Today, we get to add Google’s chapter to “Will One Company Dominate the Cloud” introspective series and take a glimpse of the silent revolution from “index” to “be” that is transforming the company and it’s products to the default way to engage the Internet.

As fate has it, Google done us a big favor in preparing for this piece. The company has launched an assault on the enterprise with its movement in the Google App Engine, having a stand-off with China, and negotiating with the EU. And that was just a bit of Google news from this week.

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Whereas it’s a bit more clear where Amazon and Cisco win (our recent analysis) as they head towards the cloud, with Google it takes a bit more expansive view. We have to take the focus out a bit, to be able to dial in on the details.

Acknowledgment: Developers are the Products they Build

We recently had the opportunity to sit down with Tim Bray. He has been a key contributor and thought leader in key areas of interoperability and information design, including his leadership in bringing XML to the world. He recently announced that he’s joining Google and focusing on Android in a transition from Sun.

Several things struck us in our dialog that we think are key for Google.

First, when Bray described his new job at Google, he talked about what he wanted to do and what he saw that needed to be done. Within three days of being there, he has a sense of ownership of the companies products and mission. In some organizations, you may never get such a luxury.

Second, Bray described his opportunity to “roll up his sleeves” and get back in the groove as a developer on a project he feels passion for. He mentioned his desire to take the open APIs of Android and expose some of the information in a more portable way, for example to transfer a call log from one phone to another. A very interesting project, with tangible results. This type of innovation lives on top of all the work the company has done to make the API exist, and to attract individuals who are willing to rethink how it should really work.

We think that open innovation is the most interesting thing about where Google is right now. It’s “open” mantra gives the company the ability to see a whole generation into the future of information channel disruption. And, by bringing in “no holds barred” developers like Bray and a legion of others, the company is patiently solving problems that many of us don’t even know exist.

Lastly, Bray said something that caused us some deep thought.

His comment, “when the Drizzle team was acquired by Rackpace, they just kept working on the their open source project and things stayed nearly the same.”

What caused us to pause was that open source development, whether Linux or XML, gives the developer, as a person, a way to contribute to the world. And it’s documented. If the Internet was the Bible, leading a key open source initiative, is like getting your own chapter in the book. Here, time, will be the judge of your actions. Much better than your manager alone.

To some, their project is their baby. It is nice to know that hard work, intellectual capital, and of course libraries are available to the world after the project is complete. This really speaks to the artist in us, in a way, the paid open source developer is using Google as a canvas.

If working at Google offers this emotional spark to employees to go further, it will gain entirely new efficiencies in solving the big problems. Developers like to contribute to a version of the greater good…and want fans to witness.

What we learned; acknowledgment matters, and connections to the whole population of people is an amazing vehicle offered through open source. Google: you can become an indie rock star – with the strength of your grep.

All of the Information on Earth

Google’s destiny to become the hub of the worlds information is intertwined with history. And this comes with artifacts of policy and posturing. To start with, not everyone agrees that Google should achieve a dominant cloud position. As we’re noticing, stopping it is another matter.

We’d like to suggest that in 2010, the company is not shy about stepping towards its future and will use its power, technology, and cash to stir it up. Here is our list of organizations in the world that Google has, is, or will be, continually bumping into in its quest for cloud information dominance.

• China (counties own the filters for the people)
• ATT (service providers own consumer on the network)
• Penguin (book publishers own the words in the texts)
• Visa (financial institutions own the digits in the transactions)
• Facebook (social networks know the details)
• Amazon (commerce sites own the decision point)
• Twitter (owns “what’s happening”)
• Microsoft (owns the computer applications and files)

Open can be a Key to Unlock Doors

We see both practical and strategic reasons that Google has a deep connection with the open source movement. Strategically, being the new optimized layer, removing all historic barriers to information give the company more leverage. Practically, solutions can be built where information is free.

Reviewing a few examples, such as Google Earth, Android, and even GMail and we see that where there are open protocols and information disruptive products can be built. Once they are built, the Google wields a significant economic advantage in binding the worlds information assets and converting them to eyeballs.

