The first decade of the new millennium ushered in new versions of just about everything.

Long ago the software industry established a simple versioning protocol to mark the progress and development of its products. These are expressed as versions 1.0, 1.1, 2.0, 2.1, etc.

Over the past decade, the world borrowed this successive, numeric method to mark significant, often revolutionary advancements in other areas: government, communications, activism, business, and charity to name a few. More so than in decades past, the progress made in these last 10 years across so many parts of society has been so great that we were compelled to view them as fundamentally new—as versions 2.0.

Although technology served as a primary enabler of these 2.0 transitions—and Web 2.0 both coined and drove the 2.0 trend—technology did not entirely define the dawning of the 2.0 era. Rather, it was a unique mix of psychology, philosophy, and innovation together with a healthy measure of humanity that broke down the barriers to the next version of just about everything.

To be clear, the 2.0 designation is not meant to imply that versions 2.1 or 3.0 will follow any time soon. This is where the software analogy ends. The 2.0 designation simply marks a fundamental shift in thought, principles, and overall modus operandi. It deliniates the past from the present and future. Not coincidentally, it aligns with the first decade of the new millennium.

Following are a few of the 2.0 highlights from the past decade.

Dawn of the 2.0 Era

Web 2.o: We are all too familiar with the original 2.0, so we won’t go into too much detail. Quite simply, it is marked by a series of C-words (with the notable exception of one): community, collaborate, cooperate, control, connect, communicate, create, contribute, collect, content, and crowdsource. If we missed any, feel free to comment.

Environment 2.0: We’ve written before about the meaning and significance of Environment 2.0 and how it evolved quite rapidly from the first version starting around the turn of the century. In many ways the distinction is as simple as being for environmental solutions as opposed to being against environmental destruction. This has enabled politicians, corporations, and pretty much anyone to participate and support sustainability and green living simply because it’s a positive and reasonable thing to do. And while this has opened the door to greenwashing, this second version of environmentalism is still far superior to the first.

Politics 2.0: Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential campaign demonstrated the power of the Web for political organizing and fundraising. You might say this was the beta version for what President Barack Obama accomplished in 2008. Obama’s campaign approach is now the gold standard in Politics 2.0, which leverages networks and empowers supporters in distributing your message and attracting new supporters.

Government 2.0: In principle, American democracy is a government “of the People, by the People, and for the People.” The reality is that we have representative democracy, which tempers the direct power (and whims) of said People. The Web has gotten us closer to the ideal through open government initiatives, increased citizen participation, and greater accountability while maintaining the representative structure. In short, Gov 2.o enables a more perfect union.

Nonprofit 2.0: The leading edge of the nonprofit world adopted a new ethic and way of doing business. Yes, business. Just because an organization doesn’t have shareholders and a profit motive doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be run as if it does. Nonprofit 2.0 is about achieving measurable, bottom-line results and return on investment (ROI). These returns are measured not in dollars but rather positive change and fulfilling a stated mission as efficiently as possible. Social entrepreneurship, hybrid companies, B-Corporations, and the fourth sector all emerged in concert with this 2.0 trend.

Generation 2.0: Also known as the Millennial Generation and Gen-Y, this demographic powerhouse rivals the Baby Boomers in both size and idealism. Their potential to change the world is magnified, however, by the networked environment in which they came of age. Gen 2.0’s first major achievement was electing America’s first black president. And though they’ve had to tough out the greatest economic disaster since the Great Depression, precisely at a time when so many were graduating college and looking for work, it should only serve to build character and strengthen the connections between them. We have high hopes for them in the twenty-teens.

Entrpreneurship 2.0: The ethos of Entrepreneurship 2.0 encompasses many things including social ventures, triple bottom line thinking, and utilizing the social web to engage and involve customers in your business. The rules of business have change, and savvy entrepreneurs are taking advantage of this to compete with established companies of the previous era. If there is a poster child for Entrepreneurship 2.0 in the 2000s, it’s Tony Hsieh of Zappos.com. Sure, Tom’s Shoes founder Blake Mycoskie might appear more relevant, but Mycoskie’s company didn’t sell to Amazon for close to a billion dollars.

What are your favorite 2.0 trends of the past decade? Where will version 2.0 strike next in this decade? Leave your thoughts in the comments.

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Fox News recently did a feature story on Zumbox, the paperless postal system. The story was syndicated nationally and internationally through Fox television affiliates (TV and Web).

The piece focuses on municipal adoption of Zumbox in San Francisco, which was spearheaded by the City’s forward-thinking Mayor, Gavin Newsom, and its Department of the Environment. The objective is to save taxpayer dollars on printing and postage costs while reducing waste and communicating more efficiently with residents.

Max Gladwell founder Rob Reed is interviewed for the story, serving in his capacity as VP of Marketing and Government Relations as well as designated spokesperson.

