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With a US presidential campaign in full swing and a current president at his term limit, the world is prepared for changes in Washington, DC. But abandoning Microsoft Office?

Enter the dark horse Google Apps - the new platform for day-to-day business operations in DC - now that Vivek Kundra, Chief Technology Officer for the District of Columbia, has decided to switch the District's 38,000 employees from the installed Microsoft Office suite to the Web-based Google suite.

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According to Bloomberg, the Google contract - signed in June to the tune of an estimated $500,000 a year - will replace the District's current email, word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation programs with Google's Web-based versions.

While this change won't be taking place in the Oval Office, it's still worth noting. The win marks a big step forward for Google Apps, which a little over a year ago, was still a viable target for Microsoft finger-wagging campaigns, decrying Google Apps' viability.

That view is definitely changing.

Earlier this year, Bernard Lunn hypothesized that Google Apps had become a true threat to Microsoft Office:

"Solid economic engine, good on collaboration/mobile, increasingly mature/ready for prime time...Yes, Google Docs looks like a major winner."

And this move by the DC CTO seems to validate that hypothesis.

With "belt tightening" on everyone's lips, the decision to move from the entrenched Microsoft offering to a more affordable solution could draw attention - especially given Kundra's focus on delivering more technological power at a lower cost:

"When I moved to Washington, I had more computing power on my laptop at the local coffee shop than the average police officer or teacher. We looked at the cloud computing model and the consumer space. Compared with the cost of owning infrastructure, it's far cheaper."

Granted, one Google win over Microsoft doesn't necessarily signal a trend. But the win is significant for Google, nonetheless. It becomes even more noteworthy considering that the customer is a local government, a market which has traditionally been slow to embrace the latest technologies.

If DC's willingness to abandon Microsoft Office indicates that Google Apps' user base has truly moved beyond bleeding-edge adopters, this could mark the beginning of a very interesting trend.

Discuss

Filed under: Cellphones

We think that phones like the Touch Pro and X1 sort of limit the market for pricey dumbphone QWERTY sliders, but be that as it may, LG clearly has every intention of making the Prada II one of its headline devices in the waning months of 2008. The rumored 7.2Mbps HSDPA 850 / 2100, WiFi, TV-out, an FM radio, and a 5-megapixel camera have all been confirmed to go along with the full keyboard for a launch in Europe in the end of October or beginning of November, running something in the range of €600 (about $816). Don't get us wrong, it looks alright -- but would this be your first choice of ways to part with the better part of a grand?Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

When in doubt, follow the leader. That's what MySpace seems to be doing with the release of MySpace MyAds, a service that - on the surface - appears to have a great deal in common with another successful ad model, Google AdWords.

Like Google's ad platform, the new MySpace ad platform allows anyone to establish an account and begin targeting ads to a particular demographic. Unlike Google, however, MySpace allows users to build image-based ads on the fly. What's more, advertisers will find the targeting options get exceptionally "granular."

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With MyAds, MySpace offers familiar demographics to advertisers interested in using its service. Among the targeting selections are gender, a range of ages from 14 to 65+, geographic targeting for the United States, and a series of highly targeted interests:

Unlike traditional online advertising demographics, however, the MySpace targeting includes some very MySpace-specific options, including "drinking," "partying," and professional wrestling:

And this type of granularity - providing a true view into its user base - could be the key to MySpace's success.

In fact, when announcing the private beta of the service last year, MySpace claimed that this new "hypertargeting" technology would drastically improved online advertising with results "as high as 300% over demographically tageted ads."

To date, all popular social networking sites have struggled with converting a wealth of users into a sustainable revenue stream. MySpace is no different.

Advertising seems to be the most viable means of doing that. And with the information at its disposal, perhaps no one is better positioned to provide targeted advertising than MySpace.

Will advertisers adopt this "hypertargeted" platform with the same vigor that has catapulted Google to such incredible heights? That remains to be seen. But one thing is for sure, with myAds, MySpace has taken a decided step forward in attempting to drive revenue using its most valuable asset: its users.

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Traditionally, the greatest power that governments have held over their people has been information. The promise that connectivity brings to Africa is that people are now using that abundance of information for oversight of government and more interaction with administrations. To say that the propagation of internet and mobile connectivity in Africa has been disruptive is an understatement.

A number of web and mobile applications are undermining the efforts of dictators and totalitarian governments, allowing them to be more readily be held accountable for their actions. In this post we profile some of them.