Here, we take a quick look at the information assets that Google is investing the global cloud.

• Results: Google has moved away from Page Rank to “Closest Object” in it’s default results. What this means is that many businesses today show up as widget in the results in google with embedded links, maps, and other efficiencies.
• Ads: This is perhaps the best known and most valuable insight and unique asset, who wants to pay for what customer
• Realtime index: Google has worked to keep up with Twitter’s realtime firehose
• Semantic index: The company continues to add more and more microsyntax parsers into its index, giving more controlled tools for publishers
• GMail: It had to be done. And it is monetized.
• Documents and files: Google Docs and the Apps Marketplace create a whole new stream of information about an individual. Private, personal, and shared.
• Mobile transactions: This is an interesting sample of where Google’s strategy to build the Android OS pays off in the cloud. Not only does Google get to connect mobile to the rest of the offerings, but also to be able to dial in on movements, calls, and other critical tasks in our real-time lives.
• Books: Indexing all of them, first is an interesting piece of the strategy to break apart historic containers of knowledge. Is the book copyrighted? How about the quote?
• Browsers: The browser knows a lot. Google’s Chrome moves it from being default search, to being default experience. This was a great example of where access to information “Faster pages” is the simple value proposition for consumers to switch.
• Filters: Protecting companies, trademarks, and interpreting the legality of free speech. Someone has to do it, if we’re all one people.
• Health transactions: Google has even taken on one of the most sensitive challenges, private health information. And, it’s connections to legacy systems that prefer EDI to JSON.

It’s clear that Google is making progress. What we’ve also learned in this review is that the companies biggest asset – people – may scale to solve problems in lightweight ways that entire teams and companies haven’t been able to in the past. Perhaps being open, or transparent, gives the company a unique advantage in being prepared for a cloud future.

Is the cloud where the action is?

What verb would you be if you were hired at Google?

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Releasing Bing for iPhone Worldwide was an Accident…

Just as it launched this new version of the app, however, Microsoft also pulled the Bing applications from all the non-U.S. versions of the App Store. According to a statement Microsoft sent to Neowin, the company “inadvertently made it available to all countries in which the Apple Marketplace has a presence.” Why it took Microsoft three months to pull the app, which was released in December 2009, remains a bit of a mystery.

New Features

If you are in the U.S., however, the Bing iPhone app remains to be the best way to access Microsoft’s “decision engine” on your phone. The new version now includes a number of interesting new features. One of the most useful features is the app’s ability to let you bookmark maps, websites and direction. Sadly, however, this feature isn’t integrated with Apple’s Safari, so your bookmarks don’t carry over to the iPhone’s default browser.

Other new features include better parental control settings, private search and the ability to edit your search history and support for first generation iPod touch devices.

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This time Fried and Hansson take a more general approach to business by examining the ways that new companies are disrupting traditional business practices and making a big splash. They cover their entrepreneurial bases by reminding us that “no time is no excuse” and that “a business without a path to profit isn’t a business, it’s a hobby,” but then also elaborate on less traditional practices that have helped them succeed.

The main theme of the book is to trim the fat and do fewer things better; simplifying every aspect of your business and doing a smaller number of things at a higher quality is far better than trying to do too much and a mediocre level. There were times when customers of their products wanted more features and they refused to comply because it would slow them down and decrease efficiency. They decry time-stealing meetings, lengthy contracts, childish office politics and bloated inventories because they weigh down companies from reaching their full potential.

Rework is a great read for entrepreneurs because it is very focused and doesn’t waste any time with lengthy use cases. The book itself is an example of the principals it teaches; the quality of a written work is not based on it’s length, so why should company be judged by how many features it offers? Fried and Hansson admit that the book, which comes in at a dense but brief 288 pages, was originally drafted to be nearly twice as long, but why say in 600 pages what you can say under 300? Another reason the book is a great read is because of the authors’ open and honest tone.

