Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, O2 and others face one and the same threat as mobile phones become more powerful, cheaper per unit produced, and wireless networks (EDGE, 2G, 3G, 4G) improving towards universal world-wide coverage. And the earthquake for existing businesses comes again from Google.

Apple (iPhone) said no to Google Voice, because they had a fiduciary responsibility towards its carrier who subsidises the iPhone 3G and 3GS at a huge price. Which they make up with pricey subscriptions. I use already Skype on Android when I call abroad or for longer calls in general. The threat (um, tsunami) for carriers is, that the Googlephone (GPhone) will handle its calls though 3G/2G as network and associated Google Voice only. The coming revolution that everything will go though the ‘Pipe’ in and out, should cause them having bad dreams.

For existing mobile phone carriers and their traditional business, counting calls by minutes, Google is a disruptor. And Google is moving fast. They (Google’s Eric Schmidt) said for years (publicly in interviews and speaking events) that the phone is the first device for people in developing countries, experiencing the internet (& Google). When a CEO is speaking so candidly about a thing, shouldn’t you pay attention? No, because according to the business textbooks, you should pay attention to big existing companies who are already competing in the same market as you. Verizon vs. AT&T vs. T-Mobile. Small companies can move quick and fast, but have it hard to gain traction. Guess what, Google is big and everywhere, but still moves considerably fast, is agile, and gets traction fast because it is everywhere. Now Google will use its operational size, employees smarts and brand name to come in as disruptor to the mobile phone business. What they need is just ONE carrier who give them access to their network only. Deal done for the coming revolution. I see especially China and India and other developing countries, who are building their cellular network, the most interesting target for Google, they could buy a stake into one of the many small phone carriers (compared to Verizon or AT&T) and support with quick and cheap cash the undergoing construction of networks, thus that their grand plan for the GooglePhone/GPhone can be realized. Carriers here in Europe or America won’t cannibalize their own business for sure. Google, again, is solving a customer problem with high impact. Something they are always aiming for when using their resources to develop products.

Second thought on this, my projection. In two to three years, when counting by minutes is dead, when counting by megabytes is norm (like now with the ‘internet’), Comcast and other broadband providers are competing for the same customers as AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, O2 et cetera. When they realize they can’t compete against the trend. Broadband providers have the land-line infrastructure, what they just need are the radio towers to distribute the signal through the air. My word, they will compete for the same customer. When the US economy up-ticks (should) again, we will see some big provider doing M&A, they will throw in the word synergy to make it tasty for shareholders, and employees will lose their jobs as usual. Speaking on the phone, having a conversation on the phone – will move onto the ‘Pipe’, and there is nothing you can do about it. It’s Economics again, technology, cost and leverage.

For us the consumer, it becomes cheaper to communicate. Existing businesses and associated businesses will change eventually. Mobile phone manufacturers will be doing business like any other PC/Laptop manufacturer. Developing a compelling product consumers want to buy. Consumers then are free to choose which network they want to use. Over will be the days that we can have only an Apple phone when we are willing to join AT&T’s world as well. Over are the days of subsidies. Yes, we may have to pay $150-$300 for a brand new phone, but it will be your main communicator for the future on the road, a very powerful one. It is called convergence (see computing and technology).

————————

Further Readings:

• The New World of Wireless: How to Compete in the 4G Revolution
• Mobileopportunity Blog: The mobile data apocalypse, and what it means to you
• Video – Web 2.0 Expo 2007, Eric Schmidt talking about the mobil space
• Timesonline.co.uk – The Googlephone: Google gears up for attack on mobile-phone market

A post compiling some of my favorite USA TODAY portraits. All, except one, taken for the Wednesday print/video/photo “Talking Tech” pieces.
Below: Sonic Solutions CEO Dave Habiger

Demand Media CEO Richard Rosenblatt

Roku CEO Anthony Wood

Sorenson Media CEO Peter Csathy

Behind the scenes @ Netflix

Google CEO Eric Schmidt

Animoto CEO Brad Jefferson and 2 Spidermen on Hollywood Blvd.

