The icloud app includes access to files, document viewing, and uploading of photos directly from mobile device cameras. The iPhone version enables you to directly share any file from your phone and email it as a link using the iPhone’s built-in email.

icloud also has an “Easy Upload” system to keep desktop computers synced with icloud, similar to what’s offered by Dropbox and Egnyte, among many others.

icloud has matured considerably since Simon wrote about it over a year ago. It’s not an operating system like Chrome OS or Jolicloud, but works in a browser. The service is now operational in multiple desktop and laptop browsers and operating systems, as long as Java has been installed. I’ve tried it in Chrome on a Mac, and it seems stable and reasonably speedy.

In addition, beyond the basic productivity apps Simon talked about, there are more apps that work within icloud’s operating system, including IM, RSS and Twitter apps; business trend and money-management apps; a bunch of games; audio, video and internet radio players; and a system for developing your own custom icloud apps.

The free version includes 3 GB of storage space, but you can purchase a premium account with 100 GB of storage for $39.99 per year.

Of course, there are now lots of web-based options for being productive away from one’s office computer. We’ve covered a large number of options for syncing files, contacts, to-do lists, and calendars with mobile devices. But if you like the idea of having a “workspace in the cloud” that you can customize to meet your needs, you might want to try icloud.

Have you used icloud, or other “web operating systems?”

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‘Today’s portals are not really about search, but instead they are all about pageviews and other services,’ says Page. ‘We are all about search and pure search, while the other guys think of themselves as media companies, not as search engines any more,’ quips Brin. (from my story for Forbes.com)

They knew search queries were nothing without a super infrastructure to support those queries. But more importantly, they knew simplicity of that experience would endear them to the masses. Google came up with a clean white page that featured nothing but the Google logo, one small box for entering your queries and the search button. That was a perfect solution, and I bet Apple’s Steve Jobs would have a tough time finding fault with it. One look at the page and you knew exactly what to do next.

Now for the first ten or so years of Google’s life, that simple search-box driven philosophy worked well for the Mountain View, Calif-based Internet giant. It also found a way to augment that simplicity with a text-ads-based business model, which has turned the company into a nearly $30 billion a year behemoth.

Google’s Consumer Future

As it looks at its future, Google needs to realize that it has a “user experience” problem and its simplicity — the elegant search box — isn’t enough, especially as it starts to compete with rivals whose entire existence revolves around easy, consumer experiences. To me, user experience isn’t about making things pretty and using pretty icons. Instead it’s about making simple, beautiful, usable and user-friendly interfaces.

No one can argue with Google’s ability to engineer great software — they’ve done so in the past — but that simply isn’t good enough in the new worlds they are trying to conquer. Televisions, phones, productivity applications and even Google’s own local pages are less about search and more about engagement: something not core to the company’s corporate DNA. Here are three major challenges Google needs to surmount:

• Make software usable by tens of millions of people on a disparate array of products.
• Overcome its history of only using data to define its future.
• Figure out how to keep people in their playground, rather than helping people find the information they were looking for and sending them elsewhere: a radical new approach to business.

Those problems are behind the issues the company is facing with some of its products. Yesterday, the New York Times reported that Google was postponing the release of Google TV software, which in turn would delay its partners’ plans to show connected televisions at the Consumer Electronics Show 2011 (CES). Google TV software has come under criticism for being too complex.

Such challenges aren’t unique to Google TV, though they might be most acute because of its newness. For the past few days, I’ve been using a Nexus S, a smartphone made by Samsung on behalf of Google using Android OS – which is arguably an OS engineered for a cloud-centric world. The hardware, as one would expect from Samsung, is of top-notch quality. The T-Mobile 3G network delivers most, if not all, of the time. Most of the apps I love are also available on the device.

Yet the Android OS leaves me feeling like one feels three hours after having Chinese food: a tad empty. That’s not to say millions of devices won’t sell with Android on them, but the OS  lacks the smoothness and fluidity of Apple’s iOS. It takes a few more gestures to get things done on Android. When I use the iPod touch, I can feel the obvious differences in the user experience. It’s one of the main reasons why Android’s biggest supporters — HTC, Samsung and Motorola — are adding their own user-experience shell on top of Android.

