Trends I'm Watching

Virtual World Software Platform

Trend: Virtual world software could soon be crossing the tipping point on the Internet.

Patrick Cox at TCS Daily describes a potentially killer app for the Internet — a virtual world platform that would make developing applications much less expensive and allow players to use the same tools in different worlds. People who don't have kids under 30 may be unaware how big this marketplace is. For researchers, simulations of real world events will be easier and more useful.

Link: TCS Daily - The Next Big Thing

Forces are coalescing that will produce a shift comparable at least to the spread of broadband. This change will have enormous financial, cultural and political repercussions, and the most interesting aspect of the coming transformation is that it will not be some new and unexpected thing.

Rather, the Web for many will become the cliched 3D virtual reality that has been so overused as a literary and cinematic device that most of us have forgotten how compelling that vision was when it first appeared. Before describing this evolutionary leap, however, we should spend a little time thinking about the key event that led to the last one: the Internet you are using now to read these words.

There seems, ironically, far less discussion of VR today than there was then and the very term has a distinctly cheesy ring to it now. VW for virtual worlds, in fact, seems to have replaced VR among serious researchers

...WoW is a particularly important development in VWs and MMOs as it gained five million subscribers in only a year's time. The initial $50 fee for the software needed on a player's own computer would have represented significant revenues by themselves but there is a $15 monthly subscription fee as well. With over 6 million players, WoW's developer, Blizzard, earns around $1 billion in subscription fees annually.

WoW has already become much more than a fantasy VR role-playing game. Hundreds of thousands if not millions of people are using the realm for a multiplicity of non-game purposes, including political rallies and virtual church services. There are dozens of other successful MMOs, and hundreds are trying to attain that status. America, however, is not the world center for MMOs, that being Korea where online gaming has its own television channels with ESPN type coverage for top games and gamers, as well as its own courts dedicated to online crime. Millions of "gold farmers," mostly third world techies with a low cost of living and a high degree of game savvy, are making their livings by manual labor, "grinding" to earn assets that are sold online to wealthier and less patient Westerners.

...Like AOL and CompuServe a decade ago, virtual worlds exist as a relatively small number of isolated, walled-off realms, each requiring the user to download separate software. Just as the Internet did not become the social force it is today until Netscape tore down the walls separating Internet fiefdoms, virtual world technology is currently limited.

There is, however, something going on that has the potential to change that, and quickly. Not coincidentally, a team of core developers from Netscape's early days is now developing the equivalent of a virtual world browser for MMOs....

Their plan is to provide virtual world creators the client, server, and development tools to create an MMO world. The entire technology platform is free for non-commercial use, so academics are paying nothing to create economic, architectural, sociological and other simulations. For-profit enterprises would pay royalties, but only when their games or other applications collect money from consumers, not before.

This is significant because, until now, creating a complex virtual world required tens of millions of dollars in initial development costs alone. The Multiverse technology, currently in beta-testing, claims to lower the cost of virtual world production to a fraction of its current stratospheric level. For many purposes, such as personal online spaces, there would be no cost at all.

Most importantly, however, all these Multiverse-based worlds, and many are already in development, would be compatible. With the Multiverse client software, users will be able to access any virtual world built using the company's technology. Virtual worlds will become, in effect, ubiquitous. The Metaverse.

via Emergic.org

Web Site Visitors: How Many?

Trend: Web traffic continues to grow while current methods of measuring that traffic become less accurate.

BusinessWeek.com describes competing methods of measuring traffic online that leave advertisers, investors, and even Net companies almost flying blind. New technologies Ajax and RSS are clouding the already muddy picture. Excerpts below.

Link: Web Numbers: What's Real?.

The dirty little secret of Silicon Valley is that no one knows exactly who is going where on the Web. That flies in the face of the impression that online advertising is the most dependably trackable ad medium of all time, a big reason spending on Web ads is expected to grow 33% this year, to $16 billion. But confusion over traffic measurement could cast a chill over the Web 2.0 craze. Valuations for startups such as Facebook Inc. and YouTube Inc. appear to be doubling every few months, but those numbers are based on traffic figures that could be misleading.

From the start, measuring online traffic was a juggling act. Rather than simply relying on a Web site's traffic reports, advertisers traditionally compared that data with information from Nielsen//NetRatings Inc. (NTRT ) and comScore, independent services that recruit Web surfers to record their mouse clicks. Those outfits argue that there are many reasons not to just count the clicks off a Web site's server logs. For instance, comScore points out that servers would count pop-up ads as a page view if the tracking service didn't filter them out.

