A recent report at InformationWeekdetails the story of Level 3 Communications, which recently equipped its entire sales workforce with iPads loaded with apps that provide access to pricing information; presentation creation; and display, corporate email, customer records and inventory checks. The iPad proved more than up to the task of supplementing and mostly replacing laptops.

InformationWeek goes into much more detail about what the iPads meant for Level 3, but the advantages for salespeople on the ground can be boiled down to three main categories:

1. Instant on. The iPad’s ability to instantly wake from sleep and pick up right where a user left off exceed that of even the fastest SSD-equipped notebooks, and it only sips power in tiny amounts in order to provide that functionality. That, combined with its superior portability, makes it the perfect tool for doing “quick checks between meetings, at an airport, or in a taxi,” InformationWeek says. With a laptop, five minutes in a taxi might not seem like enough time to make powering up worth your while; with the iPad, that’s a nonissue.

2. Connectivity. The iPad (at least the 3G models) provides always-on cellular network access, as long as you are within coverage range. Some laptops can offer that, but the process is still often more complicated than just tapping the wake button and being ready to surf, email or chat. But it’s not just cellular radios that make the iPad great for sales; built-in GPS positioning means salespeople can get locally relevant information, like clients or potential clients in the immediate area, in only a few short steps via task-specific software.

3. On-device demo. A laptop is an ineffective replacement for a catalog, and presenting a slide show on one is awkward. Using an iPad as a presentation tool, on the other hand, is natural. The tablet is easily passed around, can be read like a magazine, and can also output to external displays with less hassle and fewer steps than a laptop. And apps like OnLive Desktop and Iongrid make it even easier for iPads to sub in for notebooks capable of running desktop presentation tools.

Level 3 isn’t the only company to realize the value of iPads in the hands of a sales force. Sears, of all companies, announced in October it would begin rolling out iPads in 450 stores that same month, and TUAW noted at the time that Lowes and Pacific Sun were also expanding iOS deployments.

InformationWeek thinks 2012 will be a breakout year in terms of actual iPad deployments, just as 2011 saw a huge uptick in pilot programs. If that indeed comes to pass, we should see Apple easily beat the 40.7 million iPads it sold in 2011.

The iPad 3 is expected to be one of Apple’s big revenue drivers for the upcoming year. While the iPad 3 is critical, most analysts expect the iPhone 5, which is also expected to be 4G friendly, to drive sales more.Volume manufacturing is expected to ramp up in February, according to Bloomberg.If Bloomberg’s report is on target, Apple is likely to see a slowdown in iPad 2 sales, which may already be taking a hit from Amazon’s Kindle Fire. There has also been speculation that Apple will keep the iPad 2 around and play multiple price points.

Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster handicapped Apple’s iPad plans in a recent research note. He said:

“Our model currently assumes iPad 3 will simply replace iPad 2; however, if Apple expands the iPad lineup to both higher and lower price points, the new iPads could support growth well above our current estimates. Our current CY13 revenue growth estimate for the iPad is 11%, with the bull case at 30%.”

In a research note, Wedbush Securities analyst Craig Irwin said that the iPad 3 is likely to be a boon for battery suppliers. The iPad 3 is likely to have much more battery material in it. Irwin said suppliers like Simplo, Dynapack, and Polymore are likely to benefit.

Tim Cook | Apple

In his 10-plus years with Apple Inc., Tim Cook has proved he’s a whiz at running the technology giant’s operations. In 2012, the world will learn how comfortable he is being the frontman too.

In August, the 51-year-old was appointed CEO, replacing Apple’s co-founder Steve Jobs, who died in October after suffering from pancreatic cancer. So far, Mr. Cook has received high marks from employees and investors who say he’s affable but demanding and who add that he has dug into Apple’s operations and products with a similar attention to detail as did Mr. Jobs.

Next year will bring another set of tests: Mr. Cook will likely take the stage as Apple trots out new versions of old devices, like the iPhone and iPad, and possibly some brand-new products, like a much-anticipated Apple television.

Akio Toyoda | Toyota

For Akio Toyoda, the president of Toyota Motor Corp., 2012 may be a make or break year.

The head of Japan’s largest auto maker has pledged to keep domestic production at 3 million vehicles a year, even as his Japanese rivals race to offshore. The yen’s surge to record highs against the dollar has eroded profit margins on exports from Japan.

