Yoick - Hightechwire

If the Global Peace Index were to apply not only to countries, but also to companies, Google would be joining China at the very bottom ranking.

No-one should’ve felt comfortable with Google’s decision to entertain the censorship demon that is China back in 2005, but Sergey Brin’s recent comments at Davos just scored them a big fat zero.

In answer to a question whether he regretted Google’s decision to modify its search engine when they launched in China, Sergey said, “On a business level, that decision to censor…was a net negative.”

Hang your head in shame, Sergey. From a business point of view, Google.cn has been a disaster - get over it. Correct your status as a brand that stands above evil or be done — you are already on a slippery slope.

Michael Arrington sums up the feeling out there…Google isn’t saying they regret the decision because it was the wrong thing to do, and helps prop up a government that continues to violate the human rights of its own people…Google needs to say they regret working with the Chinese government because that government is evil, not because it turned out to be a ‘net negative’ business decision.

Benchmark Capital Partner, Michael Eisenberg, has blogged that Google is (rumored to be) working on turning Google Earth into a virtual world a la Second Life.

Benchmark is an investor in Second Life, so one wonders at Michael’s motivation for raising such a rumor into the blogosphere — godzilla just walked past my 24th floor office window heading north?

Michael notes the language on the Google Earth website - one more step to creating a life-like 3-D model of the whole planet….message to the Googleplex - we’ve already got one earth, so why do we need yet another virtual earth… what we need are better ways to connect, interact, create and share and doing so in 3-D is uber-cool.

Matt Marshall sees such a move by Google as an opportunity for them to act as virtual central bankers. A bit of a stretch, but an interesting one nevertheless.

UPDATE: The GigaOM has more to say on this, pointing to the possibility that Google is working with a company in China to build the avatars.

San Mateo start up, Wize, assists people find the best products in less time than if they were searching for them on generic search engines like Google.

How do they do this you may ask? They compile expert and user reviews and insert them into a scoring algorithm that outputs a Wize Rank - a single numerical score from 0 - 100 - that essentially uses the wisdom of crowds to alert consumers to products worthy of their attention.

Wize has raised $4million in  Series A financing from the Mayfield Fund and Bessemer Venture Partners. Michael Arrington covered this news recently in a post that was headed “Four Month Old Wize Gets $4m” - a number of folk have reacted to this heading with the WOTF knee jerker that the world of venture has gone all crazy again. I mean, how could a company that’s only been going for four months get $4 million in funding. So we yoicked around a bit and soon placated ourselves that Mayfield and Bessemer hadn’t gone nuts.

Wize’s CEO, Tom Patterson, had been an Entrepreneur in Residence at Mayfield, so this start up has been cooking for a while - it’s only been on the plate for 4 months, but the recipe is a tried and tested one. I’m a big fan of EiR’s and have been successfully running such a program over at NICTA for a few years now.

According to Raj Kapoor, managing director at Mayfield, “We started working with Tom as our Entrepreneur in Residence a year ago to revolutionize the product research space and zeroed in on Wize, as they have the most compelling proposition - giving the mass market consumer the simple answer on what product to buy when confronted with dozens of reviews and guides on the Net. By bringing together a breadth of data in an intuitive interface and simplifying the decision process, Wize will funamentally change the way users research products on the Web.”

Talking with the folk at Wize, I agree with their premise that while expert reviews are ideal for letting you know how a product compares to others in its category, user reviews are better at letting you know how a product performs over the long term in the real world.

Competition includes ViewScore, Nextag, Thefind and Shopping. Nothing wrong with a bit of healthy competition. It will be interesting to see how the space pans out as consumers oscillate between the comfort zone of a generic search and honing in on the right products based on collective knowledge of what works in various product categories. More power to the consumer!

Second Life sees voice as an important tool for its residents. According to the virtual world’s creator, Linden Labs, their development path is focused onhaving both voice-enabled avatars so you can simply walk up to someone and engage in a conversation and allow for spatially aware multiple voices so that you can walk through an area and hear people speaking with their voices emanating from where they are in that space.

In an interview with IDG News, Joe Miller, Linden Lab’s VP of platform and technology development also noted that they have a significant initiative under way to make inworld search more natural and visual.

Joe also mentioned they have created an API which will allow their business customers to create their own front porches into SL. Not my favorite analogy, but this is an important development. In fact all three initiatives are important as SL has copped a lot of flack for its clunkiness. Marketing and hype is one thing, but happy users is a whole other ball game.

Let’s end with a great quote, which we strongly agree with…We believe that multiple-user virtual environments are just in the beginning stages of their existence…to create communities, commerce and a permanent place for ourselves.