“Ever seen those weapons prisoners make out of soap, or a spoon? They make do with what they’ve got,” one passage humorously points out. “Now we’re not saying you should go out and shank somebody, but get creative, and you’ll amazed with what you can make with just a little.”

Other useful and easily digestible analogies for their unique business ideas include comparing your company to a hot dog stand. They advise that the best way to trim down an inflated company is to find the “epicenter” by asking yourself, “If I took this away, would what I’m selling still exist?” The best hot dog stand doesn’t worry about the decorations on the stand, or the condiments – it worries about the hot dogs.

There are dozens of other valuable pieces of advice in Rework that are sure to inspire any entrepreneur or small business owner. But as LeVar Burton famously said at the end of each episode of Reading Rainbow, you don’t have to take my word for it. Seth Godin, who has authored several books on business and entrepreneurship including The Dip which we profiled earlier this year, had nothing but high praise for Rework.

“Jason and David have broken all the rules and won. Again and again they’ve demonstrated that the regular way isn’t necessarily the right way,” says Godin. “They just don’t say it, they do it. And they do it better than just about anyone has any right to expect.”

This book is an obvious buy not only because the of the expert advice dispensed by the successful founders of 37signals, but also because the book is an easy, quick and inexpensive read. Personally, in a few short hours I was able to breeze through the audio version, which can be found online for less than $10. But if you prefer reading words on a page, the Kindle version is also $10, or a hardback copy is just $3 more at some online retailers.

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The new technology, still very much in the testing phase, uses an array of sensors which track both objects on or near the road, as well as the position and angle of a driver’s head and eyes. By combining the data from these sensors, GM can then project images onto the windshield with lasers to help drivers stay safe when driving.

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“Let’s say you’re driving in fog,” says Thomas Seder, group lab manager for GM’s research and development. “We could use the vehicle’s infrared cameras to identify where the edge of the road is and the lasers could ‘paint’ the edge of the road onto the windshield so the driver knows where the edge of the road is,” Seder said.

In other words, it would be like having a fighter pilot’s HUD in your car, except instead of tracking the sky for bogies, your car tracks the road for possible dangers. The display works by coating the windshield with transparent phosphors which emit light when excited by a laser. GM says this is better for the driver because the entire windshield can be used to display information, not just a portion of it like current in-car HUD systems. The technology also includes the ability to recognize and read road signs and alert the driver to when they are driving too fast or if construction is ahead.

The company says that while this exact technology will not be in any cars in the near future, some of the features will start to be rolled into upcoming models. What this likely means is the transparent phosphor windshield will be placed in cars and used to display other HUD information, like speed, gas and other indicators.

The hard part of this technology doesn’t seem to be displaying it; rather, the barrier is in the sensor work between tracking objects on the road and tracking the position and angle of the driver’s eyes. Since it’s much easier to simply display objects that don’t rely on exact positioning for the driver’s point-of-view, it’s likely we’ll see these additions before the true AR experience becomes a reality.

Eventually, however, GM hopes technology like this will make for better turn-by-turn directions and make it easier to find locations upon arrival. We’ve all heard our GPS systems say, “You have arrived at your location!” only to look around and not necessarily know where it is. With this new system, GM hopes they can solve the problem of “the last 100 yards” by displaying indicators of specific locations based on the sensor readings.

This certainly seems like the future of driving, but I wonder if it will be displaced by cars that simply drive themselves. If we can create sensors good enough to find the lanes in the road and nearby vehicles, why not just let the car drive it self and skip the HUD? Either way, its great to see AR taking steps forward beyond marketing and into practical application in a consumer space, even if it is years in the future.

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Compete found that the most popular travel-related activity for smartphone owners is finding more information about a destination while they are already traveling (34%). Close to a third of smartphone owners who responded to Compete’s survey also use their phones to check up on the status of their lodging and transportation reservations. For most smartphone owners, this probably means checking up on the status of their flights. A quarter of smartphone owners also use their phones to research lodging, destination and transportation options. Marketers will be happy to hear that 22% of users look for a specific transportation company’s or hotel’s website and 21% use their devices to do research on a specific travel agency’s site.

