In FileForum, We're hosting a piece of freeware you may have heard about after it became the first TechCrunch Disrupt Cup winner back in May, Soluto.

Soluto, in short, lets users quickly and easily customize the Windows boot process by breaking applications into three categories: Ones that are completely unnecessary to the boot process, ones that are potentially removable, and ones that are absolutely necessary to boot Windows. Soluto collects anonymous user data to give you an idea of what other users do with their applications, so if you have a piece of software that lots of other people pause during startup, you're presented with a pie chart telling you what percentage pauses, and what percentage keeps it in the boot process.

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New data confirms that the Android platform has taken a commanding position in the smartphone market, thanks to wider distribution and a much broader selection of phone models than the iPhone. Data from research firm Canalys indicates that Android phones made up nearly 44 percent of all smartphones sold in the US in the third quarter.

Apple took second spot with 26 percent of the market, and RIM third with a little over 24 percent. Apple can take some solace in the results however: the iPhone still remains the best selling smartphone model by a significant margin.

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ComScore's most recent qSearch Web search market share analysis gave Google 66% of the core search business, with the closest competitor, Yahoo trailing by 50%.

Of the more than 16 billion explicit core searches conducted in September, Google handled 10.6 billion of them. Yahoo sites handled 2.7 billion, Microsoft sites took care of 1.8 billion, Ask Network fielded 593 million, and AOL sites took 362 million.

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In yet another black eye for social networking site Facebook, the site disclosed Friday that several developers were selling user data to a third-party. User IDs, or unique identifiers given to every registered member of the site, allow an application to look up a user's public personal information.

As a result of the discovery the offending developers have been placed on a six-month suspension. While not identifying those at fault, the company did say at least one data broker -- RapLeaf, Inc. -- came forward to assist in the investigation. It was not immediately clear if RapLeaf was the purchasing broker, although it agreed to delete any user IDs in its possession.

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One week from today, the first Windows Phone 7 handsets go on sale in the United States. The international furor is over, but Microsoft's home country remains. The question: "Which Windows Phone 7 smartphone will you buy?" I asked in mid October, and Betanews readers answered in droves. Of course, since we have a global readership some of the respondents may already have purchased their phones. I asked the question before international sales started.

Microsoft's handset partners are offering nine Windws Phone 7 models this year, with a tenth model coming in early 2011. There are five choices here in the United States. On AT&T: LQ Quantum, HTC Surround and Samsung Focus. On T-Mobile: HTC HD7. The Venue Pro is available from Dell. Other models include the HTC Mozart, HTC 7 Pro, HTC 7 Trophy, LG Optimus 7 and Samsung Omnia. The majority of readers responding by e-mail and in comments choose Focus, although the HD7 is close runner up.

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Today, Windows Live Hotmail users will begin to be able to send email from other existing email addresses while using Hotmail.

In the Hotmail Options menu under the heading "Sending/Receiving email from other accounts," users can add their other webmail addresses, and then use hotmail to send and receive messages.

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Keeping true to the promises made by Sprint and Clearwire in October, the New York City WiMAX network was "switched on" today, along with Tampa, Florida, Trenton and New Brunswick, New Jersey, and Hartford and New Haven, Connecticut.

"Sprint is the first national wireless carrier to make 4G a reality for our customers and with the addition of these six new markets we are now in 61 cities, including Chicago, Baltimore and Houston, and are growing. By the end of the year Sprint 4G plans to light up several major new markets including Los Angeles, San Francisco, Miami, Denver and Washington DC to name a few," Matt Carter, president of Sprint 4G said in a statement today.

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Every year, cable companies have to re-negotiate their carriage fees with broadcasters. These negotiations are essentially an evaluation of how much certain channels are worth to the cable company, and then the cable company agreeing to pay a certain amount of money to the broadcasters in exchange for the right to feature those channels in their subscription packages.

In a power play to show the value of its stations, Fox blocked Dish Network from broadcasting 19 Fox Regional Sports Channels for the entire month of October while the two companies negotiated their contracts.

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Despite the fact that Android OS is now outselling iOS devices as a whole according to most surveys, Apple is still managing to stay at the top of the heap in smartphone sales themselves. According to IDC's Worldwide Phone Tracker, Apple is now the fourth biggest manufacturer of phones -- smart or not -- overall.