The gang from Baja Sharkeez, Hermosa Beach

Google CEO Eric Schmidt breaks down the future of his search engine and speaks about his views on the Future of Technology

Need a job? Watch closely that health care is moving from 15% of our economy to 21% investment pushing the hiring expansion here, so get your education in medical related fields…

Google Health is Confidential: How it Works?

Ergonomidesign

Access Images and news archives on this futuristic firm.

“She is not a girl, and she is not a pinup.”

Susan Estrich, Columnist, on Sarah Palin, saying she hates defending her, but is annoyed at Newsweek for featuring her on the cover in running shorts.

“I am applauding Bebo …I don’t understand the  logic for the others not following suit.”

Jim Gamble, of Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (Ceop), saying social networking sites need a help button for children to report predators  bullying.and bullies

“we should not make the perfect the enemy of the good,”

Barack Obama, conceding that the Copenhagen summit would not come up with a binding agreement on global warming.

“A portable device with an appropriate wifi connection, and a very powerful browser.”

Google CEO, Eric Schmidt’s definition of a Netbook, in a broad discussion of the future of the internet.

“Huh? If you’re already a Fortune 100 company, ‘brand awareness’ is probably not your biggest problem.”

Fast Company, commenting on a study by Weber Shandwick, that says only about 3/4 of Fortune 100 companies have Twitter accounts, few follow best practices, and most are chasing after brand awareness.

“Would I be cynical if I said I believed Apple was secretly fueling the hype by leaking bits and pieces of information to raise expectations? Does it matter?”

Linda Vandevrede, at ValleyPRBlog, on the role of PR in hype, or whether it evolves in some ‘organic’ way.

Interesting 45-minute video of Google CEO Eric Schmidt from the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2009.  At one point, Schmidt’s asked what the web will look like in five years.  ReadWriteWeb broke down a few of the key points… among those highlights:

• Five years from now the internet will be dominated by Chinese-language content.
• Today’s teenagers are the model of how the web will work in five years – they jump from app to app to app seamlessly.
• Within five years there will be broadband well above 100MB in performance – and distribution distinctions between TV, radio and the web will go away.
• “Real time information is just as valuable as all the other information, we want it included in our search results.”
• “We can index real-time info now – but how do we rank it?”
• It’s because of this fundamental shift towards user-generated information that people will listen more to other people than to traditional sources. Learning how to rank that “is the great challenge of the age.” Schmidt believes Google can solve that problem.

Google (s GOOG) earlier this week said it was buying AdMob, a mobile advertising network, for $750 million in stock — clearly an attempt to get a running start in the mobile advertising business. Together, according to some estimates, the two companies control 30-40 percent of the mobile ad market.

What wasn’t said was that without AdMob, it would take a long time for Google to get thousands of apps to use its ad service as that would involve re-tweaking thousands of iPhone apps that were using AdMob’s network. Google didn’t have time for that, as CEO Eric Schmidt explained in an interview with Bloomberg:

“AdMob is clearly the best of its ilk for applications monetization…We think that’s as strategic as search monetization, which, of course, we’re very good at…One the key success points for the iPhone was this enormous development of apps, and particularly free apps, which are advertising supported…Now that we have our Android platform coming out, and really with some serious partners behind it, it will also be important to have that be true for Android as well as the others.”

Ian Schafer, CEO of Deep Focus, a marketing agency, puts it all in context:

With the acquisition of AdMob, Google now has access to usage data of many of the most popular mobile apps–especially the apps in the iTunes App Store. For iPhones. If Google is taking on Apple for mobile OS market share, they just scored a huge competitive advantage. Google will know more details than ever about how people are using iPhone apps, how they are engaging with advertising within those apps, and users’ loyalty to those apps. Dashboards like the above only provide a window into the beginning of the mining that Google is likely about to do on their mobile handset competition.

Get the complete lowdown on mobile app stores, including details on who is doing what, in this special report, which is included in the annual subscription of GigaOM Pro. Subscribe to GigaOM Pro for $79 a year, get this report.