Interestingly, though, while about a third of smartphone owners use their devices for travel-related activities, only one-fifth of all smartphone owners have installed travel apps on their devices yet. Those who haven’t installed travel apps yet are looking for comprehensive services that can notify their users of unplanned schedule changes (52%), notify users of rate changes (48%) and consolidate all travel reservations into one itinerary. While there are already numerous apps like WorldMate and TripIt that solve these problems, there is clearly an opportunity for these companies to market their apps to a wider audience that isn’t aware of them yet.

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Formspring.me was spun out of Formspring.com, a platform for creating online forms, when users began creating forms to answer personal questions. According to the New York Times’ Brad Stone, Formspring.me has raked in $2.5 million from investors based solely in Silicon Valley. VC firms Baseline Ventures and Freestyle Capital teamed with angels Kevin Rose, Dave Morin and Ron Conway’s SV Angel to provide Formspring.me with some well deserved, and high profile funding.

Silicon Valley is certainly the mecca of venture capital and social web applications, and in many ways, moving the company to the Valley is a smart move. As we mentioned back in January, Formspring.me plans to rewrite its application to scale more efficiently as the product grows in popularity – something that requires talented programmers. The company has already listed four job openings in San Francisco for a pair of developers, a designer and a data analyst.

By moving to the Valley, Formspring.me will be able to tap the enormous talent pools to find top tier programmers and designers to take their app to the next level. If they want to build out an API and create mobile applications for their app, they are in the right place to do it. When the time comes to look for further funding, having set up shop in the Valley will certainly benefit the company in their efforts.

For other cities outside of the Valley looking to build competitive startup and venture capital communities, these are unfortunate truths. It is not uncommon to see successful startups leave their cities of birth for the Valley to find talented employees and raise their chances for finding funding. We recently discussed Chicago’s growing startup scene, which is not far from Indianapolis, but the opportunities in the Midwest do not yet compare to those available in other booming startup cities.

Had Formspring.me been founded in a city like Austin, Boulder, New York or Boston, they would have likely remained there upon receiving funding. That is, perhaps, if they received funding locally. While the Midwest is growing its startup culture, there are far fewer VC firms, and far smaller talent pools when compared to other locations. Until more cities have their own thriving startup scene, stories like Formspring.me’s will continue to play out across the country.

The fact that Formspring.me attracted funding from the Valley before relocating raises the question of whether the decision to move was theirs or if it was a recommendation or stipulation of the investors. We have reached out for comment on this question and will update this post as more information becomes available. In the meantime, let us know what you think of Formspring.me or any other startup moving to the Valley in the comments.

UPDATE: We received a response to the question from the company’s President John Wechsler on his Formspring.me page. Wechsler explains that the decision to move to San Francisco was was made by the team and was not part of the terms of the funding agreement.

Disclosure: The New York Times is a syndication partner of ReadWriteWeb

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And today, it looks like Twitter has begun working on making this last option – search – more useful for its users by offering the ability to percolate popular search results to the top of the page.

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Jennifer Van Grove at Mashable noticed an update in the Twitter API Google Group this morning that alerts us of a soon-to-come search feature – popular tweets.

From the post on Google Groups:

Until the popular tweet feature all search results have been sorted
chronologically, most recent results at the top. If a search query has any
popular results, those will be returned at the top, even if they are older
than the other results.

Basically, the API will now offer a variable named “result_type” that can will return either “popular” or “recent”. Programs will be able to use the variable to either return search results with popular tweets at the top as default, show only popular results or show only recent results.

Also added to the Twitter API this week are two other variables for the retweet API.

The first will return up to the first 100 user representations of those who
have retweeted the tweet specified in the url by :status_id.

The second will return just the ids of those retweeters for the cases where
that’s all you care about.

Perhaps these have some sort of implication in how tweets will be deemed popular, but even if not, it could be useful in watching the trickle-down spread of a tweet.