In the third quarter of this year, the company shipped some 14.1 million units, likely due to strong sales of the iPhone 4. This was an increase of 90 percent over last year, and by far the biggest jump for any manufacturer.

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Well, it's not about customers.

Microsoft has quite aggressively touted HTML5 during PDC 2010, which wraps up today. It's seemingly inconsistent with Microsoft's revamped cloud strategy, which is very much about taking propriety software to the cloud. How then does Microsoft's platform-independent HTML5 approach reconcile with extending the proprietary Office-Windows-Windows Server applications stack into the cloud?

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It should have been a week of relatively good news for the Mozilla organization. The former senior vice president for mobility at enterprise database producer Sybase, Gary Kovacs, signed on to become Mozilla's new CEO next month, replacing John Lilly and serving under Foundation chairperson Mitchell Baker. Having headed up Sybase's mobility and integration efforts during that company's buyout by European software giant SAP last summer, Kovacs is certain to inject a much-needed dose of corporate prestige and structure in to the organization.

But immediately, Kovacs may find himself leading Mozilla's greatest uphill charge in its short history. Its premier product, the Firefox browser, is in the midst of a development cycle that has put it behind all its competitors - including, for the first time, Microsoft - in relative performance. This week, however, the Firefox 4 private betas were making headway, beating both Internet Explorer 9 and Apple Safari/WebKit performance scores, on the way to catching up with Google Chrome and the first alpha builds of Opera 11.

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Apple is now No. 4 in global handset shipments -- not smartphones, but all mobiles. The share gains also put Apple ahead of Research in Motion in third-quarter data that IDC released late yesterday (presumably while I covered Microsoft earnings). Apple's ascension pushed Sony Ericsson out of the top 5 for the first time since IDC started tabulating mobile shipments six years ago. The top 5 achievement is huge validation for Apple, which before the June 2007 release of the original iPhone had no presence in the global handset market.

However, the more significant measure is yet to come, and it might explain comments CEO Steve Jobs made during last week's Apple earnings conference call. Jobs expressed displeasure about how some analyst firms count phones. "Unfortunately there is no solid data on how many Android phones are shipped each quarter," he asserted. "We hope that manufacturers will soon start reporting the number of Android handsets that they ship each quarter. But today that just isn't the case. Gartner reported that around 10 million Android phones were shipped in the June quarter, and we await to see if iPhone or Android was the winner in this most recent quarter."

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[Editor's Note: This was a live document from about 4:36 p.m. EDT to 5:50 p.m. Refresh page for updates.]

Microsoft started fiscal 2011, which first quarter closed on September 30, ahead of analyst consensus. Slower PC shipment growth didn't take the spark out of Windows revenues, and Office 2010 delivered during its first full quarter of license sales. Microsoft announced earnings after the bell, setting a record executives won't be touting: Revenues fell below Apple, by more than $4 billion, yet another sign that the aging Office-Windows-Windows Server applications stack is declining in relevance before cloud-connected mobile devices.

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The Federal Communications Commission announced Thursday that Verizon Wireless will be paying a $25 million settlement to the U.S. Treasury, and a refund to some 15 million customers totaling at least $52.8 million as an answer to the "mystery fees" it has been charging its customers for the last three years.

"Today's consent decree sends a clear message to American consumers: The FCC has got your back," said FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski today. "People shouldn't find mystery fees when they open their phone bills -- and they certainly shouldn't have to pay for services they didn't want and didn't use. In these rough economic times, every $1.99 counts."

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Mint.com today has rolled out the beta of a new service called Mint Data that takes the tons of anonymous shopping data it receives, and turns it into a searchable database of retailers. Similar to the way Amazon's Alexa categorizes the popularity of a website by its unique visitors, total views, and inbound links, Mint Data ranks a retailer's popularity by the average purchase price and number of purchases per month.

The information comes from the anonymous spending data of the more than 4 million Mint users, and Mint breaks it down into which categories people are spending their money on (such as food, dining, entertainment, etc,) the specific businesses that they're patronizing, and the city in which they're spending their money.

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