Google has been worried sick about the rise of the app economy because it undermines its ad-based search paradigm. As Andy Abramson explained:

If your business is built on things like web based technology (search), cloud based technology (Apps) and advertising from traffic that goes to and through your search engine or when people are looking at their content in the apps, the concept of many app stores has to be very, very scary for a few reasons.

Well nothing like a bit of fear to loosen the purse strings. AdMob is Google’s second-largest advertising-related acquisition to date, behind DoubleClick, for which it paid $3.2 billion. The company also paid $1.6 billion for YouTube. Notably, Schmidt said he doesn’t view AdMob-sized deals as the norm for future deals.

Photo courtesy of Charles Haynes via Flickr.

Google’s Eric Schmidt said “Five years from now the Internet will be dominated by Chinese-language content.” when he talked about the Web’s Future. See the video here. This may sounds scary for non-Chinese speakers, or at least show some pressure to them. But will that become reality?

Is the situation so serious? Personally, I don’t think so. If it were the case, what Eric should have done was to acquire the Chinese “Google” Baidu at whatever cost instead of talking. Western people tend to be confused by Chinese phenomenon because of culture differences and politics. While I agree that there will be alot more contents written in Chinese (just think how many Chinese are there), I do not think they will dominate in term of real contents. Many will be garbage, duplicates or less important materials. Let me give you an example: Recently, the Chinese government claimed that the Chinese schools have produced more PhDs each year than the United States schools. Do you believe their overall qualities top the US?

Chinese like writing, but they are under controls of what they can write. IT Berlin Wall is out there. The government shuts down anything that it does not like.

On the other hand, it is a good idea to learn Chinese because China is becoming stronger than ever before. There will be a lot of opportunities in China. One sixth of the world population speak that language already. Do you want to be left out?

Google seems to have a product for everything. The have everything from shopping to web surfing to movie times, and everything in between. They have all but monopolized the search engine industry, with a few decent ones trailing such as Yahoo! and Bing, and Google has taken over other areas with the endless number of services they offer. I remember hearing an interview with Google’s founder, Eric Schmidt, where he discussed what he saw as the future of the omnipresent search engine. He said that he wanted it to not only answer research type questions, but also ones such as, “What should I do today?” Kind of a scary thought, isn’t it? That Google may one day know you on a personal level by tracking your searches so that it can then suggest activities that you may engine. That is all Sci-Fi futuristic talk for now though. To get to the meat of this post, let’s talk about Google News.

A screen shot of Google News

The news service offered through Google is an interesting concept. It does not publish any information of its own, simply pulls from a plethora of news sources and online newspapers to present the reader with some of the best content that the web has to offer. I have had this as my homepage for a year or two now, and have been very pleased with it. Many of the leading stories come from the LA Times or the Washington Post, but others come from lesser known outlets who have interesting stories that may otherwise not have been seen.

The other handy option is Google alerts. Whenever I have searched for something within the news section of the site, I am offered the option to be notified whenever a new story comes out about the subject or person I am interested in. Let’s say, for example, that I am interested in Carl Sagan (I’ll use him since it was what would have been his 75th birthday today). I can tell Google that I want to hear about whenever he is in the news. So whenever a news story comes out about him, I receive notification about it. It is a great tool and a way to keep up on any given subject that one is interested in.

As a journalistic tool, Google News is a great asset to the online world of journalism. It helps to get reliable sources back into the open, and gives many different ones indispensable exposure by being featured on Google’s News page. Also, the fact that the user gets to choose what they want to be notified of is nice. Humans are selective readers as it is, the transition to online journalism will not change that. Google now helps us do that automatically.

Honestly, what can’t Google do? They have one of the highest rated e-mail services and offer every other internet tool imaginable. I give them two thumbs up.

The 20th century, while giving way to 21st, made one last passing remark.

And this was to determine the entire history of its successor. This remark was what came to be popularly known as the Internet.

Not only did it galvanize the way we used our brains, but it also brought forth, the best possible way of working professionally and personally geeks-on-steroids.com, making us what the modern dictionary refers to as a ‘Tech savvy’ generation. And this tech savvy generation has developed resources for itself. It has modified the internet usage and its applicability, bringing the world – right at our doorstep. This visit of the world is largely determined in terms of Internet traffic, which further depends upon the way we design our promotional websites.

