Webware

SAN FRANCISCO--He wasn't on the program, but nobody was disappointed that Google co-founder Sergey Brin showed up at the Web 2.0 Summit on Thursday afternoon and agreed to sit down for an onstage chat with conference organizer John Battelle.

Sergey Brin, Google co-founder

(Credit: Google)

Battelle said Brin had been extended an invitation to speak but turned it down, to which Brin joked, "I didn't say no, I just never responded."

But it was an appropriate time to hear from one of the minds behind Google because one of the most evident trends at the conference is that the search market is heating back up. On Wednesday alone, Microsoft announced a partnership with Twitter and Facebook for real-time search results, Google announced a similar deal with Twitter, and Google executive Marissa Mayer previewed a new "social search" feature in Google Labs.

Brin talked about the new competition with a "bring it on" attitude. "I think what Bing has reminded us is that search is a very competitive market," he said. "There are many interesting companies out there." He said he's disappointed that Yahoo is retreating from the fight and planning to strike a deal with Microsoft instead.

"I think Yahoo had a number of innovations there, and I wish they would continue to innovate in search," Brin said. He didn't go into specifics.

Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz had been slated to speak at the conference on Wednesday but canceled at the last minute, citing a bad case of the flu.

Hewlett-Packard is announcing two projects Wednesday at the Web 2.0 Summit that it hopes will give new life to print--books and magazines in particular.

BookPrep and MagCloud let content that's been too expensive or difficult to print reach readers more easily.

Andrew Bolwell, director of new business initiatives at HP, told me these products are based on an understanding that the publishing industry is undergoing a fundamental shift--which he sees as the move away from printing items ahead of time, distributing them to locations in the hopes that people will buy them, and then disposing of the products that are unsold--into the more contemporary model of printing on demand. Each year in the U.S., 2 billion magazines, or 62 percent of all those printed, end up unsold and in landfills, Bolwell said.

Books are printed in advance in the same way, for the most part, and unsold copies are likewise destroyed. Furthermore, most of the books ever printed are unavailable to buy: Bolwell said only 4 percent of the 90 million books ever printed are available to purchase.

BookPrep

HP is set to rescue old books, making them fit to print again.

(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

HP's BookPrep is built to address that. The service takes in scans of book pages, cleans them up automatically, and preps them for sale as print-on-demand paperback editions.

The service, which has been in testing for about a year at a university library, is getting some high-profile partners and a business model. The service now gets scanned books from Google and from the Internet Archive, and sells its books on Amazon.com.

The books are printed by various on-demand book printing houses. The covers are done on HP Indigo printers, but the book pages themselves are created on who-knows-what printer. Bolwell doesn't care, as the revenue comes from the sale of the books via Amazon royalties. HP said it will share a portion of its revenue with the source of each book's scan--in most cases, a library.

Unlike the Archive's more disruptive Book Server project, which is about making current books available online, BookPrep is about older, public-domain books. And the BookPrep service does not index the actual text in books--it leaves that to Google, Amazon, and the Internet Archive. All BookPrep does is take crufty scans of old books and make them presentable enough for print. It also can create nice covers for print editions.

So if you want a print edition of the 1887 White House Cook Book, this is how a surviving, aging copy of the book can appear new again.

MagCloud

The company also has a way for today's magazine publishers to print for less.

(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

The MagCloud business addresses magazine printing. It's a custom magazine printing site, like Lulu but for glossy magazines, that's been live since February. The service lets people create their own print publication and customize single copies for users based on location or other factors. When a reader buys an issue, MagCloud prints a copy at a printer as close to the person's location as possible to save shipping costs and time.

The new addition to the product is a link into Wikia community sites. Users can now print "magazines" of Wikia pages, and the service will format them so they look nice. It reminds me of Offbeat Guides to an extent.

MagCloud isn't a complete magazine publishing system in the sense that it helps people create periodical publications. It doesn't do subscription management nor does it automate print advertising. But it does look like a nice way to get a fancy-looking color magazine-like publication created and distributed easily.

MagCloud publications are printed on HP's Indigo printers.

