Entrepreneur Watch

New title and focus for my blog

I've decided to change the focus of this blog. I will still be commenting frequently about Google as I continue to work on my book. But I miss getting involved with other interesting companies in the tech community.

I spent 14 years as a tech reporter for Business Week, and five as editor-in-chief of Upside magazine. I plan to make comments on tech trends and to write about interesting entrepreneurs. Despite its size, I still consider Google to be an entrepreneurial company. It is still changing the way we do business and pioneering new trends on the internet.

I've also been doing a little consulting for entrepreneurs lately, advising them on the do's and don'ts of meeting the business press. Most of them are entrepreneurs venturing out to meet the press for the first time. I will include some of the articles I write for these clients, when I find them to be interesting enough to warrant coverage.

I may also start a separate blog on the issue of meeting with the business press, giving advice and offering perspective for free. I'll let you know when that happens.

Let me know what you think. Feedback is always welcome.

Shel Israel's new book

My friend Shel Israel, co-author of Naked Conversations with Robert Scoble, is getting started on a new book about the Internet. He's calling it Global Neighborhoods --How Social Media are moving power from institutions to  people.

 The book is still in the proposal stage, and he's inviting comments on his blog.

I recommend Shel as someone to read. If you have any feedback for him on how the social nature of the Internet is changing society, please give him some comments.

Donna on Google's evil manipulation of our medical data

Donna Bogatin at ZDNet insists that Google is too evil to hold our medical records. She rails against Google's Unhealthy Medical Plan, with which the company wants to facilitate the rapid exchange of information between doctor and patient. I'm afraid she doesn't say why it's bad, but she insists it is. Here are her incredulous remarks:

"Google audacity never ceases to amaze. What is the great Googleplex conjuring up now?
Google is on a medical mission, but it is an unhealthy one." ...

"Where would such confidential, sensitive information be housed? The mighty Google cloud undoubtedly to the medical rescue..."

I had to guess at her concerns, but if you're interested, here's how I answered her:

Assume evil

Donna, you feel that the bad side of this is so obvious that you do not mention what it is. I presume the first is that Google will abuse the information; use it to send junk mail, sell it to insurance companies, your employers, or Homeland Security agents. That assumes Google is an evil company.

I believe that Google has the strongest privacy policy of any commercial enterprise on the internet. They have not broken their promise yet, and vow they never will. So why do people take it as a fact that it will happen?

The second problem, of course, is security. It seems as though no-one can make a system entirely hacker-proof. I do not see what advantage a hacker would get out of stealing medical records? Are our insurance providers going to hack in to the database? Or will hackers sell the information to insurance companies? That assumes insurance companies are evil enough to break probably a dozen federal laws. One leak and Homeland Security, which is desperate to link anything to terrorism, will be setting up sting operations. Maybe hackers could sell it to private detectives. Or just post the data online for insurance companies to download. And risk the ire of those HS folks.

And it is possible to provide extraordinary security through encryption. It's human error that generally lets the hackers in.

Personally, as a patient and as someone who did tons of research through Google when my sister was dying of cancer, I'm all for somebody making a system like this work. As long as it's trustworthy.

The resurgence of Ask.com

Everyone is agog over Ask.com's new local search service, AskCity. As usual, the New York Times has the best overview article, by Miguel Helft.

I'm afraid I just don't find the new service that exciting. For one thing, I can't see how Ask actually competes with Google. Helft's article quotes the right skeptic who puts it into perspective: “My view is that people use Ask as a secondary engine,” said Safa Rashtchy, an analyst with Piper Jaffray & Company.

Well, my view is that Ask is a tertiary search engine, at best.

That's not to say this service won't help Ask.com' prospects, or that it won't find a nice business out of it. But all search engines seem to be taking a fundamentally different approach than Google's. Like Yahoo, Ask.com is becoming part of a portal.

Ask was acquired by Barry Diller's IAC/InterActiveCorp last year, and is now being used to integrate IAC's other properties, such as Citysearch and Ticketmaster. That means Ask wants you to restrict your searches to other properties IAC owns.

That is not the same as trying to find the best sites and services throughout the internet, where there is an extraordinary number of sites to choose from. Sure, for local services, Google will have to sign some deals with companies like Citysearch, but the best results come from including everyone you can, then pulling up the most popular of them. Any portal is faced with the dilemma of needing to give preference to its own properties, whether they're the best or not (an issue Google has to face now that it owns YouTube.)

Barry Diller is a smart guy. He turned around AOL before it was "merged" with Time-Warner and royally screwed up. T-W failed to integrate its content into AOL. Diller can be expected to do a better job.

But we must keep in mind that, before Google, ALL search engines were trying to become portals. Google came along and blew them all away. Google is now dangerously dipping its toe into the portal waters, but everyone else is whole-heartedly diving back in to a business model that failed in the beginning of this century.

As I've said before, portals are a niche strategy. They do not take full advantage of the full richness of the internet. They are media companies, and no media company will ever hold a monopoly on the best content on the internet. Power to the masses and their unparalleled collective imagination.

Yahoo is the most popular portal today. Ask may become the second (I still think the only reason people go to MSN is because it is the default site on so many of their computers.) At least Ask has differentiation, with a collection of popular sites and a search engine strategy that relies on experts. But it is an extreme minority of people who need to rely on that expertise for their searches. Google serves the masses, and proudly so, even if the elite searchers find it too general.

Best of luck to Ask. Maybe it will beat Yahoo at its game. It won't however, beat Google.