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Ajax is sparking yet another big push towards Software as a Service on the Web and even the biggest software players like Microsoft are now making significant investments in Ajax desktops, online business software, as well as elaborate Ajax development frameworks such as Microsoft’s forthcoming Atlas product.  Even more staid companies IBM and Oracle have gotten together recently and formed an Open Ajax coalition to make sense of where Ajax is going and help ensure it goes in the right direction.

AdMob is a pay-per-click marketplace for mobiles. Think Google AdWords for phones – yes, it’s that deliciously simple.

Publishers of any website optimised for mobile viewing can join the network free. And Admob run text-based ads on their site, whenever viewed by a mobile and share revenue. In other words, for a publisher, it’s all upside.

1) Publisher services. In the late ’90’s, I thought the music business had the most to gain by the dotcom explosion. Today, I think the publishers do. Understanding content and communities is the name of the game. Publishers have this in their DNA. They just need services that help them transition their businesses from tired media vehicles to the dotcom world.

2) Social search. There are lots of opportunities for companies to figure out how to help information find people. I don’t know whether that comes in the form of recommendations, sharing things, subscribing to things, a combination or something else. But this is a big space with lots of room for newcomers.

3) Web services. I don’t have clear insight into where exactly the best opportunity is in this space, but technologies that move data in and out of databases across the web is probably the single most important aspect of today’s online world. I’d bank on companies that are making RSS the core technology behind their products.

4) Video on the web. Big media is moving quickly to move their programming to the web. The user experience for consuming video is clunky, but the pieces are all there. A new hit product is going to appear here, or an old product is going to look new again, I’m sure.

…Online store with “Earth’s biggest selection” of everything from books to zithers will announce Tuesday morning that it’s adding a new and different kind of service: an unlimited data storage service aimed at software developers who are creating new Web sites and services.
This could help spur a whole bunch of new Web mash-ups and other services.

TechDirt writes:

Word is leaking out tonight that it’s Amazon that’s leading the way with the open platform. This isn’t about storage, even though that’s what most people will talk about. This is about being the file system and database on which web apps are built. That’s much more powerful than just storage.

Forget the head fake of Amazon getting into contextual advertising. Combine this announcement with the announcement a few months ago from Amazon subsidiary Alexa opening up their search platform, and start to imagine what developers could do if they can simply plug into an open online file system/database and an open search engine — and then just build an app on top of that.

It’s like Amazon just provided much of the database and middleware someone might need to develop a web-based app. Of course, there’s a lot of marketing that needs to be done between here and there, and convincing everyone to jump on that platform may not be easy (and who knows, the terms of service may be problematic). That’s, in part, because people just don’t think of Amazon in this way. However, if Amazon really can convince people that it’s providing the basics they need to build the next generation of web apps, Amazon just became a much more interesting company — not by copying Google and Yahoo, but by going beyond them and doing what both companies have yet to do.

Looking for a place to live last year, Paul Rademacher pored over Silicon Valley rentals on craigslist, the popular online classified-ad site. But the 3D-software engineer grew frustrated that he couldn’t see the properties’ locations on one map. So Rademacher hacked his own solution — a Web site that combines craigslist rentals with search engine Google Inc.’s (GOOG ) map service. The listings on HousingMaps.com appear as virtual pushpins on maps of nearly three-dozen regions around the country. Click on one, and up pop the details. Since its public debut in April, the free site has drawn well over a half-million unique visitors.

What they’re all seeing is nothing less than the future of the World Wide Web. Suddenly, hordes of volunteer programmers are taking it upon themselves to combine and remix the data and services of unrelated, even competing sites. The result: entirely new offerings they call “mash-ups.”

Mailroom is a web-based small business email management application that allows multiple users to manage multiple email addresses effectively.

The way it works it that you point all your sales, support and general email to your Mailroom account from where you can have multiple users read them, respond to them, assign them and clearly see which emails need attention. One of the really strong points of this solution is that when replying to emails it allows you to drop in standard responses based on the email you have received and previous responses to similar emails. There is no need to setup standard template responses as you can pick and choose which paragraphs you wish to reply with based on what you wrote previously.

With a single place for all emails it means that all your staff can work as a team in replying to emails, and with the response suggestions they can’t really go wrong. If they can’t respond to an email then they simply assign it to somebody who can. This sure does beat having a single email account where you often get into an internal email thread about who is going to respond to it, or worse 2 people respond to it. Also a lot better than routing rules on your mail server, or not having a sales query responded to because your only sales guy was on holidays.

1) This market is growing in a serious way. I would expect a company of any] size to be able to purchase all of the software function it wants and needs as a service, rather than as traditional software, installed within its own firewall, within 3 to 5 years.

(2) Of course, I don’t expect every company to want to move all of its IT needs to the SaaS platform in that time period. I do expect even large companies to move functions that are used only occasionally or only by small numbers of users to an outside service provider.