This is precisely what has led to the literal replacement of html by Flash. Flash, today is well known in all professional circles as an interactive mode of gaining consumer support. However, critics here too have their say. Calling the flash web design as a non- consumer friendly process, it is hugely criticized on the basis of its time consumption demands. But then, if you too are feeling the weight of such arduous problems, there is a solution. And this solution is called- geeks-on-steroids.com Custom flash web design which means that you can actually customize your website build on the Flash Web design!

Not only can the flash web design be suited to your needs, but also at the same time with custom flash web design, it can be made more appropriate and more precise- just as per your needs and requirements. geeks-on-steroids.com Custom Flash web design, offers you to customize the following aspects -

1. Transformation from a Standard Cursor to a geeks-on-steroids.com Custom Cursor.

2. Flash symbols and Flash graphics.

3. Animation basics.

4. Advanced buttons and sound in flash buttons.

5. Flash effects with modified text.

While there are several websites offer you this smooth transition with a complete tutorial on Flash manuscript and Flash guide, expert Flash-based website developers can help you benefit from the whole geeks-on-steroids.com custom web design solution process.

The time for a change is ripe. Thus, it is time for your website to dispense with the ruins of textual representations and embrace a new and fitter look in the form via geeks-on-steroids.com custom flash web design solutions.

According to the recent interview with Google CEO Eric Schmidt on Fox Business, one way to make sure they’re on the right track is not to repeat Microsoft’s mistakes. Read more at Mashable!

Google (s GOOG) CEO Eric Schmidt is on a bit of a Microsoft offensive. Earlier this week, while talking to press in Boston when Schmidt was asked to comment on a statement by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, he said, “I’ve learned not to respond to quotes by Steve Ballmer.” Oh Snap!

“Hopefully we won’t repeat the same mistakes that Microsoft did 10 years ago that ultimately led to all these things that have been happening with them,” Schmidt zinged back today when FOX Business Network’s Neil Cavuto asked him about recent comparisons with Microsoft. I bet Bill Gates must have said the same about IBM (s IBM).

He also talked about Twitter and Facebook, the economy, the recession, and a whole bunch of other current events during his interview. Actually, this clip is worth watching, and Cavuto is rational in his questions. So if you have time, check it out.

Photo courtesy of Charles Haynes via Flickr.

I landed in New York City on Tuesday morning, and a friend of mine had sorted out tickets to a debate at New York City Public Library. The subject of debate was ‘Capitalism and the Future’. The panel included some heavy hitters like Eric Schmidt – CEO of Google, Indra Nooyi – CEO of PepsiCo, Niall Ferguson – the respected historian and Harvard Professor and finally…Nassim Taleb – author of ‘The Black Swan’

So what do they think the future holds in summary? What will the economic system look like in the weeks ahead, what are the innovations  shaping the future and what will the role of business be in the future?

Capitalism, in the current climate, can be seen as a bit of a dirty word. One of the key outputs from this debate was that this shouldn’t be the case and capitalism ultimately creates innovation, jobs and opportunities… There was however a slightly uneasy moment when Indra Nooyi, paraphrasing Gordon Gecko in ‘Wall Street’ perhaps went one step too far by suggesting that ‘greed is good’ (to be fair – she did say that necessary precautions need to be taken), but it didn’t sit that well with me in a period of time when greed has led to taxpayers picking up the tab for excessive risk in the pursuit of financial gain…

Niall Ferguson who was very impressive throughout raised his fears about the danger of state monopolies. he argued (brilliantly) that politics should be kept away from business, that the business world should be about survival of the fittest, not the fattest and that we need to move away from state monopolisation. He made a great point that I loved that said that we live in capitalist times when things are good and there are profits…but we want to revert to socialism when we face losses… RBS being a particularly relevant example of this…

Eric Schmidt was very optimistic and argued that the economic structures put in place since the financial crisis began are working. He suggested that the future was bright and summarised the future rather nicely here…

