I almost lost my phone today.

During that nebulous span of time spent worrying about connectivity I did a little poking around. I began worrying about the whole waiting for my insured replacement thing. Then I got to wondering if I should just upgrade from my Blackberry Curve (which I still love) to the lusty Droid I’m looking for (sorry bad and overtly obvious Star Wars reference). Then I started wondering about cel phone plans, data plans, minutes, extra features, etc.

So I perused the Verizon site, looked at some gadget sites and gleaned more information about the Droid, it’s features, and possible future iterations. During that time it became overwhelmingly clear to me that Google’s ultimate goal is free cel/data connectivity everywhere, and cel phone carriers should be worrying about it RIGHT NOW.

One indicator coincidentally is an area most of us in the tech field refer to when attempting to predict trends – the automobile industry.

The other day I was watching Antique Roadshow and someone brought in a set of third party armrests for a Model-T Ford. Third party armrests you say? Yeah. It turns out when the automobile industry exploded globally, a ton of third party companies sprang to life around it. Some of these became huge companies that are still around today, offering aftermarket parts and accessories. Other companies disappeared when the Goliath automotive industry began incorporating their third party accessories into their new automobiles at no additional charge.

What I think we will see in the future is many large companies being swallowed by Google offering competing services for free. They have already shown a propensity for doing such a thing with the free GPS functionality incorporated into the new Droid OS.

The free Google Voice, plus the recent Gizmo5 acquisition is another fine indicator. Gizmo5 and Google Voice have already worked closely over the last year to make completely free VoIP calls. Unfortunately it required a ridiculous amount of steps and processes to get it to work. I predict Google is going to make this process significantly easier in the short-term. In the long-term I predict it will be completely seamless.

How will Google finance something like this?

Do I even have to say?

With Google’s latest acquisition of AdMob I think the answer is pretty clear.

Advertising.

Some people are skeptical of this. They ask, “How often have you clicked on a mobile phone ad?”

But consider this:

• Apple, Kindle, and others are creating a perception that mobile access doesn’t necessarily have to be “phone only”.
  Many mid-sized and portable devices will continue to proliferate in the market. People will be connected all the time and it won’t just be cel phones.
• Cel phones are increasingly offering a more luxurious browser experience.
  As this continues to be refined and tweaked we will see more opportunities for mobile ad placement.
• The concept of ad placement and clickthru behavior is still evolving.
  I agree with the skeptics to an extent. I have NEVER clicked on a mobile ad. Hell, I’ve never even clicked on an RSS ad in my Google Newsreader. But one thing is clear. The battle for the mobile desktop is on. The computer desktop battle is pretty much over. With the exception of highly specialized programs (like audio workstations and rendering programs) everyone with an application worth having on a standard computer has developed, or is developing a web-based equivalent. And often even a mobile equivalent.

This is just a stream of conscious post with little in the way of supporting facts. It’s not a new thought, since it’s been posited many times before. It just seems so imminent now and I’m excited!

I’ll post more as expand my research.

Update:

Someone asked me how I thought Google could monetize voice phone calls.

As you may or may not know, Google already offers voice ads. As I poked around the web for more information on these ads, I came across this article in the Royal Gazette which posits something similar to what I think would work (and what I would deem acceptable advertising for a free service).

I would love to hear an ad on my free Android phone while placing an outbound call. As far as clickthrus, I would love to have the option of pressing a number for additional options.

“Press 1 to have more information sent to your GMAIL address.”

“Press 2 to have a SMS text message sent to you with more information.”

“Press 3 to have a sales representative from this company contact you during business hours today.”

I would LOVE this! I wouldn’t care if they served ads based my Google Profile, or based on my Google Voice message text matched up to the phone number I’m calling. Whatever.

Data Searches

When I am looking for data that rarely changes, I typically use the mighty Google. It’s really great, and with all the search operators and functions built into Google search it’s relatively easy to really dig in and find hard-to-find information.

Breaking News and Time Sensitive Searches

When I am looking for information on a current event or breaking news typically Google doesn’t cut it.

To Google’s credit, blog posts about time sensitive information do bubble up to the top fairly regularly, and Google does a good job of detecting when a search query is about a time sensitive event and displays the latest Google News articles at the top of the search results.

But that still doesn’t do it for me. Instead I consistently rely on Google Blog Search for the latest information. Even if it is from a less than reliable blogger, there are often links to other timely articles within their blog posts so I can click through and find the latest reliable information.

Twitter Search is also a great place to find breaking news, but I’m sure this isn’t news to most. Admittedly, Twitter isn’t always easily reliable. Spammers have figured out how to use the hash tags to spam Twitter feeds. And when the Twitter spam is coupled with URL shorteners it can be a bit precarious clicking through the results. So sometimes it takes a bit of time to weed through the crap, but more often than not, you can find what you need using Twitter search.

Search Tools That Combine The Best of Both Worlds

MIT’s Technology Review has an article today covering a site that is launching later this week called Wowd:

According to CEO Mark Drummond, Wowd is trying to strike a balance between the up-to-date but chaotic results produced by a site like Twitter and the slower-to-change results that come from traditional search engines such as Google. He expects Wowd to be particularly valuable to users who want to know what content is currently popular, and who see search as an additional feature.

