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The shortest way to describe this is that Google is no longer a verb. It’s becoming a noun. Not just the few clicks to find information, but the information itself and the experience surrounding it. 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. Sponsor 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 about 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 this 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 moved into Google, 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, where time will be the judge of your actions. Much better than your manager alone. To know that hard work, intellectual capital, libraries are available to the world after the contract 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, it will gain entirely new efficiencies in solving the big problems, in the context of individual efforts. Maybe this open source spirit is embedded into Twitter, and is why it works. We like to contribute to our version of the greater good…and want fans to cheer us on. What we learned; acknowledgment matters, and connections to the whole population of people is an amazing vehicle. Google: become an indie rock star – with the strength of 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? Discuss

Novell is providing the first glimpse of Pulse, its new real-time collaboration service. The new service will eventually fully integrate with Google Wave . This version does not include Google Wave as part of its service. But there is an expectation that eventually the integration will serve as a federated platform that may serve as the basis for new open-source collaboration efforts. 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. Sponsor 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. Discuss

What is the effect of the Oracle acquisition of Sun Microsystems on cloud computing? Well, there have been quite a few if you look at where Sun’s best and brightest have moved on to in the past few months. Tim Bray is the latest Sun star to move on. You may know Bray as the co-founder of XML. Eve Maler is also a co-founder of XML. She had worked with Bray for many years until her departure from Sun last Spring to join PayPal. Eve as many of you many know, is one of the leaders in developing identity standards and initiatives. Sponsor Perhaps the clearest example is evident at Rackspace where five developers from Sun were recently hired to work on Drizzle, a heavy duty system for high scaling applications in the cloud: When it’s ready, Drizzle will be a modular system that’s aware of the infrastructure around it. It does, and will run well in hardware rich multi-core environments with design focused on maximum concurrency and performance. No attempt will be made to support 32-bit systems, obscure data types, language encodings or collations. The full power of C++ will be leveraged, and the system internals will be simple and easy to maintain. The system and its protocol are designed to be both scalable and high performance. According to Rackspace, the service will “keep the good and remove the bad,” from MySQL. And here is where we see the power of open-source. We interviewed Bray today. He pointed out that open-source is developed outside the walls of the company. So, in the midst of corporate upheaval, developers can move onto new places and not face any interruption in their work. That’s exactly what we see with the Drizzle team: It feels like Oracle has lost a huge opportunity in the open-source community. The lucky ones are the companies that are picking up these talented people with faith that the open-source way represents the future of cloud computing. Discuss

Google Analytics offers site owners an easy and free way to gather highly detailed analytics about their websites’ visitors. A lot of people, however, don’t feel comfortable with the idea that Google can track their every move on the Internet. After all, even if you don’t use any Google product yourself, you will still send personal data about yourself to Google through programs like Google Analytics. According to an announcement the Google Analytics team just posted on its blog, you will soon have the option to opt out of being tracked by Google Analytics. Sponsor How Will This Work? It still remains to be seen how this opt out feature will actually work. According to Google, the Google Analytics team wants to offer a “global browser based plugin.” This is a very vague statement and given that there is no standard for browser plugins, it remains to be seen how Google will implement this. It is also worth noting that a lot of users probably don’t know how to install a plugin. Those users who care about being tracked by Google Analytics will likely know how to do this, but it is probably in Google’s best interest to explain this opt out procedure in great detail. Google plans to make these plugins available globally in the coming weeks. Will this Make Stats Useless? If opting out of Google Analytics becomes a widespread phenomenon, this could have wide-reaching consequences for site owners. After all, having detailed analytics about your visitors allows site owners and publishers to tweak their marketing efforts . What About Other Analytics Tools? It will also be interesting to see how other analytics firms will react to this. While Google Analytics is probably one of the most often used analytics services, other companies like Clicktale , Sitemeter and Woopra also collect large amounts of data from Internet users. Those users who want to opt out of Google Analytics will surely also want to opt out of other programs as well. Google Opt Out Feature Lets Users Protect Privacy By Moving To Remote Village Discuss

TechStars is an early stage venture fund based in Boulder, Colorado. ReadWriteWeb was given an early peek at historical results data on TechStars companies, which the organization is about to release . The data shows acquisition and failure rates, as well as how many of the TechStar companies have gone on to receive angel or venture funding. TechStars reports that nearly 6 of 10 of their companies have historically gone on to receive outside angel or venture funding (not including friends or family). Five other companies reported that they are now profitable without outside funding, so overall 27 of 39 (69.23%) TechStars companies have either raised outside funding after the program or bootstrapped to profitability. Sponsor Of the 39 TechStars companies analyzed, 29 are still active (74.36%), 4 were acquired for > $2M (10.26%), 1 was acquired for < $2M (2.56%), and 4 failed (10.26%). One of the companies is listed as “other” (2.56%), but there is no explanation of what that means. The data that TechStars reports is similar to a recent study by the blog Awesome Zombie , which did an analysis in December of similar early stage venture fund Y-Combinator . Awesome Zombie found data on 145 Y-Combinator companies from a variety of non-official sources, such as CrunchBase, news articles and discussions on Hacker News. It found that 82 Y-Combinator companies are active (24 having received further public investment rounds), 33 failed, 14 were acquired. The rest were stealth, unknown or “other” (e.g. merger or private investment). The TechStars numbers are very encouraging for early stage companies. Nearly 70% of TechStars companies have raised outside funding or have become profitable on their own, which is comparatively better than the more high-profile Y-Combinator (with the proviso that the Y-Combinator data was unofficial and gathered by a third party). TechStars attributes this success rate to its “mentorship driven approach.” The program also only funds 10 companies per batch, which TechStars says is due to its focus on quality over quantity. TechStars CEO David Cohen told ReadWriteWeb, “I think that the programs that will ultimately prove to be most powerful for their local entrepreneurial communities are those which follow the mentorship+community formula that we pioneered. It’s powerful in so many ways when you get dozens of mentors involved in very hands on, meaningful ways with each company from day one of the program.” I happened to be in Boulder on Wednesday, where Elyssa Pallai and I met with a group of TechStars companies for lunch. The knowledge and passion for web technology exhibited by each person at the lunch impressed me a lot. If this group of young entrepreneurs were representative of the Boulder startup scene, then it’s a city with plenty of vitality and smarts. If you’re a U.S. company interested in applying to TechStars, applications for their Boulder program are open for a few more weeks. TechStars also has a new Seattle program starting soon. Discuss