Independent traffic analysis becomes more important as bigger chunks of advertising flow online and the threat of "click fraud," which inflates ad bills, grows bigger. No wonder that a host of newer services, such as Alexa and Hitwise, are highlighting the weaknesses of the older traffic-measuring companies and are muscling onto the scene with alternatives. By providing some free traffic data via their Web sites, these outfits make it easier for anyone to publish an estimate. But they also have their own blind spots and are making side-by-side comparisons vastly more confusing.

To see why there's an opening for new ways of measuring traffic, look at what has happened to the old standard for gauging online growth, the page view. As the Internet evolved during the 1990s, advertisers came to rely on the number of pages a site served up each month as their most reliable metric. With the rise of new programming and distribution technologies, however, page views suddenly look less relevant. For instance, the beauty of a site such as Meebo is that it is built with software tools called Ajax, which speed up Web surfing. When you log onto Meebo, instead of loading a new page for every mouse click, only the log-in section is loaded. But no matter how long people stay on Meebo, they're technically viewing only one page.

Ajax isn't the only technology that's upending traditional Web measurement. Real Simple Syndication, or RSS, lets people sign up to have news articles, blog posts, or audio interviews from their favorite sites sent directly to their computers. But since they aren't surfing around, none of the sites gets credit for the page view.

For advertisers, the problem is that while any one method of measurement may capture certain Web technologies or demographics, it misses others. An alternative to counting page views, for instance, is to measure reach, which is a calculation of each site's usage as a percentage of all Net traffic.

The best hope for clarity is for Web ad giants and small fry alike to work with the established measurement services to improve their tracking ability. ComScore and Nielsen//NetRatings are beginning to respond. ComScore, for instance, now reports the number of requested videos at online video sites, rather than page views or unique visitors.

Some observers expect that in time a variety of metrics, such as time spent online, will be applied to different services until one measurement that combines a set of factors can emerge. Until that happens, though, the Internet will have to deal with the discrepancies. And Web metrics, like company valuations, will remain a crapshoot.

YouTube's Future

Trend: The younger generation doesn't want to sit in front of a TV to watch video.

Jeff Matthews says that whoever purchases YouTube understands how the younger generation watches video. Excerpts below.

Link: Jeff Matthews Is Not Making This Up: What Google Wants is What Rupert Has: Next TV.

YouTube is the Next TV.

Before you spit out your coffee, or Jamba Juice, or chai tea, or soy latte at that grand statement, consider for a moment what is happening here.

People watch more than one hundred million videos on YouTube every day. Since YouTube accounted for just under half of all visits to U.S. online video sites in September, more than two hundred million videos are viewed every day on U.S. video sites, including YouTube, MySpace, Google and others.

Keep that number—two hundred million a day—in mind.

Now, consider that of the nearly 300 million Americans alive at this moment, roughly 15% are below the age of 10 and roughly 50% are 35 or older, which leaves some 35% of those 300 million within the prime online-video-watching age range of 10-to-35. That is something close to 100 million pairs of “eyeballs,” as they used to say during the Dot-Com Bubble.

But let’s assume that at least two-thirds of those 100 million 10-to-35 year olds have better things to do than watch a video of some poor loner lip-synching “Stop! In the Name of Love” to his pet iguana. If my math is close to reality, then about one-third of those 100 million likely viewers, or 35 million, are watching those two hundred million videos a day.

Which amounts to approximately seven videos per person per day.

Keep in mind these videos aren't all made by lip-synching losers: there are old Jerry Seinfeld nightclub shows and home-made videos of early Beatles concerts; there are television shows both pirated and, thanks to Fox, which announced last week that it would put shows on MySpace, legit, not to mention stupid "Jack-Ass" type stunts and almost anything else you can think to look for.

And that is why I call YouTube and its ilk the Next TV.

Yes, I know the mantra from the not-dead-yet TV and Movie Establishment—“Who wants to watch a movie or a TV show on their computer?”

Unfortunately, that’s almost exactly what their friends at EMI and Warner Music asked when the iPod came along: “Who wants to listen to music on a computer?”

This notion that people need to sit in a living room to watch moving images is, I think, the opiate of the network TV bosses. If they asked me, I’d tell them precisely who wants to watch television and movies and sports on their computers: my daughters and all their friends and all their friends' friends.

About 35 million of 'em, for now.

