By Bret Moore

Did you happen to go to Google I/O this year? Or perhaps you have made your plans for WWDC this week?

This may sound like jibberish if you are outside of Silicon Valley or the high-tech industry, but these otherwise cryptic acronyms represent the annual developer conferences held by Apple and Google.

They are also ground zero for technology decisions that ? although once limited in interest to the geek elite ? stand to shape your day-to-day lives for years to come.

The two tech titans are currently waging a monumental war for worldwide consumer market share, unrivaled perhaps since the heyday of Coke versus Pepsi.  

However, this time the stakes are even higher.

Flash and the panned
From high-dollar electronics items such as iPhones and iPads to the billions of searches generated by Google?s search engines, the two companies have produced some of the most popular and profitable products of our time. 

In the heat of what has become a gloves-off slugfest between the two, this year seemingly every strategic decision or product announcement has been focused on jockeying for market position and courting the developer ecosystem that creates new applications and content for Apple and Google?s platforms.  

At the recent Google I/O and assuredly at Apple?s WWDC [Worldwide Developers Conference] this week in San Francisco, one of the biggest topics of discussion will be the latest technology battleground: HTML5 versus Flash.

This standards debate is being driven by the mobile Web and the rapid advance of mobile device capabilities ? can you believe we have phones with 1 GHz processors now?

With the steady march of smartphones from niche to mass market, consumers now legitimately expect their phones to provide flashier, more exciting experiences than their trusty computers. 

On the desktop, these experiences have been the domain of Flash, Adobe?s popular content authoring system. 

The technology that powers audio and video on the Web has been a curious holdout on mobile. 

Flash-enabled Web sites such as YouTube, Hulu and countless others are unavailable on smartphones due to a lack of Flash support, most notably on the industry-leading iPhone.

This has been due to challenges in getting Flash to work well on low-powered mobile devices, as well as a lack of interest on Apple?s part.

This indifference recently blossomed into an all-out attack by Apple, which banned the use of Flash tools to create apps for the iPhone and kick-started a groundswell movement to HTML5, a new standard for delivering rich content.

To drive the point home, Apple went after one of Flash?s strongholds ? the advertising community ? by creating iAd, a new mobile ad platform based exclusively on HTML5 technology.  

High on five
Meanwhile, across town Google has been readying ?Froyo,? a major update to its fast-growing Android mobile platform which will include Flash support.

You would be hard-pressed to find anyone who is not itching to try it out and see Flash in action on a mobile browser. This update should immediately enable scores of Flash-enabled Web sites on Android phones.

Even so, Google ironically embraced the HTML5 standard at its recent I/O conference, going so far as to thank Apple for pushing its agenda forward.  

For the future-minded, HTML5 certainly provides the best of both worlds: rich, engaging content for consumers and standards based technology optimized for mobile.

HTML5 also provides exciting new capabilities such as location detection ? which we are using at WhitePages as part of our latest mobile Web site design.  

However, for the many existing Web sites with embedded Flash content, even the combined urging of Apple and Google may not be enough to compel them to recreate their sites to support the new format.

In the meantime, iPhone owners may be left envying their Android-toting counterparts.

In the crosshairs is Adobe, the creators of Flash, which recently launched an aggressive campaign  pleading the case of consumer choice and freedom to use whatever platform publishers, agencies and developers wish.   

Perhaps lost in the shuffle is the most important constituent of all ? the consumer.  

Consumer focus
The tech industry has long strived to put consumers first , but it is easy to be distracted by strategic objectives,  revenue goals and technology agendas.

Many brands have fumbled and failed at balancing these competing interests, while a select few such as Apple and Google have succeeded, usually by making consumer needs a top priority.

It is a challenge to all tech companies and product professionals to keep this consumer focus.

The HTML5 versus Flash skirmish is just the latest example of how behind-the-scenes battles can affect what products are made available in the market. It also illustrates the central role the mobile Web is playing in shaping the future of technology products.

Bret Moore is director of mobile at WhitePages, Seattle. Reach him at .