It’s a small world after all.

Today, I discovered Twittervision and Flickrvision. Neither is a technology that enhances my productivity (quite the opposite), or makes me more efficient, or gives me more flexibility at work. Both are simple but hypnotic mashups of Google maps with Twitter and Flickr respectively. Go to Twittervision and watch in almost-real-time on a map of the world as people send short text message (SMS) updates to Twitter on anything they are doing or thinking about at the time. Go to Flickrvision and watch in almost-real-time on a map of the world as people post their photographs.

They are fascinating sites that may not change the world in time-saving, efficiency-boosting, information-processing ways but they might change the world in a kinder we-are-all-the same-after-all kind of way.

Two important lessons from Google’s rise, or how to get on the cover of Business Week.

Business Week has a very interesting analysis of Google this week, examining whether Google has become too powerful. It’s certainly an astonishing story, that of Google. How a simple search engine could rise in a mere 9 years to one of the largest and richest companies in the world holds many lessons to be learned.

The fist (and my favorite) lesson is of course the one about how information is the gold (or oil) of our time. If you can find a way to produce, sort/search, interpret, or distribute information more efficiently and more effectively than others, you can make a lot of money. Google started out with a better way, developed by Sergey Bin and Larry Page (then of Stanford), of sortin/searching information on the web and they made it available for free. That’s it. Nothing more than that. But it was enough to attract huge numbers of users who were looking for a better and more accurate way of finding information.

Then comes the second lesson: Once you have the loyal audience, find a smart, unobtrusive way to make money from them without charging them for what you’ve already provided for free. So, Google went with advertising. Simple text ads that appear after a search and are relevant to the keywords entered by the user. The rest is history.

Skype did the same thing. They found a more efficient way of distributing information (the audio of phone conversations). They made it available for free. Users flocked to them. Once they had a loyal audience they moved to lesson number two. They started offering value-added services for a small price. By then, they had millions of loyal users and a peer-to-peer network which, by definition, has diminishing to negligible marginal costs as its user base expands (in fact the network’s power grows with each new member). So, even a tiny number of subscribers to those value added services meant big profits for Skype.

So those of you who are entrepreneurial in nature, look around. Can you identify a context in which you or others currently produce, sort/search, interpret, or access information and where at least one of those processes can be improved even marginally? If the answer is yes, put on your thinking caps. A year from today it could be your company on the cover of Business Week.

It’s all about information: The wireless application and service innovators.

Business Week has a special section on wireless technologies this week and as a part of it, they showcase what they call “The New M-Commerce Barons.” They are the new innovators in wireless applications and services. Going over this impressive list of innovations is illuminating in the sense that one can identify the types of opportunities that are available today for creating business value using technology. Some examples:

1. Use information technology to reduce even the slightest time delays in a person’s daily life. Check out Mobo, for example, which allows you to pre-order food using a text message so it’s ready when you get there. For a busy New Yorker, the ability to save 10 minutes of waiting for lunch to be prepared is worth a lot.

2. Provide information, using a simple interface, that is otherwise unavailable or hard to get. Loopt, the brainchild of 21-year-old student, provides the location of your friends with GPS-enabled devices. 4info allows users to send text messages with questions on news, sports, movies and so on. Google also does this very successfully for all kinds of information.

3. Allow people to share information. Call it community building, call it social networking, call it whatever you want. People have always loved to share information, from showing off vacation photos to giving recommendations on restaurants. Eyeka allows users to share photos and video and even sell them to those who want to buy.

4. Piggyback on someone who’s already successful. iSkoot allows users to make Skype phone calls using their cell phones and voice networks. (Jajah already does this without using Skype, by the way)

So, it’s all about information. How you create it, manipulate it, interpret it, distribute it. Find a way to add value to at least one of those processes and you may have an idea for a successful business.

Interestingly enough, Business Week also showcases the latest trends in wireless devices, but compared to the innovations in wireless applications and services, the devices just look downright boring.

Twitter, Dodgeball, and other funny things about privacy.

When I teach my class on e-business, at some point we talk about location-specific services. The idea is that information and services are available on a device that is mobile (from a cell phone to a laptop) based on the device’s current geographical location. I talk about how it would be possible for a company to push information, such as an ad, to a cell phone or PDA if it knows its location (through GPS, for example). So, as I pass outside a BestBuy store I could, theoretically, receive a message on my cell phone giving me a unique code I can use to get 15% off my purchases if I go in and buy in the next hour.

What ensues is a flurry of hands up followed by complaints about invasion of privacy, annoying interruptions, and so on.

At which point, I usually give my short speech about how in the US Constitution, privacy was never explicitly written (only implied by certain later amendments) and how that is representative of the schizophrenic attitudes Americans have about their privacy. They always seem to be complaining about its loss, often up in arms trying to protect it, but in the same breath will give away tons of personal information for just about anything: discounts, free t-shirts, 15 seconds of fame on YouTube, you name it.

Dodgeball (owned by Google) and Twitter are two services that allow others to know where you are and what you are doing at all times. They do it in slightly different ways but the bottom line is the same: They can be used to disclose private information about one’s location and whereabouts. And both are very popular. In fact, Twitter was all the rage at SXSW recently.

The way I see it, people will give up their privacy more and more, partly because there will be better things offered in exchange and partly because they will have no choice. We seem to be continuously decreasing the amount of private information we truly expect to have. But at some point, and it may already be here, there will be a huge market for “privacy technology.” The average joe and jane out there will be willing to pay for “information island” technologies: solutions that allow them to have information that is fully disconnected from the rest of the networked world. I have a feeling that in the not so far future, we’ll be talking about all the start-ups that offer exactly those kinds of solutions.