“The potential for Zumbox is to build and strengthen communities by enabling electronic communication that didn’t exist before,” said Reed.

The biofuel industry went through a boom and bust not unlike the dot-com era. Can Biofuels 2.0 revitalize the broken industry in the twenty-teens?

The previous decade will be remembered for giving birth to the clean tech movement and more specifically the business opportunity in green technology. When we look back, the 2000s will be credited for launching countless companies in solar, wind, geothermal, electric vehicles, smart grid, and biofuels. The latter is unique in that the biofuels industry experienced a roller coaster ride much like the dot-com era of the ’90s. We rode the wave from 2005 to 2007 and have been keen observers ever since. There is definitely a book to be written about the great biofuel boom and bust of the 2000s. This was our first-hand experience.

In early 2005, we were engaged as consultants for Earth Biofuels, a biodiesel startup based in Dallas, Texas. As you can imagine, building a vertically integrated energy company is highly capital intensive given the tremendous infrastructure involved. Fortunately, the economy appeared to be quite healthy at the time, and the investment environment for such things was quite favorable. By the fall of that year, the company was in a position to complete a reverse merger and go public. Concurrently, Earth Biofuels acquired Willie Nelson’s small biodiesel distribution company, complete with the BioWillie brand, and both Willie Nelson and actor Morgan Freeman joined the company’s board of directors.

Earth Biofuels entered 2006 with multiple biodiesel refineries either under construction or in the planning/acquisition stages. The BioWillie B20 biodiesel brand was being distributed at a handful of independent truck stops around the country. The press couldn’t do a story on biodiesel without referencing BioWillie, and the company was quickly expanding into the corn ethanol business. Goldman Sachs had already forecast $100 oil (though it wouldn’t be realized until 2008), which made a clear business case for biofuels.

Indeed, the case for biofuels was compelling across the political spectrum. Renewable, domestically produced fuels supported local and rural economies while reducing our dependence on foreign energy, and they were good for the environment by reducing both toxic and greenhouse gas emissions. Having personally conducted the market research and written the business plan for Earth Biofuels, we also realized the inherent limitations of soy-based biodiesel and corn-based ethanol. We didn’t believe these fuels represented a long-term solution but rather one of many ways to transition away from petroleum. We knew that second-generation biofuels such as algae-based biodiesel and cellulosic ethanol would be necessary for biofuels to be truly scalable, viable, and sustainable as fuel alternatives. We weren’t alone, however, in backing the first generation.

Looking back on the biofuel boom, there were a number of key moments and key players that made it what it was. In 2005, Bill Gates invested $84 million in Pacific Ethanol, taking a 27% stake in the company. Perhaps the most credible and passionate proponent of ethanol was legendary venture capitalist Vinod Khosla of Khosla Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, and Sun Microsystems fame. His PowerPoint presentations and white papers were widely distributed, and he made a compelling case for how corn-based ethanol would provide the necessary bridge to cellulosic. Sir Richard Branson himself entered the fray by funding Virgin Fuels, now rebranded as the Virgin Green Fund.

By the summer of 2006, the industry was firing on all cylinders (if you’ll forgive the pun). Ethanol producer VeraSun energy made its successful public offering, rising 30% above its IPO price and raising $421 million.

Riding a U.S. push toward ethanol as a substitute for imported oil, VeraSun is the first of three producers of the corn-based motor fuel to go public this summer. Still to come are Aventine Renewable and Hawkeye Energy.

The peak for Earth Biofuels occurred at roughly the same time, as this brief period marked the peak of the biofuel boom.

Following the reverse merger and stock split in November of 2005, Earth Biofuels shares traded at around 60 cents. By the summer of 2006, prices had risen to more than $6/share and reached an interday high above $7/share. The market cap exceeded $1 billion for several weeks, and on July 18th, Earth Biofuels announced that actress Julia Roberts had joined the company’s advisory board and would serve as spokesperson for a new clean school bus initiative. The announcement added roughly $200 million to the company’s market cap over a seven-day period.

This was a relationship we developed in an effort to drive awareness about the health risks posed by diesel-powered school buses and how biodiesel presented an easy and cost-effective solution. Regardless of how biodiesel is grown or produced, its emissions are non-toxic and, therefore, dramatically improve the air quality for students who ride them. Julia promoted the initiative on The Oprah Winfrey show, which prompted California State Senator Dean Florez to inquire about supporting our efforts. We worked with the Senator and his staff to draft a seven-bill package of biodiesel mandates and tax incentives during the 2007 legislative session. The fate of those bills, though, was consistent with that of the biofuel industry as a whole: a bust, thanks in no small part to opposition from Big Oil.