Lest you call me an Android-hater, Andy Rubin, one of the co-fathers of Android, recently acknowledged at an industry event: “I would probably characterize Android today as an enthusiast product for early adopters — or wives of tech enthusiasts.”  Recently, I got the Cr-48, a Chrome OS-based laptop for trials. After using it for a few days, I pointed out in a review that the Chrome OS interface “is rough around the edges,” and that most of the Chrome OS web apps were still a work in progress.

Google TV (based on Android), Google Android, and Google Chrome OS are complex software that have a unique challenge: They need to work on disparate devices in disparate form factors. It’s a unique quandary that would fox any company, and is particularly challenging for a company used to offering us the web through a single search box. Even Microsoft didn’t have a task that challenging with its desktop-oriented Windows OS. It ran on a single platform, and whenever Microsoft tried to adapt it to new platforms, well, you know what happened.

When Past Defines the Future

Doug Bowman, currently the design head honcho at San Francisco-based Twitter, said in a blog post about his time at Google:

When I joined Google as its first visual designer, the company was already seven years old. Seven years is a long time to run a company without a classically trained designer. Google had plenty of designers on staff then, but most of them had backgrounds in CS or HCI. And none of them were in high-up, respected leadership positions. Without a person at (or near) the helm who thoroughly understands the principles and elements of Design, a company eventually runs out of reasons for design decisions.

With every new design decision, critics cry foul. Without conviction, doubt creeps in. Instincts fail. “Is this the right move?” When a company is filled with engineers, it turns to engineering to solve problems. Reduce each decision to a simple logic problem. Remove all subjectivity and just look at the data.

Those are harsh words, but also true from a guy who worked on projects that included Google Calendar. That said, I totally understand that Google would be very careful about its user interface, especially around web services. Given it has hundreds of millions of users, one can’t fault them for being data-driven in their approach to user experience and user interaction. However, that argument doesn’t work, especially as it starts pushing more consumer-centric products.

Unlike the web and search, where it defined the user experience, in the world of physical goods, Google has to compete with the likes of Apple, which starts designing products with user experience as the life-force. Google has to learn the art of engagement — something particularly challenging.

Google, during its first ten years, thrived by helping people go elsewhere on the web. The faster it sent them elsewhere, the sooner those users would return. However, these new platforms Google is trying to build are inherently personal. Unlike the PC-based web browser which tries to help you find things, these new platforms are about bringing information to you. They are about discovery, not search.

Google is like an old dog trying to learn new tricks. The good news is that Google isn’t that old, and more importantly, the company knows it has a problem and is trying to find ways to fix it.  Rubin isn’t the only Google executive who has been vocal about building better user experiences. David Girouard, who heads up Google’s cloud efforts, told me the company is working on building better user experiences for their apps as well as other Google offerings.

Knowing you have a problem is the first step; fixing it is the next one. Hopefully, Google does that fast.

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At first glance these stories have little in common, but the truth is the economic factors contributing to Groupon’s growth should be doing the same for eBay, had eBay not made a long series of strategic blunders.

Groupon is still a relatively new service, which makes the acquisition talks with Google all the more impressive. Launched in November 2008, the company’s revenue is already reported to be around $50 million per month, with gross margins in the range of 50 percent. Its revenue grew by nearly 900 percent in the 12-month period through September. Forbes called Groupon the fastest-growing company in history.

This would be an amazing accomplishment in any business environment; it’s all the more impressive given the lackluster economy. But the terrible economy hasn’t been a barrier to Groupon’s success — on the contrary, it’s been a boost. To understand why, you first have to realize that small businesses in America are still in critical condition. A recent WSJ article noted that there are 100,000 fewer companies (with at least one employee) than there were a year ago. As the American consumer deleverages and the credit markets remain stagnant, small businesses are desperate for new revenue sources. Enter Groupon.

Businesses selling a product or service offer Groupon members a discount of 50-70 percent off the retail price and split the remaining proceeds with Groupon, which advertises the deal on its site and blasts it out to thousands of email subscribers. This discount and pricing structure leaves retailers with only 20 to 25 cents on the dollar, making a Groupon campaign far from a sure thing. A study by a Rice University professor recently found that one-third of Groupon promotions are unprofitable, and small business owners vocally debate whether Groupon is good for their business (e.g. the comment section of this NYT blog post). But whatever the risks, the weak economy is prompting small businesses to roll the dice with Groupon at a breakneck pace.

