Earlier today I wrote about my eagerness for Google GDrive, a cloud-based file management service that has been rumored for years now.

The idea that Google could swoop in and dominate the online storage market certainly doesn’t help the founders of several startups sleep better at night. But they aren’t without their arguments for why a Google solution would be bad for consumers.

Box.net has come up with the following clever response to the idea that Google should control all of our information, including our files (click for a bigger view).

As the company describes it:

The goal of the game is to use Google shares to buy as many properties as you can without landing in the deadpool and losing your stock. As with any great board game, there’s a very real metaphor to what’s going on…. What happens when the Google monster gobbles up all that is left in the web world, is present on your cell phone, desktop, and even controls your health information? For all their product excellence, the threat of amassing this much data is too serious to ignore.

So the real question is, does placing Box.net on the board (between none other than LinkedIn and Facebook) mean the company sees itself as Google acquisition bait? And how do fellow startups Loopt and Scribd feel about being placed on Mediterranean and Baltic?

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Cuill, a stealth search engine company we first covered in September, has raised $25M in a Series B round led by Madrone Capital Partners and joined by Tugboat Ventures and Greylock Partners.

Not a whole lot is known about Cuill except that it apparently can index the web at 1/10th the cost of Google. The startup was founded by search experts, two of which came from Google. It has been rumored that Google itself has looked at acquiring Cuill even before it launches.

We previously heard from sources that Cuill had raised $4M in a Series A round from Greylock Partners. That wasn’t exactly true - it had raised $8M from both Greylock and Tugboat. That raises Cuill’s total to at least $33M, with another $5M maybe from self-funding.

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Filed under: Google, Googleholic

Welcome to Googleholic - your bi-weekly fix of everything Google! In this edition:

• Geotagged YouTube videos on Google Maps
• Google Earth 4.3 to be released later today, includes Street View
• Market leader in China within 5 years - Goodbye Baidu?

Continue reading Googleholic for April 15, 2008

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Two more startups have released services for storing, syncing, and sharing files in the cloud over the past week…but still no sign of Google’s GDrive.

Syncplicity launches today with the same value propositions as SugarSync, which we reviewed in March. Syncplicity can be used not only to automatically back up files from anywhere on your computer but to sync files between computers and share them with friends as well. Its most unique feature is the ability to sync your Microsoft Office documents with Google Docs, as DocSyncer does but both ways (DocSyncer only pushes files to Google).

The other startup is veteran Allmydata, which completely gutted and rebuilt its backup product with the quiet release of version 3.0 last week. The company has mostly abandoned its P2P roots, saving that technology for only server-to-server data transfers. Allmydata users now install a client (Mac or PC) that can be used to set up a virtual drive with unlimited storage for $5/computer. There’s not a whole lot in terms of sharing files with others since it’s primarily meant for personal backup, but a web interface for your files is provided for when you’re on the go.

The online storage space has become very crowded. In addition to the three companies mentioned above, we have also recently seen the launch of Dropbox and HP Upline. These join other startups such as Box.net and Xdrive that have been around for a while, plus the tepid efforts of Microsoft from last Fall.

Through all of this, we have yet to see any real movement from the one company with the clout to dominate and popularize online storage: Google. We’ve been waiting since 2006 for the so-called GDrive (alternatively known as “Platypus” or “My Stuff”) and as recently as this past November there were murmurings from the Wall Street Journal that it was coming in the subsequent months.

But it’s April and there’s still no sign of its arrival. When the WSJ wrote about Google’s plans to “store on its computers essentially all of the files they [consumers] might keep on their personal-computer hard drives”, it noted the possibility that “new developments could lead Google to shift tack or shelve plans for the storage offering in the coming months.”

It would be a shame if that has indeed happened. The coolest thing about Box.net is its OpenBox feature, which allows you to easily load your files from online storage into various web services like Picnik and Zoho. Other services like SugarSync and Syncplicity are also blurring the lines between your personally stored files and those stored on web services. If Google were to provide a “backup” system that essentially integrated your files with its cloud software, we would see an acceleration in the adoption of its software and browser-based applications in general. It would give a huge boost to the Web 2.0 movement, and assuming that Google provides the proper APIs, would create a whole range of new opportunities for startups.