Having moved on from Earth Biofuels at the end of 2006, were were focused on two new startups. The first was a search and discovery learning technology designed specifically for healthy-green living, which is still in development. The second was Conserv Fuel, a green filling station in the heart of Brentwood, CA. It would become the first station in LA to sell both B99 biodiesel and E85 ethanol. Then-Senator Barack Obama used the station as a backdrop for a clean-energy campaign speech in 2007, and Men’s Vogue did a feature story on our efforts to develop Conserv Fuel into a franchise model for green filling stations nationwide. As the only source of E85 in LA, the station also enjoyed support from General Motors.

This was the period of the boom when GM and other auto manufacturers were pushing FlexFuel vehicles while urging us to Live Green and Go Yellow, a reference to E85 corn ethanol. In the fall of 2007, however, things started to unravel rather quickly for the biofuel industry. In truth, the industry had always been plagued by competing forces ranging from the economic and academic to the social and political.

The industry itself was competing for limited resources. There were only a few companies that could build biorefineries, so not only were they booked years in advance but they could charge whatever they wanted and renegotiate contracts as they saw fit. Since biofuels couldn’t be transported through traditional pipelines, they required rail cars and trucks. During the peak of the boom, no rail cars could be found. Most importantly, the primary biodiesel feedstock (soybean oil) was in short supply given the unprecedented demand. Producers couldn’t produce and those that could weren’t profitable. In the end, though, biofuels had trouble living up to the green hype.

In writing the business and marketing plans for Earth Biofuels, we relied on data from USDA studies and others that showed a positive energy balance for biodiesel of more than three to one (3:1). In other words, for every unit of petroleum energy you invested to bring biodiesel to market, you’d get more than three units of biodiesel energy in return. This contrasted with petroleum diesel and gasoline itself, which often yielded a net energy loss.

In terms of the food issues, we were  skeptical of the charge that biofuels were responsible for boosting food prices because there were much more powerful forces at work, namely rising energy prices across the board and unprecedented demand from developing nations. Neverthless, as the biofuel boom waned, the industry steadily lost support from one of its key constituencies: environmentalists.

The use of genetically modified soy never sat well with this group (for good reason), and the whole energy balance question had never sufficiently been addressed. The increased use of imported palm oil as a feedstock, which necessitated the clearing and destruction of rainforests, started turning the tide in 2007. The Sustainable Biodiesel Alliance emerged to address some of these concerns, but the biofuel industry had already passed the point of no return.

One of the defining moments of the biofuel bust—the beginning of the end—was an article published on February 8th, 2008, in the New York Times entitled Biofuels Deemed a Greenhouse Threat:

Almost all biofuels used today cause more greenhouse gas emissions than conventional fuels if the full emissions costs of producing these “green” fuels are taken into account, two studies being published Thursday have concluded.

This was a huge blow to the industry’s green credibility and its viability as a truely renewable fuel. We remember feeling grateful that we didn’t have to deal with this blowback. We can only assume that everyone involved in the biofuel industry was in full crisis mode. To use a war analogy, this article was the Tet Offensive of the anti-biofuel shift.

Later that year, VeraSun and several others filed for bankruptcy. Pacific Ethanol’s Chapter 11 followed in May of 2009 and a month later the California State Water Resource Control Board made it illegal to store high biodiesel blends (above 5%) in underground tanks. This effectively put Conserv Fuel out of the retail biodiesel business.

Alas, the industry’s coup de grâce arrived on New Year’s Eve 2009, at the dawn of this new decade, when Congress blithely allowed the $1/gallon biodiesel tax credit to expire. This was the industry’s lifeblood. The credit gave producing and selling biodiesel a fighting chance at profitability. Without it, there is no biodiesel industry. And if you’ve read this far, it’s clear how this could make for an interesting book on the great biofuel boom and bust of the last decade.

Now that we’re into a new decade, it’s possible that the biofuel industry will reinvent itself just as the Internet did in the previous decade with Web 2.0 and social media. We’re ready for Biofuels 2.0. Are you?

Is your company (or client) positioned to take advantage of geolocation as a business strategy? We look at seven that just might be.

The geolocation trend is bigger than most of us realize. Granted, it’s premature as a broad business opportunity. But make no mistake. Geolocation will become as broadly relevant and valuable as social media itself in the coming year(s).

Consumers will benefit by gaining better access to information based on geographic relevance i.e. geospatial awareness. This means that anyone running a consumer business, whether online or off, will be able to participate and ultimately benefit from a geolocation strategy using Twitter, Google, and other geo-based services. A few will be able to integrate geolocation to the very DNA of their business models.

In the following, we look at seven companies that are uniquely positioned to explore this next great frontier.

1. General Motors

This applies to all car makers. GM just happens to have the OnStar system, which gives it a slight advantage. As soon as cars become fully web enabled, it will be quite easy to integrate geolocation apps with the navigation systems. In addition to the static info you get about restaurants, airports, and points of interest, you’ll get real-time info about everything going on around you—restaurant wait times, available parking spaces, live video, and where your friends are located. You’ll also be able to program the system to push select types of notifications, such as if an accident has occurred on your current route or if a friend has come into range. This might also be available in a head-up display. In an ideal world, Audi teams up with Apple to offer the first tablet-like device integrated with the dashboard that will offer this feature package in the 45-mpg A3 TDI. It’s only a matter of time before Apple expands into the automotive market, just as Microsoft has with SYNC, and Audi seems like a great fit.

