Eric Schmidt
Attended a keynote address by Eric at the CIO Summit hosted by Sierra Ventures. A few thoughts that stayed with me:

• Google TV - Google has developed an OS for televisions. If successful, we will finally have Internet Browsing capability on televisions
• Andriod continues to grow fast. The free licensing policy has attracted a lot of device manufacturers. I believe that this poses a real threat to Apple. For now, iOS is a significantly better user experience.
  
• Voice translation Eric talked about a demo where an English speaking person conversed in (near) real-time with a German speaking person to buy shoes. The is in in its infancy but, give it a few years, and we might actually be able to speak with anyone in any language.
• Instant Search speeds-up an already blazingly fast Google search. Up next "read our mind"!
• 4G on mobile devices will open opportunities for a whole new set of businesses and functionality. Verizon is planning a major splash soon and AT&T will follow suit. Get ready to buy new devices and spend more. I am so happy about my iPad / MiFi decision.
• Enterprise revenue continues to be a tiny part of revenues at Google. A few years ago, Eric was surprised that Enterprise customers would even consider GMail.

Very interesting!

Personalization vs. Privacy
It seems that the internet has collected enough information on all of us to successfully read our minds without typing a Google search! I was just reading about another interesting technology (Solariat) that reviews questions in social networking conversations and identifies conversations elsewhere on the web that might have an answer - Look, no search!

Everyone I know tries hard to maintain their privacy: What should be my facebook settings?, etc. Organizations worry about how not to cross the line with their customers. The fact that each one of us has a different "line" for each question makes the decision very hard and complex. Any generic decisions applied across a large number of consumers are bound to not satisfy anyone.

One answer would be to give a user an easy enough way to control their "lines". However, marketers (read $$) seem to have more sway over the privacy decisions at internet sites than the non-paying consumers. Did you read who won when Microsoft was evaluating default privacy settings in IE (wsj article)? Why am I not surprised?

The pic has nothing to do with the post ... a couple of interesting wines we tried recently ... sharing a bit of personal info :-)

Recorded Future
Interesting article on allthingsd regarding a cool search technology that lays out future events on a Time-line. Cool idea.

Have setup a few alerts. Let us see how it works.

Just realized that I have not posted for over a month and a half ... need to try and post more frequently!

Googlenomics
Paula forwarded me this fascinating Wired article on how Google used auctions to permanently change how advertising is sold. The most interesting part is how the algorithm evolved.

I am a bit surprised that I have been blogging a fair amount about search.

Google / Twitter
I had blogged about my thought that Google should buy Twitter to provide more real-time search. Seem that a deal is with Twitter is not imminent. Read this post on GigaOM on what might Google do about losing the battle to provide search for the "now web".

Here is what I think Google might do: Twitter has a great pulse on current happenings but details of real newsworthy information is still being posted on the blogs. Google should build a real-time indexing for sources that have the most current information and tag it to allow users to follow the most relevant information. Google can then allow users to comment on the stream on information Google produces. Let us see if Google managed to address this evolving opportunity.

How about calling it Google Pulse?

Another Search (Computational Knowledge) Engine
There is a fair amount of buzz about Wolfram|Alpha (obviously branded by a geek). Everyone is trying to figure out if is a Google killer.

On the surface, I am not sure what I will use this for. I typed "weather in DC" and it came up with a pretty good answer. Here is an interesting article on CNET about some additional tries and results.

Let us see if I will begin using it for some queries.

Kosmix
Very interesting "Explore" engine. Is this the next generation of search? A few initial searches seemed to return pretty food results. Will try to compare with Google.

Here is a blog posting on InfoWeek.

Will love to hear what others might think - leave a comment below.

Social and Real-time Search
Interesting article on John Battelle's Searchblog describing how Social Networking sites are creeping up on Google as a key source of traffic. I guess Search Engine Marketing will be followed by Social Marketing.

Also, I feel that Search Engines are bound to become more real-time (a good article on the topic). Searching Twitter already gives you a better information on current events. This morning Yahoo mail was down and I searched "Yahoo Mail" on Google - no information on a current issue! I searched on Twitter and found that it was down and the first tweet on the topic was about 1 hour old. So, the issue was not just with my mailbox and I decided to wait.

In my mind, Google should acquire Twitter!