“Technological innovation and entrepreneurial activation will be the only way to develop mass growth in the future”

It seemed a very succinct way to sum up all the arguments…

Vor ein paar Monaten schrieb ich einen Blog-Beitrag über die Vorherrschaft von Google, die doch lange anhalten sollte. Waren vor ein paar Jahrzehnten noch Hardwarehersteller wie IBM und Sun die beherrschenden Größen im Markt, wurden sie in den Neunzigern vom Softwarehersteller Microsoft überholt. Jetzt werde Google den Takt vorgeben und eine neue Ära begründen, da sind sich die Autoren von absatzwirtschaft und PC-Praxis einig: „Google beherrscht den Markt von Suchmaschinen, Geosoftware und sozialen Netzen immer stärker“, sagt Professor Max Mühlhäuser von der TU Darmstadt: „Nun kommt der Angriff auf die Browser, und der Angriff auf Betriebssysteme und Standardsoftware sowie Mobiltelefone ist schon ,eingebaut’.“

Zur Zeit hat sich der Wind etwas gedreht und man versteht immer mehr die Aussagen des Wissenschaftsjournalisten Ranga Yogeshwar: „Wenn Sie das Gefühl haben, es ging in den vergangenen Jahren schnell, dann legen Sie den Gurt an: Es wird noch schneller“, so Yogeshwar bei seinem überaus interessanten Vortrag auf den Voice Days in Nürnberg.

In Blogger-Kreisen wird nunmehr bezweifelt, ob Google in der Lage ist, den Trend zum Echtzeitweb mitzugehen und die Schlagkraft des Social Webs richtig zu nutzen. So schreibt Olaf Kolbrueck in seinem Blog „off the record“: Norbert Bolz irre mit seiner Annahme, dass ein Internetnutzer nur auf das stößt, war er wirklich sucht. „Ein Internetnutzer stößt in der Regel nur auf das, was er sucht.“

„Der Medienwissenschaftler ist offenbar nur selten in Netzwerken unterwegs. Sonst wüsste er, dass die Nachricht und die Botschaft den Nutzer künftig vor allem findet – durch die Vernetzung mit ähnlich Gesinnten“. „If the news is that important, it will find me.” Die Ökonomie der Aufmerksamkeit bekommt eine neue Logik, die von Jeff Jarvis als Echo-System bezeichnet wird. Google scheine zu ahnen, so der off the record-Blogger, dass die Suche allein in Zukunft nicht mehr die Kernrolle spielen wird.
„It’s because of this fundamental shift towards user-generated information that people will listen more to other people than to traditional sources. Learning how to rank that “is the great challenge of the age ”, sagt Google-Vordenker Eric Schmidt in einem sehenswerten Video. „Es ist also geradezu zwingend für Google sich dem Thema zu widmen. Wenn sich der soziale Lifestream als Königsweg zum Auffinden von Informationen etabliert, ist das Geschäftsmodell von Google auf lange Sicht gefährdet“, schreibt Kolbrueck.

Social Media werde wohl zum größten Konkurrenten für Google. Die Suche nach Nachrichten und Informationen könnte bald wie ein lästiges Stück Arbeit aus der Zeit Dampfmaschinen wirken, wenn diese Inhalte künftig ohne größere Mühe mit Unterstützung des eigenen Social Media-Ökosystems zum Nutzer finden.
Es sei deshalb auch falsch, wenn der Publizist Richard David Precht auf den Münchner Medientagen über systemrelevante Massenmedien (er dürfte Print, TV und Co meinen) philosophiert, die der Kitt der Gesellschaft seien, weil sie Öffentlichkeit herstellen. Genauso gut könnte man die Sonntagspredigt als sozialen Klebestoff der Kirche bezeichnen, wo doch vor allem das gemeinsame Abendmahl die Gemeinschaft herstellt. „Der Kitt der Gesellschaft entsteht eben künftig nicht durch Glotze und Papier, sondern durch die Vernetzung der Menschen untereinander“, so Kolbrueck.