Mr. Toyoda, 55, entering his third year since taking over the quasi-eponymous company founded by his grandfather, has vowed to prevent the hollowing out of Japan’s industrial base. But with Toyota’s stock at 15-year lows, his commitment raises a question echoing a former General Motors Corp. CEO: Is what’s good for Japan good for Toyota and vice versa?

Kenneth C. Frazier | Merck

In his first year running Merck & Co., Kenneth Frazier defended the pharmaceutical company’s heavy spending on drug research in the face of Wall Street critics.

He vowed to protect his company’s labs from the deep cutbacks that rivals likePfizer Inc. were embracing, and in the process the general counsel-turned-CEO became the leading advocate for the pharmaceutical industry’s science.

Whether Mr. Frazier can win over those who say R&D is wasteful depends on the fortunes of drugs like Bridion, a treatment designed to reverse the effects of surgical anesthesia that Merck expects to submit for U.S. regulatory approval in 2012.

The Penn State alumnus also will head the special committee investigating the university’s response to child sex abuse allegations against a former football coach.

Tom Horton | AMR

Thomas Horton is tasked with saving American Airlines.

Named chairman and chief executive of the carrier’s parent company, AMR Corp., on Nov. 29—the day AMR filed for Chapter 11—the 50-year-old Texan is now trying to figure out how to make a company that lost $10 billion over the past decade profitable again.

In 2012, his 23rd year with AMR, he will aim to cut costs on aircraft leases and labor contracts, while convincing 88,000 employees his decisions are in their best interest. He may also lead a merger with another airline, or see a competitor mount a hostile takeover.

Cyrus Mistry | Tata Group

Does he have the business chops or is he just there because of his father? That’s the question hanging over Cyrus Mistry, the 43-year-old heir apparent at India’s flagship conglomerate, Tata Group, which counts among its holdings Jaguar cars and New York’s Pierre Hotel.

Mr. Mistry’s curriculum vitae touts his achievements as managing director of his family’s construction firm, Shapoorji Pallonji & Co. But his father, reclusive billionaire Pallonji Mistry, also is the biggest shareholder in Tata Sons, Tata’s holding company, with a stake of about 18%.

Mr. Mistry will have time to learn on the job before the answer becomes clear: He will spend almost a year’s apprenticeship with the outgoing chairman, Ratan Tata, who retires in December 2012.

Ron Johnson | J.C. Penney

The former head of Apple’s retail stores took the helm of J.C. Penney Co. in November, and already is shaking up the sleepy department store chain.

Ron Johnson, who is largely credited with the “cool factor” in Apple’s stores, brought in a management team of former Apple and Target Corp. colleagues, and struck an exclusive deal with homemaking maven Martha Stewart Living OmnimediaInc.

During the company’s third-quarter conference call in November, Mr. Johnson said, “I am here to transform.”

Now all eyes are on what Mr. Johnson and his new team will tackle first, and how they will adapt to a store with much broader product inventory and a dusty image. Some expect Mr. Johnson to bring on other high-profile exclusive brands.

Tom Staggs and Jay Rasulo | Disney

For Walt Disney Co.’s top executives, 2012 marks the first full year of competition for the CEO crown, and no two candidates are said to be more primed to face off for the job than Tom Staggs and Jay Rasulo.

Serving current Disney Chief Executive Robert Iger, who announced in 2011 his intention to step down from that position in 2015, the two longtime Disney employees two years ago swapped jobs at Mr. Iger’s behest. In the coming year, each is expected to oversee ambitious plans that will telegraph their potential to lead one of the world’s biggest media companies.

Mr. Staggs, chairman of the theme parks and resorts business, will shepherd development of Shanghai Disneyland, part of a $4.4 billion Disney resort that broke ground in April.

Mr. Rasulo, Disney’s chief financial officer, must position the company to measure up to the results of its most recent fiscal year, for which it posted record profit and revenue, as the company pushes into not just China but also media markets in India and Russia.

Fu Chengyu | Sinopec

The top executives of China’s major state-owned companies often seem faceless and interchangeable, in part because authorities frequently shuffle them among different firms.

Nevertheless, Sinopec Chairman Fu Chengyu stands out for his aggressive attitude toward deals and his global ambitions.