(3) SaaS will increasingly look like a great solution for commodity problems like Email, for companies of any size. Remember, having Email supported by SaaS means outsourcing your Spam problems, too, and most of your virus problems as well.

(4) Look for large traditional software players to start to seriously offer SaaS-based alternatives to their traditional software offerings. These have to be serious, full-function alternatives rather than Microsoft’s recent foray into on-line services, offering incremental services to Office users, but still requiring the customer to install Office on every workstation and multiple Microsoft servers within the firewall.

(5) Watch the innovator companies like Google figure out how to be SaaS vendors beyond the consumer function they offer now. Inevitably, they’ll offer software to the small business market and they may decide to move beyond that into services that appeal to the remote workers of large companies, for example.

How important strategically is the mobile business to Google?

For Google, it’s extremely strategic. Our mission is, take the world’s information and make it universally available and useful for our users. And we don’t believe all the users will use PCs to access content. Especially in emerging markets where cell phone penetration is deeper than PC penetration, cell phones might become — or, in some cases, have already become — the primary means of accessing data.

What’s your overarching mobile strategy?

The phone is not the PC. It’s about creating the right experience for the mobile user, so they can find exactly what they want, quickly and efficiently. People search differently on mobile phones; they don’t browse as much, as PC users do, for example.

After months of cryptic Web marketing and word-of-mouth hype over Microsoft Corp.’s project code-named Origami, the company finally showed off the product Thursday: an ultracompact computer running Windows XP with a touchscreen and wireless connectivity.

The device, about the size of a large paperback book, weighs less than 2? pounds and is about one inch thick. It doesn’t have a keyboard, but includes a seven-inch screen that responds to a stylus or the tap of a finger. The device, manufactured by Samsung Electronics Co. and others, is expected to be in stores next month for between $600 and $1,000.
…
The screen is wide, bright and easy to see, even in low light. Mr. Mitchell showed a music video on one model and a film on the other. It doesn’t have its own keyboard, but since the units are designed with USB 2 ports, one could be plugged in as needed, the Associated Press reported. Other units shown to the AP had SecureDigital Card and CompactFlash memory-card slots, along with jacks for connecting digital cameras, headphones and speakers.

Marc Canter has an unmissable statistic: Did you know that 45% of all of eBay’s listings come in through their APIs?

As you might remember, at Sprint we were trying to open up the wireless side into an open technology and business platform. It failed, mostly for lack of a cultural imperative to drive in that direction.

Ebay’s business comprises two stages: someone lists an item (eBay gets paid for this), and someone buys the item (eBay gets paid for this too). They’ve taken all the friction out of the first half of their business. No human necessary! Only the actual purchase still requires a human click, and it can’t be too long until the shop-bots start to change that too. (Although we’re part-way there already.)

Now think about the traditional telephony business. I have to dial, you may have to answer. Voicemail part-automates the answering, generating more metered minutes. But you have to ask yourself: is it really the best you can do? Is it impossible to broaden the business model – temporary buddies, address book access, directory, etc.? Can’t you deepen it too, and automate previously manual business transactions via APIs?

The service we are considering here is a `mobile’ version of a combination of del.icio.us and flickr.

As you probably know, both del.icio.us and flickr are based on tags. However, note that in a mobile context, a `tag’ would have a different meaning to the term on the web. People do not like to enter a lot of information on a mobile device. Thus, a tag in a mobile sense, would be explicit information entered by the user(i.e. a `web’ tag) but more importantly information captured implicitly when the image was captured(for example the user’s location).

The service would enable you to
a) Search related images and get more information about a `camera phone image’ using historical analysis of metadata (including tags) from other users. This bit works like del.icio.us i.e. searching via tags BUT with a mobile element because the `tag’ could include many data elements that are unique to mobility(such as location)
b) `Share’ your images with others (either nominated friends or the general public similar to flickr but as a mobile service)

From a user perspective, the user would be able to
a) Capture an image using a camera phone alongwith metadata related to that image
b) Gain more information about that image from an analysis of historical data (either a missing element in the image or identifying the image itself)
c) Search related images based on tags
d) Share her image with others – either nominated friends or the general public

Google is working on a project to create its own global internet protocol (IP) network, a private alternative to the internet controlled by the search giant, according to sources who are in commercial negotiation with the company.
…
Google has long been rumoured to be planning to launch a PC to retail for less than $100. The Google computers are likely to be low-grade machines that require a connection to Google to be able to perform functions such as word processing and spreadsheet manipulations. While using the computers, it is understood that consumers will be shown personalised advertising from the company’s AdWords network.