Which is why it makes all the sense in the world to me that the Google guys—whose video service hasn’t gained much traction whatsoever—are looking to buy YouTube (founded February 2005) even though my friend Mark Cuban famously predicted YouTube will get “crushed” owing to the same type of commercial copyright issues that brought down Napster.

In fact, it makes all the sense in the world to me that Rupert Murdoch, the canny Old Media Mogul who saw what was happening and bought MySpace a year before poor old Sumner Redstone realized what was going on, is reported to be in the hunt for YouTube as well.

Because what Rupert knows is this: Cable TV is dead: long live Next TV.

Coming soon to a URL near you.

Sprint Nextel's Hidden Advantage

Trend: WiMax implemented on a large-scale cellular network promises to bring broadband speeds to cell phones, PDAs, and rural areas.

Robert X.Cringely explains why Sprint Nextel has the infrastructure to overcome the weaknesses and leverage the strengths of WiMax. Excerpts below.

Source: PBS | I, Cringely . August 18, 2006 - Sprint Nextel's Hidden Advantage

Get ready for the REAL WiMax, now that Sprint Nextel has finally revealed its plans for deploying the new wireless networking technology in the United States.

I'm not saying that WiMax is bad, just that it isn't all that it has been promoted to be.

So what makes Sprint Nextel different? Everything.

I have long predicted that Sprint Nextel would come to dominate the U.S. WiMax business, primarily because the company has the largest portfolio of licensed frequencies usable for WiMax -- most of those acquired in an early-90's buying spree that cost Sprint more than $1 billion.

Reason number one, then, why Sprint Nextel's WiMax service is different from its competitors is that the company already owns the frequencies, so the effective cost of acquiring them is nothing. Most competing WiMax operations that intend to use licensed frequencies have to pay for those frequencies, which constitute a large part of their network budget. Meanwhile, Sprint Nextel can just move forward and build its network.

...Where any new WiMax player would have to build towers or buy space on them and install or purchase network connections to those towers, Sprint Nextel already has a national cellular network in place with thousands of towers in hundreds of cities, all connected through an existing fiber-optic network. Again, they have more money to spend yet less to accomplish.

And here's an important distinction. Sprint's core cellular network is based on Personal Communications System (PCS) technology, which uses less power and therefore shorter ranges than other cellphone systems. This meant that when Sprint built its PCS network in the 1990s, it had to have proportionally more cells with towers closer to end-users. More towers closer to users works well with the weaknesses of WiMax as described at the beginning of this column.

This disadvantage of PCS turns out to be an advantage for deploying WiMax.

Compared to an ab initio national WiMax network, then, Sprint Nextel's job is a lot easier. Rather than building a new network, they can adapt an older one. Rather than buy new frequencies, they can use licenses bought long ago and feared worthless. Even the multipath interference problems of MMDS are handled by the fact that WiMax is specifically designed to work in multipath environments and even to derive greater range from the interference.

Even the way Sprint Nextel announced its WiMax service was different. They positioned it as the company's 4G wireless data service -- a MOBILE WiMax service -- making it a simple upgrade for millions of existing voice and data customers.

It is a lot easier to up-sell an existing customer base (Sprint Nextel already has 51 million customers) than to create a new customer base from scratch.

Why, then, if it appears to have every advantage, does Sprint Nextel still have to spend $2-3 billion? Because for all the company's advantages WiMax is still difficult to do well. Thousands of towers need to be upgraded along with beefing up the supporting network that will have to carry 10 or more times as much data as before.

This is Sprint Nextel turning lemons into lemonade. It plays to all the company's strengths. Unlike other 3G wireless data providers, Sprint Nextel won't be afraid of people actually using its WiMax system, so they can aggressively market the service. While Sprint Nextel is talking about WiMax as a mobile service, there is no reason why they can't also compete for fixed wireless customers. You don't see Verizon or Cingular, for example, trying to sell their 3G products for use in fixed home or office applications. Some 3G operators, in fact, specifically prohibit using their equipment in that way, because while the network is fast, its total aggregate data capacity is a lot less than you'd expect.

Not so with Sprint Nextel, or at least that's the way it looks from here. With smaller cells and a robust backbone, there is no reason why the company's 4G (WiMax) network can't compete directly with cable modems and DSL, which was the original vision of WiMax , whether it was really practical or not. And as an existing landline voice provider operating now primarily in the backyards of its competitors, Sprint Nextel could mount a devastating VoIP telephony sales campaign using its WiMax network.