Mr. Fu, 60 years old, is best known for running Cnooc Ltd. when it made its audacious, and unsuccessful, 2005 bid to acquire California-based Unocal. Now in a similar position at China Petroleum & Chemical Corp., or Sinopec, Mr. Fu has led a series of acquisition attempts around the globe this year.

Whether he can significantly broaden the company beyond China—and whether he can pull off an unusual unsolicited bid for China Gas Holdings Ltd.—remains to be seen.

Ginni Rometty | IBM

On Jan. 1, International Business Machines Corp. will embark on a new era with its first woman at the helm. Virginia M. Rometty, now in her 30th year at IBM, got the nod after shepherding the company’s expansion into high-level consulting and emerging markets.

Chief on her priority list is to continue to drive IBM’s growth initiatives around enterprise software and cloud computing and to achieve greater focus on emerging markets.

At the same time, Ms. Rometty, 54, will have to navigate a turbulent global economy and major shifts in the way companies use technology.

She doesn’t plan any near-term changes to IBM’s strategy, business model or financial road map, she said in an October interview when she was named CEO.

Still, Ms. Rometty knows it is critical that IBM never stop reinventing itself, some advice given to her by outgoing CEO Samuel J. Palmisano, who will remain chairman.

Abilio Diniz | Pão de Açúcar

Abilio Diniz spent a lifetime building up Brazil’s largest supermarket chain, Pão de Açúcar, battling his competitors, his family and his friends every step of the way.

At a moment of financial weakness in the last decade, he agreed to sell his empire to France’s Casino SA, but that complex transaction culminates in 2012, when Mr. Diniz, 74, must hand over a single crucial share to give Casino control.

In 2011, the audacious executive sought to keep his company, going behind Casino’s back to cut a deal with the French firm’s fiercest rival, Carrefour SA. The bid failed, but no one believes that has dissuaded Mr. Diniz, and plenty more fireworks are expected before the deadline next June.

Meg Whitman | H-P

Former eBay Inc. CEO and California gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman faces her toughest task yet in 2012: turning around Hewlett-Packard Co.

Ms. Whitman was named CEO of the struggling computer and printer giant in September and so far has aimed to undo the damage created by her predecessor, Leo Apotheker, including putting the kibosh on a proposed split-off of the company’s PC business.

Ms. Whitman has made it clear she plans to generate steady profits as opposed to making big strategic bets that take H-P into far-flung areas. To that end, she’s already lowered the bar, setting conservative profit targets and declining to provide full-year revenue guidance.

Jack Ma | Alibaba Group

Jack Ma, chairman of China’s largest e-commerce empire, Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., has become a key figure in the uncertain fate of Yahoo Inc., which owns a roughly 40% stake in his company.

Mr. Ma holds the right of first offer to take over Yahoo’s shares in Alibaba, and the executive has made no secret of his intention to get at least some of that stake back. That gives him significant say over the U.S. company’s single most valuable asset.

At home in China, Mr. Ma is trying to stay ahead of the game as competition rises for the first time against his massive online shopping sites, Taobao Marketplace and Taobao Mall, which rival eBay.com in terms of transaction value.

This year, he circumvented his board, including his two biggest investors, Yahoo and Japan’s Softbank, in a decision to transfer ownership of a key subsidiary to a separate company he controlled. Mr. Ma said he made the move to comply with regulations on online payment services but the decision brought him into the debate over Chinese corporate governance issues and heightened concerns that the government may try to further limit foreign investment in the nation’s high-flying Internet sector.

Jobs was all about mass personalization. The ubiquitous i of the iMac, iPhone, and iPad signaled individual as well as interactive in the user-friendly products he spawned.

In democratizing a technical field, Steve Jobs was the Henry Ford of his time. He turned computers into consumer products affordable by billions. Apple wasn’t the biggest company — although Jobs lived to see a glorious moment when Apple’s market cap shot ahead of Exxon’s to be number one. But Apple consistently pushed the industry to change, playing the role of feisty fresh-faced free thinker. Apple was always a counterculture challenging establishments and going for the future — like the early emphasis on getting Apples into classrooms to help kids learn. Jobs was a co-founder but emerged as the business as well as technical leader. He didn’t put his name on the door, although the Macintosh was named after his favorite apple, and company style reflected his tastes.