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Democratizing Information Through Technology

When the Ethiopian government instituted an SMS filtering service to censor mobile communication, the developers behind Feedelix responded swiftly. They created their product Feedlix, a java-based client that supports Amharic, Chinese and Hindi characters. The application then uses GPRS, through internet protocols, to mimic SMS and bypass the censoring filter put in place by the government.

Sokwanele is a civic action support group campaigning for freedom and democracy in Zimbabwe. Their website includes an 'election violence map' that provides detailed information related to localized occurrences of violence related to the election. During the most recent crisis in Zimbabwe, Sokwanele was used to get information out of the country when the government began restricting communication.

Mzalendo is an aggregation platform for tracking the actions, activities and communication of Kenya's Parliament. For people who want to make sure their elected officials are staying on task, it's invaluable.

When Moroccan blogger Mohamed Erraj was jailed for disparaging the government in his online magazine, Hespress, it was through the efforts of other bloggers (like the writers at GlobalVoicesOnline) and people using applications like Twitter that his story made international news. The added pressure of having the whole world paying attention is perhaps what convinced the Moroccan government to let him free where traditionally his actions could have resulted in much harsher punishment.

Rethinking Africa

In conclusion, Africa is producing some very unique and innovative technologies. There's more to the continent than the things you see on TV - something people, especially in the tech industry, seem to forget. Where most other markets in the world are incredibly saturated, Africa offers the opportunity to start afresh: new ideas and a billion new people to use them.

It's a big place; nearly one billion people and a land mass where the sum is greater than that of China and the United States combined. For social entrepreneurs and investors, the innovation occurring here is a huge sign of progress that could potentially change the continent's world standing forever. The most exciting aspect for me, however, is the decreased reliance on developmental aid and foreign groups to provide these solutions. The number of African developers who are beginning to create applications that offer solutions for their own communities is increasing and that, more than anything else, will shape the future of Africa.

"If Africa is surprising, then you're not paying enough attention." Ethan Zuckerman at PICNIC08

You can read more articles by Jon Gosier at Appfrica.net.

See also: Social Media in Africa, Part 1
and Social Media in Africa, Part 2: Mobile Innovations

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Earlier this year, when Bill Gates retired from Microsoft, I wrote a post explaining why no one was going to replace Bill and Steve (Jobs). The only person I thought was within striking distance of being the likely replacement was Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon (AMZN).

Amazon has proved to be a proxy for future trends of web and technology; cloud computing and Kindle being the most recent examples. Today, when I read this quote from him in the New York Times…

“Our willingness to be misunderstood, our long-term orientation and our willingness to repeatedly fail are the three parts of our culture that make doing this kind of thing possible”

…I realized that Amazon would keep pushing the envelope and coming up with interesting ideas and that should make Bezos a lock for the inheritor to Bill and Steve’s crown. His company’s “willingness to repeatedly fail” and focus on the long term is what makes him and Amazon different from others.

P.S. Check out my video interview with Jeff Bezos

Filed under: Storage

The LaCie product roof has been raised to 7.5TB with the new 5big Network -- an Active Directory and gigabit Ethernet-friendly array of storage drives that supports several RAID configurations for up to five hot-swappable hard drives. You can try it on in four different sizes -- 2.5TB for $899.99, 5TB for $1,399, or the aforementioned, bar-raising 7.5TB for $1,899. In keeping with his sixteen year relationship with LaCie, the renowned Neil Poulton applied his HAL 9000-inspired design to the product, winning him another Janus de L'industrie award. The only problem with the HAL motif: you really, really don't want your RAID storage device to drone on about how its "mind is going, Dave."

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An important requirement in a lot of applications is reporting. It can be internal reports (same application jsp/html) or to an external format like xls,pdf or xml etc. A popular reporting engine is JasperReports. In the past few months I have seen a common posting theme in Spring Community Forums (even asking me via email) related about integration between JasperReports with Spring Web MVC and...

I’ve been hearing a lot about Google’s innovative login feature for the Android phone, but only saw it today for the first time (Loren Feldman, who recently did some video of one, sent a screenshot).

Unlike other phones, which require a four digit number for unlocking, the Android simply puts nine dots arranged in a square on the touch screen, along with the words “draw pattern to unlock.” My understanding is that any pattern can be used as long as it touches at least four of the dots. Given the many, many different possible patterns (any math majors want to tell me how many?), it seems like a decent way to to lock and unlock a phone.

