow them into the iTunes store, especially considering they're offering a competing product. (See: Google Voice banishment from the iPhone, for example).

Meanwhile, Hulu's online site doesn't work in the iPhone's web browser because it was built in Flash. If Apple rejects the Hulu app from iTunes, the company's other option is encoding all their site's content in H.264 and make that available via HTML5, the new web language that offers streaming video sans plugin. Since this has already been done, a Hulu app could launch a player on the iPhone or iPad, if, of course, Apple allowed them to do so. If not, then a mobile site would have to be built in HTML5 - video controls, overall UI, advertisements and all. That's no simple process.

What's Hulu Doing Now?

So is this the plan Hulu has decided on now? It's hard to know for sure. Like Apple, the company is incredibly secretive about their plans and product roadmap, often refusing to respond to calls and emails entirely, even to say "no comment."

And yet, the Hulu iPhone app exists. We've spoken to someone who's seen it...but that was ages ago. For all we know, iPhone/iPad app plans have since been scrapped to work on a new solution that works around any potential Apple restrictions. But sources inside Hulu have clammed up lately, meaning they're either building something top, top secret...or perhaps nothing at all.

We hope it's the former, because frankly, an iPad without Hulu is a sad, sad affair. But will we ever see a real app? At this point, we're not holding our breath.

Get Satisfaction, the popular online customer service company, just announced that it is bringing its service to Facebook fan pages. This new service, the Facebook Social Engagement Hub, will allow companies that have a presence on Facebook to easily answer questions from their customers on Facebook. The Social Engagement Hub recreates the Get Satisfaction experience on Facebook and allows users to ask questions about products or make suggestion for new features. One key feature here is that the discussion on Facebook and the Get Satisfaction topic pages are synchronized, so that questions that get answered on a company's topic page on Get Satisfaction also appear on Facebook and vice versa.

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Liberating Content from Facebook

The new Social Engagement Hub on Facebook will cost Get Satisfaction customers an additional $99 per month. As Get Satisfaction's co-founder Lane Becker told us yesterday, however, this expense could easily be worth it for these companies, as users on Facebook tend to be very active on these fan pages and really want to interact with these companies and brands on the social networking service.

As Lane also noted, conversations that happen around a brand in Facebook tend to be trapped in this silo. Thanks to the synchronization between the two platforms, however, brands can now take this content and make it useful outside of Facebook as well. Another problem for brands that Get Satisfaction is trying to solve here is the simple fact that conversations on Facebook only have a very short lifespan. Get Satsifaction now allows companies to capture these conversations.

Overall, this looks like a very smart way for brands to interact with their customers on Facebook and to streamline their social media customer service efforts.

Tuesday night Google announced the creation of the Google Apps Marketplace, a place for third-party applications developers to share their work with the community of Google Apps users. Currently, businesses can use enterprise versions of Google's popular suite of web apps, and with the new Apps Marketplace, they can integrate outside applications into these services. One of the applications launching in the App Marketplace is Expensify, an online tool for gathering and reporting expenses.

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Expensify, whose motto is "Expense reports that don't suck," prides itself on its ability to create detailed and IRS certified expense reports without the need for a single scrap of paper. Users can associate a credit card with their account for automatic tracking of purchases, and Expensify will create electronic versions of the receipt, eliminating the need for paper receipt hoarding.

For expenses like hotel and travel reservations that require special treatment, users can email the confirmation to Expensify and the app will generate the data and include a PDF of the email in the report. If you use the wrong card or pay with cash, mobile applications for iPhone, Blackberry, Android and Palm devices allow users to snap a picture of the receipt and send it to Expensify.

When sending reports, Expensify makes full color PDFs with tables, charts and graphs of the data. Recipients can accept, modify or reject the expense reports and can even reimburse the expenses from directly within Expensify by printing a check or sending a payment via direct deposit. Or, if need be, the reports can be send to third-party bookkeepers for review. Expensify's CEO David Barrett hopes, however, that small businesses and startups taking advantage of Expensify will be able to cut bookkeepers out of their work flow entirely.

"Expense reports affect everyone of all business sizes, from sole proprietorships to million dollar businesses...Everyone has this problem and everyone hates the current solution," Barrett told ReadWriteWeb Tuesday. "One thing that makes Expensify unique from other applications is it's not built for accountants; it's built for the people actually doing it."

With the new Google Apps Marketplace, companies looking to implement the app into their business can simply add it as an extension of Google Apps. This means that employees won't have to create new Expensify accounts; the application does that automatically in the background when added to Google Apps through the Apps Marketplace. From anywhere within Google Apps, users can click the "More" tab at the top of the screen, select "Expenses" and they are directed to Expensify's site with the help of OpenID.

"We are very excited to have Expensify in the Google Apps Marketplace," said Scott McMullan, Google Apps Partner Lead for Google Enterprise in a press release Tuesday. "Through the Google Apps Marketplace, software vendors like Expensify are helping us build a rich ecosystem of integrated apps that work seamlessly with Google Apps."