That was Apple round I. Jobs also had a comeback story rivaling any in business, a model for leadership development. He lured a former PepsiCo executive, John Scully, to the young Apple company, as his “adult supervision,” only to find himself pushed out, in part due to excesses in the Mac division he headed. For a time it looked like Jobs was another faded icon, dabbling in a set of ventures hoping to recapture former glory or looking to prove Apple wrong. But he took advantage of opportunities, learned, and grew. He headed Pixar, a star in computer animation, and founded Next Computer. Next turned out to be his ticket back to Apple, when the underlying technology was sold to Apple.

His leadership pause refreshed and broadened him. As CEO of Apple round II, Jobs built a bigger and even more innovative company and it soared. Under the mature Jobs, Apple now understood how to enlist developers and other partners. Job’s new bite of the Apple created products and platforms that made the computer less important than the content. He led the company into devices of the future, grabbing initial leadership in smartphones, and perhaps saved the online music business in passing. Even the Apple-Microsoft rivalry reflected the kind of competition that spurs innovation.

Jobs didn’t start a dynasty, and he didn’t take on world problems. He focused on Apple. He won’t be known for the charitable foundations bearing his name or the good done afterwards but for the value created through new products during his lifetime. Jobs brought design from backroom to forethought, shook industry boundaries, challenged giants, and excited consumers. That is an enormous legacy that will stand the test of history.

Thanks to Rosabeth Moss Kanter of the Harvard Business Review for the content of this story.

Genius Idea: Although review sites can be handy while trying to secure a last-minute hotel reservation or — deep breath — finding a hair salon in a new neighborhood, nothing evokes more confidence than taking the recommendation of a friend whose tastes you know and trust. But there doesn’t yet exist a convenient platform or library for sharing and storing recommendations with your friends.

Enter Stamped, a Google Ventures-backed iPhone app launched by a team of (mostly) former Google employees this week. The app, which is coming soon to other smartphone platforms as well as the desktop, lets you keep track of and share the things you like. You can also tap into the recommendations of your contacts and well-known tastemakers, such as chef Mario Batali (an advisor to the startup) and New York magazine.

It works like this: After downloading the app, you’re given 100 stamps, which you can use to recommend restaurants, books, movies and albums, among other things. You can also see what your friends are recommending by authorizing the app to pull in your contacts from your phone, Facebook and Twitter. If someone likes your recommendation, he or she can give it an additional stamp, and you’ll earn two more stamps to give out. Recommendations can also be liked and saved to a do-list.

Pulling up your friends’ recommendations is easy. You can browse by category (such as books) or location (including nearby), the latter of which is displayed conveniently on Google Maps. You can also search for terms like “sushi” or “iPhone app” to hone in further.

“People are very prone to sharing and exchanging, there just wasn’t an efficient way to do it,” says cofounder Bart Stein of his team’s desire to create the app.

Like many a startup entrepreneur, CEO and cofounder Robby Stein (who, according to Stamped’s about page, is not Bart’s brother) says he and his team are “100% focused on building a product that delights our users.” They have, however, also recognized immediate opportunities for revenue. When you see a recommendation for a restaurant for instance, you can click through to book a reservation on OpenTable. Likewise, you can purchase movie tickets through Fandango, books through Amazon and songs through iTunes. Stamped has an affiliate relationship with each provider.

So there you have it: a truly useful, beautifully designed app — with a plausible business model — from a talented, well-backed set of young entrepreneurs. This is hands-down one of the most promising startups I’ve seen all year.

Thanks to Lauren Indvik of Mashable for this article!

Over the years, I’ve become a student of sorts of Jobs’ career and life. Here’s my take on the rules and values underpinning his success. Any of us can adopt them to unleash our “inner Steve Jobs.”

1. Do what you love. Jobs once said, “People with passion can change the world for the better.” Asked about the advice he would offer would-be entrepreneurs, he said, “I’d get a job as a busboy or something until I figured out what I was really passionate about.” That’s how much it meant to him. Passion is everything.

2. Put a dent in the universe. Jobs believed in the power of vision. He once asked then-Pepsi President, John Sculley, “Do you want to spend your life selling sugar water or do you want to change the world?” Don’t lose sight of the big vision.

