Six hundred and fifty dollars! Can I get $650? How about $700? Here comes $700. Who’s next? An auction? Nope, just Wall Street analysts tripping over themselves to raise the price target for Google shares.

Since the odds of $700 a Google a share are probable that means we’re only $1,300 away from Henry Blodget’s Google at $2,000 a share call, which was tongue in cheek…I think. What’s a few hundred when Google could get $100 billion in revenue?

First up on Friday Todd Greenwald, an analyst at Nollenberger Capital Partners raised Google’s earnings estimates and raised the search giant’s price target to $650. What else can you do when Google is flirting with $600?

Greenwald said Google has a strong third quarter under its belt with strength in Europe. As for mortgage advertising worries, Greenwald–along with every other analyst–says the concerns are overblown. Text advertising will be the last budget to be cut. Greenwald also said there’s a lot of untapped opportunity in Google, which dominates a growing online advertising market.

Not to be outdone by Greenwald, Bear Stearns analyst Robert Peck slapped a $700 price target on Google. After all it’s really a pain to have to revise a price target every month. The $700 mark should spare Peck some ink until December or so.

Peck writes in a research note:

We have updated our model to reflect a more thorough fundamental look at Google’s online search drivers, YouTube’s potential revenue contribution, and Google’s efforts in radio and print advertising.

The argument: Google is gaining search share and “Google’s efforts in online video, radio, and print, have added a layer of value that is absent from its competitor’s portfolio of offerings and which has the potential to yield significant financial rewards.”

We’ll overlook that those aforementioned businesses have yielded nada so far. Why? We have bigger questions to ask.

Can I get a $750 in the house?

Research in Motion reported stellar second quarter earnings and highlighted a few areas: Software called Unite that can coordinate schedules for up to five people; enterprise gains amid Wi-Fi and wireless network roaming and prosumer hits such as the Pearl update.

RIM reported an in line second quarter, but provided a strong outlook for its fiscal third quarter. Wall Street analysts across the board cheered the results. For instance, Pacific Crest Securities and RBC gave RIM a price target of $120, up from its $110 target. Shares were last trading at $108 in early trading.

Among the notable topics highlighted by RIM on its conference call (transcript courtesy of SeekingAlpha):

Unite software: It’s not entirely clear what RIM’s Unite software will ultimately be, but it sounds promising on the surface. On Oct. 3, RIM announced that it would be testing Unite software with Telefonica in Spain. On last night’s conference call, RIM Co-CEO Jim Balsillie offered a few more details on Unite, which is currently being developed for release later this fall. The target market is families and small home offices.

According to Balsillie said Unite will be a free PC download that will allow groups of up to five users with mobile access to share calendars, pictures, music and documents via BlackBerry devices. The users in this Unite group will be able to modify appointments and availability as well as send reminders.

Here’s Balsillie’s description:

Some of the features of BlackBerry Unite include the ability to share key information, including e-mail, contacts, pictures, documents and bookmarks directly from the BlackBerry smartphone with other group members; remotely download content, including pictures, music, documents and other content on their desktop computers directly from their BlackBerry smartphone; coordinate schedules using shared wireless calendar, with the ability to check each other’s availability setup or modify appointments and send reminders; remotely secure devices, including the ability to use commands that wirelessly erase lost or stolen devices and to enforce password protection; simple wireless controls to help define acceptable smartphone usage for each individual, such as the ability to place long distance calls or access certain online content, and the ability to automatically back up files on the BlackBerry smart phone to the desktop computer, so that if the device is lost or stolen, all the data can be simply restored in minutes on a replacement unit.

Enterprise strength. For all the talk about the Pearl and consumer efforts, RIM isn’t taking its eye off its core enterprise business, which accounts for about 70 percent of sales. RIM said its enterprise server 4.1.3 and BlackBerry wireless handheld server 4.1.0 has been certified in 25 countries under common criteria. RIM also rolled out its an update to its BlackBerry smart card reader.

Another promising enterprise technology is RIM’s Ascendant suite. This suite aims to combine fixed-line and mobile voice systems. Balsillie said companies are looking to converge their handset technologies and networks.