Now that Google has released its App Engine, let’s hope it’s still serious about the utility-like components of cloud computing that can serve consumers directly.

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Google’s “Don’t Be Evil” motto, first uttered by Googler Paul Buchheit (now founder of FriendFeed) in 2001, has long been the pillar of their self-imposed code of conduct. It was amended somewhat in 2006 when CEO Eric Schmidt, under fire for entering the Chinese market with censorship restrictions, said “We actually did an evil scale and decided not to serve at all was worse evil.” He turned it into a sort of evil minimization algorithm.

But the core motto is still displayed prominently on the Google Investor Relations site, and the company appears to be supporting it up 100%.

Not so, apparently. Last week, however, Google’s Marissa Mayer said “It really wasn’t like an elected, ordained motto” during an interview in Australia, adding “I think that ‘Don’t Be Evil’ is a very easy thing to point at when you see Google doing something that you personally don’t like; it’s a very easy thing to point out so it does get targeted a lot.”

There’s a certain disconnect between paragraph two above and what Marrissa says in paragraph 3.

This is most likely not a precursor to an official move away from the motto. I imagine it’s little more than a venting of a frustration that Google continues to be held to a promise made six years ago, when they were under significantly less scrutiny than they are today. Google can’t ditch the motto (the press would eat that up), and it’s becoming increasingly difficult to live up to it. What can they do? Not much. They made this bed. It’s too bad they couldn’t get Buchheit to take it with him when he left to found FriendFeed.

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Google has long been using Google Maps as a way to show local business listings. When you search for hotels in a given city, for instance, each digital pushpin that appears on the map can be clicked on to reveal more information, including photos, reviews, and Web links. Now YouTube videos associated with each listing will also appear. For instance here is a video that is embedded in the Google Map listing of a San Francisco bakery called I Dream of Cake (screen shot above).

Combining the power of YouTube with Google Maps should make Google’s local listings that much more appealing. Now any local business can essentially put a television ad on Google Maps. But the most effective videos will be the ones that don’t seem like ads at all, but rather show the real people behind the businesses that are listed.

It is unfortunate, though, that Google chose to make this feature available only to businesses that list on Google. As far as consumers are concerned, they can watch the geo-videos but not create their own.

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New figures released by comScore show that AOL’s Platform A advertising network is the top advertising network in the United States by reach (unique visitors).

According to the figures, Platform A reaches 90.7% of all American internet users, ahead of Yahoo on 85.3% and Google on 80.9%. AOL’s figures include ads served from Advertising.com.

Erick covered rumors of an AOL advertising lead IPO in September 2007 and more recently AOL was said to be in merger talks with Yahoo. Ultimately these figures don’t equate to revenue, but market leader by reach is certainly a strong selling point for AOL in any merger talks or for an IPO.

comScore also released figures for “niche” advertising networks and the Snap Shots Advertising network, launched in November 2007, came out on top. Another notable entry is Widget Bucks, which launched in October 2007.

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On Monday, Google and Salesforce are officially announcing the complete integration of Google Apps (Docs, Calendar, Gmail, and Gtalk) and Salesforce’s online enterprise apps. TechCrunch broke the story last week. Now we have some more details. Google Apps will get exposure to Salesforce’s one million paying business subscribers, and Salesforce in turn will become more attractive to the “tens of millions” of business users on Google Apps.

Google is in effect becoming Salesforce’s productivity suite. Google documents, spreadsheets, and presentation can be created from within Salesforce’s CRM application. GTalk works as the de facto instant messenger within Salesforce. With one click, sales people who use Gmail can send any email correspondence with potential or existing customers to Salesforce, where it becomes recorded as part of the sales cycle. Sales events and marketing campaigns can be overlayed onto a Google Calendar (see screen shot below), as well as colleague’s schedules for figuring out convenient meeting times.

The Google productivity apps are free unless a company wants to upgrade to the premier edition (which includes added security and management features) for $5/user/month. By summer, Salesforce will be reselling the premier edition itself for twice as much—$10/user/month—and will throw in telephone support and put everything on one bill.

Salesforce founder and CEO Marc Benioff tells me that he is embracing Google as another way to undercut Microsoft:

You’ve seen what we have been doing is slowly integrating all of our services with theirs. Certainly the enemy of my enemy is my friend, which makes Google my best friend. I have spoken with a lot of customers who want to get off of Microsoft Word.