This environment should benefit eBay, as well. While pop culture portrays eBay as a site populated by collectors and hobbyists, small businesses have always been the backbone of its sales. The auction site left behind its Beanie Baby past in the late-90s as so-called “power sellers” — small businesses who used eBay as a primary distribution channel — flooded the site with electronics, computers, and even automobiles.

As I detailed in The PayPal Wars, we saw this firsthand at PayPal. The service started as a handheld mobile payment system, but we changed the product’s direction because small businesses on eBay desperately needed an alternative to paper checks and began encouraging their buyers to use PayPal. By the fourth quarter of 2003, eBay was moving three-and-a-half times more gross merchandise than Amazon, and a small industry of services built around eBay listing and inventory management was flourishing.

eBay should have been poised to share in Groupon’s recent success by giving small businesses a cost-effective sales channel to distribute goods and services. But instead, revenue from the site’s marketplace is stagnant, growing only 3 percent last quarter, compared to 22 percent for PayPal. The turnaround that CEO John Donahoe tried to jumpstart when he took the helm in 2008 still hasn’t arrived.

The reasons for eBay’s stagnation come down to leadership. During former CEO Meg Whitman’s tenure, the company’s culture became increasingly bureaucratic, and improvements to the site became few and far between. eBay hiked fees aggressively while doing little to improve its user experience. The company misjudged the threat posed by Google’s advertising network, which effectively decentralized ecommerce by making it viable for small businesses to sell directly from their websites. Also, as my former PayPal colleague Keith Rabois asserted, eBay started out as a fun, social ecommerce site but it failed to grasp the advent of social networking. As sites like Facebook and YouTube offered consumers new venues for amusement, eBay failed to adapt and actually became less fun.

The party may be winding down at eBay, but over at Groupon it’s in full swing. As an entrepreneur and advocate of small businesses (my own startup CapLinked gives companies tools to raise capital, find investors, and sell assets), I hope that eBay can roll back the clock and recapture some of that innovation it had a decade ago.

Or at least poach some of the Groupon team.

Eric M. Jackson was part of PayPal’s marketing team from 1999 to 2003, where he served as interim vice president following eBay’s acquisition of the company. He is the author of the book The PayPal Wars and currently is the CEO/co-founder of CapLinked, an online platform for companies to share deals and communicate with investors.

That’s great news for startups counting on advertising as their main source of income. It’s even better news for big boys like Google, Yahoo and Facebook.

Much of the spending will be shifted from traditional media — print, radio and online.

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Flock, the Menlo Park, Calif-based company, today released a new version of its social networking oriented browser, Flock 3.5, for both Windows and Macintosh operating systems.

The new browser makes it easy to integrate five different social networks inside the browser, the latest being LinkedIn. The company had initially launched a Chromium-based social web browser (version 3.0) in June 2010 exclusively for Windows Platform. The new version of the social browser now supports Apple’s Macintosh OS.

“We are adding LinkedIn support on demand from our customers,” said Shawn Hardin, president and CEO of the five-year-old startup. The company, which has gone through couple of management changes, recently started using Chromium as its core technology instead of Mozilla. The company is facing increasing competition in the browser market, the latest being Mountain View, Calif.-based start-up, RockMelt, which has developed a social-networking-centric browser.

If RockMelt, which focuses heavily on Facebook integration, has a certain in-your-face quality, then Flock 3.5 has a more subtle interface, which appears calmer. If you’ve used Google’s Chrome, then you won’t be too surprised by the browser, through it has done job of building social networking into the browsing experience.

Here are some of the things the new Flock browser does:

• Combined Address & Search Bar: Apart from search, as you type, you see any matches from What Your Friends Are Saying as well as from your history or favorites.
• Sidebar: Shows you the aggregated activity of your friends’ updates, tweets and favorite content (feeds) from across the web
• Groups: Allows you to create groups across social network. (This is an awesome feature, though the company should figure out a way to make it more pretty.

The browser, at least in my opinion, could use some work on the user experience front, but it impressed me enough for me to continue using it. In terms of user experience, while RockMelt allows you to sign-in using your Facebook Identity, Flock makes you set up a unique identity before you sign on to your social networks.

Click to enlarge image

The idea behind this user profile is that company can one day help you discover and recommend content based on your usage. Scary? Perhaps, but then it seems everyone is trying to learn about us and discover new services and news for us. This is part of the “hyper-personalized” future of the browser, according to Hardin. It’s not hard to imagine Flock being the hub for other non-social cloud-based services.

