This week I watched Tiger Woods win the US Open at 3pm in the afternoon on my computer. Right now I am watching “The Governer’s Economic Summit” streaming live from Barack Obama’s site, via Ustream. How’d I found out about both? Well I check blogs intraday and Silicon Alley Insider tipped me off . How did I find out about the Governor’s Economic summit? Well I am a follower of Barack Obama on Twitter and they posted the url .

This is extremely powerful when you think about it. Trusted sources recommending live content that I can watch directly from my computer.

The future is here…

Developers start your engines. Upon Apple’s 3G iPhone news on Monday, apparently there’s a new gold rush: iPhone applications. So much so that VCs are beginning to salivate over the seemingly tiny market. With 6 million handsets out there - and a fraction of the overall market, and limited distribution there’s gotta be some pretty strong kool aid over there in Silicon Valley.

This is very similar to the Facebook market for applications:

1. Sexy “Open” platform.
2. Applications quick to deploy.
3. Limited market.

Most individuals, companies that were building Facebook apps a year ago have gotten out of the business. Hell even the largest Facebook app makers have stopped making apps. Can’t wait to fast forward twelve months and see if the fad has past.

Update 1:  Silicon Alley Insider gives credence to an anaylsts’ claims that iPhone apps will be a 1 BILLION dollar market… In the first YEAR!

Update 2: TechCrunch shows some glimmer of rationale calls it bunk

I really wanted an iPhone 3G. I really did. It’s sexy, it has a large disk drive by phone standards, and it has great software. But after digging into the details of the I’m a bit disappointed with a number of decisions that have been made. While other phones and platforms are opening up, Apple continues to lock down the ecosystem in ways to allow them to charge you for more.

1. All apps for the iPhone MUST be downloaded through the store. This is different from Blackberry, or Nokia, or any other phone where users could typically load any application they wanted to their phone without approval by the phone provider. This is is even further limiting than with iPods where users could load any music onto the player. In this new setup Apple must first approve applications to appear in the store before they can be loaded to the phone. This bottleneck in distribution will stifle innovation. We will see developers clamor about how unfair Apple is for giving certain applications favorable treatment.
2. Apple has created “smart pipes” for developers to send information to the iPhone. So any updates that are being sent to the phone will be metered, by Apple. This way the company can limit bandwidth, as well as understand which applications are being used most often. Apple can turn on or shut off these alerts for any application at any time. This is a very scary reality for developers - your application, and it’s interactivity is at the mercy of Apple. This is also very scary for users as if Apple may force you to “upgrade” your software if you want to continue to receive data from these applications.
3. New purchase and activation restrictions on iPhone. Previously, I could purchase an iPhone online as a gift, or a prepaid iPhone and not have to activate it immediately. Now we learn that the iPhone must be purchased AND activated in store, perhaps even penalizing people who do not activate the iPhone within a certain period of time. It is not clear whether customers can simply purchase an unsubsidized iPhone without signing up for a two year contract. And we all thought that the industry was beginning to allow users to bring their own phone to a service, or purchase a phone that THEY owned without a contract. This is in complete opposition to where the industry is moving…

These factors scare me a bit, and they should scare developers. I remember one of the most infuriating problems with my sidekick was that there was no way to get applications to the phone outside of their application store. The average user does not care much, but this will frustrate the hell out of power users. Where the iPhone is a powerful product, it seems to wield a bit too much control over my mobile experience than I think I want to give.

Microsoft’s Search Live Cash launched this week. Unfortunately most of the coverage has been pretty negative. That’s because bloggers and reporters kind of don’t get it.

Here’s how Cashback works:

1. Users search for a product.
2. They find what they are looking for.
3. Microsoft gets paid for making the referral.
4. Microsoft hands the referral fee back to the purchaser.

This is not a new business model. Microsoft purchased Jellyfish this year - a company that does just this. Companies like Ebates , Fatwallet , and others have been doing this for years.

What is fairly significant however, is that if successful, this step by Microsoft could represent a evolutionary shift in search engine advertising. Yahoo and others pioneered CPM. Google wrote the book on CPC. Now Microsoft is pushing this trend one step further by embracing a CPA advertising model.

Many acknowledge that CPA is the future of advertising. And the dirty little secret is that more companies than you know are using CPA as a revenue generator.

For example - why do you think Blockbuster was such a large partner when Facebook launched its Beacon service? Well because Blockbuster pays out upwards of $34 for each sale an affiliate drives.

Jason Calacanis and Mahalo are also in the CPA game. His May 14th post that highlights Car Loans, College Loans, and Buying and Selling Stocks is driven by the fact that these offers are some of the top performing offers in affiliate networks today.

Now Google can say that they think that Microsoft’s idea is a bad one because Microsoft is paying users, but if it’s such a bad idea then why don’t they charge for Google Docs, Analytics, or any other product? Is Google not giving away missed revenue in this situation? Why do they give away vouchers to Godaddy users just to try Adsense?

Finally, one could argue that hte CPA model is what they have attempted with the combination of Google Shopping and Google Base. They just haven’t gotten it right yet.

At the end of the day, what this all means is that web advertising has driven accountability up one more notch against other mediums. It has moved away from just counting ads or clicks to driving sales. Which is a pretty big deal in my opinion.

Thinking about Twitter’s scaling issues, it makes it seem that there is an opportunity for history to repeat itself here. Friendster was a social networking pioneer. Its feature set was also rather limited compared to up and coming social networks.

Its problem: the site became too slow to use, and an up and coming social network called Myspace had a better feature set for users to express themselves.

We now hear that the company has to re-engineer its entire platform. This will take time, especially now when the service begins to hit critical mass.

I’ve gotta believe that someone out there has technology that is close enough to Twitter functionality, with a few more bells and whistles that could very easily steal share from Twitter.