Except a very low tech side effect of the touch screen may be giving Google pause.

From what we hear, some people using the phone are noticing that the oil from a user’s fingers may leave enough of a smudge that the unlock password can be guessed at some of the time. Particularly since most people start their unlock pattern with the top left dot, and then move right or diagonally right. If you can see the smudge, it’s an easy guess what the unlock code is.

Of course users can always just wipe down the screen whenever they lock the phone. But my guess is Google offers an alternative, and more traditional, way to lock the phone as well.

Update: Good video and discussion of the unlock feature here, per the comments. Video is also embedded below, as well as another screenshot:

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship written by Robert C. Martin is one of the best books I have read in the past few years. This is the book for developers looking to produce better code.

Filed under: Desktops, Displays, Media PCs

Acer believes you're seeking a PC with a Blu-ray drive and formidable storage space so you can watch hours and hours of high definition video. That's why it's introducing the AX3200 desktop (suggested retail: $679.99) to go with the P244W 24-inch 1080p LCD display ($399) -- to fill that consumer electronics-shaped hole that you didn't even know existed within you. The compact desktop sports an AMD Phenom X3 8450 triple-core processor, 4GB of RAM, a 640GB hard drive, and NVIDIA's GeForce 8200 integrated graphics chip. The graphics solution won't rev up the frames in modern computer games -- especially not at the P244W's 1920 x 1080 resolution -- but it'll do fine for watching movies, and there are tons of great Blu-ray releases out there by now, right? Right?Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Filed under: Cellphones, Handhelds

The BlackBerry Pearl 8220 runs neck-and-neck with the Storm for the title of "most leaked RIM device of 2008," but for what it's worth, T-Mobile is just now getting around to announcing a date and price for the most fliptastic phone in Waterloo's ever-expanding lineup. That's good news -- but perhaps the best news is that the launch date just happens to be today (for one of the two available colors, anyhow). The black version of the 8220 will be appearing online and in T-Mobile stores today, while the dark red will be following on a week later on Monday, October 20. Both will run $149.99 on a two-year contract.

Be sure to check out our hands-on impressions -- and a dazzling gallery of visuals to go along with them -- over on Engadget Mobile!Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Last week, after ignoring the world’s financial problems for almost a year, Silicon Valley woke up to find itself caught in the death grip of the credit crunch. Declining stock markets only added to the overall gloom. And when one of its own — Sequoia Capital, among the smartest and most rational investors in the world — told its portfolio companies to cinch their belts tighter than ever, all hell broke loose.

Those of us in the Valley are now reassessing our bullishness and trying to quickly figure out which sectors are going to get hit the hardest. The consensus that is fast emerging? Advertising.

And yes, that does include online advertising — even if it is likely to recover first. Regardless of the timeline involved, the destruction that will follow is going to be on a massive scale, as it will take down any number of poorly funded startups whose fortunes depend on those ad dollars.

In a sobering and harsh analysis sent to his clients, UBS analyst Ben Schachter said online advertising network ValueClick would be among those negatively affected. Using that as a proxy for the “advertising network” business, it’s safe to assume that dozens of advertising networks that have cropped up over the past two years will be impacted.

The economic problems are much wider and deeper than most people realize. The sub-prime mortgage industry lit a fire not only under the housing market but under consumer spending as well. All that spending led to big-time advertising on the part of consumer companies and, as those revenues worked their way across the entire technology food chain, healthy ad spending spread to even decidedly non-consumer areas.

The boom was particularly evident on the web, where it helped to spawn a whole slew of ad-supported ventures such as social networks, video sites and other web services. Now, however, we are moving in the opposite direction. Consumer spending is starting to fall, and the long-term prognosis isn’t pretty.

As Schachter wrote, “[W]e see no business model based on advertising or consumer spending that will be immune to a downturn. Specifically for the advertising names, as corporate profit forecasts come down, we expect planned advertising spending will be delayed and/or cut.”

The problem isn’t limited to smaller players. Yahoo, for example, which is heavily dependent on display advertising from the financial and automobile sectors, is very vulnerable and might soon face a day of reckoning. Viacom slashed its full-year earnings forecast Friday afternoon, citing the softening ad market. The only ad-related company that looks like something of a safe place amidst this chaos is Google, thanks largely to its performance-based advertising system, which allows advertisers to only pay for what brings them returns.