Flock has indeed come a long way since it launched. According to the company, there have been a total of 21 million downloads and has 9.5 million cumulative users with 2.36 million total monthly active users. Since June 2010, when the company launched its social browser, it’s seeing an average 15-percent increase in active users week over week.

The increase in number of users has helped the company sign Google on, which has helped boost the revenues. Google pays the company for the search traffic it generates, much like Ask.com and Yahoo. Profitability, however, won’t be coming until the end of 2011, Hardin said. For now, he needs to make sure more people use his browser more often.

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Akamai, the Cambridge, Mass.-based content distribution company has been monitoring the traffic to various retail sites, and so far they are seeing strong growth. According to the data collected by the CDN, today at 11.30 AM (eastern) retail sites were generating about 1.338 million page views per minute on a global basis. In North America alone, the retail websites were generating 1.1095 million page views per minute at 1 PM (eastern.) These are today’s traffic highs, according to Akamai, which tracks about 270 global retail/e-commerce websites.

So far, there haven’t been any major glitches reported on Black Friday, Gomez Advisors, a web performance measurement company, noted in an email to us. According to Gomez, it is because traditional websites have been ready for the season by ramping up their infrastructure, and they are not making any massive site changes during this critical period. In addition, Gomez notes that people will be turning to mobile devices for their shopping this year, even though the mobile web experience isn’t comparable to the PC experience. So far, Gomez found that shoppers seem to be pretty happy with their online retail experience.

This year is looking better than last at the start of the shopping season. According to comScore, U.S. online sales during first 21 days of November were $9.01 billion versus $7.95 billion during the first 21 days of 2009. The Chase Paymentech’s Pulse Index, which measures same-store growth at 50 major online retailers, has seen a 21 percent year-over-year growth through November 22, 2010. The total numbers of transactions were up 36 percent during the first twenty days of November alone. According to J.P. Morgan, the first 20 days of November 2009 represented 25 percent of 2009 total holiday season sales.

I will update these numbers and other relevant data over the weekend, as I gather more information.

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From hit TV show, Men of Certain Age, Courtesy TNT.

Trouble and trends, they say, come in threes. Today, a trifecta of deals shows how old-school web companies are engaging in a little retail therapy because they must, and because Wall Street has given them the equivalent of a year-end bonus, thanks to an uplift in tech stocks.

• Amazon is buying Quidsi, the parent of Diapers.com, for $500 million in cash, or roughly 3 times Quidsi’s 2009 sales. Diapers.com is a hit with the mommy set and is on target to generate $300 million in sales for 2010.  Amazon will assume $45 million in debt as well.
• QuinStreet, an online marketing and lead-generation company is buying CarInsurance.com for $49.7 million in cash and is expanding its footprint in the insurance business. CarInsurance.com, as the name suggests, sells car insurance online and provides leads to automobile insurers.
• Shutterfly, an online photo service, bought the assets of WMSG Inc., for $6 million and will use these to expand its commercial print-on-demand business. WSMG was in the business of helping deliver direct-marketing campaigns for large companies like Toyota and Dell

Now, while we all like to obsess about what company Google will buy next, the recent wave of M&A shows that it’s actually these old school web companies of a certain age that are looking at a current boom in tech stocks as a way to bolster their businesses. A report from the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA) recently noted that during the third quarter of 2010, there were 104 mergers, a trend they expected to continue. And why not?

Over the past two months, the tech-heavy NASDAQ composite is up almost 500 points or roughly 18.5 percent to over 2800. According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, the tech stocks in the S&P 500 are trading at 13.9 times their forward earnings, versus the average of 12.7 times for the entire index. The current rally in technology stocks is driven by profits and growing sales for companies such as QuinStreet and Amazon.

QuinStreet’s stock is up 60 percent over the past three months, while Amazon has seen its stock jump 40 percent since early September, and Shutterfly shares have climbed over 35 percent since August of this year. Positive earnings are only adding to their coffers, which in turn means they can be used to beef up their businesses.

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Does the world need yet another browser? Tim Howes and Eric Vishria think that it does, and that is one of the reasons why two years ago they started Mountain View, Calif.-based RockMelt, raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Andreessen Horowitz (and scores of technology luminaries such VMware co-founder Dianne Greene, Intuit’s Bill Campbell and Josh Kopelman) and hired away some of the best design and browser talent from other companies. Their socially aware browser will finally see the light of day today and will be made available as a beta version.