Taping up old pages

Bolwell has a modern yet conflicted appreciation for print, which is not surprising for someone who works at a one of the largest printer manufacturers. He believes that people will continue to love and want printed products and that, "especially for rich four-color content, the experience of the printed page is the preferred way of reading content." However, he also believes that the process for creating a printed product must change: "It's only a matter of time until the entire (magazine) industry moves to print on demand," he adds.

Both BookPrep and MagCloud seem to be Band-Aids for likely terminal patients. The demand for printed books and magazines won't vanish tomorrow. Nor will the demand for newspapers evaporate suddenly, though that's an industry even Bolwell doesn't think printing technology should try to fix.

The question is to what level the book and magazine printing industries, even streamlined, will decline, and how fast they will get there. I hope Bolwell has exit plans for this business, and I don't mean selling it to Google.

Jeff Immelt holds the GE Vscan ultrasound scanner.

(Credit: Rafe Needleman/CNET)

SAN FRANCISCO--In a wide-ranging interview at the Web 2.0 Summit, Jeff Immelt, CEO of General Electric, announced a low-cost and very portable ultrasound scanner called the Vscan.

"It's about the same size as a BlackBerry," Immelt said, holding up a white device that appeared to fold in the middle like a flip-phone. The top of the device showed an ultrasound image (of a patient's liver, we were told), while the bottom showed control keys.

"This is Moore's law," he said, saying that the device had the same power as a console ultrasound from two to three years ago that would cost $250,000.

The price of the device was not revealed, but Immelt asked the audience to imagine these devices going to Africa and helping health care providers there determine "if a baby is breech," for example. "This could be the stethoscope of the 21st century," he said.

Immelt also gave a demo of an enhanced online medical records system, in which patient data is combined with clinical outcome data and research to help caregivers apply effective and current treatments to patients. Medical records, he said, don't win only because they give patients portable electronic files, but rather, "it's about making better clinical decisions faster."

On the topic that the Web 2.0 audience was expecting to learn more about, the potential sale of GE's NBC Universal, Immelt said, "An IPO would be fine." Also: "You've got to think a couple of years head in this space and think, there might be other partnerships. We've got all the options."

See also: Comcast CEO: We are not a dead duck.

See also: Smallest ultrasound system for fast diagnoses

Evan Williams (left) and John Battelle (right)

(Credit: James Martin/CNET)

SAN FRANCISCO--In anticipation of an onstage interview with Twitter CEO Evan Williams at the Web 2.0 Summit on Tuesday afternoon, conference organizer and Federated Media CEO John Battelle told the audience to expect "a surprise" during the talk.

Turns out that "surprise" was actually a recently unearthed video clip of Williams in 1994, explaining the Internet on behalf of a company called Illumination Labs and sporting a haircut that looked like it belonged on the set of '90s alterna-teen flick "Empire Records." (No, we don't have a snapshot of it yet.)

Williams didn't really say a whole lot else about where Twitter's going, beyond what the world already knows: it's been growing fast. It turned down a buyout offer from Facebook. It just raised a ton of money. It still hasn't disclosed a long-term revenue model.

Evan Williams

(Credit: James Martin/CNET)

"It's not like we're spending our days looking in the couch cushions for the elusive revenue model, but obviously we've done a lot of thinking about it," Williams said, declining to comment on the potential of search deals with Google or Microsoft. "I can't tell you exactly what the model is, but it's pretty obvious to you that there may be some advertising that makes sense...there's a lot of commercial activity on Twitter today, there's a lot of brand marketers who use Twitter today, and it works. We think of Twitter (as) not a social network, it's an information network...a substantial part of that is commercial and theoretically monetizable information."

Williams, who previously founded Pyra Labs and sold its flagship Blogger product to Google, took over as CEO of Twitter from fellow co-founder Jack Dorsey last year. Dorsey, who remains Twitter chairman, is working on a new mobile commerce start-up called Square.

