The "anti-software" company joins forces with one of the biggest small-business software makers out there, striking another blow on behalf of the cloud.

Image via CrunchBase

Salesforce.com's (CRM) future depends on rapid expansion of its customer relationship management business and its ability to become the platform of choice for developers of cloud-based business applications.

But the company can't do it all alone. That's why this morning Salesforce.com announced a strategic partnership with Intuit, maker of QuickBooks. The popular accounting software is used by 4.5 million small businesses. Under the agreement, Intuit will resell Salesforce.com's CRM through its App Center. Customers will be able to synchronize customer data with QuickBooks and QuickBooks online, a web-based version of its software

The partnership is good news for Salesforce.com, which is hoping to penetrate Intuit's customer base of small businesses with CRM. But that's just the beginning.

"CRM is the Trojan horse," says Brad Zelnick, vice president and senior software analyst with Macquarie Group. "With CRM Salesforce is able to land and expand and go deeper into corporations." More

Starting, I suppose, with the company's founding on April 1, 1976

Click to enlarge. Source: ThinkGeek

Geeky April Fool Day jokes are not my cup of tea. I'm more of a salt in the sugar bowl, electrical tape on the sink sprayer kind of guy. But given Apple's (AAPL) historic link to the first of April, it's hard to let the 35th anniversary of the company's founding go by without a tip of the hat to the two pranksters who started it.

The most elaborate Apple Fools gag we've seen today is ThinkGeek's Playmobil Apple Store, complete with Genius Bar, tiny Macs, iPhones and iPads, and a miniature Steve Jobs holding forth in the in-store auditorium.

But there's plenty more where that came from. Techmeme, TechCrunch and Network World have assembled master lists of today's pranks, and Network World's Paul McNamara has posted an Apple specific list that goes back 35 years.

Also on Fortune.com:

• The CIA discoveres 91 million missing Chinese Internet users
• Report: Apple to absorb quake costs
• How many iPads did Apple sell?

[Follow Philip Elmer-DeWitt on Twitter @philiped]

The only thing more important than whether there is a tech bubble: why we're so obsessed with one.

FORTUNE -- I'm calling a top to the pundit bubble. All week, spurred by Color's gaudy valuation, the tech and economic punditry have continued their months-long monologue about whether or not we're in a tech bubble. Back and forth they went, inflating nothing but their own self-importance as they jostled to be the one on the right side of history. (Call it the Roubini Effect.)

The only way to keep track is to grab a napkin and keep a running bubble pro/con list. Put it right next to that million-dollar startup idea you wrote down during lunch. More

The Mint.com founder now runs a big part of Intuit and invests in startups on the side. Here, his take on Jack Dorsey's Square and the one investment on which he's glad to take a pass.

If you're not one of the 5.6 million active users on Mint.com, we suggest you give it a long, hard look, because even the most business savvy can benefit from its services, whether it's saving up for a summer vacation to Hawaii or receiving email reminders when users pass self-imposed monthly allowances. Mint makes personal finance a bit less painful.

These days, 30-year-old founder Aaron Patzer has more on the brain than just Mint, which was acquired by Intuit in late 2009 for a reported $170 million. As Intuit's Vice President of Personal Finance, he helms a $130 million-a-year division and a staff of 100 that handles brands like Quicken, Quicken Bill Pay, and PayTrust.

We caught up with Patzer earlier this week at Intuit's Innovation Gallery Walk event in Manhattan, where he reflected on the last year or so post-Mint.com acquisition and offered up some personal savings tips as tax day fast approaches.

Fortune: It's been about a year and a half since Mint.com got bought by Intuit. How has the transition been from running a startup to being a part of a larger entity? More

The outgoing Google CEO came up on top of other CEOs including Apple 'CEO of the Decade' Steve Jobs in Glassdoor's CEO approval ratings.

I'm not sure if the date has anything to do with the latest findings from Glassdoor.com, but now former Google (GOOG) CEO Eric Schmidt left his position on top of other tech CEOs.

Glassdoor's results are anything but scientific.  The survey results come from anonymous current and former employees, interviewed candidates, and even the companies themselves.  However, the numbers seem to trend with the relative success of the companies involved.

Following Eric Schmidt (96% approval rating up from 93%) and Jobs (95% down from 98%) are Amazon's (AMZN) Jeff Bezos (83% down from 87%) and Oracle's (ORCL) Larry Ellison (73% down from 77%).  There has been some tumult in Ellison's life and his war with HP(HPQ) and Java suit with Google might have turned off a few employees.