It’s a bold move by the two co-founders. They are entering a hotly contested market that is dominated by Microsoft (Internet Explorer), Google (Chrome), Mozilla (Firefox) and Apple (Safari). In addition, they’re launching a desktop browser — it works on Windows and Mac OS — at a time when the axis of computing is shifting to touch-driven mobile devices.

Vishria and Howes say the reason they started the company was that, while people’s usage of web and the services they use have changed, the browser itself hasn’t changed very much. “The modern web has evolved to a point where it needs a new kind of browsing experience,” said Vishria, CEO of RockMelt. “I can’t understand why the web browsing experience is so serial, especially when we have so much available processing speeds, memory and available bandwidth.”

He argues that today, everyone in the browser market is about minimal user experience, ease of navigation and speed. What RockMelt is focused on is around people’s web usage – which centers on consuming content, social sharing and social networking.

RockMelt’s quest reminds me of another grand attempt to take on the browser establishment, called Flock, which, despite great social aspirations, has had a tough go of it thus far. Vishria and Howes say that it is all about timing. Thanks to increased broadband penetration, the rise of cloud-based services and mainstream adoption of social services such as Facebook and Twitter, the browser itself needs to be social, said Howes, who worked at LoudCloud/Opsware along with Vishria.

“Most people communicate with a few friends and check only a few sites and we’ve made it easy for them to stay connected and get their information,” said Vishria. The browser integrates Facebook, Twitter and other social services right into the browser itself. At the same time, it makes it easy to add news feeds and other information sources. The browser, which is based on Chromium (the open-source project behind Google’s Chrome browser), requires you to sign-in with your Facebook credentials. Once logged in, you can add your favorite friends and news feeds on the left and right side of the browser. The browser makes it easy to update, tweet and share content via Facebook and Twitter. (See screenshots to get more details on the browser and its features.)

From the demos I saw, the 30-person company has done a fantastic job of integrating social features into the browsing experience. It has developed proprietary technologies (mostly HTML5-based) that make search a massively fast and more meaningful experience. The browser uses its built-in cache to pre-fetch, then pre-render a lot of content and make it available instantaneously.

However, it still has its work cut out for it; it’s entering a saturated market and will need to fight for attention. RockMelt wants to focus on mainstream consumers, but it has to contend with the harsh reality that people are slow to change and switch. Look at how long it took for Internet Explorer numbers to start sinking. Perhaps that’s why the company is focusing on getting the browser in the hands of many users before trying to build a business model. “Search is a good way for browsers to get paid, and we are thinking about other services beyond search, but that comes later,” said Howes. For now, the founders will be happy if a million people are using their browser in six months.

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Apple and Microsoft, not surprisingly, are responding to Android’s threat in two different ways, but both are using HTML5 to compete on their own terms.

HTML5: Another wall around Apple’s garden

Those who, like I, hoped Apple would dramatically lower prices, increase developer outreach through open source and open standards, and otherwise emulate Google in order to grow its smartphone market share are going to be disappointed. The iPhone’s decreasing market share may be what Steve Jobs expected — or even wanted. Apple, after all, has built its business on emphasizing profit margins over market share. It builds a Ritz-Carlton experience, with no intention of ever competing for Holiday Inn distribution.

Yes, Apple is opening up to HTML5, but this is not at attempt to open up its system. Apple will continue to jealously guard a premium iOS experience for those developers willing to write in Objective C. Its adoption of HTML5 was purely a tactical move, meant to counter Adobe’s lock on web content. In order for Apple to maintain its control of its own ecosystem, it needs to keep other proprietary standards out.

Open standards open doors for Microsoft

Microsoft is taking the opposite tack, wanting to replicate its desktop dominance in mobile. While Windows OS is finally losing a little market share to Mac OS X, according to Gartner, Microsoft recognizes the need to win in mobile, which initially means catching up with Apple. The fastest way to gain app parity with Apple’s iOS is not by forcing developers to toe the Silverlight line, but rather by embracing an open web through HTML5.

Microsoft can always lock in customers down the road through proprietary cloud services that deliver data and more to otherwise open devices. But for now, unlike Apple, Microsoft needs a relatively open app story to make Windows 7 look less like a laggard. HTML5 provides a compelling means to this end, a more open approach than RIM’s attempt to quickly add apps to the BlacBberry by supporting Adobe’s AIR and its 3,000-plus ready-made applications.