In his talk at Web 2.0 Summit, Williams mentioned new features like user-generated "lists," currently in beta, and said that they may end up replacing the site's current (and much-maligned) "suggested user" list altogether. ("It's gone on too long, and I desperately want to kill it or evolve it.") He also said that "some things we're launching" may counteract recent slowdowns in Twitter's U.S. Web-based traffic, which was growing exponentially not so long ago.

"We are seeing slowing of growth in some areas and accelerating growth in other areas. Twitter is very hard to measure, even for us," Williams said. "The biggest two areas that we're seeing growth is on mobile and internationally." Last week, the company inked new mobile deals in India and Japan; currently, its five biggest markets are the U.S., the U.K., Japan, Brazil, and Indonesia, which has been "growing like crazy lately."

So what does he think of the other players in the real-time Web? He's not sure what to make of Google Wave ("I sure as hell don't know what Google Wave is going to be. I haven't wrapped my head around it yet") but underscored that in Twitter's early days he wasn't sure what that would turn out to be either. And as for Facebook, he shrugged off speculation that the social-networking giant started aping Twitter when it was unable to actually buy it.

"I don't know how Facebook's feature prioritization works. I suspect that they came to a lot of the same conclusions we did," Williams said. "In the global sense, I'm pretty sure the world is big enough for Facebook and Twitter, and fundamentally I think they're good at different things. Facebook is phenomenal at communications among people who know each other."

Facebook ultimately purchased a far smaller streaming-information start-up, FriendFeed, this summer.

"We had a few conversations with our friends in Palo Alto (Facebook) and ultimately I just didn't see a reason to sell if that opportunity would have presented itself because it's not the point," he continued regarding the failed acquisition. "The point is really to see what we can build. We believe very strongly in that at Twitter, and enabling the open exchange of information is a good thing for the world."

It's his usual schpiel. Aside from the Nirvana-era haircut, there wasn't a whole lot to tweet about here.

The Web 2.0 Summit wrapped up Friday with conversations about the Internet, politics, renewable energy, and space. Below are videos of on-stage talks, courtesy of TechWeb.

In a panel discussion in which The Huffington Post founder Arianna Huffington is joined by San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom and Democratic campaign organizer Joe Trippi, Huffington argues that "were it not for the Internet, Barack Obama would not be president," in part because the blogosphere has "an obsessive-compulsive disorder." Trippi agrees that "the (Internet) medium demands authenticity."

In response to Huffington's remark that "politicians definitely need to adjust how they behave," never assuming that they are having a private conversation with anyone in public, New York magazine's John Heilemann says to Newsom, "So Gavin, there's no off-the-record ever again now."

Newsom, who says he is "obsessed with Facebook," agrees: Politicians need to "get over it," he says. "You're on the record. If you get into public life, you should expect nothing short of it."

Continuing their discussion, the quartet focus on how the political spectrum is changing, largely because of the vast exposure to information that the Internet affords. But not everyone can afford to access the Internet regularly, Newsom says.

"We have a huge digital-divide problem," argues the San Francisco mayor, who has been working hard to bring his city municipal wireless broadband. "We are slipping; we are not making any real advancements." Hundreds of thousands of people still rely on network television to gather their political insights, he says.

Meanwhile, Huffington says citizen journalism on the Internet is playing a major role in transforming the lingo and polarization of American politics.

"We are so completely used to talking about right versus left," she says. "It's a lazy way to talk...If you really want to transform politics, you have to transcend these divisions and really define the new center, and I can't really think of anything more important."

For The Huffington Post, at least, "right" and "left" are now "the forbidden words."

Newsom, a Democrat, chimes in: "If you don't want to be part of the Democratic Party or the Republican Party, you better be part of the get-it-done party, and the peril of all of this is that you've got to deliver."

Next up: Web 2.0 Summit moderator John Battelle, head of Federated Media Publishing and longtime journalist, invites serial entrepreneur Elon Musk up to the stage to talk about the three areas Musk identified in college in which he wanted to get involved: the Internet, renewable energy, and space exploration.

Musk acknowledges somewhat smugly that he wasn't confident during college that he'd be able to innovate in the latter two areas; the Web provided the easiest (read: least expensive) endeavor. "I'm more of an engineer than anything else, I guess."