Consumer gains. RIM noted that this was the first quarter where consumer subscriptions outpaced enterprise gains. “The enterprise business is growing very fast. The non-enterprise business is growing very, very fast,” said Balsillie, who added that over time prosumer customers will represent more of RIM’s base.

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) won a legal battle as a Minnesota jury found a woman liable for downloading music. The penalty: $220,000 in damages for downloading 24 songs illegally.

The New York Times calls the RIAA decision “a crucial legal victory for record labels and other copyright owners.” Other reports (see Techmeme) come down on the “RIAA is evil” side of the equation. Declan McCullagh breaks down how the RIAA won.

But there’s a broader business picture that’s missing. The issue: The RIAA’s so-called victory comes at a bad time. Music piracy is theft, but suing customers isn’t a good business move. Meanwhile, the music industry is actually making some strides–labels are ditching DRM, business model experiments abound and there is a growing file of evidence that the industry has a clue.

And then the verdict against Jammie Thomas, the Minnesota woman, hits and any recent goodwill from the music industry goes flying out the window. We’re back to equating the music industry with lawsuits again. The Times reports that record labels have brought legal action against 3,000 people since 2003. The average settlement occurs out of court for about $4,000. That adds up to $12 million not counting legal expenses. Is it really worth it?

For this effort, the RIAA has alienated consumers and has looked progressively worse compared to other content companies. Say what you will about television broadcasters, but the likes of ABC, NBC and CBS are hellbent on not making the same mistakes as the RIAA. The TV industry is throwing multiple models against the Web wall to see what sticks. A lot more gets done when you’re not suing everybody all of the time.

Notable headlines:

Mary Jo Foley: Microsoft releases beta of XP SP3 to Vista, Windows Server testers.

• Internet Explorer 7 update: Now WGA-free.

Ryan Naraine: MS Patch Tuesday: 7 bulletins coming, 4 critical. Sun issues patch for ‘highly critical’ Java flaws.

Larry Dignan: RIM ups third quarter outlook. RIM tops profit forecasts, predicts more strength.

Mary Jo Foley: Microsoft: We’re good for your health. Photos: A peek inside HealthVault. Dana Blankenhorn: Who will trust Microsoft HealthVault? Techmeme.

Steve O’Hear: AIM adds further social networking features; borrows from Twitter and Facebook.

Christopher Dawson: OpenSUSE beats Ubuntu to the punch.

Russell Shaw: Skype 1.4 for Linux out of beta with new features.

Techmeme: RIAA jury finds Minnesota woman liable for piracy

PaidContent.org: IAB: H107, Q2 Online Ad Spend Numbers Show Rising Revenues, Yet Confirm Slowdown.

Larry Dignan: Checking in with Apple: Price cuts boost iPhone sales units; Mac sales level out. Jason O’Grady: AMEX return protection overwhelmed by iPhone customers. New iPhone wannabes: LG Voyager and Blackberry 9k. Apple arrogance - part II. Russell Shaw: How many unlocked iPhones are there in the wild? I think I have a good idea.

No work-free holidays or home life? You’re not alone.

Larry Dignan: EMC buys Berkeley Data Systems, creator of Mozy. BT, FON Wi-Fi deal hints at wireless future.

Photos: On the road to robot race (right).

Adobe plots its path on the Web.

Dan Farber: Northwestern Mutual’s foray into Web 2.0. Salesforce.com’s marketplace extension.

George Ou: Are thin clients the solution to all your security woes?

Smart meters to cut energy costs. Ethanol isn’t a magic word.

Microsoft: ‘Halo’ first-week sales hit $300 million.
Photos: Japan probe approaches moon; who’s next?

Dana Gardner: Analysts debate role of governance and ‘total management’ in the dawning era of SOA.

Dana Blankenhorn: Is it time to give Red Hat some respect? Will open source desktops succumb to bloat?

Computerworld: DHS e-mail snafu reveals info on thousands of security pros.

Yahoo!, eBay and PayPal Join Forces to Protect Consumers Against E-mail Fraud and Phishing Scams.

Dan Kusnetzky: Applications will perform exactly as before in a virtual environment.

Judge allows class action over Target Web site.