Time will tell, however, if Microsoft can use HTML5 to wrest the mass-market crown from Google. Microsoft has already taken to the courts to try to slow Android’s momentum. Perhaps it should instead focus on besting Google’s developer appeal of openness. It’s not really in Microsoft’s DNA, but it may be the only way to make its HTML5 love-fest sound sincere enough to work.

Disclosure: I work for Canonical, a Linux vendor.

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In a move that is being interpreted by many as a cannon shot across Facebook’s bow, Google has changed the terms of service on its contacts API — the programming interface that allows developers to automatically pull your contacts from Gmail and other services.  While the description of the change is somewhat opaque, the meaning is simple: Third-party apps and services can’t pull data from Google without allowing Google to do the same with their data. Think of it as a declaration of data reciprocity. Depending on how you feel about Google and its vast reach and quasi-monopolistic status, this move is going to seem like:

• an attempt to impose Google’s vision of how the Internet should operate on helpless little companies and competitors like Facebook
• an attempt to force openness on companies who might otherwise want to keep your data locked down within a walled garden (this is clearly the view that Google itself has, not surprisingly).

I lean towards the second of those viewpoints. Too many services want to be a roach motel for your data. They will take the data, and make use of it for their own purposes, but they don’t want to make it easy for you to take it out.

Facebook Is Data Greedy

Facebook is a classic example. It’s obvious that the company sees the user data that it collects, whether it’s email addresses or connections between users — i.e., the “social graph” — as the core of what it has to offer both users and advertisers. But it doesn’t make it easy for you to get all of your information and activity back out of the Facebook universe. Yes, you can now download some of your content, including photos and wall posts, but you can’t download the email addresses and other info of your contacts. In other words, it’s not true data portability.

In the past, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said the company believes in data portability in principle, but said there are privacy issues involved in giving you access to all of your friends’ email addresses and other data. So why is it okay for Facebook to have it, but not the person who created those connections?

It’s interesting that one of the factors that kept Apple from allowing the automatic import of Facebook contacts into Ping, according to comments from Steve Jobs, was that the company’s terms for making use of this kind of data were “too onerous.” Facebook seems to see its control over that data as giving it a pretty big bargaining chip when it comes to dealing with other services.

The bottom line is this: To me, the contact info of my friends is *my* social graph — not Facebook’s social graph. I should be able to take it wherever I wish. My only criticism of Google’s move is that it has taken way too long. The issue of data openness and data portability with respect to Facebook arguably first blew up in 2008, when Robert Scoble got in trouble for trying to scrape his personal info. Why has it taken two years for Google to make such a change? In that time period, Facebook has gone from less than 100 million users to over half a billion, and that kind of influence is going to make it easier for the company to just ignore the whole data portability issue.

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Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Giuseppe Bognani

Now, if American Airlines gets its way, there’s a good chance other airlines are going to follow suit and start negotiating for better prices with all online travel agencies. Given that these OTAs are already working on razor-thin margins, their fiscal health could take turn for the worse pretty fast. Orbitz gets about 25 percent of its revenues from domestic sales, and with American representing about 14 percent of the U.S. market, the loss of AA would be felt deeply by Orbitz. J.P. Morgan, an investment bank, estimates about 3.5 percent decline in annual revenues.

In a research note, J.P. Morgan Airlines analyst, Jamie Baker, pointed out that “the loss of ticket sales from major distributors like Orbitz could be greater than the cost savings AA is hoping for.” In other words, if Orbitz plays hardball and decides to forego AA inventory and none of the other airlines follow, the company can breathe easy. However if the company re-negotiates with American, others are likely to follow and their revenues could slip 12.4 percent on an annual basis. This shake-up in the industry is likely to impact Expedia and other online travel services as well, J.P. Morgan notes.

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Google has made it a habit of making news for the wrong reasons! Days after it reported a blockbuster quarter, the company’s chief executive made some childish remarks about privacy.

And, in past week or so, the company saw three well-known executives leave the company. First it was Chad Hurley, co-founder of YouTube, who decided it was time to hang up his CEO spurs. (Hurley is staying on as a special adviser.) Then came news that AdMob co-founder Omar Hamoui was leaving. Then, over the weekend, news spread that Lars Rasmussen, who was one of the co-creators of Google Maps and Google Wave, is leaving.