Of course, Microsoft’s desktop cp-Office apps are threatened long-term by Google Apps, and its own CRM software for small businesses is threatened by Salesforce. But why didn’t Salesforce simply build its own Web-based productivity apps as so many others are doing? Says Benioff:

I really didn’t want to compete against Google in an area they consider core.

Better to gang up against Microsoft together. Now he has the leading Web-based productivity suite baked into Salesforce. But that brings up another question. If Google and Salesforce are so well suited for each other, why doesn’t Google just buy Salesforce? It could accelerate the growth of Google’s enterprise business and make it a little bit less reliant on advertising dollars (since Salesforce charges monthly subscriptions). When I put this notion to Benioff, he punted it back to Google:

You should give them a call and ask them about that.

Something tells me I won’t get a straight answer from them either. But it is obvious that Google is thinking along the same lines when it comes to enterprise apps in the cloud. Just last week, Google launched its own marketplace for enterprise apps, which is similar to Salesforce’s AppExchange. Ultimately, though, how many different Web platform companies can co-exist? A Google-Salesforce combo could sew up the Web platform for enterprise apps.

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GrandCentral, Google’s $50 million phone company, has been down all morning (see overview of service here). And that means every single user who has started using their GrandCentral phone number isn’t able to receive any calls. Users are complaining on Twitter, and I’ve confirmed this as well by simply calling friends who use the service. Calls will not go through.

We’ve noted problems with the service in the past, but never a general outage. The site is down. The service is down. Everything appears to be offline.

If you want to be a phone company, and get your users to rely on you to manage all of your incoming calls, this simply cannot happen. There are undoubtedly going to be a lot of very upset homeless people this morning, as well as GrandCentral’s other users.

GrandCentral’s blog is offline as well. If Google wants users to take the service seriously in the future, they should make some kind of announcement on their main blog letting users know what happened and when they can expect the service to be back.

Update: service is back online sometime before noon PST. Still no word from them on the cause of the outage.

Update 2: Cofounder Craig Walker posts the following on the GrandCentral blog:

I wanted to write a quick note to all the GC users and apologize for the service interruption this morning. We had a power issue at our current colo facility and it knocked us off line for a few hours. Unfortunately I’ve been up in the mountains with the family this weekend and had no cell/internet coverage so couldn’t respond earlier. I did want to let you know that we were able to restore the service by noon today and are working extremely diligently to make sure this won’t occur in the future. We’ll do a better job keeping you informed in the future, not only about service related issues but also about upcoming features, soliciting your feedback, and generally making sure that you, the GC user, is well informed as to what’s going on with the service.

Thanks for your patience with us and we’ll continue to work to make the service better by the day. - Craig Walker

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The Australian Newspaper (part of the News Corp empire) has outed the strange business practices of Mark Tucker, Google Australia’s only Australian director as part of a piece on Google Street View and privacy.

According to Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC, Australia’s SEC) documents, Tucker maintains six different versions of himself, complete with varying birthdate, for his various corporate investments:

According to data filed with the Australian Securities and Investments Commission, six different Mark Tuckers live at the Mona Vale address. All were born in the Sydney beachside suburb of Manly - but on slightly different dates.

According to ASIC records one Mr Tucker was born on January 21, 1953, one was born on January 13, 1953, another born on January 25, 1953.

Another Mr Tucker - who is both the director and secretary of a company called Bahama Acres Holding Company - is registered as living at the same address but was born on January 12, 1953.

A Mark Tucker living at the Mona Vale address - who is currently the director of the Tucker Family Superannuation Co - was born on January 12, 1963, while another Mr Tucker at the same address was born on March 12, 1953.

Tucker claimed that the varying dates were “typographical errors,” but 6 typographical errors? A company involved in the Bahama’s would automatically raise eyebrows, but six different records is more interesting considering that data matching for tax purposes in Australia usually relies on matching details of directors with a heavy emphasis on a directors date of birth.

There may be nothing untowards here, and we wouldn’t suggest that there is, but someone in Mountain View will be calling Australia shortly, if they haven’t already. There may also be an ASIC or ATO (Australian Tax Office) investigation into Tucker’s business affairs and that’s not going to be a good look for a Google Director.

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