3. Make connections. Jobs once said creativity is connecting things. He meant that people with a broad set of life experiences can often see things that others miss. He took calligraphy classes that didn’t have any practical use in his life — until he built the Macintosh. Jobs traveled to India and Asia. He studied design and hospitality. Don’t live in a bubble. Connect ideas from different fields.

4. Say no to 1,000 things. Jobs was as proud of what Apple chose not to do as he was of what Apple did. When he returned in Apple in 1997, he took a company with 350 products and reduced them to 10 products in a two-year period. Why? So he could put the “A-Team” on each product. What are you saying “no” to?

5. Create insanely different experiences. Jobs also sought innovation in the customer-service experience. When he first came up with the concept for the Apple Stores, he said they would be different because instead of just moving boxes, the stores would enrich lives. Everything about the experience you have when you walk into an Apple store is intended to enrich your life and to create an emotional connection between you and the Apple brand. What are you doing to enrich the lives of your customers?

6. Master the message. You can have the greatest idea in the world, but if you can’t communicate your ideas, it doesn’t matter. Jobs was the world’s greatest corporate storyteller. Instead of simply delivering a presentation like most people do, he informed, he educated, he inspired and he entertained, all in one presentation.

7. Sell dreams, not products. Jobs captured our imagination because he really understood his customer. He knew that tablets would not capture our imaginations if they were too complicated. The result? One button on the front of an iPad. It’s so simple, a 2-year-old can use it. Your customers don’t care about your product. They care about themselves, their hopes, their ambitions. Jobs taught us that if you help your customers reach their dreams, you’ll win them over.

There’s one story that I think sums up Jobs’ career at Apple. An executive who had the job of reinventing the Disney Store once called up Jobs and asked for advice. His counsel? Dream bigger. I think that’s the best advice he could leave us with. See genius in your craziness, believe in yourself, believe in your vision, and be constantly prepared to defend those ideas.

Skeptical? Before I explain why, let’s get something out of the way.

Siri is a voice recognition app, but voice recognition is just the underlying tool that drives the app. Even though it does appear to work better than other voice recognition software, the key to Siri is what it does with the voice it recognizes: It can update your calendar, check the weather, set reminders, play music, and write and send emails and texts, etc.

My kid already uses Siri to send most of his texts and emails (except when he’s in school; there he still uses the “hands under the desk while pretending to listen attentively” move perfected by students everywhere.)

Overcoming the initial use threshold meant he quickly started using Siri to do more things. Now he doesn’t open as many apps since Siri chooses which app, service, or site will best handle the task he wants to complete. The result is a ripple effect where SIri will increasingly replace his use of apps and tools—including the likelihood he’ll open a browser window and search using Google or Yahoo or Bing.

Does that mean the search engines are in trouble? Not really. Over time much of the data users access will still come from search engines. Siri doesn’t use Google results, but similar Android-based tools obviously will. And Google will certainly adapt to changing user behaviors.

But what it does mean is that your current SEO strategies will have to adapt and change as well. For example, Siri and similar apps to come:

• Will often bypass search altogether. Ask Siri to “find the closest Italian restaurant” and the result is based on your current location and data from Yelp. Clawing your SEO way to the top spot on Google for “Philadelphia Italian restaurant” won’t matter.
• Will place added emphasis on local. As a result, savvy small businesses that don’t rely on e-commerce will spend even more time optimizing listings on Foursquare, Yelp, Facebook Places, etc. For example, Yelp recommendations are currently embedded in Siri responses, so Yelp optimization matters more than SEO.
• Will make PPC irrelevant. Without a search engine involved, there is no PPC. If you rely heavily on PPC campaigns to drive traffic, your total ad serves could steadily decline.
• May change the social media marketing landscape. Say you own a bed and breakfast. Your inn has a number of great reviews on TripAdvisor, partly because you offer incentives to guests who post a review. That’s awesome… but what if the (eventual) Android version of Siri only includes results fromTravelPost? If that happens, a major chunk of social media marketing disappears.

So what should you do?

If you run a small business, keep working to improve SEO results on major search engines but spend the majority of your time focused on optimizing listings on Google Places, Yelp, Foursquare, Epinions… because more and more, your customers won’t be hanging out on search engines.