Rasmussen is trading Google for Facebook. He apparently likes the new gig so much he would give up Sydney and move to the San Francisco Bay Area. In an interview with the Sydney Morning Herald, Rasmussen said:

It feels to me that Facebook may be a sort of once-in-a-decade type of company. The energy there is just amazing, whereas it can be very challenging to be working in a company the size of Google. (SMH)

According to some estimates, one in five Facebook employees have ties back to Google, including COO Sheryl Sandberg and CTO Bret Taylor. Google has over 23,331 employees according to company’s recent filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Facebook has about 2,000 employees.

Rasmussen explained in his interview that getting things done (GTD) was a big problem at Google, and shutting down his project, Google Wave, a year after it was made available as a beta is a sign it was becoming difficult to get things done at the search giant.

We were not quite the success that Google was hoping for, and trying to persuade them not to pull the plug and ultimately failing was obviously a little stressful. It takes a while for something new and different to find its footing and I think Google was just not patient. (SMH)

He’s not alone. Many former members of AdMob have privately expressed frustration at their inability to get things done at Google. Others who have quit the search giant have expressed similar sentiments. Sometimes, money and perks aren’t enough to retain talent. If today it’s Facebook, then tomorrow it will be yet another hot startup that will keep fishing in Google’s talent pool and find eager biters.

I don’t think rivals (including upstarts) have the ability to stop Google’s financial steamroller. It will continue to be a dominant force in search and online advertising for years to come. But if it doesn’t reign in its talent problem, the company will have a long-term crisis on its hands. It was exodus of talent and inability to get things done that has brought giants of the past — Yahoo for example — to their knees.

For the longest time, Google has been the beacon for the smartest and most talented people in the world, especially from an engineering perspective. If these super-smart people start getting frustrated by their inability to get anything done, they’re going to follow Rasmussen to somewhere they can find a more receptive and nurturing environment.

In the end, that’s the single biggest problem for Google.

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Fixit produced another of their legendary tear-downs today, this time examining the inner workings of the Logitech Revue Google TV set-top box. What they found reminded them very much of a plain old netbook: Logitech’s Revue features a regular-sized Gigabyte motherboard, a 1.2 GHz Atom CE4150 processor that comes with a with a 400 MHz GPU
, 1 GB of RAM and a total of 5 GB of Flash memory.

Of course, the Revue isn’t just a netbook with a different label. It has a number of special-purpose hardware extensions, including an HDMI port used for picture-in-picture viewing of live TV and websites. iFixit also took apart the keyboard and found a Synaptics T1021A touch controller, which is the same as the one used in the Microsoft Kin 2.

How does this compare to the Apple (a AAPL) TV? Apple used one of its new A4 processors in its living room device, clocked at 1 GHz, and added a generous 8 GB of RAM. Essentially, the Apple TV specs were very close to the iPad, but Apple tried really hard to give the device a very different form factor. Logitech’s Revue specs, on the other hand, are very similar to those of a netbook, and the company clearly didn’t bother to hide its ancestry all that much. Whether consumers care remains to be seen.

Image courtesy of iFixit.

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iLife

iPhoto

iPhoto is my picture storage solution, especially now that I use Snow Leopard’s Services to allow any app to pull images from iPhoto. This is very handy in PowerPoint; I have an event called Presentation Images: images I think are great to be used in presentations. PowerPoint can’t access iPhoto on its own, but using Services, it can.

Ever since iPhoto went to the event-based storage system, though, it’s been driving me nuts on imports. It’s pretty rare I’ve gone to an actual event. Instead I end up taking a few pictures of something interesting on my iPhone. Instead of just automatically creating Events, I’d like to see some greater intelligence here. At the import screen I should be able to specify which photos actually are part of an event, and which should go into a slush pile I can sort out later.

I’d also like to see better integration with Flickr and Facebook. I want iPhoto to go both ways, and also download any photos I’ve added to that set via Flickr or Facebook from other sources.

iMovie

Like many people, I mourned when iMovie took away the timeline. iMovie ’09 is a little better, but I’d still like to see it bridge the gap to Final Cut Express with better timeline integration.

I’d also like to see it become a better screencasting tool. Now that Snow Leopard can record my screen, I’d like to see them borrow some of the features of ScreenFlow and integrate them.

iWork

Pages

It’s unlikely my biggest annoyance with Pages — the inability to quickly open a Word document, make a change, and save without needing to export — is likely to ever get changed due to how Pages handles importing and exporting. I can dream, though, and in my dream the process works much more smoothly.