Zeichnet sich hier am Horizont eine Machtablösung ab? Diese Frage würde ich gerne mit Eurer Hilfe recherchieren für einen NeueNachricht-Beitrag. Also bitte Tipps und Expertenmeinungen an meine E-Mail-Adresse gunnareriksohn@google.mail.com schicken oder mich anrufen unter: 0177 – 620 44 74.

The answer to the question: “What will Google look like in 2015?” may well depend on where Eric Schmidt will be in 2015

+ Read the full report

By Anitha

interesting talk by one who knows!

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_web_in_five_years.php#at

Highlighted comments include:

• Five years from now the internet will be dominated by Chinese-language content.
• Today’s teenagers are the model of how the web will work in five years – they jump from app to app to app seamlessly.
• Five years is a factor of ten in Moore’s Law, meaning that computers will be capable of far more by that time than they are today.
• Within five years there will be broadband well above 100MB in performance – and distribution distinctions between TV, radio and the web will go away.
• “We’re starting to make significant money off of Youtube”, content will move towards more video.
• “Real time information is just as valuable as all the other information, we want it included in our search results.”
• There are many companies beyond Twitter and Facebook doing real time.
• “We can index real-time info now – but how do we rank it?”
• It’s because of this fundamental shift towards user-generated information that people will listen more to other people than to traditional sources. Learning how to rank that “is the great challenge of the age.” Schmidt believes Google can solve that problem.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt envisions a radically changed internet five years from now: dominated by Chinese-language and social media content, delivered over super-fast bandwidth in real time. Figuring out how to rank real-time social content is “the great challenge of the age,” Schmidt said in an interview in front of thousands of CIOs and IT Directors at last week’s Gartner Symposium/ITxpo Orlando 2009.

Highlighted comments include:

• Five years from now the internet will be dominated by Chinese-language content.
• Today’s teenagers are the model of how the web will work in five years – they jump from app to app to app seamlessly.
• Five years is a factor of ten in Moore’s Law, meaning that computers will be capable of far more by that time than they are today.
• Within five years there will be broadband well above 100MB in performance – and distribution distinctions between TV, radio and the web will go away.
• “We’re starting to make significant money off of Youtube”, content will move towards more video
• “Real time information is just as valuable as all the other information, we want it included in our search results.”
• There are many companies beyond Twitter and Facebook doing real time.
• “We can index real-time info now – but how do we rank it?”
• It’s because of this fundamental shift towards user-generated information that people will listen more to other people than to traditional sources. Learning how to rank that “is the great challenge of the age.” Schmidt believes Google can solve that problem.

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_web_in_five_years.php

Eric Schmidt, CEO de Google, da su visión de lo que será internet dentro de 5 años en una larga entrevista en el Gartner Symposium/ITxpo Orlando 2009:

La entrevista nos deja algunos datos a tener en cuenta:

• Dentro de 5 años la mayoría del contenido de internet estará en chino.
• Los adolescentes de hoy representan el modelo de cómo funcionará la web en 5 años, donde reclaman facilidad de uso.
• Las conexiones superarán los 100MB y no existirán diferencias entre la distribución de TV, radio y web.
• YouTube empezará a generar gran cantidad de dinero.
• Google puede indexar información real desde ya, pero, cómo la posicionamos? Este es uno de los retos para Google.

Nice excerpt from Eric Schmidt’s interview at the Gartner Symposium in Orlando here on what the internet will look like in five years.

The key Excerpts for me are:

• There will be more Chinese content than English
• Assuming the phone manufacturers get it right, more people will be accessing by a mobile rather than PC

But for me the most important comment is:

• Most people’s information will be gotten from other information as opposed to traditional information sources. People will listen to other people more than anyone else.

Those in PR that aren’t working to build advocates for their brands outside of the traditional media now, will be well behind the eight ball if Eric’s forecast becomes reality and I tend to think he won’t be wrong.

The promising technology of Cloud computing recently suffered its first serious bout of growing pains when Microsoft/Danger, which provides cloud computing services crashed and lost all of T-Mobile Sidekick customers’ mobile phone information on their servers and back-up. That has to have cast a pall of concern over corporate customers evaluating the wisdom of outsourcing their relationship with their customers to a third party. Microsoft was at fault, but T-Mobile gets the blame. The other reasoning that has to be running through customers’ mind is that with an emerging technology, what can go wrong will. Anyone who has experienced Microsoft’s blue screen of death can attest to this.