I’m just waiting to see who this company is…I’d switch in a heartbeat. Someone once said to me about running a startup: “The pioneers are always the ones that end up with the arrows in their backs.”

Twitter was down for a couple of minutes again this morning! This happens daily and it really sucks… Is there a way I can help you support sms?

Please contact interested…

It’s understood that Google is light years ahead of Microsoft today in search. Even a Yahoo! acqusition probably will not help materially as far as momentum goes. Google is smarter and they are just experts at the search game.

That doesn’t mean that MS is dead. They are still a tremendous force from both a PC and a web perspective. However, if I were Microsoft here’s what I would do:

1. Either fully open source windows (both vista and mobile) or buy a linux company. This would allow MS to participate in a platform where innovation is happening. The desktop is and will be the dominant platform for years to come. Mobile is the sandbox that the innovators are playing in right now. Microsoft can capture existing developer mindshare and generate new excitement for their platforms.
2. Invest in or buy search startups like Powerset, Hakia, Wikia, Mahalo and others. This will allow Microsoft to be on the cutting edge of search, and a lot of the guys starting these companies are Google alums providing them with valuable intelligence.
3. Turn the Xbox into a visual local search engine. Fine, they’re probably already thinking this - but turn the Xbox into a local web browser by taking Microsoft live maps and creating a second life-like environment that lives both in the browser and the console, where people can search and discover local content .
4. Buy Facebook. I know it was hard for me to actually write this one, but I think Zuckerberg has a big enough ego to fend the Microsoft monster off. But honestly Microsoft Facebook with huge hooks into everything from cars to supermarket shopping carts. This would be one huge way to make Facebook useful for productivity and in real life.
5. If nothing comes of the Yahoo! deal buy IAC. They have a number of niche sites with very strong audiences, and they are aggressively moving into vertical search as well.

All of the time and energy and money Microsoft is spending trying to force Yahoo! to go quietly, they could be putting it to better use innovating, and going after more willing investment and acquisition targets. This strategy won’t put them at number one immediately, but it positions them more competitively for the upcoming platform wars the future of search.

I am still very much a creature of the desktop revolution. I still feel much more comfortable creating, storing, locally than from the cloud. My obsession with mobile has left me with the realization that devices are still very limited, and can increasingly lean on the cloud to add functionality.

Typically as a rule of thumb I do not use free cloud based offerings that store critical information. I use them to share and syndicate content.

I much prefer to own my own cloud. I prefer this for a few reasons:

• In a sense this gives me the peace of mind that I always keep all rights to the content I host there.
• I feel that my content is safer in my cloud rather than in the cloud of a much larger target to hackers.
• In many cases I can customize the environment to my personal needs.

Currently my cloud includes the following:

• Email, calendaring, and contact management - Zimbra, is an open source Exchange alternative. It’s extremely robust in online functionality and has clients for both desktop and mobile (both wap and java).
• File backup - Jungledisk + Amazon s3 - This really does the trick for backing up my system (I use this in addition to hard drive backup). Super simple to set up and configure. Secure storage is supported. And the software has come quite a way since its first version.
• Remote Desktop - eyeOS. I have visited this open source project in the past, but in the past the offering was just too lacking. Recently they updated the package with a desktop sync. In other words - the files on your desktop sync with your remote desktop. They also have a decent mobile wap application that I like.

Right now that’s what my cloud looks like. I’m looking for good way to manage my media remotely. eyeOS kind of does this but doesn’t have a web based media player yet.

However I believe owning your cloud is a great alternative to using Google Apps or MS Live disk because you benefit from community innovation, you can control the environment and at the end of the day whatever you keep there is unequivocally yours.

The blogging world today is all about distribution. The wider the distribution, the easier it is for people to discover your blog.  That’s how you get people, subscribing to your RSS feed or email newsletters (I read Copyblogger for content insight). Distributing your blog is similar to the mantra Location Location Location, it’s equivalent from moving your content from a back dirt road that’s really hard to find, to a main strip mall where people are bound to stumble into it if they are looking for what you talk about. The content part is up to you.

Here is what my blog syndication network looks like:

I post to my I’m Building Something Here . It automatically cross posts my company’s You Are Media Blog. From there I feed it into MyBlogLog, Technorati , and Netvibes, and FriendFeeder. I rinse and repeat for the You Are Media Blog.

On the personal side of things because my personal information is more targeted towards people who already know me, I typically post to my Twitter and Flickr which feeds into my personal domain blog David Dundas. My David Dundas blog feeds into MyBlogLog, Technorati , and Netvibes,  FriendFeeder, and Plaxo.

All of my blog feeds also are tied into my Feedburner account.

The basic strategy is to use my blogs to capture the information I post across the internet, and then feed that information into larger portals where people interested in You Are Media, or my personal interests can discover me.

Over the past couple of weeks there has been a lot of chatter about mobile social networking. My thoughts have always been that the mobile phone is quintessential social network.

Now that mobile browsing is taking off, and the handset has been identified as the next frontier for mobile social networking we’ll start to see mobile social networking move into the limelight.

Today the Mobile Entertainment Forum, the organization that sets the agenda worldwide for mobile entertainment  has announced a Social Networking working group that will drive standards in monetization and safety in social networks (sounds like the web could use something like this).

Yesterday Vodaphone purchased Danish social network Zyb  to “meet our customers’ total communications needs.”

A couple of weeks ago  Nokia announced that they would work with T-Mobile to  “to accelerate the availability of new Internet services and personal social communities on mobile devices.”

This top down attention to social networking from standards’ groups, device manufacturers and carriers is exactly what is needed in order for mobile social networking to take off. We will start to see these features make their way into carrier and handset offerings.