One area I think Pages is seriously lacking in is academic uses. While Pages ’09 introduced easier citation and equation management, those features require third-party add ons. Word 2011, due out Oct. 26, handles both of those in-app. Apple really shouldn’t be slacking on features that could help it penetrate the education market even further.

Numbers

Numbers often gets a bad rap because it’s not Excel, but I’ve personally never hit many walls in Numbers. That said, I’m pretty much the app’s target audience: someone who does light billing and spreadsheet work, or maybe needs to gussy up a chart for a presentation. That said, the biggest complaint I tend to run across from others who are more demanding with their spreadsheet software is “no pivot tables.” So, um, go pivot tables?

Keynote

I don’t really have a big wish-list for Keynote, although PowerPoint 2011′s layering feature would be very handy. The biggest problem I have with Apple’s presentation tool isn’t really with the desktop application; it’s with handing off presentations to the iPad. I tend to use a lot of non-standard fonts in my presentations, which get completely mangled when I show them on the iPad. So, what I’d love in Keynote is the ability to save a version for the iPad that will properly display my fonts, let me drive the presentation, and make any last-minute changes.

Inter-app-operability

Office for PC has one feature I’ve been longing for in iWork: the OLE framework, which makes it very easy to embed editable elements. So, I can drop an Excel table or chart into Word and be able to make changes to that. iWork would really benefit from better cross-app integration.

I don’t think my demands are too extreme, but I also have little faith that we’ll see many of these changes implemented, which is a shame, because in my opinion, these are the major problems holding the iSuites back from a user experience perspective, something Apple should be all about. If rumors are right, we’ll see how far off the mark Apple is when iWork ships on Oct. 20.

What are you hoping for or expecting from updated iWork and iLife suites?

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Opera Mobile will be hitting the Android platform within a month, according to the company. This is the full mobile version of the Opera browser, and will add pinch/zoom and hardware acceleration to take advantage of high-powered smartphones currently on the market. The Android web browser is as good as that on any mobile platform, so Opera is obviously hoping the new browser will convince the millions of users of Opera Mini to upgrade to the new version. Opera Mini is designed to work well on low-end phones and isn’t as full-featured as Opera Mobile.

The upcoming release of Opera Mobile for Android will follow on the heels of the release of Opera 11 for the desktop. The new desktop version will add a feature that has been requested for a long time: extensions, which will bring Opera up to speed with Firefox and Chrome. Opera is mum about extensions on Opera Mobile, so most likely, this will be added in the future.

Opera’s choice to launch the new mobile browser first on Android demonstrates how big an impact the platform is having in the smartphone space. Historically, it has been common for companies to release an iOS version of apps first, followed by other platforms. This is changing due to the rapid growth of Android, and we should see Android versions of other apps getting released first going forward. The fact that it’s easier for developers to get apps in the Android Market quickly no doubt plays a role, too.

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Steve Jobs is known for his stance regarding sexual content in the App Store. Essentially, he wants to keep it clean, so that most content is family-friendly. There are notable exceptions, like the official Playboy app, but generally speaking, nudity and sexuality are a no-no for iOS apps. If that’s not enough, worried parents can lock their kids devices down, restricting access to certain types of content, or to the App Store or Safari altogether.

Apple’s ideas of what is and isn’t acceptable in the App Store have led to some controversial decisions regarding which apps get banned or disallowed in the past. For some, it seems inappropriate that a company can decide what you should and shouldn’t do with your device once you own it.

The new patent takes that a step further. If this tech ever makes it way to your smartphone, it could theoretically alert a user, admin, or other designated individual whenever objectionable content appears in a text message. In practice, that could mean a parent gets a text when their teenage son writes something racy, or that your boss gets a notice whenever you swear in an outbound communication.

According to the patent, the iPhone could also offer suggestions with which to replace the offending text, or just delete it outright as soon as you’re done typing so that it never gets sent in the first place. In effect, that means it could actually change what you’re going to say.

Now I’m not against parents protecting their kids from potentially dangerous situations. That makes sense. But putting this degree of control over something as basic as what you can say with a direct communication device frightens me. Sure, this would probably end up residing in the Restrictions section of the iOS Setting menu, but even just the fact that it would be there would invite things like use by employers to monitor employee texting even more closely than I’m sure many already do, something I definitely don’t approve of.

What do you think? Is this a feature you’d welcome, or an example of Apple going too far?

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