2. Greenopia

Geolocation is fundamental to the Greenopia model. The company started with printed, Michelin-style guides to green businesses and services for Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York. It also provides that same info for more than 50 cities through its website. Starting in January of 2010, you’ll gain access to that same info using the Greenopia iPhone app, which is powered by Geodelic. Now you can dynamically locate green businesses across all categories from wherever you happen to be. The app features the addition of Yelp reviews as well as one-click directions. The missing piece is a social component ala Foursquare to make finding and supporting local green businesses more…social. It’s also worth noting Greenopia’s recent partnership with American Express, the undisputed king of geo-commerce data.

3. Amazon

Every Amazon account is anchored by a shipping and/or billing address, which means that Amazon knows more-or-less where you are when you login. This is largely true of any online retailer; Amazon just happens to be the largest. It’s possible that Amazon users would be willing to share or broadcast purchases, which could be viewable by geographic area. Why would they do this? It’s not entirely clear at this point. But if the successful launch of Blippy is any indication, people are ready to share their purchasing decisions. Amazon would simply provide local context. You wouldn’t necessarily have to reveal your street address. Rather, you could share based on a select geographic radius. In turn, this data stream would show what people are buying on Amazon around you. Yes, this is reminiscent of Facebook’s Beacon, only with more user control.

4. Zumbox

The first paperless postal system is a platform based on verified street addresses. This is what enables mail to be sent online (paperless) the same way it’s sent offline (paper) to save on mailing costs and reduce waste. It also means that every street address in the U.S. is digitally connected, enabling secure communication on a one-to-one, one-to-many, and many-to-one basis using a universal-yet-finite and publicly available contact point: the physical street address. Zumbox can leverage its platform to become a major player in the geolocation space, enabling users to broadcast information within a geographic area and quickly access local deals. We’re not at liberty to speculate further because Max Gladwell founder Rob Reed works for the company.

5. Zillow

Zillow provides quick and easy access to real estate information including home-value estimates based on aggregated data. Plus, Zillow’s users are urged to “claim” and register their house (provided they own it), which associates them with a fixed geographic location. The possibilities for a geolocation strategy are fairly wide, as Zillow can open some of its data for external consumption while aggregating additional geolocation data to add value for its two major constituencies: consumers and the residential real estate industry.

6. CitySearch

Despite Yelp’s total dominance in the local space, CitySearch can continue to be relevant if it plays its cards right. We see this a bit like the challenge MySpace faces in rebuilding its brand and repositioning itself relative to Facebook. In order to do so, though, CitySearch has to get much further ahead of the curve in terms of its geolocation strategy. For example, launching Facebook and Twitter integration in December of 2009 is not exactly ahead-of-the-curve behavior. Most of the CitySearch data has geographic coordinates, which can form rich streams of valuable info. The challenge is that CitySearch needs to simultaneously address its community, mobile, and real-time strategies in order for geolocation to have maximum value for its consumer and business users alike.

7. Netflix

As with Amazon, Netflix knows where you live because that’s where they mail your DVDs. It’s conceivable that Netflix could enable users to broadcast what movies they are currently renting/watching such that the information could be filtered geographically and accessed through Netflix or third-party sites. We don’t know if being able to see what movies are being watched in your neighborhood (potentially in real time) would be useful or not. But stranger things have certainly happened.

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A series that reflects on the big topics and trends from the first decade of the 21st Century.

We’re big fans of history, as there is so much to learn from it. This is the first in a series of posts that will look back on the past decade from 2000 – 2010. Each may not have specific relevance for social media or sustainability, but the big topics of the housing bubble, the Bush Era, the dotcom bust and the rise of the Millennial Generation provided the broader context from which social media was born and the new era of sustainability emerged.

The Housing Bubble

There was so much wrong with the housing market we hardly know where to begin. First, you had a flood of a cheap money thanks to China’s cash surplus, the securitization of mortgages, and the Fed’s unprecedented interest-rate cuts. Investors were seeking new opportunities following the dotcom bust, and real estate was considered safe if not sexy. Mortgage lending got creative with no-money-down loans and low teaser rates. Plus, you could cheapen your payments by opting for interest-only or negative amortization, where you pay less than the interest and the balance is added to the principle. On top of that, lending standards were non-existent.

Next, you had all of the players involved in pumping the housing market: Wall Street, mortgage brokers, real estate brokers, credit rating agencies, home builders, appraisers, and the media (advertising and editorial). This housing cabal single-handedly propped up our economy. Topping it off, you had the key assumption that housing prices wouldn’t (couldn’t) go down.