The other vulnerability cloud computing customers face is security. Imagine if the T-Mobile Sidekick disaster had been a raid by hackers instead of a server farm and back-up meltdown. In a world of computer hackers that have become expert at finding the flaws in each new release of software, cloud computing has to offer an appealing target. And it’s not only financial records. Cracking into a server farm is the equivalent of breaking into the vault of a Swiss bank: personal records in the millions and not just one credit card company but charge accounts for them all. All of these problems will get solved in time as vulnerabilities get identified and fixes are implemented. The question for anyone contemplating being an early adopter is “do I want to be the guinea pig that finds the bug?” like T-Mobile.

Perhaps the greatest vulnerability is the lack of a single point of contact ensuring the security of the cloud computing solution. If a client buys the computing resource and storage capacity from Amazon, Microsoft, Google, or another cloud supplier; he purchases middleware from one or more third parties; and he gets applications software from someone else, the only one that has a vested interest in security across these different vendors is the client buying the service. If a break-in occurs finger pointing ensues. More importantly, hackers understand this vulnerability and seek out the weakest link in the collection of elements comprising a solution for any given client. For example, they might find the back door in a middleware program that can be used to gain entry into the main database.

Google’s cloud computing solution is called the Google App Engine. When asked after his introductory remarks at the Google Internet Summit May 5 and 6, 2009, in Mountain View, California to comment of security not being built into the architecture for cloud computing, Google CEO Eric Schmidt made the following statement. “The answer to your question depends upon where you think security should lie. Do you think it should be at the application layer? Or do you think it should be at some middleware layer… I think it’s too early to really know. It’s very strategic for us that people build—think of them as Ajax applications, Ajax++ (see note) with all the extensions—because that displaces the traditional PC dedicated client architecture… I don’t know how security will play out. I’m not aware within Google of a lot of activity at the applications level in security because the kinds of questions that are asked are still relatively early. Maybe we should fix that.”

Cloud computing is relearning all the security lessons that previous computing generation—the early mainframes, the minicomputers, and the PCs—already experienced. For those not familiar with them, the book “Cyberpunk” by Katie Hafner and John Markoff is an entertaining and informative place to start. You’ll follow the exploits of, among others, Kevin Mitnick who exploited the lax security that protected most minicomputer systems 30 years ago. In 1979, Mitnick gained unauthorized access to Ark, the computer system Digital Equipment Corp. (now part of Hewlett Packard) and stole DEC’s next generation RSTS/E operating system software—then in development, a crime for which he was charged and convicted in 1988.

Maybe security should be given more consideration in the development of cloud computing architectures.

Note: according to Wikipedia, Ajax (asynchronous JavaScript + XML) is a group of interrelated web development techniques used on the client-side to create interactive web applications. With Ajax, web applications can retrieve data from the server asynchronously in the background without interfering with the display and behavior of the existing page. The use of Ajax techniques has led to an increase in interactive or dynamic interfaces on web page and better quality of Web services due to the asynchronous mode. Data is usually retrieved using the XMLHttpRequest object.

When the CEO of Google speaks, the rest of the Web tends to listen so when Eric Schmidt gave a recent interview at Gartner Symposium/ITxpo Orlando 2009 it is fair to say he raised some interesting points for anyone in the industry.

The entire forty five interview can been seen below, which Schmidt touches upon a number of topics from the forthcoming Chrome OS to the future of super-fast broadband, but our interest was piqued by the discussion on the Real-time search and social media.

Schmidt discusses the value of real-time information sources, which is more than just Twitter and Facebook, with the big challenge not being a question of indexing this data but how to rank and sort it. As we see such a huge increase in social media content it changes the way people consume information and Schmidt believes that “the great challenge of the age” is learning how to rank it all.

Do you think Google is up to the challenge or have Bing stolen a march on the Mountain View giant here?