Google tests pay-per-action advertising

Today, everybody seems to be talking about Google’s experiment with pay-per-action or cost-per-action advertising (Others, like Turn, are also doing this). Basically, an advertiser would only pay Google if a user clicked on an ad and also performed some pre-determined action on the advertiser’s site (buy a product, register, etc.). There are a lot of arguments in favor of this, including reducing click fraud, since the advertiser will not have to pay for all the fraudulent clicks on their ad.

This makes me a little wary, only because it’s starting to remind me of the beginning of the online advertising craze. Back in the mid-90s when all we had was the simple rectangular banner, everyone got so excited about the ability to click on an ad and be transported to the store, that they started ignoring the other effects of advertising, i.e., getting inside people’s heads even if it doesn’t involve immediate action. So, for a few years, all anyone cared about were clickthroughs. And when those clickthroughs went downhill (because people stopped clicking on ads), they all started to talk about the death of online advertising. Fortunately, others remembered that advertising is not all about direct response but about things like branding. And online advertising started to flourish again.

What we shouldn’t forget as we talk about PPA models, like the one tested by Google, is that for rich media advertising the PPA model doesn’t work. Users don’t click much on rich media ads because they appear on publisher websites where they go to consume information. For example, when I am at the NY Times website, I want to read the articles, not click on an ad and be taken somewhere else. So, what matters most for rich media ads is how much they change customer beliefs and attitudes. It’s not whether users click on them and then buy or register at the site they go to.

It’s ok to be excited about the prospect of PPA advertising but only if we are talking about sponsored search ads. After all, they most often appear after a keyword search at a search engine, when a user wants to click on a link to go somewhere else and do things like buy, register, and so on.

Is Google the new Wal-Mart?

The NY Times reports on yet another server farm that Google is building in Lenoir, N.C., a small town known for its furniture making which is currently struggling in a global furniture-making market. Apparently, some of the furniture makers were educated as computer scientists and engineers. Since they couldn’t find tech jobs in the area, they went into furniture making. According to the article, there are many who have opposed Google’s plans for a server farm there, partly because Google made the deal with local officials in secrecy and partly because Google demanded and received huge tax and other financial incentives, potentially worth $260 million.

 This smells an awful lot like Wal-Mart to me. Google now has the ability to command whatever it needs, wherever it wants it, and it can usually get it. Even worse, and unlike Wal-Mart’s retail stores, server farms require few humans to function. But the scariest part for me, is the fact that server technology will keep getting more efficient and the hardware will continue to get smaller. Eventually, these server farms will resemble the entire rooms used for those early computers in the 50s and 60s, which had less computing power than a laptop. What will happen when Google decides it needs fewer and smaller server farms? Will we have the equivalent of the abandoned car-manufacturing towns of today? Google (and the towns themselves should demand this) should start investing in the towns beyond the server farms it builds, so that the towns are sustainable even if Google leaves them. The NY Times story says that Google is helping develop a technology training program in the local community college. It’s a start, but it may not be near enough.

Ning: Create your own social network

Ning is the brainchild of Marc Andreesssen, one of the creators of Mosaic and a co-founder of Netscape. It’s an amazing playground for social networks. Basically, any user can use Ning’s ridiculously simple interface to create their own private social network which can include photo and video sharing, discussion forums, tagging and social bookmarking, and blogs, as well as a fully customizable look and feel for each social network. Ning goes beyond that and makes the source code for your social network open for your to tinker with. You can basically customize your social network virtually any way you want.

This is yet another great example of the rebirth of the web as a platform. For years, decades actually, the building of applications has been the domain of technogeeks, engineers, and computer scientists. More and more, they are being relegated to the background, building not applications, but the infrastructure that allows everyone else, the non-geeks, to build their own applications. The interface is becoming simple enough, that it’s like putting together lego pieces. In fact, it’s easier. There’s no guess work as to what fits where.

So now, the 12-year-old girl who wants to build her own social network for girl-fans and boy-fans of the shoes worn by the latest American Idol contestants, can do it in just a few minutes. Before you know it, and if word spreads around, who knows? She may find herself with a thriving business of a niche social network site that even makes money. How? The old-fashioned way. Running ads by Google.

Google tackles Microsoft

So, Google today announced its Google Apps Premier Edition. It’s basically an integrated suite of applications for businesses and with this product, Google is competing directly with Microsoft’s Office and Outlook. A standard edition of Google Apps has been available for a while now, and has included Gmail, a web-based calendar, Google Spreadsheet, and Google Docs, among other things. The beefed-up premier edition offers enhancements like telephone support and 10Gb of storage space per user, all for just $50 per user per year.

Back in the mid-to-late 1990s, I remember when many people believed that Microsoft’s undoing would come from Java. The idea was that Java-based applications (like a wordprocessor or spreadsheet app) that could be downloaded through a web browser, would render Microsoft Office obsolete. Why would you need to buy a license and install Microsoft Office on your expensive fat client PC when you could just buy a stripped down thin client and run all your applications as Java applets that you download using a web browser? Of course, that never happened. Java applets were huge, took a long time to download (especially at the connection speeds of the time) and run, and were often buggy.

 The difference today is that truly web-based applications, using Ajax or simply Javascript, are efficient, effective, centralized, and user-friendly. Google Apps Premier Edition may not replace Microsoft’s products in the next few months or even in the next couple of years. But it is definitely a step in the right direction, especially for small and medium businesses. Microsoft knows this and they have repeatedly said that they are moving on a web-based model as well, though probably not as quickly as companies like Google and Zoho (who must be feeling very nervous today after Google’s announcement). Who will win this next battle of the productivity software remains to be seen.