This week on the Dan & David Show Microsoft dominates the news. Today the company introduced HealthVault, and free client application and Microsoft Live service for building and maintaining health records. It’s an emerging market that is going to be huge, with Google and others trying to gain favor as the service of record for medical information.

In addition, we discuss Microsoft Office Live Workspace, a new beta service that follows Microsoft’s hybrid client/services model. It’s is not a hosted Microsoft Office 2007 or direct competitor to Zoho, Think Free or Google Apps, but a SharePoint in the cloud aimed at consumers for storing and sharing Office documents as well as documents from OpenOffice and other suites. Groove, which Microsoft acquired from Ray Ozzie’s (now chief software architect at Microsoft) company, provides the offline capabilities. (See Mary Jo Foley’s coverage of everything Microsoft.)

David thinks Google has a better offering than Microsoft, and I am growing weary of Google’s presumed greatness at a time when Microsoft has more than $16 billion in revenue associated with an office suite and Google has close to zero. The game has just begun.

David also talks about his proposed bet with Robbie Bach, president of the Microsoft division that includes Zune, who boasted that the Zune will be in 2nd place in terms of market share by the end of the year:

As long as you’re referring to units sold by Christmas 2007 and NPD Group’s aggregated market share numbers for all (flash and hard drive-based) digital media players (the basis of the market share data cited in the Bloomberg story) , I will shave my head on the stage of your choice if Zune is in second place according to NPD’s first post-holiday report on marketshare (my wife is going to kill me when she finds out). The quid pro quo is that you must shave your head on the stage of my choice if it’s not (I’ll even provide a licensed hair stylist).

In addition, I talk about my visit with Peter Zencke, head of R&D for SAP and a member of its Executive Board, and we question whether Microsoft was rebuffed by Facebook, given Steve Ballmer’s remarks about Facebook as a fad.

This podcast can be delivered directly to your desktop or MP3 player if you’re subscribed to our podcasts (See ZDNet’s podcasts: How to tune in). For more the topics covered during the show, search our blog. You can also search the audio by entering a keyword in our podcast player.

In a CIO Vision Series interview, Steve Bozzo, CIO of 1-800 Flowers talks with me about what it takes to run the company’s daily IT operations, across a network of more than 9,000 florists.

Today, about 75 percent of 1-800 Flowers transactions are Internet-based, Bozzo said, and the user experience is a key factor. “Making the user experience very, very elegant and pleasant for our customers, we’re always looking for that, that’s absolutely paramount in our minds. The company is also exploring Web 2.0 technologies.

The company has built infrastructure to scale up for the few extraordinary days of peak usage during the year. “We need to build our infrastructure to manage the peaks obviously, and then the rest of the year we have that excess capacity. So basically what we do is scale the environment horizontally in three hosting centers around the country,” Bozzo said. “When we don’t need the environment for the peaks, we expand our development environment and start virtualizing so we’re tapping into those resources more and more.”

Watch the video

More CIO Sessions

• Air Force Reserve
• Alcatel-Lucent
• American Red Cross
• BAE Systems
• Boeing
• British Airways
• Campbell Arnott’s
• Charles Schwab
• Churchill Downs
• CIO Panel
• City of Philadelphia
• City of San Francisco
• First Group
• Harrah’s Entertainment
• Harvard Medical School
• Hilton Hotels
• Jetstar
• McKesson
• Millennium Hotels
• Motorola
• Oxfam GB
• Qualcomm
• Reuters
• SF Giants
• SFO
• SurfControl
• Travelocity
• UNICEF
• UC Berkeley
• Vanguard
• Virgin Entertainment Group
• Virgin UK
• Vodafone
• Webcor Builders
• William Hill
• Wotif
• Yahoo!
• Yili Group

Research in Motion added 1.45 million BlackBerry subscriber accounts and shipped 3 million devices in its second quarter results, which were in line with Wall Street expectations.

In a statement Thursday, RIM reported second quarter net income of $287.7 million, or 50 cents a share, on revenue of $1.37 billion. In the same quarter a year ago, RIM reported net income of $140.2 million, or 25 cents a share, on revenue of $658.5 million. The results matched estimates according to Thomson First Call.