For the rest of us, the era of sleepless nights has begun.

Eyealike, the startup that lets you use photo recognition to help find your ideal mate, is expanding to apply its image processing technology to a new market: advertising. The company says that the new system will allow businesses to place highly targeted advertising alongside photographs that appear on their site (which have long been difficult to monetize).

For now the image recognition is restricted to identifying physical traits of the people in photographs, with categories including age, gender, hair color, and skin color. In the demo I saw, the results were impressive: photographs with babies in them were paired with products for infants and toddlers, and makeup ads were shown near photos with women in them.

The company is also in early stages of identifying company logos in photographs (which could be paired with matching products), and eventually hopes to include support for more objects, like vehicle recognition and applications for travel.

Eyealike isn’t meant as a consumer product. Instead, it’s being licensed at an enterprise level, with a customizable backend that Eyealike will tailor for each customer’s needs. Provided the system works well, Eyealike shouldn’t have any trouble finding customers - sites like MySpace with billions of photos would love to more effectively monetize them.

The problem that Eyealike is trying to solve isn’t a new one, as numerous other startups have tried to implement their own versions of image recognition. Unfortunately, lackluster accuracy has long hampered this kind of technology. Eyealike claims that its algorithms work 90% of the time - an impressive figure that would undoubtedly lead to higher advertising revenues. But because the technology doesn’t have a consumer front-end, I was unable to try it out for myself. Eyealike says that it is in talks to implement its system in a large social network, so we may get to try it for ourselves soon enough.

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Join Women 2.0 for “Music Makers and Technology Shakers” on Wednesday, Oct. 15, at Slide in San Francisco, featuring artists, seasoned executives and music industry disrupters, from KCRW to Real Networks to Sellaband.com (all the way from the Netherlands). Hear influential technology and music leaders talk about the changes in the music industry, new business models, current trends and how the startup community can empower change for artists around the globe. This is an event for technology entrepreneurs with an interest in music startups. GigaOM readers get 10 percent off registration admission using the discount code “w2gigaom.”

MySpace, after offering its hyper-targeting platform to large advertisers, today launched MyAds, a self-service platform that would open its social network to smaller advertisers. It is a page out of Google’s playbook. The search giant had used smaller advertisers to build up a groundswell for its advertising service. MySpace is betting that, by giving advertisers the ability to target users with banner ads based on age, gender, location and specific interests, it can build a sizable business. “We think the sky’s the limit on this,” Jeff Berman, president of sales and marketing at MySpace, told Adweek. He seems to think that this will “significantly grow our base of advertisers.”

The company said that the entire network inventory is open for grabs. More than 3,500 advertisers, including small businesses, are testing the system and the ads cost at least 25 cents per click. Given the patchy click-through performance of banner ads, MySpace’s experiment can have long-term implications for banner-type advertising. That said, MySpace’s announcement comes at a time when the advertising market — both online and off — is looking a little shaky because of widespread economic uncertainty.

A new report by Forrester Research states that the market for collaboration and productivity web apps in the enterprise (a.k.a. enterprise 2.0) is set for a shake-up, with prices to fall in some cases by over half. Price drops will be especially sharp in blog, wikis, social networking and widgets. The only exception is mashups, which will increase in price over the next 5 years.

Forrester says the price drops will be due to "cutthroat competition, commoditization, bundling, and subsumption", with many startups and established big companies competing for the enterprise dollar.

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There is still expected to be strong adoption by enterprises of web 2.0 apps, which will result in increased license revenue. However that will be offset by the large price drops.

Which Apps Will Suffer The Most?

The outlook is particularly bleak for blogging software, which Forrester says will "fall to the lowest average cost per enterprise among Web 2.0 tools" - that's bad news for Six Apart and Automattic, both of whom have been aggressively targeting the enterprise in recent years.

Wikis are also expected to fall in price, however Forrester notes that wikis have had a strong impact on enterprises so far. So there will be more competition, but best-of-breed solutions will continue to do well. Forrester says that "well-designed, intuitive, and cheap wiki technology" will do best.

We've noted over the years that it's very tough to create an easy-to-use and intuitive wiki app, therefore we expect existing best of breed providers such as Atlassian and SocialText to continue to do well. [disclosure: SocialText is a RWW sponsor]

Widgets are expected to drop in price a bit over the next 5 years, mostly because they will become far more common place than they are now. Forrester notes that traditional enterprise applications providers like SAP and Oracle will begin to offer widget solutions for their existing customers.