It will be interesting to see if Wowd can pull all these disparate search tools together into one useful tool, a central hub for breaking information and rarely changed legacy data.

If it works, I know it’s something I will use religiously.

I’m curious. How do YOU stay abreast of breaking news and information online?

Yesterday was a total freak-out when GMail went down. It reminded me of the time in the late-90’s when AOL went down for a day and the world came to a standstill. Hell, back then it even made headline news!

After GMail came back online the debate began over the viability of “cloud computing”.

What Is Cloud Computing?

It essentially works like this:

There are way smarter people who can explain it better. Look around. A good place to start would be Wikipedia.

Those Clouds Look Ominous!

Below are people’s biggest worries when they finally understand the cloud computing concept for the first time:

1. Google is too powerful and could steal my data.
2. Someone could hack into Google and steal my data.
3. Someone could hack into Google and infect my email or documents with a virus or malware.
4. When Google goes down (i.e. GMail) I can’t do ANYTHING!

So let’s take these points one at a time shall we?

“Google is too powerful and could steal my data”

It is entirely in Google’s best interests to keep your data private. They are basically betting the farm they can do this.

Let’s answer a few questions I have heard:

Can they read your data at Google?

Yes they can.

Do they scan the content contained in your emails and documents?

Yes they do.

But bear in mind this is aggregate data.  This means that while they do scan your data, they don’t really know who you are.

Why do they do that?

Google offers a powerful web-based suite of software (Gmail, Google Docs, Google Calendar, etc) and pays for it by selling relevant ad space inside those web applications.

When they search/scan/analyze your data they don’t see

“Don Makoviney has an email conversation about penis enlargement pills”.

Instead, they see

“Anonymous Gmail user has an email conversation in his inbox about penis enlargement pills. So when this email is opened serve him a penis enlargement pill advertisement.”

The exception to this is illegal activities. If Google is served a court order they can drill down and ultimately find out who you are. But this is no different in any organization (public or private) that runs email servers. The same thing happened to Enron, WorldCom, AIG, and even the White House (thanks Scooter Libby!).

If you put it in email, whether it’s a cloud-based service like GMail, Hotmail, or Yahoo Mail or whether it’s your local business Exchange Server or local ISP, there are already multiple copies of your email out there floating around entirely out of your control. You need to understand and accept that.

“Someone could hack into Google and steal my data.”

The same point applies here that applied in the previous statement. Google has bet the farm on security, infrastructure, and redundancy.

If you have trust issues I can understand this might not be enough to convince you.

But think about it:

No doubt you have heard about financial institutions like CitiBank, American Express, and others having their data stolen. What happened? Nothing! Even when hundreds of thousands of ACTUAL CREDIT CARD NUMBERS have been stolen the damage was minimal. Often less than minimal! Large batch jobs cancel the cards. More batch jobs are run that generate new credit or debit card numbers, which feed to another batch job that actually creates new cards, which feeds to another huge batch job that mails all those new cards out.

Done. Problem solved.

(Yes, I know I oversimplified with the batch job thingy, but you get the point, no?)

The point is, once you are doling out personal information there are always risks. Whether it’s handing the waiter your credit card and he walks to the back of the restaurant out of sight, or buying a book at Amazon.com, there are always risks.

So choose your cloud computing “partners” wisely. Don’t hand over your personal information to the latest hip Web2.0 start-up just because they ask for it. Do a little research first.

“Someone could hack into Google and infect my email or documents with a virus or malware”

I’m not sure if you are a GMail user reading this or are someone contemplating switching over to GMail. Either way, let me tell you from experience GMail has one of the most up-to-date and aggressive anti-virus and malware detection tools I have ever seen. It’s a mix of good old fashioned algorithmic programming and consensus from the users. Everything that is downloaded via GMail is run through virus scanning detection and even emails with suspicious links are quarantined.

(On a personal note: They still haven’t figured out how to get rid of the fake virus alerts friends forward to me incessantly. Stop it. Please? My hard drive will NOT catch on fire if I open an email)

Additionally I don’t even run virus scanning software on my computer at all. I haven’t for almost 5 years. The biggest risk seems to be from porn sites, torrent sites and warez (illegal software) sites. And if you get a virus from one of those, well, you got what you deserved I guess

The fear mongering by many about “the cloud” has created a mindset that is not just limited to cloud computing.

Several years ago people were freaking out that websites using cookies were stealing their data. CNN/MSNBC/FOX News and network news shows were doing these ominous news segments about privacy concerns with cookies. People were turning off cookies in their browsers. As a result they couldn’t buy books on Amazon.com, save searches on retail sites, or check their bank account balance online anymore. The web was broke for them. It took a lot of education on the part of web retailers and web developers to convince clients and customers the CNN tech reporter was full of crap. Cookies were simply a necessity in maintaining state across web pages.

So you see, this mindset is usually the result of (1) fear of a technology they don’t fully understand, and (2) overblown media hype about online security that preys on the uninformed.