Now, with Google also in the mobile handset arena, the stakes have changed a bit. Apple’s former CEO Steve Jobs saw the introduction of an Android device, by HTC, that felt very similar to the iPhone as a move that amounted to “grand theft” and reportedly declared that he would go to “thermonuclear war” with Google over it.

Since then, Android has continued to grow and now has the largest install base of any mobile operating system (on smartphones), with iOS sitting in the second spot. Both of these OSs have a massive lead on any potential competition as Windows Phone 7 has yet to gain any real traction, webOS is on the brink of fading away forever and BlackBerry has gone off the deep end.

Being reliant on a competitor’s products, especially one as contentious as Android is to iOS, is never a great idea, and you can be sure that Apple knows it. Android devices, of course, have access to all of the same Google products that the iPhone does, and more, but there is a key difference.

By using Google’s services, Apple is effectively supporting their competitor’s products to the tune of 250M installed devices.

This is something that has to change and Apple knows it. This is why it is currently working, as it has been doing since 2009, to divest itself of as much of Google’s products as it can.

Siri and Search

When the iPhone was launched, Google won a bidding war with Microsoft to make its search product the default on the iPhone over Bing. This was revealed during a Senate Antitrust hearing over Google’s dominance in the search industry.

This battle to be the default provider on Apple’s iOS devices happened before Android was announced by Google, indeed, before it was ever in the form that we know today. You can bet that if Google had a rival mobile operating system at the time, it would have been a much tougher play to get Apple to go that way.

That being said, Google was by far the dominant search engine at that time and still remains so in many ways today.

So what is the best way for Apple to combat competition in something that is as basic a need as search? By pulling a play from Google’s own book.

With Siri, Apple is showing off its new search strategy in a big way. Siri launched with two content partners, Yelp and Wolfram Alpha, that allow it to deliver query results directly to those asking for it.

If you ask Siri for a restaurant nearby, you aren’t taken to a Google results page with restaurants by location, instead you’re provided with a simple list based on your query that contains information and star ratings provided by Yelp.

This behavior is the exact same manner in which Google behaves if it ‘thinks’ it can give you a direct answer to your query rather than directing to you a page on another site that contains the answer. Examples of this are product searches, directions and stock quotes. Queries to those return the Google-provided result right at the top, and all other results from the web right below it.

This behavior actually got Google in some hot water with senators wanting to know how Schmidt thought that this couldn’t be construed as an unfair advantage.

But that advantage is exactly what Apple is after with Siri. Apple isn’t going to stop with just two content partners. I’ve talked about the future of Siri at length before, but the first move that we’ll see, once the service has been stabilized, is Apple signing on more content partners by the bushel.

Soon, you’ll be able to search for just about anything that you’ll want to find and have the Siri results delivered to you directly, rather than being pushed out to a Google search.

It’s an incredibly smart move that manages to combine introducing a next-generation user interface, voice, with breaking Google’s hold on search results from iOS devices.

This move is such a good one, in fact, that Google’s Chariman Eric Schmidt recently told that same Senate Subcommittee that it was a ‘serious competitive threat‘ to Google’s business of mobile search.

Now, it can be argued that Schmidt, who is in charge of a company that basically has a stranglehold on search at the moment, was merely trying to drum up some false competition to get his company out of an antitrust scrape.

But the strategy makes sense. Apple is working its hardest to divest itself of Google search and Siri is the best first step.

Out beyond Siri, I see a partnership with Microsoft as the next logical break. I don’t know the terms of Google’s deal with Apple for search, but Schmidt mentioned thatthe deal was ‘extended’ in June of last year.

But that mention came shortly after Apple introduced Microsoft’s Bing as a search option on its iPhone and iPad devices with the release of iOS 4 (and the iPad equivalent).

In the end, all it would take is for that deal to run out and for Apple to flip the default search option over to Bing to make the iPhone a nearly Google-search-free platform overnight.

Maps

Another way in which Google is heavily intertwined into iOS is with the deal that it has to license its map data to Apple.

I’ve spoken to two sources, one at Google and one at a company that produces Apple-competing mobile devices and they both told me that Google licenses map data exclusively to Apple outside of its own Android food chain.

This means that other mobile devices that don’t run Android, like the now-defunct HP Touchpad, couldn’t use Google maps data, even if they wanted to.

