A recent survey of 2733 mobile application developers has shed new light on the so-called “Apple vs. Google” battle that’s taking place now in the smartphone industry, positioning Apple’s dominant iPhone/iPad operating system (iOS) against Google’s mobile operating system Android. The survey, conducted by mobile app development company Appcelerator , asked a representative sample of their some 51,000 customers to weigh the pros and cons of both the Apple and Google mobile platforms, among other things. According to the findings, developers view Apple’s near-term outlook favorably, given its App Store, large market share and device line up. However, it’s Android’s adaptability as a platform that had the developers pegging the OS as the best bet for long-term success. Sponsor Apple: Near-Term Dominance Makes it Number One Pick…for Now It should come as no surprise that developers overwhelming picked Apple’s iOS (formerly iPhone OS) mobile platform for near-term success, given its market dominance. But when asked for more detail, 69% of developers said that Android’s potential for long-term success was greater due to its ability to extend to other devices, including tablets, e-Readers and set-top boxes. Appcelerator positioned this battle as one between “near-term momentum” and “long-term dominance,” but there’s a flip side to the fight which wasn’t fully considered: the battle of the “cons” between the two platforms, another survey question that was left, for the most part, unexamined. When reporting on the downsides to the two dominant OS’s, developers said that Apple’s worst “con” was its closed and controlling nature.

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OCR (optical character recognition) fans that are frustrated with the current offering of online services may be pleased to learn that Google Docs will now grab text from images and PDFs quickly and cost free. According to the blog Google Operating System , the new feature has quietly been pushed live by Google after several months of experimentation and development, but will it replace commercial software or online solutions? Sponsor When uploading files to their account, Docs users will now see an option to run an OCR scan, which will extract characters and place them within a new text document. As far as accuracy goes, PDFs fair much better than images, especially basic black text on a white background. I uploaded a picture of my business card and Google Docs had trouble recognizing the largest text and clearest text on the card, but surprisingly did better with smaller text. A test of a PDF document turned up nearly perfect recognition results, but Google Docs strips nearly all of the formatting out, spewing out the text in a stream of letters and spaces. Other examples from Google Operating System produced decent results, but far from perfect or useful. Additionally, when scanning a PDF, Google Docs does not save a copy of the PDF, so scanning to text and saving an original file requires two separate uploads. This feature is great for casual OCR users that want to quickly grab text from PDFs and some images or business cards. Those who rely on OCR heavily will likely be disappointed with the features and may have better results with commercial solutions. Discuss

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Have you ever watched those movies with the crazy genius who has newspaper and magazine clippings pasted all over their walls with circles and lines and highlighted paragraphs to find the hidden common threads and secretly wished that you were crazy and smart enough to be that guy? Well, wish no more. No, we don’t mean go buy a glue stick and get to clipping – a company out of New Hampshire called News Patterns has taken care of all that for you. Sponsor Using News Patterns is like hiring your own private sleuth to track a topic and let you know anything and everything important surrounding that topic. Started nearly a decade ago by Jim Andrus, the company just last year got into what it now considers its bread and butter – visually representing massive quantities of news. We spoke with Andrus this afternoon and he explained that experiencing news visually takes advantage of our natural programming. “Our brains and our bodies are still on the Serengeti plains and based on that basic neuroscience, we’re taking that wiring of us as humans and looking at huge volumes of news,” Andrus said. “Our brains can take in information at 10 million bits per second, but you can only read 200 bits per second.” The basic idea here, he explained, is that you’ll notice things visually that you wouldn’t be able to even see otherwise. News Patterns’ custom algorithms, which take in thousands upon thousands of articles and process them for relationships and relevance, are handling the overwhelming task of taking in massive quantities of data. It then plots the information on a bulls-eye graph, wherein a topic’s importance is signified by its distance from the center and relationships between different topics and data points are shown by their proximity. “We’re creating this environment where people can be exposed to things they didn’t even think of asking about in the first place,” Andrus explained, offering up Google Alerts as an opposing example. With Google Alerts, the user simply requests that any time Google comes across a specific set of terms in its indexing of Web content, it notifies them. Andrus said that with something like Google Alerts or similar alert systems, if you wanted to know about “Google electric cars” you would often get spammed with content, because it is taken out of context. If, suddenly, Yahoo got into the electric car making business, it wouldn’t tell you because it doesn’t have the keyword Google. With News Patterns, this is the sort of information that would not only be pointed out visually on the News Radar, but potentially emailed to the user as an alert. The News Radar offers a number of different ways to look at information, from animations over time connections between topics new and old. A number of examples are provided, from the 2012 US Presidential Candidate Identity , which means to show the most likely Republican candidates for the 2012 Presidential election, to a glimpse of the field of wireless technology . Although, at a starting rate of around $4,000, this isn’t likely to become your next tool for keeping up with local politics or what’s going on in the world, it looks to be a powerful addition to larger, more professional endeavors and Andrus told us that it had already been used by a number of major political campaigns and currently has BP (which surely could use some help in keeping track of what’s going on in the world and public relations) as a client. Discuss

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Zoho Invoice and Zoho Creator Helpdesk joined Zoho CRM & Zoho Projects in the Google Apps Marketplace today. All the apps come in both free and paid varieties, and integrate Google Apps’ users, contacts and other features into Zoho’s offerings. Sponsor The company was one of the original Google Apps Marketplace launch partners. As we reported last year , Zoho’s revenue mostly derives from applications like CRM and Project – apps that put them less in competition with Google and more in competition with Salesforce , Netsuite , and 37 Signals . Zoho’s Raju Vegesna says a “few hundred” businesses sign up for Zoho Apps every week through the Google Apps Marketplace, and the software lineup has around 3 million users worldwide. Zoho Invoice, which was overhauled earlier this year, includes features such as invoice creation, online payments, and expense tracking. Users can create up to five invoices for free per month; paid plans start at $8 per month. Zoho Creator Helpdesk features trouble ticket management, asset management, a knowledge base, and reporting. Administrators can customize forms and fields and the entire look of the site. It’s available for free for up to two technicians, with pricing for three or more technicians starting at $15 per month. Discuss

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Last month , Google announced the advent of “Tags.” For $25 monthly, businesses can leverage these yellow symbols to communicate additional information. Tags rolled out initially on a trial basis in 11 cities. As of late last week , they are becoming available nationwide. Tags appear below a business’s listing and carry information such as coupon offers, sales and website URLs. Starting with the states where the previous 11 trial cities are located, the goal is to roll them out across the U.S. Currently, the only place they are available statewide is in California. Sponsor The next states they will be available in will include Georgia, Texas, Colorado, Illinois and Washington. Location-based advertising has proven very profitable, as we have reported before. One in four U.S. adults use location-based services. Half of those users engage with location-based advertisements on those services. Check-in service Foursquare has grown wildly . Competitors like TopGuest have entered the arena, offering real-world deals . We looked up vinyl, books, shoes, archery and other searches in both San Francisco and Seattle to no effect. (The screenshot above is from the Google announcement) Admittedly, this is in the early stages. But, Google Tags will prove useful, to both businesses and customers, only if they get used and get seen. Thanks to Charly Omer Discuss

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