I feel we’re in a similar boat with cloud computing. While there are (and should be) legitimate concerns, we are experiencing a lot of ominous news pieces that aren’t telling the whole story. Mostly this is because the concept is relatively new and people just don’t know all the facts yet.

That’s fine. It’s why people like me are around

Lastly:

“When Google goes down (i.e. GMail) I can’t do ANYTHING!”

“Bullshit!” (Thanks Penn & Teller)

When I hear this I wonder if the person saying it is lazy, or simply uninformed.

Google anticipate this problem long ago with the implementation of Google Gears. Basically, Google Gears synchronizes your data in “the cloud” with your local computer. This way, if Google is down you can still access your data, compose emails or documents, and have these queued and ready-to-go when GMail, Docs, or Calendar comes back online.

This data is kept in a specific folder on your computer, and this location depends on what browser you use. Google has a simple handy guide to help you figure it out in 30 seconds or less.

If you have any sort of programming tendencies, you can even access the data through a handy SQL Query tool Google provides for free. Otherwise, you can just use your local browser and localhost server to access the data.

Sound confusing? Don’t let it worry you.

Basically this means if GMail is down and you go to GMail in your browser it will just show your local synchronized documents and not your data live online. Google Gears syncs up GMail, Docs, and Calendar frequently so chances are your documents aren’t that out of date. If at all.

(Side Note: Project management from your inbox is highly discouraged anyways. If you would like to get away from such an abomination, check out Inbox Zero.)

Yesterday when people were freaking out about not being able to use GMail, I didn’t miss a step. Sure I couldn’t receive new emails and I couldn’t send emails. In fact, I kinda missed an important one.

Noooobody knows, the trouble I’ve seeeeen …

When I think about GMail’s 99.9% uptime and compare it with the many times I have lost EVERYTHING in Outlook/Exchange Server/Thunderbird I look at the big picture and am very thankful that cloud computing is taking off in such an astounding way.

It’s like having backups without really thinking about it. This is the way it should be.

For two years in the late 90’s I worked at a dotcom. On more than one occasion the Sys Admin had to completely rebuild our company mail server from the ground up. When it’s up he says he only last ran a backup two months ago so any email I received over the last two months are lost.

For almost 5 years, I worked at a Global Fortune 1000 software company that was an MSDN Subscriber and early adopter of new products. We were always upgrading our local mail server, spam filters, and add-on services and it wreaked havoc on project communications.

So a free, cloud-based, email system that constantly syncs with my local computer and is up 99.9% of the time is a sweet deal for me.

Better Free Backup Strategies

The point of this article was to help debunk some (what I feel are) unfounded but understandable fears about cloud computing in light of yesterday’s massive GMail outage.

But admittedly, I like solid physical backups too.

Really, you’re only as good as your last backup.

So …

If the risk is still too high in your mind, stay tuned. At the end of the week I’ll show you some pretty nifty backup strategies I use in concert with cloud applications that are (a) free (b) local, and (c) not super technical.

Sweet, right?

(Note: This article/rant assumes you are already using Facebook to market your small business. )

I have been noticing an unfortunate trend in Facebook “marketing”.

I’m not talking about Facebook ads, which can be used in a remarkably effective manner.

What I’m talking about is small businesses using Facebook to announce things related to their business.

At any given time I log in to Facebook and receive literally dozens of event invites. Oftentimes it is two or three from the same business. Wine tastings, music festivals, concerts, film viewings, and so forth. It gets to the point where my eyes just glaze over. I hit DELETE or “No I won’t Be Attending” without even looking at the date or show information because now, it’s just annoying.

These announcements are just being shouted. It’s no different than getting spammed with e-mail newsletters. I have been “un-friending” the worst offenders at an increasing rate. And more and more are becoming offensive every day.

The sad part is these are local businesses I want to use and support.

This is one problem with social media that many not familiar with the intricacies are failing to understand. It’s very easy to move back to the traditional one-way conversation marketers have used in the past.

If you run a Facebook page for your company, restaurant, or music venue, use the following simple guidelines:

• When you post an event and someone says “No they will not be attending”, follow up with them and tell them you will miss them and you hope to catch them at the next one.
• When someone comes to an event and you meet them, thank them for showing up. Follow that up afterward with a post to their wall thanking them for attending.
• Monitor your friend stream for mentions of your business. Participate in the conversation.

Doing this ensures that (1) you aren’t giving the impression you are spamming. (2) You develop a relationship with the person which ensures genuine interest.

Where To Find The Time?

You own a business and you are a busy person. You are probably wondering how you can fit even more time into dealing with Facebook. That’s a fair question. If you are already logging in to post events, do it then. It will take all of 10 additional minutes to fire off some quick responses to people not attending or people you met at the last event. It might take even less time.

You can even put together some semi-canned responses that you can tweak for each person you communicate with to shave off a few extra precious minutes of your social marketing time.

Honestly, this is the reason I use Twitter more than Facebook. Twitter almost makes it a prerequisite that you have a two-way conversation. It’s remarkable in it’s simplicity (for now anyways).