In the end, Google and Android will own the smartphone market. It won’t happen this year and it may not even happen in 2012 but the day is coming when the de facto standard for smartphones.

Multiple manufacturers have reported that Android phones are on the way including up to five from Motorola this quarter and a number from Samsung this year. Google also has a number of handsets in for testing and should be rolling them out after the Nexus One.

Avadis “Avie” Tevanian, a former chief software technology officer at Apple, has jumped ship to Elevation Partners, where he will be a Managing Director.

Tevanian joins Fred Anderson, Apple’s former CFO who is a managing director at Elevation. Elevation is also the largest investor in Palm, and brought in Apple exec Jon Rubinstein as CEO of the mobile company. Tevanian will help Elevation discover new investment opportunities and develop strategy for the firm.

“This is not GDrive” said Google Docs product manager Vijay Bangaru yesterday while showing me something that sure does look exactly like the fabled GDrive.

“How is it different,” I asked.

“That’s hard to say, because GDrive doesn’t exist.”

Alrighty then. Putting that aside, you can soon upload any file type at all to Google Docs, not just the dozen or so Office formats that the service allowed as of yesterday. Video files. Images. Audio Files. Even Zip files. As long as those files are 250 MB or smaller, you’re good. The new feature will roll out over the next several weeks, says Google.

Like other documents in Google docs, files can be kept private, made public or shared with a few users. Google Viewer can be used to view many file types, with the notable exception of video.

Regular users have 1 GB of free storage and can purchase more for $0.25/GB. Enterprise customer pay higher prices, starting at $17/year for 5 GB. There are no bandwidth charges.

Should we be considering virtual goods when evaluating online holiday spending? We’ve seen that e-commerce spending over the holidays was strong, with consumers shelling out nearly $30 billion over a period of a few months. Now, virtual goods platform PlaySpan reports that digital goods have seen a similar, if smaller trend, with Americans spending $30 million on virtual gifts in November and December of 2009.

It’s no surprise that the digital goods world saw strong sales over the past year; the business was projected to make $1 billion in 2009. And as virtual goods are booming, various startups have emerged to capitalize on this growth by facilitating the exchange around these goods.

The line between online security and reputation is blurring. ReputationDefender is a new kind of online security startup that helps you monitor your reputation on the Web and take actions to make sure that when someone Googles you they see you in the best possible light. Last year, ReputationDefender raised $8.65 million from Bessemer Venture Partners and Kleiner Perkins, which it is announcing today. The round came in two tranches, with $4 million form Bessemer in May, 2009 and another $4.65 million from Kleiner in August, 2009, with Bessemer participating again. David Cowan of Bessemer and Ted Schlein of Kleiner now have board seats, along with angel investor Mike Maples who led the Series A in 2008.

ReputationDefender sells four different security products on a monthly subscription basis (MyReputation, MyPrivacy, MyChild, and MyEdge) which lets you monitor information about you across the Web, as well as in semi-private databases, and helps you remove inaccurate information or counter by promoting your own vetted profile. CEO Michael Fertick thinks “we are entering a third phase of digital security.” The first phase was around protecting your devices from viruses and malware. The second was around financial payments and making sure people are who they claim to be. “Now we have a third phase,” he says. “Your whole life is on the Web. You live, work, date on the Web. Nobody has your back yet. Nobody gives you the tools to control your life on the Internet.”

Google’s annual I/O conference is still over four months away, but the company is already ramping up for the event. Google has just posted 60% of the sessions that will be featured, and has opened sales for its early bird tickets. Tickets run $400 up until April 16, when they jump to $500. There’s also a $100 academic price that’s first come, first served. The event takes place May 19 – 20 in San Francisco.

The main topics of discussion? Enterprise, Chrome (including Chrome OS), and Android. Eric Tholome, Director of Product Management for Google Developer, says that Enterprise is a key focus because companies are quickly beginning to adopt the web stack and cloud computing. Chrome will be in the spotlight as Google talks about Chrome OS, developer tools, extensions, and HTML5. And Android will be a hot topic because Android growth is rapidly accelerating.

ImageShack, one of the largest media hosting sites on the Web, updated its iPhone app ImageShack Uploader (iTunes link) this morning, unlocking features that enable users to easily share both videos and photos using either ImageShack services and third-party sites like YouTube and Twitter.