RIM also upped its outlook for the fiscal third quarter. The company projected earnings of 59 cents a share to 63 cents a share on revenue between $1.6 billion to $1.67 billion. The company expects to add 1.65 million subscriber accounts for the quarter ending Dec. 1. Wall Street was expecting earnings of 55 cents a share on sales of $1.5 billion.

Forrester has published a detailed case study by Oliver Young (available for $279) on the adoption of Web 2.0 technologies by Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance. The company has deployed blogs and RSS feeds to employees and seen improvements in productivity and communications, although the ROI is difficult to measure. One of the good surprises is that 70 percent of Northwestern Mutual’s 90-plus active blogs are focused on project management. The company developed guidelines for its internal bloggers and also addressed security, compliance and retention concerns in the platform.

According to Forrester’s June 2007 US Web 2.0 Online Survey, the adoption of Web 2.0 tools is at an early stage, but more corporations are investing in blogs, wikis, RSS and podcasting, mostly on a small scale. The survey didn’t include social networking, which has also come on the radar, especially as it can tie into existing HR systems.

However, Young points to several barriers to Web 2.0 adoption in the enterprise in his report:

• Enterprise Web 2.0 lacks a measurable value proposition.
• Managers have concerns about Web 2.0 disruptions.
• Many CIOs pursue a “search and destroy” strategy, stamping out unsanctioned use of Web 2.o tools. Nearly 80 percent of the CIOs surveyed were very or somewhat concerned about the uncontrolled usage of Web 2.0 tools.

Get the full report: Case Study: Northwestern Mutual’s Enterprise Web 2.0 Journey

Do you really care what wireless network you’re on? Aside from a few wireless geeks that live in an acronym filled world of 3G, EVDO, HSDPA and CDMA no one cares.

The future of wireless is plain as day: You’ll have a device that hops from 3G to WiFi (and WiMax) to whatever access technology appears. This access will be seamless and you’ll barely know the difference. Getting to the future is another story. When it comes to this wireless future I’m like a kid stuck in the backseat of a long car ride. Are we there yet? No. Are we there yet? No. Repeat.

There are some efforts moving toward this future from that likes of T-Mobile, which is using Wi-Fi along with its network. But for every one of these examples there are disabled unlocked phones, network restrictions and walls between using Wi-Fi and your traditional wireless network.

That’s what makes today’s deal between BT Group and Spanish Internet startup FON interesting (FON blog, Techmeme). BT bought an undisclosed stake in FON and plans to create the largest WiFi network to blanket the UK. I’m far from sold on the idea of WiFi being strung together into a great wireless network, but it certainly has a role.

By combining FON’s hotspots with BT’s WiFi coverage, which is usually found at a McDonald’s or airport, you get to something I’m really sold on. A lot of network hopping.

BT’s game plan is to use its partnership with FON to boost its BT Fusion service. This service allows customers to switch seamlessly between fixed, mobile and wireless networks. Toss in some WiFi and BT’s Fusion service could have a much larger footprint.

I’ll be curious to see how this plays out for BT. I hope it plays out well because we could certainly use a little more wireless access fusion here in the U.S. All of these uncommunicative access options–insert your acronym here–just don’t make sense for the customer.

FON founder Martin Varasavsky described the BT deal and said the following about the carrier:

It was amazing and refreshing to see how agile a telco giant could be in working with an innovative concept like the BT FON Community. Everyone at BT and FON has dedicated an extraordinary amount of time and effort in working closely together to make this new Wi-Fi community a reality.

Here’s to hoping some of that agility and innovation makes it across the pond.

Salesforce.com is contemplating a new service that would enable its customers of its CRM platform to share leads, opportunities and custom objects with each other. As a way to stir up interest, the company is asking for names of the “proposed” service and put up a poll. With 82 votes in, S2S (Salesforce to Salesforce) has the lead (the Vizu Web poll service used for the voting is nicely done).

It sounds like an idea that is well along the development path, and in line with salesforce.com’s platform focus and AppExchange marketplace. With Force.com, salesforce.com has opened its platform so that developers can run their code on salesforce servers. An extension of the marketplace and a unified platform would be to allow customers to share sales leads, opportunities and custom objects. I would guess that that such a marketplace would be transactional as well.