In addition, Apple only licenses the data, period. It has built its own proprietary system for handling that data and all of the framework you see in action in the Maps app is Apple’s. Only the raw data and satellite images are Google’s.

Because advertising money doesn’t play a huge role in an embedded Maps app with its own special sauce for displaying results, the issue of replacing maps on the iPhone is likely a bigger deal for Apple than it is for Google.

This is why Apple has been quietly building its own solution for maps since at least 2009. That is when it acquired small but innovative maps company Placebase and started up its own ‘GEO Team’.

Since then, Apple has continued to make small purchases in the mapping arena,snagging Google Earth competitor Poly9 in July of 2010 and wicked 3D mapping company C3 Technologies in August of this year.

During the location tracking brouhaha earlier this year, Apple mentioned that it was gathering anonymous data for an ‘improved traffic service’ that it would be able to offer iPhone users within the ‘next couple of years’.

This traffic service would provide an Apple-supplied layer of traffic data on maps, rather than Google’s. This layering of map data was one of the core technologies of Placebase’s mapping technology.

It is likely that this traffic service will be aided by the additional accuracy of the iPhone 4S GPS system, which now incorporates Russian GLONASS satellites.

The mapping deal was renewed as recently as this year according to Schmidt, but once again, no one knows the time period involved. You can bet that Apple was thinking about just how much work it had to do on its own solution when it extended the deal though.

YouTube

YouTube is probably the one area where Apple doesn’t care about Google integration one way or another. People like their YouTube videos, but usually they are discovered via an inbound link from Twitter, Facebook or the web.

Would it be a huge deal if, when you clicked on a YouTube link, it just played in the iOS video player and not in a dedicated YouTube app? I don’t know, perhaps for some heavy YouTube users who like to comment and rate videos.

Google’s web app for YouTube is actually really excellent though, and I just don’t see this being a huge sticking point for either company.

I’d expect to see YouTube continue to appear on your iPhone’s home screen unless some deal with Google went sour due to Apple’s other moves to ditch Google products. Once again the lack of advertising here makes this a more attractive feature for Apple than it does for Google, who could play pre-roll ads and more via their web app.

In the distant future? Perhaps an iCloud-based video sharing service that is truly personal, for friends and family only, rather than the public bucket that most of YouTube is.

I just don’t see Apple encroaching directly on YouTube territory with this one. My bet is to see this stick around.

Does Google Care if it Gets Locked out?

But, you might say, Google has its own massive platform that it can use to gather revenue and search queries. It’s even bigger than Apple’s! Why would it care if Apple decided to go ‘Google free’?

By some numbers, Google accounts for 97% of all mobile search queries, which is a massive, if not incredibly surprising number. But it turns out that 2/3 of that number originates on iOS devices, not Android.

This means that Microsoft could literally become the market leader in mobile search overnight, if Apple decided to make a deal that appointed Bing as the iPhone’s mobile search engine.

But it’s not just volume of searches that is the issue. Remember that Google is a company that makes its primary living on search ad revenue, period. While Google’s desktop search business is in good shape, it is clear that mobile is going to become the default way that most of the people in the world access the internet, sooner rather than later.

Right now Google makes some $2.5B a year in revenue in mobile, most of it from mobile ads, and the search numbers mean that a large chunk of that comes from iOS devices.

The revenue from ads isn’t a 1:1 correlation to search queries, of course. But it does give us a basic yardstick that we can use to gauge how much of a market Google stands to lose along with the iOS platform.

Android is growing at a rapid clip, with some 550K activations every day, and every one of those is a potential source of advertising revenue for Google.

But iOS is growing too and the numbers show that far more browsing is done on iOS devices than on Android. Due to this, the impact on Google’s mobile revenue from Apple divesting itself of ties could be massive, even bigger than that “2/3″ number would imply.

Terms

It’s clear at this point that Apple is taking strides to rid itself of a reliance on Google services, and that it is doing so with a multi-pronged approach across its OS. It’s just a matter of time before Google loses its toehold on Apple’s devices.

Then we’ll see just how robust a platform Android is for maintaining Google’s mobile business.

When the divorce is finalized, It will be interesting to see who gets the lion’s share of the mobile revenue numbers. I think that the only safe bet at this point is ‘not Google.’