Any reasonable person observing all of this could see what was happening and where it was headed. The fundamentals that historically drove up housing prices were non-existent. It wasn’t a function of population growth or rising incomes. And though it appeared like a function of supply and demand, the demand was artificially created by all of the free money. Housing prices were going up. But housing values pretty much stayed the same or quite possibly went down given the rapid increase of supply and stagnant income levels.

It certainly didn’t take a Yale economist to piece together this bubble in the making. We had unprecedented access to credit—to free money. Each of us was put in a position to bid up the price of a home well beyond what we could afford by any measure of affordability and with little or no money down i.e. no risk. All the while comforted in the belief that the price was only going higher because that’s what it always did. Multiply this scenario millions of times, and it’s no surprise how trillions of dollars in “wealth” evaporated.

How could we have been so stupid? The answer is that we were acting rationally, as we are supposed to. Given the atmosphere of the housing market during this time and the balance of incentives vs. disincentives, everyone pretty much behaved exactly as they should have i.e. in their rational self interest. And therein lies the problem. A system was created that guided rationally behaving individuals toward a collective crisis and downfall. Short-term personal gains came at the expense of long-term prosperity and well-being as a society.

This isn’t to suggest that collectivism is preferable to individualism or that people should be any less responsible for themselves. Those responsible should be held accountable, though that’s a topic for another discussion. The point is that we created a system that lead quite naturally and predictably to its own collapse. This is why free societies have established and enforceable laws and regulations: to save us from ourselves. If a single piece of this disastrous equation had been altered, such as a mandatory 20% down-payment to secure a mortgage, it all could have been avoided because the presence of risk would have better guided our individual actions.

In the end, it’s quite possible that housing prices reached an inflation-adjusted peak that will never again be realized because the perfect storm of factors that created this mess will never again conspire in the same way. We’re confident prices will continue to drop in the coming years, as there are no fundamentals to support them, least of all widespread employment or demographic trends. The federal government is doing all it can to prop up prices with tax credits and low interest rates, but this is simply prolonging the inevitable—the inevitable bottom, which probably isn’t far from where housing prices were at the start of this decade.

As a result, it’s quite possible the past decade fundamentally altered the nature of the American Dream. It can be argued that home ownership is no longer part of that fabled ideal because it simply doesn’t make financial sense to invest in a house.

Update: A couple days after we posted this reflection on the great housing bubble of the past decade, CNN Money reports the following: “Taking into account inflation, home prices are actually lower than they were 10 years ago, according to a report from the National Association of Realtors.” And then this article points to three reasons housing prices are still headed lower. So if you’re thinking about buying a house, you have to ask yourself whether it’s because of social pressure to participate in the American Dream or because it’s a sound financial decision. Owning a house is no more a part of the American Dream than filing for bankruptcy or getting audited by the IRS.

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Give back by checking into the real-world places you go each day. It’s good Karma.

Just days after we posted our trend piece on geolocation, inspired by the “clear implications for entrepreneurship, sustainability, and green business,” we witness the launch of CauseWorld, a mobile geolocation iPhone/Android app that enables users to earn points (Karma) by checking into various locations and convert them into charitable donations and other social goods. It’s essentially SocialVibe meets Foursquare. Given that it’s backed by legendary VC Kleiner Perkins, this is one to take seriously.

The CauseWorld model follows a recent trend wherein consumers become an integral part of a company’s philanthropic or CSR efforts. The reasoning goes something like this: If we’re already giving to charity, why not get some extra credit and exposure by involving our customers and potential customers in the process? Web 2.0 technologies and mobile apps make this quite easy to execute and manage. CauseWorld’s novel approach leverages geolocation and commerce (geo-commerce) in forming a  business model with clear social value.

For example, when you check into a restaurant or retail outlet using the CauseWorld app, you earn Karmas (points). When you accumulate enough of them, they can be donated to various causes. Instead of attaching overt monetary value, though, Karmas are converted into more tangible impacts such as offsetting two pounds of CO2, donating a book, or planting a tree. This is clever because the perceived value of these goods is much greater than the actual. It certainly feels better to plant a tree than to donate 10 cents (market price for tree planting) to American Forests.

You’ll earn an average of 10 Karmas per check-in, and it takes 100 Karmas to plant a tree. So you’re earning roughly a penny per check-in at that rate of conversion. This isn’t meant as a criticism because it’s a helluva lot more than you get from a Foursquare check-in. It’s only fair, though, that we put things into context.