Nick Carr, author of the forthcoming “The Big Switch: Our New Digital Destiny,” which has now been renamed more precisely “Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google,” had this to say about saleforce.com’s proposed sharing service.

For Salesforce and other multitenant vendors, the big payoff would be the creation of a strong network effect. As companies begin trading data within a system, their partners would have a big incentive to join the system as well. At some point, a critical mass might be reached, setting off a snowball effect. Of course, where there’s a network effect, there’s also a lock-in effect. Convenience has a price.

HP is building out its digital library for its turnkey on-demand video services.

Back in February HP announced an effort called Video Merchant Services and signed Wal-Mart up as its first customer. The general idea was to offer on demand video downloads. Simply put, HP was angling to be a video arms dealer.

Since that announcement, however, HP has been largely silent until Thursday.

HP said in a statement that it has inked agreements with 30 content providers to license their libraries for distribution of HP Video Merchant Services. In total, HP will be able to add 4,000 movie, TV and documentary titles to its library. In a statement, HP said the agreements are the “first steps toward building one of the largest catalogs of licensed commercial video available.”

The studios dealing with HP include Anthem Pictures, Lightworks Program Distribution, Santa Fe Productions, Seedsman Group, Starlight Home Entertainment, Vanguard Cinema, Wink Inc. Productions and World Events Products among others.

The game plan for HP appears to be building out specialty content for its on-demand DVD service. HP is offering an on-demand DVD service where consumers can order classic TV shows, sporting events and specialty content packaged DVDs in small quantities.

Apple’s iPhone price cut has boosted demand to a new sales plateau. Mac sales are leveling out after a back-to-school spurt. iPods are moving off shelves at a rapid clip. And Apple’s latest iPhone software update may have shut down what was a growing resale market.

Those are the conclusions of Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster, who detailed his latest sales check in Apple stores across the country.

Here’s the nutshell of Munster’s findings as published in a research note Thursday.

Overall, Apple looks to be off to another strong quarter, according to Munster. He expects Apple will sell 1.05 million iPhones (all resources, Apple Core) in the September quarter. Demand in September was up 56 percent from August, but iPhone units jumped 200 percent plus after the Sept. 5 price cut. According to Thomson Financial Wall Street is expecting Apple to report earnings of 83 cents a share on revenue of $5.99 billion for the fiscal fourth quarter ending Sept. 30.

Munster is also projecting Mac units in the 2 million to 2.1 million range. A month over month Mac sales slowdown isn’t worrisome given the strong back to school bump Apple got in August.

As for iPods, Nanos and Touches are in and classics are out. Among the iPod units tracked by Munster 39 percent were Nanos with 36 percent being Touches. Shuffles were 16 percent of units with 9 percent representing iPod Classics. “The popularity of the touch will drive the iPod’s (average selling price) up. In fact, one store we visited was sold out of touches on Sun. 9/30,” wrote Munster.

Munster also had some interesting comments about Apple’s recent move to render unlocked iPhones inoperable. He wrote:

During our store checks we noticed many people buying iPhones in the maximum 5/customer allotments, which we believe were being purchased to be unlocked and operated on carriers other than AT&T. This trend was especially noticeable in the New York City stores, where one Apple employee acknowledged that customers were buying five iPhones per store visit in order to resell unlocked. At one point during the visit, the store sold out of iPhones. Judging from our checks, as much as 10% of the iPhones sold in Sept. were purchased with the intention to be resold unlocked. On 9/27, however, Apple released iPhone software version 1.1.1 and the update rendered most of the unlocked phones inoperable. In doing so, we believe Apple effectively minimized the market for unlocked iPhones.

Update: Munster’s final point about 10 percent of iPhone sales were being purchased to be unlocked is getting big play from Russell Shaw, Jacqui Cheng and Katie Marsal. The figure is notable, but isn’t it kind of moot now? After all, many of these iPhones were rendered useless with the iPhone’s latest software update.

EMC said it has acquired Berkeley Data Systems, best known for its Mozy, online information and backup services.

Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, but the acquisition will have no impact on EMC’s revenue or earnings. In other words, EMC is acquiring a small online service to complement its current offerings.

