Business Week is reporting that Apple and Microsoft have been in talks over the past few weeks about brining Microsoft’s search engine, Bing, to the iPhone as the default search engine. The position is currently held by Google, but through recent events between Apple and Google, Apple might be pushing away from Google. Google is also the default search engine on Apple’s desktop version of Safari.

Also, recent reports show that Apple is planning to remove the Google Maps application from the iPhone OS. It is unlikely that Apple would leave out a map application in OS 4.0, possibly substituting it with Bing Maps or their own map application made by Placebase, a company that Apple bought not too long ago.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Apple and Google are becoming more competitive than we had suspected. According to their sources, Google was also in serious negotiations with Lala Media for possible acquisition right before Apple won the bid. Meanwhile, we had previously reported that Apple was in serious talks with Admob immediately prior to Google’s acquisition of that company.

The twin pursuit of the start-ups reveal that the two tech titans have further plans to move deeper into each other’s business: Apple wanted to get into advertising, while Google sought a music service.

Only time will tell whether these two companies will become enemies or not

Apple released four software updates, one AirPort client update for Snow Leopard users and three firmware updates addressing optical disk drive noise on a number of computers.

- AirPort Client Update 2009-002 (12.95 MB) addresses several issues experienced by users of Mac OS X Snow Leopard related to wireless networking.

This update is recommended for all Macintosh computers running Mac OS X Snow Leopard 10.6.2 and includes fixes for the following:

- Inability to turn AirPort on or off in some cases after upgrading from Mac OS X Leopard
- An occasional loss of network connection when using Wake on Demand
- Inability to create a computer-to-computer network, or share the Internet connection on some MacBook, MacBook Pro, and Mac mini computers

- Individual firmware updates for the MacBook (MacBook EFI Firmware Update 1.4, 3.14 MB) and MacBook Pro (MacBook Pro EFI Firmware Update 1.8, 3.36 MB) work with the separate SuperDrive Firmware Update 3.0 (18.35 MB) to address optical disk drive noises on Apple computers.

This update will eliminate the noise made by the optical disk drive during system startup and wake from sleep on your Mac. This update works with the following EFI updates:

iMac EFI Firmware Update 1.4
Mac mini EFI Firmware Update 1.2
MacBook EFI Firmware Update 1.4
MacBook Pro EFI Firmware Update 1.8

Full details on the SuperDrive firmware update are available in the associated support document.

A great thing about dialing “411″ on your cell phone is that you can get information, phone numbers, addresses of the businesses that you are looking for. For example, Best Buy. However, the major down side to using “411″ is that most cell phone networks charge for this feature.

Google has created a free “411″ service for all types of phones called, “GOOG411″. To use GOOG411, just dial 1-800-GOOG-411 from any phone, state the location and business type, GOOG411 automatically searches Google, connect to the business and that’s it! It’s all for free too!