These donations are currently funded by $500,000 in grants from CitiGroup and Kraft Foods. Each time you make a donation, there is a reminder about which company (sponsor) made it possible. This is a key component of the model because it facilitates a feel-good engagement with the sponsor’s brand. CauseWorld has essentially placed a value of one penny per point by making a total of 50,000,000 Karmas available. When you do the math, it’s quite a bargain for Citi and Kraft to be earning positive brand engagements at a rate of $0.01 to $0.10 a piece. Over time, CauseWorld can develop a competitive marketplace for these engagements, whereby sponsors bid for the spots. This can potentially raise the cost to purchase Karmas associated with certain causes, where CauseWorld could earn a margin on the exchange. At this point it’s not clear whether this is part of the revenue model.

Like Foursquare, you’ll also earn status symbols (badges) as you accumulate points and convert them. Naturally, there are limits to the number of times you can check in per day, and you can only check into a single location once per day. The app offers Facebook integration, so you can automatically post your CauseWorld actions into your news feed, and it has a well-designed e-mail invite feature. There is also a Community Achievements board that tracks where the Karmas are being donated, complete with the aggregate impacts.

TechCruch outlined the core business model on the commerce end:

For now businesses that get the extra foot traffic are paying nothing at all. Although I’m sure [parent company] Shopkick will be sending reports to those businesses letting them know how many people they brought into their stores. In the retail world, people mean conversions, usually 25% – 90%, depending on the type of store (nobody walks into 7-11 or a supermarket without buying something, but less people buy something at Best Buy).

I applaud the charitable aim of CauseWorld, but I also note a brilliant business plan – finding ways to get people to step foot inside a physical store. If I was Gap or Nordstroms I’d pay right now to distribute karmas to users of the app for coming into the store.

This is a geolocation game in the spirit of Max Gladwell, so we’ll be playing along and reporting on its progress.

Looking to the year ahead through the lens of social media, computing, mobile, and web technology.

Max Gladwell keeps its own calendar, which ends on April 1st each year. We offer a different 12-month period through which to reflect and look forward based on the Max Gladwell launch date.

For the standard calendar year, we look to predictions being made by others and offer our own perspective. This year, we look at ReadWriteWeb’s 2010 Predictions and cherry pick the best ones.

1. Marshall Kirkpatrick: A new social network will rise to join the big ones. It may offer the privacy that Facebook is moving away from, it may be mobile and location-centric, it may focus on personal content recommendations.

MG: This is just as much hope as prediction, specifically the location part. There is huge potential and value in networking local communities. This platform will demand unparalleled privacy and security because you’ll be dealing with people’s locations and potentially home addresses (which are already publicly available, but this will makes them more accessible and revealing). Nevertheless, the social value of being more connected and aware of our neighbors will be worth it.

2. Alex Williams: A new breed of social networks will emerge that act as one-stop shops for applications and services. These will look more like marketplaces than social hubs for conversations around the proverbial virtual water cooler. SaaS leaders will face off for this growing market.

Max Gladwell (MG): Expanding on the above, we’ll see more browser-based applications, thanks in part to HTML5, that are cross-compatible with laptops and smartphones. Developers will more easily be able to repurpose their iPhone apps for the web.

3. Sarah Perez: The iPhone still rules and grabs more mobile market share than ever before.

MG: This is pretty obvious, but we also shouldn’t underestimate the power of the iPhone. Despite deficiencies with AT&T and several missing features, the iPhone is still five to 10 years ahead of its competition. Its value continues to be unlocked and expanded on a daily basis. The only thing to challenge it in terms of people’s attention will be Apple’s forthcoming tablet.

4. Sean Ammirati: Apple will release an “iTablet” and the world will be a better place for it. Ok, more accurately we’ll all think the world is a better place for it.

MG: The contrarian view might be that Apple’s good fortune has to run out and sooner or later it will fall on its face. While this could be true at some point, it won’t happen with this year’s launch of the iTablet. If it’s anything like we imagine—a bigger, more powerful iPhone with a slew of new features—it will revolutionize mobile computing and take the publishing, broadcasting, and telecom industries with it.

5. Sean Ammirati: Facebook will go public & the IPO will be a huge financial success.

5.1 Jolle O’Dell: Facebook will become the Borg. Its number of users will continue to climb until the network is as ubiquitous as Google and lay people confuse Facebook with “the Internet.” They’ll make more money and control more data than ever before.

MG: We have a poll running about which quarter Facebook’s IPO will occur. Our vote is Q1, and it will become of the most successful tech IPOs ever, setting the stage for a resurgence in tech IPOs for 2010. The memories of the ’90s have faded. We’re into a new decade and pulling out of a deep recession (albeit slowly). All signs point to Irrational Exuberance 2.0.

6. Sean Ammirati: Hyperlocal advertising will heat up, delivering another nail in the traditional newspaper industry’s coffin. Specifically, it will be more common for a local establishment to pay marketing dollars to Yelp or FourSquare, for example, then their local newspaper.

MG: The only thing we’ll add is a quote from Sol Lipman, co-founder of the location-based app Rally. When asked about their revenue model, he responded, “With location-based services, you don’t have to rely on anyone else to make your money. Location is the Holy Grail of advertising.” This is partly because local advertising is more relevant and valuable for consumers. Global and national brands could respond by positioning themselves as more local.