Berkeley’s Mozy is a subscription service that protects the data on your desktop, laptop or remote server. In a statement Thursday EMC said it will continue to invest in Mozy and “advance the brand in the marketplace.”

What’s interesting about the deal is that Mozy gets EMC a more consumer, small office, home office audience. EMC typically caters to large enterprises with its software–Documentum, RSA and the recently IPO’ed VMware–and storage hardware.

Perhaps EMC is following the blueprint of Cisco Systems. While Cisco is still a premier enterprise brand it has grown a consumer business with the acquisition of brands such as Linksys. With Mozy EMC also gets an online service play.

Mozy founder Josh Coates had the following to say in an open letter to customers:

Mozy has always been and always will be simple, automatic, and secure. That will not change. We will continue to innovate and improve our product and service for both consumer and business customers.

The big change is that you will get the benefit of all the stability and security that a large public company has to offer. EMC has been around for almost three decades: Your data will be in the hands of the most trusted global leader in information management.

I appreciate your loyalty, support, and patience over the last couple of years as we’ve broken barriers and disrupted this market. It’s been a lot of fun, and I’m excited to start a new chapter of innovation here at EMC.

Notable headlines:

Matthew Miller: First impressions of the AT&T Tilt. Gallery: The unboxing.

Mary Jo Foley: Accounted for: The five mystery Vista updates to be added to SP1.

Ryan Naraine: X Font Server flaw hits Sun Solaris hard. Apple (finally) fixes year-old QuickTime flaw.

New York Times: In Facebook, Investing in a Theory

AppleInsider: New iMacs plagued by interface freezing issues. David Morgenstern: Apple releases battery firmware update for some MacBook Pros.

Christopher Dawson: Upcoming Ubuntu release to improve features for educators, general, power users.

Mary Jo Foley: Microsoft to release .Net as Shared Source. Ryan Stewart: Microsoft opens the .NET Framework libraries. Techmeme.

Photos: Server room cabling overhaul (right).

Paula Rooney: Adobe slips out first alpha of Flex Builder Linux IDE.

Dan Farber: Google Transit now public.

Russell Shaw: BlackBerry 9000 said on way: 3G with full Backup/Restore.

Garett Rogers: Google Apps becomes a more viable enterprise solution.

Gizmodo: First-Gen Zune Getting All The New Features: This is How You Treat Your Customers.

Mary Jo Foley: Could customer support be Zune’s biggest selling point? David Berlind: If Zune is #2 after X-Mas, I’ll shave my head.

Intel to boost single-core performance.

Jason O’Grady: Are SSDs ready for prime time? Micron: Momentum builds for solid state drives; Memory comes cheap.

BlimpTV: Vista parody video.

David Morgenstern: iPhone: a different kind of customer?

Gallery: Scenes at Ceatec, day 2.

Larry Dignan: Amazon sheds light on Dynamo. Robin Harris: Inside Amazon.

Dana Gardner: IBM ‘continuum’ helps companies crawl-walk-run along the SOA path.

Phil Wainewright: SAP, Adobe, Microsoft: three monkeys take on SaaS.

CIO survey: HP shines; Virtualization, storage top priorities. EDS, Sabre extend IT services deal.

Richard Stiennon: Children. Be very, very afraid.

David Berlind: Toshiba’s sub-3 lb. projector is a road warrior’s dream; a pricey dream, but still a dream.

DigiTimes: Apple reportedly considering Intel platform for iPhone

Matthew Miller: QuickOffice integrates Mail for Exchange on S60 devices.

Dan Farber: Zoho adds database to office suite.

Spam-scam crackdown nets $2 billion in fake checks.

Cell phone helps Japanese stay fit. NTT DoCoMo considers new pricing model.

Joe McKendrick: Is ‘SOA business case’ a paradox?

George Ou: The 22″ dual-core all-in-one game PC for $765.

Dana Blankenhorn: The cost-growth conflict in health care technology.

Computerworld: The 10 funniest YouTube help desk videos.

Gamers gather for 7th World Cyber Games. Gallery (right).

Blockbuster’s online DVD subscribers seen down.

Yahoo mulls options for shopping site Kelkoo.