VoIP Over WiFi WILL Disrupt the Cellular Industry

Trend: WiFi and WiMax could undercut the current celluar infrastructure for wireless communications.

Tom Evslin at Fractals of Change provides reasons for more disruptive change in the telecommuncations industry. Excerpts below.

Link: Fractals of Change: VoIP Over WiFi WILL Disrupt the Cellular Industry.

The next generation of cell phones have WiFi access built into them. Although there are some nasty non-technical details to be worked out, these phones can go online via a hotspot as easily as they connect to a cell tower.

But, here’s the rub for the cellular industry: when these phones log on in a hotspot, they can become VoIP phones as in free or very cheap calling, as in Skype. Telco have invested their typical borrowed billions in wireless frequency auctions and in so-called 3G services. These investments were made on the premise that wireless prices for voice and some services would stay astronomically high compared to landline and Internet connections.

Here’s a bunch of specific predictions:

• WiFi support in mobile phones will wipe out the distinction between the mobile phone and the home phone (about time!).  When you are in your house, your phone will be logged into your home WiFi and become your home phone.
• WiFi support in mobile phones will shift the balance of power from the big wireless operators to the cellphone hardware and software makers. Phones will be purchased independently of calling plans just as computers are purchased independent of Internet connectivity arrangements.  Coupons for access may be included with phones instead of phones being included with calling plans.  Why? Because voice calling will be too cheap to meter and hardware will still cost something.
• The about-to-happen incredible growth of the WiFi mesh will benefit from the savings in cellular costs it enables; and the incredible growth in WiFi availability will hasten the day when traditional expensive cellular connections (an the price paid for them) are obsolete. A true virtuous circle.
• Existing cellular infrastructure will be used as LOW-COST wireless access to the Internet (EVDO does this today at a fairly high price). This is exactly analogous to the use of today’s legacy copper network to carry DSL over which VoIP functions. Problem for the owners of this infrastructure (at least owners of the frequencies and radios – towers will be good) is that the rates they’ll be able to charge in competition with WiFi and WiMax won’t pay the interest on the debt incurred to build those networks. So bankruptcies will be required to lower the cost basis of these assets and make them affordable.

The telcos are afflicted with the incumbent’s dilemma:  they could embrace the new technology and hasten the death of their traditional wireless cash cow. They might survive better that way.  But they’ll be worse off next quarter and the quarter after that. And might have to write-off the assets currently on their books if they recognize the disruption.

That’s why upstarts who enable the disruption won’t have to worry about marketplace competition from the incumbents early on. Regulatory “competition”, of course, is another story.

via Emergic

Sprint Commits to Mobile WiMAX

Trend: Fast, inexpensive wireless broadband will available next year, and it will jumpstart mobile networks into the next wave of computing and communications.

Katie Fehrenbacher at GigaOM describes Sprint's commitment to mobile WiMax and the implications for partners and competitors. Excerpts below.

Link: GigaOM : » Sprint Details Mobile WiMAX Plans

Sprint confirmed it has chosen mobile WiMAX as the technology for its 4G network and says it will spend between $2.5 billion and $3 billion on capital expenses by 2008. The company says it is working with Intel, Samsung and Motorola, though didn’t specify how much additional money each of those companies is investing in the plan.

Sprint executives said the network will offer between 2 to 4 Mbps, and will be launched in the Q4 2007, with a nationwide rollout in 2008. With that much bandwidth available, Sprint executives referred to a network that will be built to run user-generated content, and enabling subscribers to access “YouTube and MySpace on the fly.”

Sprint detailed some of the reasons for its mobile WiMAX choice, and said the company can create a “mobile WiMAX ecosystem” with 4 times the performance and a tenth of the cost of a technology like EVDO. In a call after the conference Sprint phrased the benefits as providing ten times the combined performance and cost saving over other available networks, but wouldn’t clarify more on this somewhat confusing metric.

All of the cheering on the call was of course at the expense of Qualcomm, which Sprint did not choose for the 4G network, and which builds a business off of owning proprietary IP standards and a closed model. Sprint said Qualcomm’s tech was not chosen for technical differences, among a variety of reasons, and emphasized its interest in mobile WiMAX as a global standard with a business model for building an ecosystem.