7. Elyssa Pallai: iPhones and other smartphones become the purchasing tool of choice.

MG: This is long overdue. Plastic credit cards should go the way of paper checks and rotary dials. Let us pay for everything with our iPhones.

8. Marshall Kirkpatrick: Facebook will open aggregate user profile and social graph data for outside analysis.

MG: As Facebook opens its data in general, it will be a serious boon to the geolocation space, for in addition to being able to see our friends’ whereabouts (according to their privacy settings), we’ll gain access to anonymous, location-specific data. This will accelerate the ability to have complete geospatial awareness.

What are your predictions for 2010 in social media and sustainability? Prognosticate in the comments.

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Twitter’s sudden profitability is a lesson in priorities and value creation.

Bloomberg BusinessWeek broke the news today that Twitter became profitable. (Just as surprising, Bloomberg BusinessWeek broke this story before the tech blogs.) Twitter achieved this feat through big search deals with Google and Microsoft (Bing) totaling $25 million. Though it remains to be seen whether Twitter continues to be profitable in 2010, the company has come to this point by staying true to the value principle. In other words, it prioritized long-term value over short-term revenue, and it’s paying off.

As early as 2007, analysts questioned the Twitter revenue model. As the company grew, so did the skepticism about how Twitter would monetize its millions of users. Meanwhile, the founders of Twitter focused on providing value for its users, fully aware of the fact that value is what ultimately yields sustainable revenue models.

First, Twitter provided value for consumers with its free microblogging platform. Next, it provided value for developers, who reciprocated by adding value of their own. As soon as enough consumers were using Twitter, it provided value for businesses. Incidentally, the Max Gladwell brand owes a good measure of its success to Twitter and how we used it in the early days. Finally, Twitter offered enough value for two of the biggest companies on the web, Google and Microsoft, to warrant a couple checks worth $25 million. Twitter can now take its time in determining how it creates value for advertisers without compromising the value it has created for consumers. This won’t be easy, but as long as they stay true to the principle, it should work out for everyone.

Contrast this with the approach MySpace took after it was acquired by NewsCorp. While the founders of MySpace initially offered value through a highly personalized social networking platform, the mission quickly turned to monetization. The overwhelming, in-your-face advertising created an unbearable consumer experience, and since the focus turned to revenue, it was diverted from the product and providing real value. MySpace ceased innovating. NewsCorp drove the company and brand into the ground, sacrificing long-term value for short-term gains. Facebook ate their lunch in social networking. The founders left (moving on to the next big thing, we hear). And the process of rebuilding the MySpace brand has now begun.

This isn’t to suggest that web-based businesses don’t need revenue models or that monetization shouldn’t be a priority. It’s simply a matter of prioritization. First, develop a compelling and sustainable revenue model for your business. Once you (and your investors) are sufficiently satisfied it’s viable, turn your resources and energies to creating value. Create metrics and benchmarks based on value creation. Make value creation the measure of success. Twitter generated so much damn value that big, bad Google and Microsoft couldn’t acquire them and had no choice but to become clients! That’s a lot of value.

So you should always keep an eye on the monetization strategy. But never let it undermine the enduring value you’re creating.

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Social media provides real-time access to the who, what, and when. Geolocation now provides the “where” in real time. Web meet World; World meet Web.

Geolocation will become a huge market in the coming years, much like social media itself. There are more than a dozen companies in the space already, and it seems like every tenth post on TechCrunch lately is about geolocation: Facebook vs. Foursquare, Gowalla, GeoAPI, Social Paradox, SimpleGeo, Google, Rally, and this one about Ambient Streams.

Our friend Pete Cashmore of Mashable cited geolocation as one of his top web trends to watch in 2010. In his CNN column he wrote that “location is not about any singular service; rather, it’s a new layer of the Web. Soon, our whereabouts may optionally be appended to every Tweet, blog comment, photo or video we post.” This is big. But it’s not just about broadcasting our whereabouts. It’s about the data and how valuable that can be for everyone.

To expand on Pete’s description, geolocation is content that has been tagged with geographic data such as GPS coordinates or a street address. This can be a video, Tweet, blog post, news story, restaurant review, or an entire lifestream. It is ultimately about geospatial awareness. The trend is being driven by location-based social networks like BrightKite, FourSquare, and Gowalla, where you check in to a location, thereby alerting your friends, and possibly take other actions to engage with that location such as posting a photo or writing a review. All of which is generating rich data streams of location-based information. Today there isn’t enough participation to make geolocation broadly useful. But that’s about to change.