A turn in the antispyware war?

Fake Steve’s fake traffic.

Netvibes, one of the many personalized portals based on feeds, has officially launched Premium Universes. It’s a way for businesses to have branded Netvibes pages, aggregating feeds and widgets, embedded their own sites and generate ad revenue. Launch partners include Tagged.com, MIVA, Les Echos and Le Figaro. It follows on the Netvibes Universe service launched earlier this year that allows users to create branded pages that live on the Netvibes site. To date, about 750 branded sites have been created, according to the company.

Google Transit has moved out of Google Labs and officially into Google Maps. It makes public transit directions an option, including cost and time, as well the cost differential versus driving for some areas. If you extrapolate from Google Transit, at some point in the future Google will teleport you for free if you are willing to immerse yourself in ads for the nanosecond trips.

Is Fake Steve Jobs a must read now that he’s not fake?

The question came to me after Mary Jo Foley pointed out this AP story about Fake Steve (aka Dan Lyons, an editor at Forbes) and his book tour for “oPtion$: The Secret Life of Steve Jobs.” The quirky article was good for a chuckle, but then it dawned on me: I have barely read Fake Steve’s blog since he was outed in August.

I was bummed when Fake Steve was outed and noted that some of the magic was gone. I had no idea at the time that I wouldn’t check out Fake Steve anymore.

Apparently I’m not alone. Alexa.com shows a big Fake Steve Jobs spike at the outing and then a drop back to the original plateau. It’s a shame since Fake Steve is posting up a storm. Thanks again New York Times.

Pardon the interruption in our regular programming for some inside techland. Henry Blodget is suggesting that CNET could acquire my friend Mike Arrington’s TechCrunch sites for $100 million on the heels of analyst Douglas McIntyre’s post explaining why he thinks TechCrunch and other blog operations will eventually be acquired for serious money by big media.

McIntyre is right in theory, and Blodget is wrong, or simply pumping up his traffic with poor research. First, I agree that TechCrunch, GigaOm, PaidContent and other upstarts will eventually be able to cash out by continuing to produce quality journalism, attract high quality audiences and generate some profit. And I personally (not speaking officially for the publicly traded CNET Networks) think it would be great if we could join forces, but Blodget’s $100 million valuation is a bit steep, don’t you think? McIntyre’s analysis is also faulty. He states:

According to internet measurement service, TechCrunch has an audience about a third of CNet (CNET). And CNet is in bad shape. It’s blog business has not caught on.

I would assume he is using Alexa for the numbers, which show TechCrunch with a third the daily page views of CNET.com and more than ZDNet. The numbers for ZDNet, which is part of CNET Networks, compared to TechCrunch are off by around a factor of ten. CNET.com probably does more page views in a single morning than TechCrunch does in a month. In terms of audience size, CNET.com has millions of unique users per day, compared to  perhaps 1 million unique users per month (Feedburner cites 575,000 RSS subscribers) for TechCrunch.

CNET Networks (which includes sites such as CNET, GameSpot, TV.com, MP3.com, CHOW, ZDNet, and TechRepublic, with a global footprint) overall has more than 137 million unique users per month. According to official CNET Networks statements, 2007 total annual revenues are expected to be in the range of $405 million to $430 million. Including $20 million in stock compensation expense, operating income is estimated to be between $18 million and $33 million.

TechCrunch is a great site, a leader in its field and is nicely profitable on less than $10 million from advertising and event sponsorships.

McIntyre said that CNET’s blog business has not caught on. Well, just the ZDNet blogs I manage have doubled in the traffic and unique users year over year. Comparing ZDNet blogs to TechCrunch is a little bit apples and oranges in that ZDNet is more focused on enterprise-related technology and has more individual blogs than TechCrunch.

In reality, TechCrunch competes directly with our CNET Webware and Crave, which have been growing strongly since they were launched less than a year ago. And, CNET News.com now has nearly 40 blogs, and CNET.com has 36 blogs.

The new Techmeme Leaderboard ranks sites every 20 minutes based on the amount of headline space they occupied on Techmeme over the 30 days. It’s focused mostly on the Web 2.0 world, where TechCrunch has established itself covering startups and trends. As you can see from the rankings (from mid-day Oct. 1) CNET Networks blogs and news site have a strong presence, including this blog.