The latest venture funding activity includes:

* Heavy.com, an online video site for 18-34 year old males, which has closed a $20m financing from Polaris Venture Partners. The funding (which comes on top of $10m provided by Polaris in early 2006) will be used to expand Heavy’s network internationally. According to Mike Hirshland, a partner at Polaris, “Heavy is building a true 21st century media company, which combines internally developed content with great consumer generated content and with a sustainable revenue model. As advertisers expand their online video budgets in 2007, they are looking to work with the few online brands that can effectively deliver audience in scale.”

* With technology developed in Israel, San Francisco based Amobee has developed a telco grade adserving solution for mobile operators, which enables them to ad-fund non-voice related apps and services. The company has raised further funding from Sequoia and Accel (they raised $5m in 2005).

On the M&A side, Colorado-based Digitalglobe, which provides high resolution commercial satellite imagery and geospatial information products has acquired GlobeXplorer, a geographic data integration and publishing company from Stewart REI. GlobeXplorer’s web-based search and delivery apps will augment Digitalglobe’s Quickbird satellite system. The company’s images power GoogleEarth and they anticipate launching two new satellites in 07/08.

Need we say more…(for the great unwashed..it’s Edvard Munch’s birthday).

The Australian Financial Review has an article in its weekend edition focusing on the struggle the established corporate world is having coming to terms with the new Internet.

Come on guys, it ain’t that hard. Web 2.0 is about CICS, plain and simple - (Connecting, Interacting, Creating and Sharing).

Here are some snippets from the article…at the interface between the established corporate world and the fronteir of the internet, there’s a whiff of desperation…business people fear that a world they didn’t create and don’t understand is about to change the way they do business.

In the article David Bolliger, CEO of Tilefile, a Sydney-based socnet startup, likens the development of Web 2.0 to the creation of a city. The best cities, he says, “don’t come into existence from one person’s pen but from longitudinal social interaction and person-to-person interactions.”

Hey, I like the analogy.

Here’s another great quote from David - smart cookie this guy…“It’s an earthquake that’s moving through the collective. We should think of Web 2.0 not just as an internet phenomenon but as an internet expression of a global cultural phenomenon.”

Indeed, and the vanguard of this ‘revolution’ is the fundamental human desire for more CICS.

Well, crap, says Michael Arrington in response to a cease and desist letter from Wilson Sonsini, lawyers for YouTube.

According to Michael the alleged ‘offense’ they committed… was creating a small tool that lets people download YouTube videos to their hard drives.

Go here for more detail.

Marrisa Mayer has identified one of the key challenges for Google is around how the company can keep innovating. So far they’re tackling this by getting to failure fast with projects.

Speaking at the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit, the VP of Seach & User Experience at Google went on to explain how they fail fast:

If you assume that one in five things you do will turn out to be really successful, and maybe two of five will be moderately successful, and the other two will languish, you want to do a lot of things. It’s all about being agile. Most of the teams at Google are three to ten people. Five people launched Google News. About five people launched Google Toolbar. They operate like small companies inside the large company.

Marissa goes on to compare Google to a VC firm - namely, they take a portfolio approach, placing bets on a number of teams with the expectation that there will be a high failure rate.

Google is a lot like managing a VC firm, because you’re placing bets on different teams. Our organization mirrors the Internet. It looks more like a network than a hierarchy.

In my opinion…this is a very, very smart way of business building, in fact I like to call it yoicking it!

In an interview with John Battelle at the Web 2.0 Summit, Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt spoke about their 70-20-10 model. 70% of Google’s activity is core, aka search, while 10% is reserved for crazy stuff and employees are actively encouraged to allocate part of their time to such blue sky, left of field endeavors.

Eric noted that most of the impact is coming out of the 10-zone. No surprises there.

John went on to ask him, how then, does Google maintain focus.

Eric essentially replied that Google embraces chaos, they see chaos as being part of the creative process. I totally agree with this comment — from my point of view chaos is good, chaos should be encouraged. However, there is good chaos and there is bad chaos. Positive chaos continues to drive your activity in the direction you want to head, while negative chaos pulls you down and can cause a death spiral for any company.

It is important to also point out the context of Google’s chaos embrace. They have a system, a way of classifying innovation in certain markets to solve certain problems.

Eric also pointed out that they are very much a consensus driven company, where there are no single decision makers. He feels this leads to mor robust decisions and greater buy in. I believe that this is an essential ingredient to ensuring they keep their chaos balanced on the positive side.