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Every year content providers offer smartphone users any number of ways to keep up with March Madness. With the NCAA Men's Division I basketball tournament set to start soon, 2010 is no different. Take Yahoo!'s new dedicated mobile Web site for its Yahoo! Sports' 2010 Tourney Pick'em game at m.yahoo.com/tourneypickem, for example. The mobile site lets college basketball fans play the Yahoo! Tourney Pick'em game (for a grand prize of $10,000) right on their iPhone or other smartphone. With it users can view their brackets on their phones to see their teams' standings; get live scoring of all college hoops tourney games the minute it happens; and see news, blogs and analysis from Yahoo! Sports .

In spite of the continued misgivings on the part of some analysts and CIOs, the iPhone and its 140-thousand strong (gorilla of an) App Store continue to make their presence known throughout the business world and in the enterprise. In other words, the iPhone is here to stay whether IT likes or not.

IDC recently reported that the iPhone accounted for 14.4 percent of the global smartphone market last year, up from a little over 9 percent in 2008--remarkable for a mobile platform that hit the market a mere 2.5 years ago. Research In Motion (RIM), which came in second with 19.2 percent in 2009, grew its share by 4.2 percent over last year (see table below).

Nokia continued to hold an impressive lead over its two closest rivals, commanding a 38.2 percent share of shipments. However, unlike Apple and RIM, Nokia's piece of the smartphone pie shrank by nearly two percentage points from 2008.

What should be even more alarming to business-stalwart RIM is the results of J.D. Power and Associates' annual Wireless Business Smartphone Satisfaction Study. According to the survey, which poled close to 1,400 business wireless customers, the iPhone ranked higher than the BlackBerry in a number of categories, including ease of operation, operating system, design, features and battery life (see second table).

So what's IT and a company's internal development department to do to support the growing iPhone presence? And how can they leverage the iPhone itself to better perform their daily information technology tasks?

Let us know what you think.

As Apple did with the iPhone a few year ago, the company took the huge viewership opportunity of the Oscars last night to roll out its first television ad for the iPad (see above) The commercial showed viewers a number of tasks they can do with Apple's tablet. It was set to the music of Blue Van's "There Goes My Love."

The eagle-eyed out there noticed that Apple's CEO, Steve Jobs, didn't view the Oscars and his company's ad from home like the most of the rest of us. Instead, he watched the Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin-hosted show live in the Kodak Theatre.

And, as tuaw points out, the iPad ad may have revealed eBook pricing for apple's tablet PC. Not at all unimportant finding, as Apple has Amazon's Kindle eBook reader, among any number of other types of gadgets, squarely in its sights with the iPad and the device's iBooks app.

The cost of eBooks for the iPad will, apparently, range from $8 to $15.

Network attached storage (NAS) servers company Synology America Corp has launched the latest edition of its DiskStation Manager (DSM) solution). Version 2.3 includes a number of new features, such as support for encryption, the easier setup of RAID volumes, backup to the Cloud, and--most importantly to readers of this blog--support for video surveillance of your storage setup through a new iPhone application. So, with the new app, called DS cam, Synology customers who use the company's Surveillance Station solution with their DiskStations can now view live and recorded events, as well as take snapshots, from their IP cameras on their iPhone. See here to learn more about the iPhone app and here to learn more about the overall DiskStation Upgrade.

SplashData, which recently acquired iambic, let us know today that it plans to update the latter's popular PIM app for the iPhone, Agendus, to version 2.0. According to the correspondence, the application will receive a major interface makeover and the addition of many new features. No other details about the upgrade were given. We expect to heare more from SplashData about Agendus 2.0 next month.

Now on version 1.2, Agenus, long available for other smartphone platforms, first found its way to the iPhone and iPod touch last summer. The edition for Apple's mobile devices ($4.99, available here), enhances and extends the built-in iPhone Contacts App while introducing its own comprehensive Task management function. It includes a Today View, a Task List View, a Compact and Expanded Contact Views, and features like Contact Linking, One Tap Dial / Email, quick item deletion, task categories, colors, grouping and filtering, over-the-air services such as integrated weather forecasts, and more.

Shortly after the release of Agendus 1.0, iambic updated the app to version 1.01, which introduced over thirty improvements, including the addition of full landscape support in all views and dialogs, iPhone OS 3.0 compatibility, and various new sorting, grouping and display options for both Contact and Task related views (such as priority indicator, due date, default categories, etc.). An added "services" preference panel allowed users to have the weather location automatically determined, as well as to specify a twitter client for the "share on twitter" functionality.

Last month, the developer rolled out an upgrade to Agendus 1.2. See a comprehensive list of new features and enhancements after the break.

Back in January, Datviz updated the Documets To Go to version 3.0, making it the only mobile Office application for the iPhone to support the viewing and editing of all three Office formats (Word, Excel and PowerPoint). It has now added support for Google Docs with the release of Documents to Go Premium 3.1.

According to the developer, access to the Cloud has become more and more important to its customers. So, with Document's 3.1, it is starting off support for these types of remote services, with Google Docs access.