I have great admiration for Mike and team, and we enjoy working the same streets together. The Wall Street types should do more research than looking at Alexa to make their case.

Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon, is outlining details of “Dynamo,” an internal operating system that runs the e-commerce giant’s storage system.

In a post, Vogels said Dynamo will be detailed at the Operating Systems conference in a paper (PDF). Here’s his description:

Dynamo is internal technology developed at Amazon to address the need for an incrementally scalable, highly-available key-value storage system. The technology is designed to give its users the ability to trade-off cost, consistency, durability and performance, while maintaining high-availability.

And Dynamo won’t be for sale. Vogels wrote:

Dynamo is an internal-only tool. It is not a public web-service and will not be offered through that channel. If there are any questions then they should not go to the AWS forums, the AWS evangelists or Amazon PR, as they will not be able to help you.

The paper is a bit out of reach for the average bear (notably me), but software engineers will be able to follow along. Techmeme has more.

The key takeaways:

Dynamo’s big goal is to deliver reliability even as components in a large system fail continuously. Dynamo will sacrifice consistency to provide an always on experience. The paper then details the nuts and bolts as well as the key trade-offs.

Does storage get short shrift in services oriented architecture? Amazon’s paper details how storage technology is critical to managing SOA–a point I haven’t heard in many places.

From the paper:

One of the lessons our organization has learned from operating Amazon’s platform is that the reliability and scalability of a system is dependent on how its application state is managed. Amazon uses a highly decentralized, loosely coupled, service oriented architecture consisting of hundreds of services. In this environment there is a particular need for storage technologies that are always available. For example, customers should be able to view and add items to their shopping cart even if disks are failing, network routes are flapping, or data centers are being destroyed by tornados. Therefore, the service responsible for managing shopping carts requires that it can always write to and read from its data store, and that its data needs to be available across multiple data centers.

Each Web service has a service level agreement. In technology service level agreements (SLAs) are critical to keep things running. Web services are no different, according to Amazon. Each component has a defined SLA.

In Amazon’s decentralized service oriented infrastructure, SLAs play an important role. For example a page request to one of the e-commerce sites typically requires the rendering engine to construct its response by sending requests to over 150 services. These services often have multiple dependencies, which frequently are other services, and as such it is not uncommon for the call graph of an application to have more than one level. To ensure that the page rendering engine can maintain a clear bound on page delivery each service within the call chain must obey its performance contract.

Here’s how it all fits together.

There is a lot more in the paper that’s worth checking out.

Google Apps is a collection of Google services like Docs, GMail, Calendar, and GTalk bundled together in a package that allows businesses to use Google’s infrastructure behind their own domain. For small businesses, it’s a no-brainer. I’ve used it and it’s simple and works great.

Apps comes in two editions: free and “premier.” The free edition does most of the things a small business needs, but Google’s trying entice larger enterprises to take the plunge with the premier edition and leave their messaging needs to Google. At $50/year/user, it’s not cheap, but many organizations can probably make a case that it’s cost effective based on what they spend now.

Today Google’s uping the ante by increasing the storage on the premier edition to 25 Gb (it was 10) and adding new tools based on technology they acquired with Postini. The Postini tools provide further protection from Spam and virus scanning. They also allow companies to recover lost data and manage compliance issues by ensuring users don’t inadvertently violate company policies with outbound content controls.

Someone asked me yesterday if I thought Google was going to displace Microsoft. I replied that I didn’t like the question because I’m not sure what it means. But it’s clear that Microsoft’s business is built on a software model that many–not just Google–believe is 100% 20th century. More and more companies are finding that they can turn over critical functionality–like email–to someone else and be better off.

Only a few years ago, the notion that businesses would turn over their email to a company like Google would have been scoffed at, but I hear more and more places talking about it as a serious possibility. If your company uses Google Apps (or something similar) for email, leave a comment and let the rest of us know how it’s working out.

Google is showing that they’re serious in courting the corporate client. While that business is small now (less than 1% of Google revenues) it’s plainly a place where there could be big growth.