...The first winner is Motorola, who looks to have taken a huge early lead over rivals such as Ericsson and Nokia and is in a good position to stave off the coming threat of AlcateL(ucent). The second winner is Samsung, who is right now the biggest WiMax player from a global perspective and can make the most compelling argument that the are The Leader, when dealing with emerging markets (which is a far bigger play than the US in the long term). The third winner is all the small-time players who have already deployed WiMax (well preWiMax and upgradeable to WiMax really) in the 2.6 GHz band. These guys now have the potential to craft nationwide roaming offerings for their customers. They also get a good outlook for an exit plan, as sooner or later Clearwire or Sprint will look to gobble them up, which means it should be easier for them to raise money to continue to build out their regional networks.

Video Ads from Google Search

Trend: Ads on search results pages will be more interesting with Google's latest move.

Jim Hedger describes Google's latest advertising enhancement and its implications. Will this solve the pay-per-click problem?

Link: The Revolution Will Be Televised, Details After These Ads by Google.

Google introduced a new age of advertising earlier this week by announcing plans to distribute video commercials on websites in its pay per click AdWords network. The move opens the once exclusive marketing channel of televised ads to a far wider array of small and medium businesses.

The sudden appearance of Google’s online video ad distribution service is going to have multiple repercussions for the $38 Billion US television advertising market. It is also going to present multiple opportunities for search marketers and their clients.

Starting today, Internet users in the US, Canada and Japan, will see an increasing number of click-to-play video boxes appearing amongst standard text-based AdWords ads on websites displaying Google generated advertising. An example video ad is posted on Google’s Inside AdWords Blog, appearing in a passive-play mode allowing viewers to click on it before it runs. Others have been spotted at, dictionary and translation site, WordReference.com, and on the front page of Blogthings.com.

According to Inside AdWords, “… video ads will compete for placement on sites in the Google content network with other text, Flash and image ads.” Advertisers will bid for placement of their video ads using the same cost-per-click (CPC or PPC) or cost-per-thousand impressions formulas used by competing AdWords advertisers.

The pay per click advertising model is widely credited as the primary factor behind the rapid growth and evolution of the business of search. Google makes over 9/10 of its money from paid search ads showing consistently higher revenues based on the strong growth of its various search advertising services.

A lot more money is about to move into the online medium. Even if the next six to twelve months are more a time of trial and testing, there is no way advertisers are going to resist creating their own video ads. The applications for advertisers are endless and suddenly very inexpensive. Search engine marketers, website owners and online advertisers should be preparing to deal with the video advertising market as it expands.

Google appears to be making it as easy as possible for smaller advertisers to upload video ads by allowing for any video format. Video ads are uploaded to Google servers where they are stored and served based on contextually similar content found on the sites displaying them.

Small to medium sized advertisers also have the ability to geographically target ads and to test different versions of their video ads. One of the greatest benefits of online advertising is the ability to track where every click came from and when, giving advertisers and marketing professionals a great deal of instant information about what does and does not work.

This is potentially the most disruptive move Google has made since the day it opened its doors. Paid search advertising will have a driving force in the migration of advertising money away from the traditional print and broadcast media. That migration, in turn, will cause enormous changes in the search marketing sector.

The sudden appearance of Google’s online video ad distribution service is going to have multiple repercussions for the $38 Billion US television advertising market. It is also going to present multiple opportunities for search marketers and their clients.

Best Performing ETFs in 2006 Q1

Trends: Clean energy, the Internet, and China were the focus of the three fastest growing ETFs in the first quarter of 2006.

Tom Lydon at ETF Trends reports that the top three performing ETFs for the first quarter of 2006 are PBW, IIH, and FXI.

Link: ETF Trends

• PowerShares WilderHill Clean Energy (PBW) is up 31% YTD. As TheStreet.com points out "The fund has 41 stocks in it, most of which you probably haven't heard of, but as is the case with most PowerShares funds, no one stock has too large a weighting. Its largest holding, at 4.1% of assets, is the carbon-fiber maker Zoltek (ZOLT)" ...which is up 8% today alone.
• Internet Infrastructure HOLDRs (IIH) is up 25% for the quarter.There are currently 14 companies in the portfolio, but VeriSign and BEA Systems make up 2/3 of the assets alone.
• iShares FTSE/Xinhua China 25 Index (FXI) has made 21% so far this year. This fund is probably one of the best diversified China plays with 25 Chinese holdings. China Mobile and PetroChina are the top two positions. 

10 Modern Marketing Facts

Trends: The Internet and connectivity are changing life in modern societies (as predicted in the cluetrain manifesto in 1999).

James Cherkoff at Collaborate Marketing summarizes some major trends that are disrupting traditional marketing channels.

Link: Collaborate Marketing Services - About Us: 10 Modern Marketing Facts.