Social networking is expected to see a big drop, largely due to SharePoint. Forrester states that "much like blogs and wikis, social networking is likely to be commoditized quickly over the next five years." They do hold out some hope thought for "specialized tools that focus on alumni networks, new employee orientation, and cross-department collaboration", which they think may continue to get price premiums.

The one thing we'd caution here is that SharePoint so far has proven to be a complex and difficult to use beast, so we're not so sure that easy-to-use alternatives will be commoditized by SharePoint. In theory it sounds sensible, but in practice how many people actually use SharePoint to network?

Forrester sees mashups as being very early in their market sycle, so it is optimistic pricing will increase. It states that "IT departments will prioritize mashup technology as part of portal, business intelligence, and business process management software investments as well as a major component of SOA implementations."

Update: Jeffrey McManus (no relation) asked in the comments: "Who pays anything for mash-ups or widgets?" The report notes that both aren't common - just 1.8% of North American enterprises had a widget deployment in 2008, while mashups so far have been "small isolated tests, typically limited to the IT department". There are no figures given for how much widgets and mashups will grow, although Forrester says that it "never expects widgets to find a home in more that one-third of enterprises". However there seems to be decent money in it for vendors, with an average of $26,500 per implementation for widgets in 2007 and $76,500 per deployment for mashups in the same period. Examples of current mashup platforms include JackBe, IBM, and Serena Software. Forrester expects the price for mashups to "nearly double to $143,400 per engagement by 2013."

Also in the report, podcasts are predicted to remain largely unchanged over the next five years and enterprise RSS will play "a critical role as the Web 2.0 middleware, staving off major price declines."

The graph below from Forrester summarizes all of the data:

Why Will Prices Drop?

One of the reasons is that old fear of web 2.0 companies: commoditization. As innovation gets copied and 'digested', so it becomes less of a differentiator for the innovators. As Forrester puts it in the report, "for the most part, a blog from one vendor is no better than a blog from another, eroding differentiation and price premiums."

Bundling is another threat to startups, creating "a homogenous set of competitors." Forrester seems to be suggesting that most enterprise 2.0 vendors are attempting to sell a Web Office suite: "Everyone, from blogging vendors like Six Apart to social bookmarking vendors like Connectbeam, is converging on one offering: the enterprise Web 2.0 suite." This, says Forrester, will result in an "industrywide brawl, with buyers the only guaranteed winner".

The third main factor is subsumption, which Forrester says "brings Web 2.0 technology to millions of users at little to no cost." Subsumption in this case has a similar meaning to integration. It's a tactic that the big vendors - like Microsoft, IBM, SAP and Oracle - have more easily at their disposal over startups. Forrester points out that these bigcos can easily roll Web 2.0 features into their existing software packages - in many cases at no extra cost to the user. Microsoft has been doing this with SharePoint, which has lightweight blogging and wiki tools bundled into the main product.

What's more, Microsoft has managed to partner with a number of high profile but small enterprise 2.0 vendors - such as Atlassian and Newsgator. In June we profiled 9 small companies that had launched Enterprise 2.0 offerings that integrate with SharePoint technology. So this could be viewed as another form of 'subsumption', whereby startups have to partner with big companies like Microsoft in order to compete in this highly competitive market.

Even an apparently independent startup like Zoho, which seems to be competing well with bigger companies, has to a degree partnered with bigcos - their use of Google Gears has them relying on a technology produced by Google (ok, Gears is open source, but still it is a form of reliance).

Conclusion

Overall, the trend according to Forrester is that prices for enterprise 2.0 apps will fall but that demand will continue to ramp up. We at ReadWriteWeb can't argue with the overall trend, however we think that startups still have a few tricks up their sleeves when competing against bulky and often hard to use products like SharePoint. However we've always said that partnerships - with bigcos and other startups alike - will be key to startups as they engage their bigger competitors in a crowded market.

Tell us what you think of these trends in the comments.

Image: pansonaut

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While we have seen glimpses of how the F-35B—the short take-off vertical landing variant of the F-35 Lightning II—works, here's an amazingly detailed video showing its transforming capabilities in...

Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

Look, you don't have to explain to us how weird this thing is. Trust us, we fully understand. But as gadget editors, we have a certain love for receiving surprise packages and ripping 'em open as quickly as possible to discover what goodies reside within. Bandai's so-very-Japanese Peri Peri keychain is apt to appeal to the unboxers among us, as it recreates the unmistakable feeling of tearing open a rushed FedEx envelope. If there's a downside, it's that there's no new wares to be found after each opening, but on the other hand, at least there's no big dent on your credit card each time you "open" something new. Expect this gem to hit your keyring for just under $10 next month. Bonus video hosted up after the break.

[Via BoingBoing]

Continue reading Bandai's Peri Peri keychain lets you rip open shipping envelopes continually

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Just last year, Microsoft snagged a $240 million stake in Facebook in a bidding war against Google. However nothing but speculation has resulted since that stake was won. This week we saw the first steps of integration of Microsoft Live Search on Facebook. Microsoft is promising to improve the user experience on Facebook with the addition of Live Search functionality and advertisements.

We'd like your help in predicting what the percentage of Microsoft's share of searches will be by December of 2008 following the integration of Live Search on Facebook. Will it increase or decrease and by how much? Click here to cast your prediction.

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Fast Facts

• The arrangement was first announced in July and offers a revenue opportunity for both companies
• Microsoft owns a stake in Facebook and has an exclusive agreement with the site for banner ads
• Results vary on Facebook and Live.com because Facebook uses certain filters for their search results

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Predicting Pandora's New Royalty Rate

In the past few weeks, Pandora was at the forefront of many headlines. The CEO of Pandora fought hard to win a small victory that would grant Internet radio stations more time to reach a new royalty rate agreement with the powers that be. The cut-off time is February 15, 2009, which is right around the corner. We'd like you to predict whether a new royalty rate agreement will be reached in time and what the new royalty rate will be.

Fast Facts

• Senate approved a bill that says Congress must honor any royalty rate agreement reached
• Webcasters and copyright holders have until February 15th to come up with a deal on their own
• Current royalty rates would cost Pandora $18 million of its estimated $25 million in revenue in 2008

PD_WIDGET.keyword="auctionid:6152";PD_WIDGET.height="250";PD_WIDGET.width="300";PD_WIDGET.color1="0xFFFFFF";PD_WIDGET.color2="0xB80103";PD_WIDGET.color3="0xB80103";PD_WIDGET.create(); Discuss

MySpace launches their self serve ad platform, called My Ads, tonight, which was first talked about a year ago. Like Facebook’s similar product, it allows anyone to quickly create a targeted ad and serve it on MySpace.

Unlike Facebook, which only allows text ads, MySpace is only allowing display ads for now (advertisers would like both, I imagine). Users can choose between a 728×90 or 300×250 ad unit and can create an ad with pre-built templates and a Flash tool, or upload their own.

MySpace ads are charged on a cost-per-click basis (Facebook allows advertisers to pay, at their option, on a cost-per-click or cost-per-impression basis). Ads are prioritized based on the maximum CPC rate stated by the advertiser as well as relative click information - meaning that, like Google, advertisers will pay less if their ads tend to be clicked on a lot. The back end optimization technology behind the product was originally developed by SDC, which was acquired by MySpace’s parent company in February 2007.

The key to MySpace’s ad platform is their hypertargeting technology. Facebook allows targeting as well, although it’s based on interest areas put in by users directly. So if someone says they like books, you can target ads to them based on that. What MySpace does is much different - they build out a profile of each user based on what they do on MySpace over time, with 1,200 different ways to categorize each user. So if you only want to target women who live in California between the ages of 25-30 who like motorcycles, i can. There are 2,842 of them on MySpace. And if I just want to target those in San Francisco, I can. There are 147 of them (the ad tool tells you all of this):

Will This Be MySpace’s Google Moment?

The big social networks are still trying to find their “Google Moment” - the point when (and if) they find a way to monetize these massive audiences they’ve attracted. Google was just a great search engine until they matched it with contextual advertising. MySpace and Facebook need to find their own revenue engine.

Facebook will probably only generate $300 million or so in revenue this year. MySpace is ahead of them, with $850 million or so in revenue last year and a projected $1 billion in fiscal 2008 (which ends next June for them). But it’s still a far cry from what Google generates per unique monthly visitor.

MySpace says MyAds will be a major revenue source for them. “We expect MyAds to be a significant revenue source for us,” MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe said in an email today. “It has already exceeded our launch expectations in the pre-launch phase.”

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