Those are positives for both Google and Verizon, which has the most robust 3G network in the country. However it appears that Verizon is stuck on the same issue that surprised me about the deal: the ability for Google to save information from searches. Google stores requests generated on PCs for 18 months; the same practice would be extended to mobile devices. Today, Verizon’s primary value (after the network itself) is its locked-in subscriber base, but in a few years after it opens its network, that advantage might erode. Aside from any personal privacy concerns, the information Google plans to store is what Verizon could one day find most valuable.

But in exchange for a cut of the Google ad revenue, Verizon may cave. Carriers are trying to figure out how to avoid being “dumb pipes” and get a hand in the lucrative content and advertising plays out there. I do find it hard to believe that Verizon would roll over on a deal with the company that caused it such angst during the 700 MHz auction, but perhaps the lure of mobile search dollars is too strong.

Update: We got some data from Nielsen talking about the mobile search habits of U.S subscribers and those from Verizon in particular (for data on mobile search ad spending, check out my comment below). Nielsen estimates that at least 50 million U.S. mobile subscribers search for things using their phone, and Verizon Wireless subscribers make up 26 percent of the active mobile search market.

A Google search bar would appear to help Verizon subscribers search faster and perhaps more frequently. Eleven percent of Verizon data users use the carrier’s portal to navigate to search, while 9 percent of Verizon data users go to the web to search. Only 6 percent of Verizon data users search through a branded carrier portal.

image of search bar on the Blackjack phone courtesy of Google

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As always, Buffett’s advice is directed to investing, but his wisdom is so universal it doesn’t take much of a leap to see how it applies to entrepreneurs too. Right off the bat, for example, consider the following Buffett analogy, employed to express when it makes sense to diversify, and when it doesn’t …

If it’s your game, diversification doesn’t make sense. It’s crazy to put money into your 20th choice rather than your 1st choice. “Lebron James” analogy. If you have Lebron James on your team, don’t take him out of the game just to make room for someone else. If you have a harem of 40 women, you never really get to know any of them well.

Consider this when you’re considering a new hire, a new partner, a new advisor or investor. Focus founders!

Anyway, this Q&A is a great gem, so read it thoroughly, here. And thank you to Dang Le, the Emory student who compiled the notes (and to Feld for pushing out this post to the rest of us.)

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Tonight I caught her hilarious take on our latest “lethal” and “horrid phrase:”
Going forward!

With DEMO 2008 on this week, we’ve had several posts on the virtues of public speaking, how to improve your company presentations, and what to say (or not) to would-be investors. So, I thought you ought to consider to Lucy’s take on why “going forward…” is a phrase that will only set you back.

The first trouble with the phrase is that it’s almost always redundant. The sentence means exactly the same thing without it. If, on occasion, there is a need to spell out the idea of the future, we have some perfectly good words already. For pompous people there is “henceforth,” and for the rest of us there’s “in the future.” The second trouble is that “going forward” seems to gesture confidently toward the future but is utterly vague on timing…

Vagueness we know, is the cardinal sin of poor public speaking. But she continues…

What makes “going forward” so lethal is the way it clings to the tongue of the speaker so that it is uttered again, and again. It has become a Tourette’s syndrome for people… it’s not only infectious but constantly mutating into new, ugly forms.

Some of the abhorrent derivatives you’ll also want to avoid are:

* “the way forward”

* “on a go forward basis”

and my personal favorite — which I just know I’ve heard a VC say at least once…

* “going forward, we give feedback at every milestone”

This last concoction is where “going forward” is used as a tense modifier by people who (apparently) can’t grasp a sense of time or place at all and, therefore, stick the future tense phrase in at the beginning, but then carry on speaking in the present tense.

“If ‘going forward’ does serve a purpose at all,” concludes Lucy, “it is a signal that the listener can switch off without missing anything.” Ouch. Click here to listen to the whole piece. It is 9 minutes long, but it will be time well spent on a… um, go forward basis! (Did i say that?!)

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Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee uses the Social Graph meme to rebrand his semantic web efforts, writing in a blog post, “I called this graph the Semantic Web, but maybe it should have been Giant Global Graph!” Berners-Lee thinks there could be big payoff in adding a layer of meaning atop the documents of the World Wide Web:

So, if only we could express these relationships, such as my social graph, in a way that is above the level of documents, then we would get re-use. That’s just what the graph does for us. We have the technology — it is Semantic Web technology, starting with RDF OWL and SPARQL. Not magic bullets, but the tools which allow us to break free of the document layer. If a social network site uses a common format for expressing that I know Dan Brickley, then any other site or program (when access is allowed) can use that information to give me a better service. Un-manacled to specific documents.

But though Berners-Lee borrows social graph talk, he’s not really concerned with human relationships, but more about things that computers can understand, things like plane trips:

In the long term vision, thinking in terms of the graph rather than the web is critical to us making best use of the mobile web, the zoo of wildy differing devices which will give us access to the system. Then, when I book a flight it is the flight that interests me. Not the flight page on the travel site, or the flight page on the airline site, but the URI (issued by the airlines) of the flight itself. That’s what I will bookmark.

The semantic web has always been about computers taking on more processing for us, not about computers allowing us to be more human, which is where the social graph might more naturally aim.

Semantic web fans would like to suggest otherwise. Nova Spivack, founder of semantic web startup Radar Networks, as well wants to make everything into a semantic graph story. “The social graph is a subset of the semantic graph,” he told me when we talked about the Twine launch.

But just like social intelligence is not a subset of academic intelligence, social knowledge and understanding isn’t a subset of the semantic meaning that semantic web technologies like RDF and SPARQL are aimed at representing. Computers can easily record and manipulate information about people taking plane trips — just like Raymond Babbitt’s autistic savant. They can’t as easily collapse social meaning into something useful online.

Though a unified social graph would be an unquestionable win for Internet microcelebrities who need to manage relationships with 2,000 or more relatively undifferentiated fans, most people socialize online with relatively few people in very complex ways, ways that are not necessarily well served by the wished-for unified social graph, ways that can’t be fully represented by computers.

So while the semantic web — the GGG — may represent people insofar as they take plane trips, that doesn’t mean it has the social intelligence to represent the social graph in a useful way.

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He’s also coined a Metcalfe-style term for the next generation of energy distribution that will meet the world’s needs for clean and cheap energy: Welcome to the Enernet (energy network). Read the interview.

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