ReadWriteWeb

In November of last year, more than 50 people came together for Startup Weekend Los Angeles. They pitched 45 different entrepreneurial ideas, eventually narrowing them into seven teams. They spent Saturday and Sunday working around the clock to create working prototypes of these ideas with help from an expert panel of mentors, speakers and even lawyers.

Then they voted, and the top vote-getter - Mingly - was born, and has since been invited to Twiistup, a showcase for hot upcoming startups in Los Angeles at the end of January.

The only thing preventing Google's Nexus One phone from supporting multitouch features might be Apple's patents.

Allow me to explain: There is nothing in the hardware of this device to prevent multitouch as evinced by Google's comment this morning at their press conference. When asked if the Nexus One would one day support multitouch, a Google rep responded, "We'll consider it." In a word, this means that the hardware is ready for users' pinching and zooming, but the current iteration of Google's software is locked to prohibit multitouch for legal reasons. We give the hackers of the mobile world a couple days to hack the device - after all, it's already been done on the Droid.

The Nexus One is another smart phone that we will inevitably see inside the walls of the enterprise. Smart phones seem to have a way of being used for all kinds of work activities.

So, what are the pros and cons of using the Nexus One in the enterprise?

First off, anyone using the Nexus One in the enterprise will be using a rogue device. That's just the way it is. Perhaps that may change when the enterprise wakes up and realizes that people born after 1982 want to use any device to connect in any way they want. But that's the future, unfortunately. In the meantime, let's look at reality.

New rules from the Federal Trade Commission, requiring bloggers to disclose free gifts from companies whose products they review, came into effect on December 1st and the first major announcement of 2010 just occurred today.

The Google Nexus One mobile phone was unveiled this afternoon and all the members of the press who were on-site for the announcements received free phones from Google. This is the most-anticipated phone to hit the market in years. It's like a unicorn sparkling with magic, perhaps. Almost no one at all has disclosed getting a free unit in writing their reviews.

"2009 was the year of Social Media" according to Buzz Study, the blog that keeps tabs on Infegy's Social Radar. They're not speaking from experience, they're speaking from what they've seen in the billions of "blog posts, news feeds, forums, social networks and Twitter posts" the service has collected over the past two years.

While the service normally provides more complex information around a certain brand, as in its tracking of the Domino's Pizza PR disaster this past September, the top 50 list takes an easier approach: how many unique sources mentioned a brand over the past year.

So what brand was the talk of the town in 2009?

If you ever thought startup life would be about champagne toasts and million dollar term sheets then you need to get back in your time machine and set the dial for the nineties. If there's one thing we learned in the latter half of this decade, it's discipline. To say that it was a tough year, would be an understatement. But those of us who stayed lean will be back for 2010. While the below concepts weren't invented this year, they certainly hit their stride in 2009.

Looking to spruce up that bland PowerPoint presentation for your next meeting with possible investors? Or do you need high-quality photographs for your product's homepage or blog? Lifehacker recently profiled Sprixi, a free use image search engine, is an excellent source for finding just the right image to add those finishing touches.

Developed by Sydney, Australia-based company Thirsty Minds, Sprixi crawls Flickr and OpenClipArt.org for images licensed under Creative Commons and implements a user-based recommendation system to produce relevant results. While viewing photos, you can tell Sprixi whether or not an image is a useful result. Based on this data, Sprixi displays the most relevant images as rated by users at the top of the results.

In 2006, Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake coined the term "BizDev 2.0" when looking at the phenomenon of supplying commercial API keys to startup partners. Said Fake, traditional business development meant "trying to get hopelessly overbooked people to return your email. And then after the deal was done, squabbling over who dealt with the customer service. [It's] much, much better this way!" Three years later, many are finding that while APIs are great biz dev tools for the larger provider, startups can often suffer under the thumb of their platform keepers.

IBM CEO Sam Palmisano had some questions of his own in response to a question by a Barron's writer about Google in the enterprise.

The quote appears in a Barron's story about IBM's comeback. The actual story requires a subscription to view. Here is what Palmisano had to say:

"Is Google going to become the computing platform for the enterprise? Is a bank going to run itself on Google? Is an airline going to run itself on Google? Is IBM going to run its supply chain on Google? Is Bharti Wireless going to run themselves on Google? Is the banking system of China that we've built going to be on Google? Is the Russian Central Bank that we're building going to be on Google? No."

A hypothetical discussion between a cloud consultant and his client that is just too good not to post. Just be forewarned - this is NSFW.

Every year the ReadWriteWeb team tries its hand at predicting the future. Looking back at our 2009 predictions, we got some wrong (I predicted that Facebook would sign up to OpenSocial) but others turned out to be on the money. I correctly guessed that the usual suspects would remain unacquired in '09 - Digg, Twitter, Technorati - but that FriendFeed would get bought. OK, so I guessed that Google would be the buyer. But close enough!

Without further ado, here are our predictions for 2010. We'd love to read your predictions in the comments.

Since 1955, when Sears mistakenly printed NORAD's phone number in its catalog instead of the number of its Santa hotline, NORAD has offered Santa-realted services by phone. Now, working together with Google, NORAD continues to offer the same service online during the holidays. Starting at 2 p.m. ET (GMT -5) on Christmas Eve, the newly enhanced Santa Tracker will go live.

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.

According to a report by Business Week's Spencer E. Ante, Twitter's search deals with Google and Microsoft made the company about $25 million - enough to turn Twitter into a profitable business in 2009. According to these reports - which Twitter did not comment on - the deal with Google made Twitter about $15 million this year and a similar deal with Microsoft generated about $10 million in revenue.

In this special edition of the Weekly Wrapup, our weekly newsletter, we summarize our end-of-year series profiling the best web products of 2009. We also carried out a Reader Poll this week, asking our readers to select their favorite products of the year. We present the results of that poll here.

Finally, this week we announced our 6th annual Best BigCo award. Read on to find out which big Internet company impressed us the most in 2009.

This week we ran a reader poll, asking for your votes on the top Web products of the year. Thousands of you voted for up to 10 products, from a list of 100 selected by the ReadWriteWeb authors over December.

The poll has now closed and we're pleased to present the ReadWriteWeb community's Top 10 Web Products of 2009.

Here is the final top 10:

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:

UPDATE: The poll is now closed, CLICK HERE TO SEE RESULTS.

Google is announcing a new contest for local would-be heroes.

The Map Maker Global Competition, which challenges users to add high-quality data on universities, schools, hospitals and medical clinics in Google Map Maker, will run from Dec. 15, 2009 to Jan. 31, 2010. The grand prize for the user who adds the greatest quantity of data is a $50,000 UNICEF donation to the winner's home country.

In one of ReadWriteWeb's longest-running traditions, every year we review the top Internet companies and their impact over the past 12 months. Today we're announcing the 6th annual Best BigCo, a.k.a. big Internet company. Next week we'll announce Best LittleCo and Most Promising Company.

In 2008 the Best BigCo went to Apple, due largely to the iPhone and App Store. Facebook won in 2007, Google in 2006 and 2004, and Yahoo! in 2005. Who will be Best BigCo of 2009? Will Apple be the first company to win it two years running? Will Google win the honor for a 3rd year? How about Facebook, which grew significantly this year. Let's find out...

A few months ago, Google rolled out Place Pages with the lofty vision of creating a Web page for every place in the world. In addition to a map-view of local businesses, users can access hours, transit stops, reviews and geo-tagged photos. As of today, the company is offering a color-coded ranking system for specific aspects of a businesses' services. The question is, does the new feature mark the beginning of the end for restaurant review sites?