Geolocation is a lot like social media in that it requires critical mass for it to be valuable. In other words, generating value requires a lot of participation. For example, we found Facebook valuable long ago as a marketing channel, but it didn’t become personally useful until this past year when our close friends and family started using it. (They don’t tend to be early tech adopters.) Social media reached a major tipping point in 2009, driven largely by Facebook and Twitter, where there is enough participation and data to make it universally valuable. Today, Facebook accounts for one out of every four pageviews on the Web and Twitter drives more than 10% of the traffic to most major content sites. That’s a lot of participation and a lot of data. Reaching this level took several years for social media. Geolocation, on the other hand, will get there in the next 12 months. This is largely because social media and mobile have paved the way. Which means that by the end of 2010, there will be enough participation and data for geolocation to be universally valuable.

Critical mass in geolocation means several things. Yes, there are privacy issues. They already exist with social media, and they can get much worse with the added layer of location. It may require new security and privacy standards, and we may need ways to easily mask or approximate our location while limiting access to that information. The market will clearly demand this as geolocation approaches critical mass. However, the value of using location-based tools and generating this data outweighs the potential downsides. Because when geolocation reaches critical mass, it will give us unprecedented access to information about the world around us i.e. the world within a certain geographic radius.

Google has done a tremendous job with organizing the world’s information, per its mission, but it lacks the real-time info about everything going on around us (and that is partly why it wants to acquire Yelp). Which is to say every Tweet, blog post, YouTube video, happy hour special, political rally, museum event, live band, car accident, garage sale, restaurant menu, and friend within, say, a quarter-mile radius or 20-mile radius of our current location. Imagine if Ustream broadcasts could be filtered by geographic area (perhaps they already can). We’d be able to see live video happening at bars and events around us, often streaming from people’s iPhones, and decide whether or not it’s worth showing up. We could also cross-reference these video streams with Tweets to get more detail.

When all Web-based information has real-time geographic coordinates and when all of the new, location-specific data being created each moment can be easily accessed, filtered, personalized, and organized (governed by privacy settings, of course), we will have tremendous access to the world around us. We’re confident this will be realized a year from now, if not sooner. And though much of it will originate from Facebook (once it enables geolocation), all location-based data will have value. It’s also quite inevitable that new, geo-based platforms will emerge. It’s essential that this data is open and accessible. If the recent moves by Foursquare and Facebook are any indication, it appears that it will be.

We’ll be covering this space more closely because it’s exciting and because there are clear implications for entrepreneurship, sustainability, and green business.

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It is our first guest post here at Max Gladwell and we are excited to be contributing to the thought leadership here.

So why we chose this topic is that a surprisingly small percentage of the general public knows that a corporate conversation around sustainability even exists, let alone that they can participate in it. This is despite the fact that many of the largest companies are spending considerable resources to become socially responsible and publicize those efforts.  We discussed some aspects of this in our recent special report Social Media is Advancing the Sustainability Dialogue.

Grail Research recently released a study highlighting the fact that most consumers have no idea that companies like HP, Cisco, The Gap, Microsoft, Nike and General Mills are socially and environmentally responsible companies.  Which was exactly the point of our paper as well – companies need to be doing a better job of communicating the good works that they are doing, and getting ongoing stakeholder input, for a variety of reasons.   Silvia Springolo of Grail Research says it very simply “The low awareness of these initiatives raises huge questions because companies are spending so much money on them. And while green qualities are very important to consumers, they are not being communicated effectively.”

Recently, Deron Triff, CEO of Changents.com has been working to bring awareness of this gap by challenging people to match Fortune 100 companies with their CSR achievements via a 5-question CSR quiz.  The winner receives 100,000 consumer impressions of their Ad (benefiting a company or a favorite non-profit) on the homepage of Changents.com.  Take the CSR quiz now and see what you know – I know it was illuminating for me.

And if companies are spending so much time and money on these initiatives, it begs the question – why do we know so little about them?  If we are serious about wanting to change the world, then these stories need to be a part of the dialogue.  Companies are putting tremendous effort into compiling CSR reports, but at the end of the day who really reads those reports?  More recently, separate CSR websites are starting to emerge – who visits them?

Sustainability is such an important topic that the stories about corporate efforts need to be part of the companies’ overall communications, and companies need to start enabling dialogue with all of their stakeholders.  Conversations amongst a relative few in government, NGOs or other third parties won’t adequately address the various problems we face.  We believe social media is a catalyst for enabling these conversations as more companies try to figure out how to engage with stakeholders in this new world that demands transparency and crowd sourcing to solve our most intractable problems.

It’s important that we get more people talking – this conversation needs to move mainstream and engage with more people where they are instead of trying to get them to specific CSR communications.  Let’s face it very few people read CSR reports much less specific CSR communications.  They need to be a part of regular corporate communications and not a separate stream if we are going to truly embed this in mainstream culture, engage more people in the discussion, and inspire the change we want to see in the world.

Please help to continue this dialogue – would love to hear your thoughts!

Beth Bengtson, Partner, SDialogue