1. The consumer is in control.
"We need to embrace the urgent implications of consumer control."  Jim Stengel, Global Marketing Officer, Procter & Gamble

2. The consumer is skeptical and increasingly resistant to advertising.
“In the US 69 per cent of consumers are interested in products and services that allow them to block, skip or opt out of advertising and marketing messages.”  Yanklevich Partners

3. Media fragmentation is pervasive.
"The average British Internet user now spends 164 minutes online each day for personal use, compared to 148 minutes spent watching TV".  March 2006

4. Mass markets are being replaced by niche markets.
“McDonalds global head of marketing, Larry Light, has declared that mass marketing no longer works. Furthermore, Light goes onto declare, 'the end of brand positioning as we know it”.  Advertising Age, June 16th, 2004

9. Broadband is a mass medium.5. Corporate executives are under greater levels of scrutiny.
“As ever, the debate in the industry centres on the best way to achieve results.” The Harder Hard Sell, Economist, May 13th 2004

6. Companies that understand Internet Culture best will benefit most.
"What I worry about much more is our ability to make the necessary cultural changes to meet the new demands of the digital native." Rupert Murdoch, 13 April 2006

7. Consumers are mobilizing themselves in new, powerful ways.
"The digital native doesn’t send a letter to the editor anymore. She goes online, and starts a blog." Rupert Murdoch, April 13th 2005.

8. The broadcast model isn't working.
"What you've been selling for the last 50 years, no longer works."  John Stratton, CMO, Verizon Wireless, talking to Agency Chiefs, March 2006

"Overall, the EU market more than doubled in 2005 to 48.2 million DSL subscribers, where the UK sits third, behind Germany and France." 20th March 2006

10. User generated content (CGM) is influential and growing rapidly.
"Our audiences have moved on dramatically. Now they are consuming, creating, sharing and publishing their own content online." Tom Glocer, CEO, Reuters

Google’s Growing Online Office

Trend: Microsoft Office will be under assault by web-based applications soon. Google may provide the most significant challenge.

Jim Hedger describes Google's no-longer-secret moves to build a suite of office applications that could challenge Microsoft Office as the dominant productivity application platform.

Source: Google’s Growing Online Office

Google purchased Upstartle, the maker of a browser-based word processor called Writely.

Writely is an online word processor that enables multiple users to access and work on documents from any location. It can be used as a collaborative editing device and offers users online publishing options including the ability to convert Writely documents into “normal-looking web pages” or blog postings.

The acquisition of Upstartle, combined with other current and pending Google services poses a serious challenge to Microsoft’s desktop oriented products. Google is clearly building a suite of branded, browser-based applications that contains several daily use products designed to capture users from Microsoft Office.

Slashdot published a story suggesting Google is running a closed beta test of Google Calendar, including a link to a series of screen shots. The project, nicknamed CL2, will be integrated with Gmail in the future.

The stakes for both firms are high with Microsoft preparing to release its new Internet focused operating system, Vista before the end of 2006. Until recently, Microsoft was able to bank on the storage space offered by personal computers. Its operating systems run from the hard drive and most digital documents composed by computer users are stored on those users’ hard drives. The security of the hard-drive dependent storage system Microsoft enjoyed is about to change radically.

At its Analysts Day, held earlier this month, Google inadvertently announced the development of Gdrive, a virtually infinite, online data storage service. A series of slides offering preliminary details of Gdrive were included in notes for one of the day’s PowerPoint presentations but were later removed by Google.

"The notes were deleted from the slides we posted because they were not intended for publication," Google spokeswoman Lynn Fox said....

Google, like its competitors, is becoming a second generation web hosting firm. Another line from Slide 19 says Google wants to be able to “… house all user files including Emails, web history, pictures, bookmarks, etc and make it accessible from anywhere (any device, any platform, etc).”

Gdrive, like Writely is designed to facilitate work-group collaboration, much like a central file server in most IT offices does now. The copy kept on the hard-drives of members of a working group will be a cache of the most recent version displayed on that particular computer, but not necessarily the most up-to-date document.

Google Labs is pushing the other major Internet and search firms to work harder and faster. The addition of Writely to Google’s stable of membership-based products raises another series of hurdles for Microsoft and might force them to refocus their Vista strategies. Microsoft was hoping to challenge Google’s search dominance by integrating search within the desktop and operating system. Google appears ready to flank them by moving applications formerly found on the desktop into its sphere of search-related products. 2006 is shaping up to be a most interesting year.