But once the PayPal co-founder could afford to buy himself anything he wants, he says, he started investing in cutting-edge technologies such as solar energy (SolarCity), electric vehicles (Tesla Motors), and space travel (SpaceX).

"The point of Tesla is to get to mass-market electric cars, but to get there, you need to start with something. And if you look at any technology developments, in almost any sphere, you start with something which is expensive," Musk says, referring to the Roadster's current $109,000 price tag. "The first thing is about making the technology work, and then you go from there to optimizing the technology."

Musk points out that, like cell phones and laptops, in their early days, "internal combustion engine cars were considered toys for rich people, because everyone then was riding a horse."

In discussing recent Tesla news regarding fund-raising and layoffs, Musk compares running a successful start-up to running a highly trained military unit. He says taking a "special-forces approach" is necessary to becoming large and successful.

"The minimum passing grade is excellent," he says. It's "the difference between special forces and Army."

Closing the summit is former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, who famously went from losing the 2000 presidential election to winning an Academy Award for the global-warming documentary An Inconvenient Truth and a Nobel Peace Prize. He came to the Web 2.0 Summit to talk, at least in part, about Current Media, a Web video company he co-founded that partnered up with Web darlings Digg and Twitter to cover the election last week.

"The Internet democratizes information," Gore says, arguing that Sen. Barack Obama's win had much to do with how his campaign made use of the Web.

Gore also focuses on the motivations behind Web innovation, and he uses a lesson he'd learned from a dog trainer to illustrate his point.

"A puppy has to have a purpose," he says. Likewise, "Web 2.0 has to have a purpose. We have to have a purpose."

As the conversation turns to the collective human purpose of cutting down on pollution and its devastating effects, Gore notes that people generally need a sense of urgency to act.

"The urgency center of the brain is geared to snakes and spiders and fire," Gore says, explaining that people generally require a bit more processing and analyzing, as well as conscious decision making, to react to many other potential dangers. "It needs to be stored in the cloud. It's the aggregate bandwidth that counts...so that we can respond to it collectively."

Former Vice President Al Gore onstage at the Web 2.0 Summit.

(Credit: Dan Farber/CNET News)

SAN FRANCISCO--The central theme of former Vice President Al Gore's speech, concluding the Web 2.0 Summit on Friday afternoon, was electricity.

He spoke of "the electrifying redemption of America's revolutionary declaration that all human beings are created equal," as emphasized through Barack Obama's election victory on Tuesday, and how it "would not have been possible without the additional empowerment of individuals to use knowledge as a source of power that has come with the Internet."

Gore reiterated what so many people have said before--that the Obama campaign was a vindication for how the new tools of the Internet can be used toward legitimate change.

"What happened in the election opens up a full new range of possibilities, and now is the time to really move swiftly to use these new possibilities," he said. "I made a talk earlier today about how the early uses of electricity 100 years ago were aimed at sort of specialized applications and gimmicks and do-dads and whiz-bangs that demonstrated the special qualities of this new conveyor of power."

He meant, essentially, throwing an electric sheep. (Apologies to Philip K. Dick.)

"Now we just take electricity for granted as everywhere, and it has empowered a whole civilization," he said. Gore said the analogy stands for Web 2.0 as well. "When people are displaying interactivity or user-generated content or social networking, that's kind of the gee-whiz stuff...We need to move past that."

Electricity, too, is key to Gore's urgent call to action, which he detailed with an immediacy that was needed at a conference where some panels drifted a little too far into the speculative future. America needs a "unified national smart grid" distributing renewable solar energy across the country, something he estimates would cost $400 billion in a decade. But it would create thousands of jobs, Gore said, and it would pay for itself within three years.

When Obama takes office in January, Gore said the new president ought to set "a national goal of getting 100 percent of America's electricity from renewable and noncarbon sources within 10 years. We can do that."

He continued: "The declaration from President Kennedy that we would land a man on the moon and bring him back safely was thought by many to be impossible."