ImageShack Uploader 2.0, which is free of charge, lets you record videos and shoot pictures using the iPhone’s camera, and gives you the option to upload them directly to ImageShack servers.

Thanks to further integration with its real-time photo sharing service yfrog, users can also opt to share pictures and videos straight to Twitter, including media that was already stored on the device. Finally, there’s a direct YouTube upload option for videos as well.

Last year was the first time the online advertising industry saw a slump in revenues (JP Morgan is estimating a 5.2 percent decline, although things looked like they started to stabilize in the third quarter). But for online advertising network VideoEgg, 2009 was a great year. According to CEO Matt Sanchez, the company “more than doubled” revenues to $25 million last year and reached profitability seven months ago.

VideoEgg delivers more than one billion ad impressions per month, which reach an estimated 100 million consumers in four different countries. While that is not terribly big as far as ad networks go, it does show that VideoEgg’s “engagement ads” are showing some decent traction

Digital music company eMusic is rumored to be up for sale, according to various reports, but that hasn’t stopped it from signing licensing deals with big music. This morning, eMusic announced that it come to an agreement with Warner Music Group and that it will soon begin selling tracks from WMG’s roster of artists to its U.S. users.

eMusic last year inked a similar deal with Sony Music Entertainment.

The agreement includes titles from WMG’s Atlantic Records, Rhino Records and Warner Bros. Records as well as from independent labels distributed through WMG’s Alternative Distribution Alliance (ADA) stable that are not currently sold on eMusic. The deal will make 10,000 catalog albums from artists like REM, Depeche Mode and Aretha Franklin available for downloading, but does not include newer hit records.

Startup PBWorks, which was formally known as PBwiki, specializes in helping businesses, non-profits, and educational institutions collaborate via wikis. The startup has steadily added innovative, real-time features to its platform, most recently integrating Twitter-like microblogging and tapping into the real-time stream. Today, the startup is launching a PBworks “Template Store” that lets users adopt pre-built apps and workspaces that anyone can distribute.

With over 25 different apps, the template app store will include PBWorks forms and community-generated templates. Companies can create, share, and apply workspace templates to solve specific business problems or manage specific industries, including advertising and PR. PBWorks offers apid and free templates.

According to just released Dow Jones LP Source figures, U.S. private equity fund-raising closed out its worst year for fundraising since 2003, with 331 funds raising a mere $95.8 billion in 2009. That’s down 68% from the $299.9 billion raised by 508 funds in 2008.

Zooming in on the past quarter (Q4 2009), Dow Jones LP Source figures show PE firms raised $20.5 billion in 75 funds, down 80% from the $102.7 billion raised by 188 funds in the fourth quarter of 2008.

Most online publishers are at least vaguely familiar with affiliate programs, which can help them generate revenue from the stores and products they link to. Unfortunately, actually managing accounts with these programs can be a bit of a pain, and many people simply forget to use them. VigLink is a new startup that’s looking to help by automatically inserting affiliate links whenever you link to a product from your site. The company has just disclosed a $800K funding round it raised last summer that was led by First Round Capital and Google Ventures, with a number of angel investors including Reid Hoffman, Dipchand Nishar, Niel Robertson, Hadi Partovi, Ali Partovi, Carlos Cashman, and Micah Adler.

For those that aren’t familiar with them, affiliate programs are often offered by online retailers who pay you a commission to drive traffic (and purchases) to their webstore. Amazon is best known for their program, but many other businesses now feature them as well. VigLink looks to help you use as many as these programs as you’d like with a minimal amount of effort. The site is currently in a private beta, but plans to launch publicly in the next few months.

For the technology industry, 2009 was a pretty tough year, but Forrester says the tech downturn is now ‘unofficially over’.

The research firm says the global technology industry will see an 8.1 percent increase in IT spending in 2010, with software and computer hardware leading the charge, and IT consulting services following.

After declining 8.2 percent last year, U.S. IT spending will grow 6.6 percent in 2010 to $568 billion, according to Forrester’s latest research report. Global tech spending, which dropped 8.9 percent in 2009, will rise to more than $1.6 trillion in 2010.

Last week, I attended the Google Android “Nexus One” event. As you may have heard, they gave many of us in the audience the device to try out. I decided that before I wrote anything about it (other than saying on television that it’s a “nice little device“), I would give it a real shot. So here I am, a week later, with my thoughts on it. To be clear, this isn’t meant to be a full review or overview, for that, see our review here. Instead, I’m going to come at this from the perspective of a pretty hardcore iPhone user of the past two-plus years.