One of the large benefits of the app is that it is relatively inexpensive. It is free for users to send reports, but costs $5 per month, per submitter for managers with the first two submitters free. Integration with FreshBooks and QuickBooks makes Expensify a solid choice to track and report expenses for small businesses and startups.

Additionally, Expensify is a great example of how third-party developers can now use Google's new marketplace to build, integrate and market their products. Startups can use and develop on Google apps like Gmail, Calendar and Docs instead of creating their own. This makes it much easier to quickly launch products and features, but running a business built on the shoulders of Google may not necessarily be a long-term solution. The marketplace does, however, provide great exposure potential for apps.

With the impending launch of the Apple iPad, the Cupertino-based company's shunning of Adobe Flash technology has been brought to the forefront of technological discussions. While it was one thing to forgo Flash on a small, mobile device such as the iPhone or iPod Touch, some are questioning whether lack of Flash support is going to be a make-it-or-break it feature for the new slate devices arriving next month - devices which, if you believe Apple CEO Steve Jobs - are "better than netbooks."

On the flip side, Apple supporters echo the company's sentiments that "Flash is a CPU hog" and including support for the technology in Apple's mobile line-up would negatively impact battery life.

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However, recent tests have put Flash up against HTML5, the new web markup language that eliminates the need for the Adobe plugin. The results of these tests show that this is not a simple black-and-white issue. Is Flash really a CPU hog? Yes, in some cases. But, surprisingly, not all the time. In fact, sometimes HTML5 actually performed worse.

Testing Flash and HTML5

Jan Ozer is an expert in video encoding technologies, has worked in digital video since 1990 and is the author of 13 books related to the subject. Recently, he put HTML5 up against Flash in a series of tests that pitted the two technologies against each other on both the Mac and PC and in different web browsers including Internet Explorer 8, Google Chrome, Apple Safari and Mozilla Firefox.

The results of the tests in their entirety are published here on StreamingLearningCenter.com. The summary in a nutshell? Flash isn't always a CPU hog, sometimes that honor goes to HTML5.

Some of the highlights of Ozer's findings are below, broken up into both Mac and Windows test results.

Mac Tests

• With Safari, HTML5 was the most efficient and consumed less CPU than Flash using only 12.39% CPU. With Flash 10.0, CPU utilization was at 37.41% and with Flash 10.1, it dropped to 32.07%
• With Google Chrome, Flash and HTML5 were both equally inefficient (both are around 50%)
• With Firefox, Flash was only slightly less efficient than in Safari, but better than in Chrome

Windows Tests

• Safari wouldn't play HTML5 videos, so there was no way to test that. However, Flash 10.0 used 23.22% CPU but Flash 10.1 only used 7.43% CPU
• Google Chrome was more efficient on Windows than Mac. Playback with Flash Player 10.0 was about 24% more efficient than HTML5, while Flash Player 10.1 was 58% more efficient than HTML5.
• On Firefox, Flash 10.1 dropped CPU utilization to 6% from 22% in Flash 10.0
• In IE8, Flash 10.0 used 22.41% CPU and Flash 10.1 used 14.62% CPU

Hardware Acceleration Key to Flash Performance

In analyzing the results of the tests, Ozer determined that the key to better Flash performance was dependent upon whether or not it could access hardware acceleration. This feature, launched in Flash 10.1, allows the plugin to use the graphics processing unit (GPU) on some computers to decode video. Depending on the video card and drivers, (NVIDIA, AMD/ATI and Intel offer products that support this), the video decoding process in Flash 10.1 can now work for all video playback, not just full-screen playback as was available in Flash 10.0.

According to Adobe, hardware acceleration is not supported under either Linux or Mac OS X, the latter because Mac OS X does not expose access to the required APIs. Adobe goes on to say "The Flash Player team will continue to evaluate adding hardware acceleration to Linux and Mac OS X in future releases."

Here's what this all means in layman's terms: Apple isn't allowing Flash to become more efficient on their Mac OS X/Safari platform (or their iPod/iPhone/iPad one, either) by not providing the access to the hardware it needs to reduce its CPU load. Adobe is waiting and watching to see if they do, but, as Ozer says "the ball is in Apple's court."

Will Apple budge? At this point, it's unlikely. In blocking Flash on Apple devices, the company can easily claim that it's simply not an efficient technology...and that's true for now, considering how it's set up. But if the company wanted to allow it and make it work, it seems reasonable to believe that they could. This is what leads some insiders to believe that the decision to block Flash is less of a technological one and more of a business-minded one. After all, if you could easily visit Hulu.com to stream TV shows and movies, then why would you need to buy them from the iTunes Store?

So while Flash's "CPU hogging" may be a contributing factor in Apple's decision to not support the technology on their mobile devices, that's probably not the only reason behind the block.

Thank you to Dan Rayburn, who pointed us to Jan Ozer's article.

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