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Novell is releasing the service initially to analysts and participants at BrainShare, its user group meeting next week in Salt Lake City. Each person will get to invite one new user, Novell will provide a fuller release in the next few months. A release at the end of the year will include OpenID as a core aspect of the platform.

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The service resembles platforms that we see emerging. It has a real-time activity stream. People may create their own groups within an activity stream. Groups may also be created with external communities such as partners or customers. Pulse will be available as a SaaS or on-premise.

The service includes a co-editing feature, much like you see in Google Wave.

Novell Pulse looks like a viable alternative for the companies and government organizations that want a platform they can modify without concern about proprietary constraints. Still, it is clear that Pulse is in its infancy with a host of features needing integration.

We question how many people may use the service simultaneously. Google Wave has received criticism for its inability to handle large numbers of simultaneous users. Novell says it will see how many people the platform can handle. Of note is that the beta is so limited. It will essentially only be open to a very limited subset of the market. Perhaps it will spread through invites. We’ll see.

Its open-source roots make Pulse most compelling. The approach fits with the company’s roots. Novell sees an opportunity to federate with Google. The larger question will come down to how well the integration works with Google Wave.

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According to Hopkins’ article, Facebook not only drives a high amount of traffic, higher than Google News, but its users are far more loyal, as well.

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Hopkins took a look at the data earlier this month, noting that Facebook drives three times as much traffic to broadcast than Google News, and now we find that these users are also repeat offenders. That is, they don’t just visit once, they come back for more. From the Hitwise blog:

Hitwise data indicate that visitors from Facebook are more loyal to News and Media websites than are visitors from Google News. In particular, among the top 5 Print Media websites in the week ending March 6, 2010, 78% of Facebook users were returning visitors compared to 67% from Google News. The figures are almost identical for Broadcast Media, with a 77% returning rate for Facebook compared to 64% for Google News.

Why do we care about this metric? Because “visitors aren’t as valuable if they don’t come back. Advertisers and retailers need some assurance that visitors will return again and again.” Hopkins notes that even visitors from Google.com, often the leading source of traffic to these sites, are outpaced by those from Facebook when it comes to return visits. But why is this?

Hopkins doesn’t get into the “why” behind the numbers, but we’d be willing to wager that it has something to do with a few reasons. First, content posted by peers is more likely to be compatible with an individual’s world view. Second, their trust in friends as sources might lead them to return for more.

Google, on the other hand, can give great results just the same as it can lead you to the most worthless pages you’ve imagined. It doesn’t offer that one thing we can all trust – the valued opinion of a friend. It’s also possible that the friend making the recommendation in the first place is a return visitor who repeatedly recommends the articles they read.

Whatever the reason, the numbers tell us one thing for sure – news outlets need to focus on making sure it is as easy as possible for readers and viewers to share content on Facebook. Or, as Hopkins so succinctly puts it, “with recent Pew Research showing that Newspapers have seen ad revenue fall 26% during the year and 43% over the past three years, understanding where to find loyal readers is becoming increasingly important.”

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1. Miso

I’ve been playing with Miso off and on for a week or so. Dubbed a “Foursquare-Like App for Homebodies” by yours truly, this app lets you “check-in” to the TV shows and movies you’re watching and earn badges. While I like the idea, I’ve found that the app suffers from the lack of an easy way to find and follow other users. That leaves us TV-watching “stay-at-home” folks feeling a little too isolated when already taking part in a rather non-social, non-interactive activity. However, if the app can improve the ability to find and follow other like-minded entertainment consumers, there’s potential for a fun “niche use” type of app here. (Review: Miso: A Foursquare-Like App for Homebodies)

2. MediaServer

MediaServer seems so promising, but I’ve had trouble getting all aspects of it to work properly. The app is designed to be an easy way to view your iPhone media on your TV set by way of a Media Center-type hardware device (XMBC, Boxee, etc.) or game console (PS3, XBox 360). And it is easy to use. You install the app, launch it, and boom!, your media console sees your iPhone – no configuration required. As far as viewing user-created videos or photos, the app excels. But streaming music or video? Not so much. Due to varying degrees of DRM applied to the files themselves and codec support on the hardware device, playing media on your TV is harder than it should be. (I tried with the Xbox in my tests.) Whether it’s the app that’s to blame or the hardware, I can’t tell. However, MediaServer did become a great way to do iPhone photo slideshows on the TV and that alone is keeping it on my phone for now. Hopefully the rest will be improved in time.