Yahoo's Carol Bartz was the biggest loser having dropped from 77% to 50%.  That puts her in the same leave with Microsoft's (MSFT) Steve Ballmer (40% - the lowest - down from 46%)  and Dell's (DELL) Michael Dell who climbed from 36% to 48%.

Mark Zuckerberg was not ranked in this poll, though Glassdoor had put Facebook at the top of places to work in a poll late last year.

Full size graph below the fold: More

It might be just me, but this gag from Google reminds me of the Kinect demonstration that Microsoft gave at CES.

One of Google's (GOOG) gags today is a new way to operate Gmail - with your body movements. (be sure to check out the motion for sending an email)

That's amusing, but it reminds me of Microsoft's (MSFT) Kinect demonstration, below:

More

The Agency's country-by-county Internet count plays catch-up to Wikipedia

Click to enlarge. Data: CIA World Factbook

The last time we visited the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency's World Factbook -- a document that is supposed to be updated every week -- its "country comparison" list of Internet users seemed woefully out of date. Specifically, its December count of Internet users in China (298 million) differed from Wikipedia's (425 million) by 127 million people.

Wikipedia's numbers struck us as more credible for several reasons, and apparently the Agency agreed.

In February it issued an update that caught up to the user-generated encyclopedia, in some cases lifting its numbers from the same sources Wikipedia used. The most striking example is Nigeria, where the CIA counted 11 million users in December and Wikipedia counted 43,985,000 -- a 300% discrepancy. In the CIA's new database, Nigeria's Internet population is listed as 43,989,000.

As for China, there's a still a discrepancy of more than 60 million. But the CIA's new count (389 million) has come more than half way to meet Wikipedia's, thanks to the Agency's discovery of 91 million Chinese Internet users it missed the last time.

All this matters because many companies -- whether they know it or not -- rely on the U.S. government to stay on top of these things. Apple (AAPL), for example, likes to cite NetApplications to show how rapidly its Internet share is growing. NetApplications, in turns, weighs the county-by-county data it collects from client websites using -- you guessed it -- the CIA Factbook.

Below: The CIA's current list of the top 50 Internet countries (and the increase from December).

More

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Yep, Google wants to know your face with a new mobile app. Photo: CNN

Google tries to clean up Android, telling carriers and manufacturers that they can't get too crazy with their modifications. So it gets whacked by pundits. Damned if you do...?

It's hard for Andy Rubin and his Android creation to catch a fair break.  Partnering with just about every carrier and smartphone manufacturer, Android has come from nowhere to be the dominant OS in the smartphone industry in under three years.  Windows Mobile was scrapped, Symbian was cut and now Blackberry and Windows Phone 7 are in a fight to gain some pittance of market share against the surging Android.

Android's growth has even made Apple's iPhone, which continues to grow in numbers, flat in market share.

When I go into a Best Buy (BBY) nowadays, I see about 40 Android devices next to a few feature phones, an odd BlackBerry or Windows Phone 7 and a few iPhones.  Walk into a Radio Shack or most U.S. carrier showrooms and you'll see the same thing.

So you'd think the news would constantly be on what Android is doing right?

That's hardly the case. More

The newly released HTC Thunderbolt is keeping pace with the Verizon iPhone, at least according to Verizon store reps.

4Gs.

Some people have just got to have them.  Most people agree that the ThunderBolt isn't the best Android device on the market today, but its ability to get speeds of over 20Mb/second, faster than many wired ISPs, have people snapping them up.

Barron's quotes BTIG Research analyst Walter Piecyk who ran checks on 150 different Verizon Wireless stores in 22 cities this week:

...in 61% of cases, store reps told Piecyk that sales were about the same; in 11% of cases, the iPhone sales were ahead; in 28% of cases, the Thunderbolt was ahead.

"Clearly the strong sales of the ThunderBolt could be a result of the hype following the recent launch of the ThunderBolt," two weeks ago, he writes. "But the qualitative feedback we received from sales people was an expectation that the ThunderBolt would keep pace with the iPhone."

If you add Verizon's many other Android offerings to the mix and consider that Apple (AAPL) isn't likely to introduce an iPhone 5 until the fall, it seems unlikely that a Verizon iPhone will stop Android's momentum.

So much for the Verizon iPhone effect.

More on Fortune:

• Apple's revamped hardware schedule
• 4G won't solve 3G's problems
• My phone is faster than my cable modem

More