And to start off, I’ll come right out and say what everyone will want to know: Do I think the Nexus One is better than the iPhone? No. There are certain things it does better (I’ll get to that), but overall, if I had to choose one, I would still choose the iPhone — specifically, the iPhone 3GS. Is that my bias talking as someone who has used the device on a daily basis for over two years? Maybe a bit, but overall I do believe that while the Android phones are rapidly catching up to the iPhone, they are still not quite up to that device’s quality.

If I were to pen my own list of products I love and use every day, Streamy would be somewhere up top. I only started using it 8 months ago when the Web-based personalized news network / social network aggregator added more communication features like instant messaging, and it instantly became my new start page.

Sadly, the team behind the application secured only a modest round of angel funding in 2007 and again in 2008, and has been unable to raise follow-up funding last year. The fledgling company is now running out of cash, and is looking for another party to keep it alive and continue development on the app. And boy, do I hope someone ends up doing just that.

In 2004 everyone freaked out when Gmail launched because Google would be reading your emails to figure out what ads to serve you. “Privacy advocates objected to the advertising model, which involves Google’s robot eyes scanning every e-mail for keywords and displaying contextual advertisements alongside a user’s inbox,” noted Wired.

That might sound familiar to your great-great-great grandparents. Supposedly many people were apprehensive about using telephones in the early 1900s because they knew the phone companies could listen in on their phone calls. There are people who won’t use phones today because of the ease in which calls can be tapped.

But the rest of us seem to be ok with Gmail. And our phone. That’s because the benefits of those products far outweigh the privacy costs. And people are going to be just fine with Facebook, too. Even if they did do a switcharoo on privacy settings a month ago that is still reverberating through the tech press.

Contrary to published reports, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg did not say “the age of privacy is over” in my interview with him last Friday evening at the Crunchies. You can watch the video here for yourself. What he said is that he wants Facebook to change with its users, and keep its product fresh. Which is exactly what they are doing.

Last Friday, the location-based service Foursquare announced that it was opening their service to be used anywhere in the world. The following day, they saw the biggest day in terms of usage ever, apparently.

This past Saturday, Foursquare was averaging more than a check-in a second, according to this tweet from the official account. Some quick math tells me that this means they must have seen over 86,000 check-ins in that 24 hour span. While Foursquare hasn’t publicly stated how many users they have, our best guess is that the number is something around 200,000 (with many following Scoble) and growing fast.

If you’ve looked at buying a television the past several years, chances are you’re well aware of the terms: Plasma, DLP, LCD, and more recently, OLED. Well, there’s a new acronym in town: LPD.

Developed by the Silicon Valley-based Prysm, LPD is being formally unveiled today as the latest type of screen technology. LPD stands for Laser Phosphor Display, which likely means nothing to you, but the company is promising that it’s a tech that will allow them to create massive, crisp digital displays that consume some 75% less power than the other display technologies. The company claims these displays are also much cheaper to build, and will last longer.

More news from the social network Friendster. The site, which was acquired in December by Malaysian payments company MOL Global, has struck a deal with Yahoo Southeast Asia. The purpose of the deal is to integrate product features and cross-promote across both Friendster and Yahoo. Both Friendster and Yahoo stand to gain from the partnership as Friendster has a significant Asian audience and Yahoo also has a steady following in the regional area for certain web services.

Friendster, which was sold for just under $30 million, has over 90 million registered users and 90 percent of its daily traffic coming from Southeast Asia today. The partnership will involve a a new social application built by Friendster that will be prominently displayed on Yahoo Southeast Asia properties and a cross-promotion of Yahoo products on Friendster.

Mochi Media, a Flash game advertising network and payments platform funded by Accel Partners and Shasta Ventures, has been acquired by Shanda Games for $60 million in cash and $20 million in equity. The company has raised $14 million over two venture rounds.

The deal will be announced shortly.

Shanda is China’s largest operator of online games, with nearly 10 million active accounts. The company hosts so-called MMORPGs, or massively multi-player online role-playing games, under which users pay monthly subscriber fees as well as purchase items within the game. The company went public on NASDAQ late last year and has the enviable ticker symbol GAME.

As of June 2009 100 million people were playing games that included Mochi Media. They also launched a payments platform for game developers last year.