3. Sticky Bits

The RWW bloggers who attended the recent SXSW festival have come back raving about the barcode-scanning Stickybits app (iTunes link). The app, which debuted at the conference, goes hand-in-hand with the online service that lets you either print your own barcodes or buy pre-made stickers which you can then associate with real-world objects. Using the Stickybits iPhone application, anyone encountering these stickers in the wild can scan them to discover whatever data theyv’e been associated with. Will Stickybits actually stick around though? It’s too soon to tell, but it sure is fun to play with in the meantime. (Review: Stickbits: Portal to Another Dimension or Graffiti for Nerds?)

4. Siri

Although not brand-new, the Siri app which debuted in February on the iPhone is rapidly becoming one of our all-time favorites and therefore has to make this list again. If you have not installed Siri yet, do so now! Built with artificial intelligence technology, Siri functions as a personal assistant which can provide information on a variety of topics from weather to movie listings to restaurants, events and more. You can either type into the app’s search box or speak your query to get started. And the more you use it, the smarter it gets. The voice recognition works well, too, although it never understood “Alice in Wonderland movie” no matter how many times I said it. (Maybe it already knew I wouldn’t like that movie?) We’ll give it a pass there, though – voice recognition is a tough nut to crack. Still, the intelligence of this app will soon have you relocating the apps it replaces (movie listing apps, restaurant finders, etc.) to back screens of the iPhone. (Review: Siri: Your Personal Assistant for the Mobile Web)

5. Tweeb

Obsessed with ego-tracking your Twitter stats or tasked with managing a corporate account of some kind? Then Tweeb’s new Twitter analytics tracker (iTunes link) is a handy app to have. For $1.99, you get access to real-time, on-demand statistics including tweet counts, follower counts, retweets, mentions and clickthroughs on your tweeted links. You can also use the app to tweet, manage your friends, block or unblock users, view Twitter profiles, view your following lists and manage multiple Twitter accounts. The data is presented in clean, easy-to-read layouts and there is even a history section so you can measure your growing influence over time. Well worth a couple of bucks if you access this data on a regular basis!

6. Buzzie

The first app to access Google Buzz natively is pretty great, but I’ll admit that I’m more likely to switch over to Buzz from Google Reader’s mobile website than launch a standalone app. If the iPhone had app multitasking though, that would be a different story. Still, Buzzie has a few standout features – photo-sharing and photo browsing, most notably. It also feels “a lot snappier” than Google Buzz’s web app, noted Frederic earlier this month during his demo. (Review: Buzzie: The First Native Mobile App for Google Buzz)

7. SpringPad

Part of Springpad’s service, this Evernote competitor functions as a mobile note-taking and reminder app. Similar to Evernote’s offering, you can write a note or snap a photo to remember something (which is then added to your online account), but it also introduces barcode-scanning as another way to “remember” an item. You can use the app to access all your saved data, too – handy for accessing shopping lists, recipes and restaurants you want to try while you’re out and about. (Review: Springpad Takes on Evernote with Semantic Technology, Barcode Scanner)

Honorable Mentions

Other apps getting demoed on our iPhones include the following:

• Brizzly for Twitter: Will we leave Tweetie 2 for this new Twitter iPhone app? It could happen!
• Feathers: Want to have a little fun with your tweets? Feathers lets you decorate them with symbols, icons or even post them upside-down.
• Notifio: Just launched, this app tries to bring Android-style notifications to one central place on the iPhone, but it’s dependent on others to use its API to do so. If successful, it could be amazing…but that remains to be seen.

You can see all the apps on my iPhone courtesy of AppsFire here.

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