* FeedBurner: Core RSS feed, page view metrics, item views, reach, and email stats
* BlogBeat: Core page view metrics (plus feed data via integration with FeedBurner API)
* Google Analytics: Page views
* Amazon: Online purchase metrics
* MyBlogLog: Outbound link tracking
* Technorati: More link tracking

“Most mobile sites split their content across multiple short pages. I think in a lot of cases it’s a bad approach. In case of a small-to-medium size mobile web page it takes a cell phone much longer to start downloading the page than to actually download it. That’s why my philosophy has always been to make mobile pages as long as possible. A good example of an app that I designed with that in mind is Windows Live Mail for mobile, where we first try to determine whether the device can handle large pages, and then generate as large page as possible (with an upper limit). This improves the user experience by reducing the time that the device spends connecting and locating each page. It also lowers the amount of data that gets transferred to the user’s phone, because downloading each page has an overhead of downloading its header and footer sections.”

The merging Big Kahuna in commercial peer-to-peer seems to be Wurld Media’s Peer Impact, which has similar technology to Grid Networks (though Windows-only), but where Grid is a networking company, Peer Impact is a media company and actually has a pretty compelling business model.

Peer Impact is up and running right now, though most of what the network has available isn’t TV or music, but video games. About 1,100 video games from most major publishers except Electronic Arts are available through Peer Impact. The network has also announced it is adding video content and movies from NBC/Universal, and says it will have all major film studios and all major record companies onboard by the end of this year.

Peer Impact is similar to iTunes in that Apple sets the price ($0.99 per song and $1.99 per show). Where Peer Impact is different is in its use of Microsoft DRM, Windows client software, and a peer-to-peer distribution scheme. But where the company is REALLY different is in its relationship to participating nodes: Peer Impact pays users.

This type of Internet is far more dangerous to the advertising industry than the previous one. This new type of Internet undermines the very principals advertising has relied on for decades, such as information-asymmetry and top-down content delivery.

Slide 31 says that Google’s philosophy to new product development is “no constraints” and that they initially ignore “CPU power, storage, bandwidth, and monetization.”

Slide 20 says (in the notes) that Google plans to “get all the worlds information, not just some.”

Derrick made the full notes for slide 19 available:

In a world with infinite storage, bandwidth, and CPU power, here’s what we could do with consumer products…
Theme 1: Speed
Seems simple, but should not be overlooked because impact is huge. Users don’t realize how slow things are until they get something faster.
Users assume it takes time for a webpage to load, but the experience should really be instantaneous.
Gmail started to do this for webmail, but that’s just a small first step. Infinite bandwidth will make this a reality for all applications.
Theme 2: Store 100% of User Data
With infinite storage, we can house all user files, including: emails, web history, pictures, bookmarks, etc and make it accessible from anywhere (any device, any platform, etc).
We already have efforts in this direction in terms of GDrive, GDS, Lighthouse, but all of them face bandwidth and storage constraints today. For example: Firefox team is working on server side stored state but they want to store only URLs rather than complete web pages for storage reasons. This theme will help us make the client less important (thin client, thick server model) which suits our strength vis-a-vis Microsoft and is also of great value to the user.
As we move toward the “Store 100%” reality, the online copy of your data will become your Golden Copy and your local-machine copy serves more like a cache. An important implication of this theme is that we can make your online copy more secure than it would be on your own machine.
Another important implication of this theme is that storing 100% of a user’s data makes each piece of data more valuable because it can be access across applications. For example: a user’s Orkut profile has more value when it’s accessible from Gmail (as addressbook), Lighthouse (as access list), etc.
Theme 3: Transparent Personalization
The more data, access, and processing Google can handle for the user, the greater our ability to use that data to transparently optimize the user’s experience.
Google Desktop w/ RSS Feeds is a good first example: the user should not have to tell us which RSS feeds they want to subscribe to. We should be able to determine this implicitly.
Other potential examples: User should not have to specify the “From” address in Google Maps; user should not have to specify which currency they want to see Froogle prices in; user should not have to manually enter their buddy list into Google Talk.

these companies have a faith in the “scalability” of their “business model.” It used to be you’d beat your competitors by achieving greater scale in your operations, enabling you to spread your costs over more products and thus push down the cost of producing each product. Scale was tangible, a manifestation of plant and equipment and other real assets. Today, you strive to beat your competitors by creating an idea or a model that can scale without constraint, expanding easily and flexibly to handle ever more business. Scalability is intangible.

A relatively new and revamped web service called Box.net plans to make online storage as easy as possible without skimping on the features. With 1GB of storage for free and up to 5GBs for a small fee, you can easily safekeep files and share them with contacts.
…
Online storage is a volatile industry. Server space is at a premium these days. The only way Gmail is even able to cope with their outrageous offerings and large user base is by compressing their data. Assuming each person uses their ~2.5gigs of storage (not that anyone ever uses the entire thing, attachment size is limited to 10MB) with text, Google can compress that space to only a few hundred megabytes. However, with Box.net users are encouraged to store all types of data and media. Nothing will be compressed and that is a secret to why the service is so fast. New users can get 1GB of box space for free with paying users getting 5GB for $4.99 a month.