As a result, the mobile office suite now lets:

o Download, view & edit your files from Google Docs directly in DocsToGo
o Save and synchronize changes back to Google Docs
o Upload files to Google Docs from your iPhone or iPod touch
 Access multiple Exchange and Gmail accounts
 Freeze rows or columns in spreadsheets

Documents To Go Premium goes for $14.99 here. All those who purchased a previous version will receive a free update to version 3.0.

In addition, DataViz has submitted an update (also version 3.1) for its base "Documents To Go" product ($9.99, available here). At this time, it is "In Review" and once approved, all those who purchased a previous version of "Documents To Go" will receive it for free.

This update adds:

o Support for Gmail attachments
o Editing/viewing attachments using Docs To Go
o Freezing rows or columns in spreadsheets
o An In-App purchase option to upgrade to the Premium version

Nuance this week announced the extension of its Dragon NaturallySpeaking voice recognition technology for smartphones, including the iPhone, to the healthcare industry. Already popular in consumer apps for the iPhone (Dragon Dictation and Dragon Search), the new apps for physicians, nurses and other healthcare workers, such as therapists, are designed to help practitioners more efficiently access clinical information and document patient encounters using their mobile devices.

The company is previewing these voice-powered Dragon Medical Mobile technologies and solutions at Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society conference in Atlanta. It plans to roll them out throughout 2010, beginning in the spring.

See an overview of Nuance's conference roll out after the break.

When Steve Jobs and company introduced the iPhone three years ago, they emphasized how they'd patent the heck out of many of the underlying technologies that make the smartphone tick. Today, Apple backed up that assertion with the announcement of a lawsuit against Taiwan's HTC for infringing on 20 Apple patents related to the iPhone's user interface, underlying architecture and hardware.

HTC is the leading provider of Windows Mobile and Android-run smartphones. It even built Google's Nexus One for the search giant. HTC offers a proprietary touch interface that it installs above the main operating system for many of its handsets.

"We can sit by and watch competitors steal our patented inventions, or we can do something about it. We've decided to do something about it," Apple CEO Steve Job as statement. "We think competition is healthy, but competitors should create their own original technology, not steal ours."

Apple filed the suit against HTC concurrently with the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) and in U.S. District Court in Delaware. HTC has not publicly replied to the lawsuit yet.

In addition to the new tussle with HTC, Apple is currently in a legal tangle with Nokia over patents, which each company suing the other.

Cupertino's shipped over 40 million iPhones so far and the App Store now contains over 150,000 mobile applications.

To say that the Apple CEO is the king of hyperbole is, well, an understatement.

This makes him a great target for SNL to poke fun at. Take this past weekend, for example, when the long running comedy show performed its latest reality-show parody--a spoof called Undercover Celebrity Boss of the new show Undercover Boss; where heads of companies spend some time (anonymously - not really possible when your CEO is a celebrity) with their workers. 

In the Steve Jobs segment, which started the sketch, the Apple CEO is seen collecting garbage using the iTrash, which, as he explains to an employee, can hold 35 gallons of trash, play music, and even show movies. Then he picks up a smaller trash can, which he calls, of course, the iTrash Shuffle.

Check out the parody in the clip below.

Rhomobile has introduced Rhodes Elite Partners, a group of select mobile development shops who use the company's Rhodes "write once run on many" framework to create native apps for all leading smartphones, including iPhone, BlackBerry, Android, Windows Mobile and Symbian.

With the Rhodes platform developers czn use their existing HTML and Ruby knowledge to build native mobile applications, which take full advantage of smartphone capabilities such as GPS, PIM data, geo-location and camera. Using Rhomobile's RhoSync, users of Rhodes-based applications can work with their synchronized local data even when they are offline and disconnected.

"I am very proud to introduce the Rhodes Elite Partner network," said Adam Blum, CEO of Rhomobile, in a statement. "These are development shops that are not only using Rhodes to build native smartphone apps for their clients, but enabling their clients through training and ongoing support, to properly execute a mobile solution within their company."

Here is a list of Rhodes Features:

- Built from the ground up to leverage smartphones in the enterprise
- Allows developers to write app interface in Ruby and HTML and simultaneously build as native apps (not web apps) for all smartphones
- Support for Push Synchronized Data on iPhone and BlackBerry
- Built-in tools for test-driven development
- Database-based event logging
- Interactive debugger (Android/iPhone emulators)
- Allows users to work with synced local data for rapid access and ease of operation when disconnected or offline
-- Full access to device capabilities: GPS, audio and video, PIM contacts, native mapping, camera

Last week, Rhomobile updated Rhodes with new features such as the ability to debug in real-time and support for database-based logging. Another addition to Rhodes is support for the BlackBerry Java Development Environment v5.0, native mapping for BlackBerry and an API for returning screen size. The screensize API enables developers to conditionally handle different screen sizes smoothly, an important tool when approaching diverse platform environments including the BlackBerry and iPad, according to Rhomobile. After the break is a comprehensive list of new and existing Rhodes features.