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Foodspotting and Zagat Survey, two major food focused brands we’ve featured here before, have today announced an iPhone app integration move that pretty much sets the pace for mobile social dining in the future (You listening Michelin?).

Zagat, who has previously hooked up with Foursquare, is the first partner to utilize Foodspotting data in their apps using the Foodspotting API. Because of the move, Zagat users will now have access to thousands of Foodspotting photos and guides. Foodspotting CEO Alexa Andrzejewski suggests that the partnership will be the first of many, hinting that the Foodspotting API will be open to the public very soon.

To celebrate the partnership, Foodspotting users will now be able to earn a “Zagat badge” (see top left) when they add food photos to the Foodspotting app from any Zagat-rated restaurant in San Francisco, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York.

From Andrzejewski:

“We’re excited to have Zagat be the first partner to leverage Foodspotting data to enhance their restaurant listings. By integrating Foodspotting photos, the Zagat apps will not only be a great resource for helping people decide where to eat, but they’ll also help you decide what to eat once you’re there.”

Zagat Mobile Lead Ryan Charles told TechCrunch that the integration leaves room for many co-branded opportunities, “Looking down the road, we plan to add special offers including promotional access to our website for Foodspotting users who complete the badge related tasks.”

The full Zagat/Foodspotting integration will be available on future versions of both mobile applications.

The two parties did not disclose the terms of the deal.

Like many projects in Silicon Valley (see: Twitter), Chrome To Phone started as a mere side project at Google.

Dave Burke, Google’s Engineering Manager for Mobile and the chief architect for Chrome To Phone, was just tinkering around with Google’s third party developer tools in his free time. Fascinated by the divide between mobile and desktop, he stumbled upon Chrome To Phone. “I created an early version that I sent around internally, and then I started getting sort of notes and e-mails from people going ‘Wow, this is really useful, thanks for creating it!’ And over time people started using it more and more because it really just addresses a need today and I guess it just generated some momentum after that,” Burke says.

On Thursday, Google officially launched Chrome to Phone to the public, it’s a useful extension that allows you to push information, like web pages, phone numbers and maps directly from your Chrome browser to your Android phone. Burke says this is just the beginning, he has a laundry list of functions he plans to build. Next up? An update that will reverse the path, to Phone To Chrome. And yes, he’s already working on it.

“We get quite a few suggestions for enhancements so the first one that came out was: “Chrome to Phone is great when can i have Phone To Chrome. So this is the reverse case, you’re on your phone, you see an interesting article, and you want to take it to your desktop,” Burke says. High on his to-do list is also a feature that will let you access the history of your actions, so you can quickly pull up an old link or map on your phone.

There has also been chatter on the web, as to whether Chrome To Phone could evolve into a TV remote type of device— especially given the impending launch of Google TV. For example, with a “Chrome to TV” extension, you could pull up a video on your laptop’s/iPad’s browser and then push it to your Google TV, essentially turning your computing device into a very large remote. After our video interview, I asked Burke about the concept, he said Google isn’t working on it yet but it does make a lot of sense.

See above for our full interview with Burke above. Below is a 2-minute demo video.

If newspapers came with warning labels, they might look something like the ones Tom Scott came up with. The British “geek comedian” created warning stickers you can print out and put on newspapers (PDF below). They include:

Warning: This article is basically just a press release, copied and pasted.

Warning: To meet a deadline, this article was plagiarised from another news source.

Too bad you can’t stick these on blogs (present one excluded, of course).

(Hat tip to Nick Bilton)

As soon as the rumor broke that Apple would be renaming its struggling Apple TV to iTV, to better fit with the company’s i[Device] naming system, I thought to myself, “Isn’t ITV the name of a television network in England that always misses key goals in soccer games?” Yes, yes it is. In fact, the network isn’t too keen on Apple using the name iTV, and has promised to “vigorously defend” its IP.