i will not capitalize my sentences, though i’m still considering capitalizing the i’s 
i was writing a reply to my friend rani harpaz and figured its worth a post. this morning tech-crunch or techmeme posted a link to a note by Fred Wilson pondering through a pile of GOOG he just bought. I spent an evening talking to Fred at a dinner thrown by my friend Jeff Pulver,
so I grew some interest in his thoughts.
me and rani have spent some time discussing GOOG and AAPL, so we bounced back and forth about it. rani thinks GOOG should be shorted the important thing i wanted to post here is how google is expanding to new areas with what i believe are high chances of success, so here’s
the important thing i wanted to post here is how google is expanding to new areas with what i believe are high chances of success, so here’sthe excerpt:
i see google-maps and perhaps also google-docs/spreadsheets and some of their other technologies as infrastructures for future products. they have implemented these services in an amazing fashion and its a matter of business thinking and market evolution until these things start to be the core of offerings that bring in cash, how much cash is a different question.
an amazing thing that strikes me: google launched a google-maps-mobile feature called locate-me and deployed it to all mobile phones that run their google-maps-mobile app (most nokia phones, iphone, window-mobile and a bunch of other phones). this implements a pseudo gps using cell-tower location, giving location approximation within 10 meter to 1km. ever since hack-grading my iphone yesternight from 1.1.1 to 1.1.3 (which includes the ‘new’ locate-me feature) i’ve been obsessed by it and what i believe can be built around it.
this little feature, largely unnoticed, is the core of the next-gen of local search. this is the first time that a mainstream product (i dont consider any GPS-enabled phone to be mainstream) has the ability to run an application where you type in ‘pizza’ and get a referral to a nearby rated pizzeria. this is the sort of experience people have been talking about for years and now its finally possible. again, just a matter of time until google improves the quality of its local data and implements the right kind of interaction around local search.
so, to sum, i see new revenue paths for google, or at the very least large enhancements to their existing paid-search revenue model.
p.s. – some people think that since steve jobs is flying more frequently this means more deals are getting closed and so we should expect more revenue from AAPL in the coming months, cool, interesting and most importantly funny.
On 2/27/08, Ran Harpaz wrote:
It’s quite amazing to me how someone can be very analytical and at the same time have “blind fate” in GOOG like this guy does. It is clear that they have been over-spending on their “adjacencies” for years, at an incredible rate, and so far nothing happened. Why would he think that it’s going to change? just because we want it to???