Gore had come onstage at the conference to a standing ovation and so much applause that he had to tell the audience to quiet down. His story is familiar: he famously won the popular vote for the presidency in 2000 but lost the electoral vote to George W. Bush, and he went on to win both an Academy Award for his environmental-awareness documentary An Inconvenient Truth and the Nobel Peace Prize last year.

In 2005, Gore founded Current TV, a cable news network that he created with Joel Hyatt in response to his dissatisfaction with the television industry. "One of the main reasons why our political system has not been operating very well until this election is the deadening influence of the television medium as it has been operated," he said.

Gore encouraged the digerati in the audience to keep pushing forward as they face what he says is the most pressing struggle of our time, climate change--the subject matter of An Inconvenient Truth. The fact that the Web's candidate of choice won this time is no reason to rest easy, he said. Media democratization needs to continue evolving.

"Just as Barack Obama's election would've been impossible without the new dialogue and new ways of interacting--the Web--the only way (climate change) is going to be solved is by addressing the democracy crisis, and the country hit a great blow for victory this week, but we have to take this issue and raise it in the awareness of everyone," Gore said. "I think that it is very much in its infancy, barely beginning, and I think that we are not many years away from television sort of sinking into the digital world and becoming a part of it."

Cynics might say Gore, who calls himself a "recovering politician," is still bitter at a sterilized news media that didn't sufficiently back his calling in the 2000 presidential election. Needless to say, his views remain controversial. But onstage, Gore seemed plenty comfortable in his new role as a thought leader rather than an elected official.

"Who knew that you were the guru of Web 2.0, as well as global warming?" conference organizer Tim O'Reilly asked Gore jokingly after the former vice president had illustrated an analogy involving "crowdsourced" information and cloud computing, two of the decade's most buzzworthy digital talking points.

If the audience was any indication, Gore has gained resounding acceptance as an information-age guru, a bit of an irony, considering that 10 years ago, erroneous reports circulated that he had once claimed to have invented the Internet.

"When we have really had these great leaps forward has been when new information ecoystems have made it possible for individuals who are thinking and processing information, and who have aspirations and hopes...to connect easily with lots of voters around core ideas," Gore explained. His preferred analogy was the invention of the printing press five centuries ago, in which he connected general historical events to the rise of literacy and eventually the creation of democratic governments.

"The installation of a new sovereign, the rule of reason, and the emergence of a marketplace of ideas that was accessible to individuals--that really empowered this kind of collective intelligence," Gore said. "And the American constitution could be, by analogy, a brilliant piece of software that regularly harvested the results of that."

An audience member asked Gore how much he thought governments should regulate Internet use, and Gore fired back, "As little as possible." There was more applause, and as he left the stage, there was yet another standing ovation.

Gore might not have invented the Internet (or even claimed to do so). But if the Web 2.0 Summit was any indication, plenty of Silicon Valley's most loyal are more than happy to have him help reinvent it.

Former Vice President and presidential candidate Al Gore is scheduled to talk to attendees of this year's Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco at 4:30 p.m. PST Friday. Here, you'll find our take on his speech, in real time.

Update: The talk is now finished, but you can catch up on the entire thing by clicking the replay button below.

Digg founder Kevin Rose is taking the stage at 2 p.m. Friday at the Web 2.0 Summit for a brief "High order bit" discussion. Here, you'll find our take on his short talk, in real time.

SAN FRANCISCO--"We don't control the platform. It's magical when it belongs to all of us." Those were the words of Vic Gundotra, who spent 15 years at Microsoft and is now leading Google's application development efforts. He was speaking about the open Web, and Google's open sourcing of much of its code to the developer community at large at the Web 2.0 Summit on Friday.

David Treadwell, vice president of Live Platform Services, took issue with his former colleague's statement about Google not controlling the platform. "If you want to be open, where is the open search and ads?" he said. Gundotra responded that not all parts of the platform have to be open. "The Internet has places to build businesses," he countered. Gundotra closed with, "The big story over the last 10 years is Windows versus the Web, and the Web has won." Treadwell just smiled or grimaced and let it go as the panel came to an end.

Google's Vic Gundotra and Microsoft's David Treadwell

(Credit: CNET News/Dan Farber)

It's clear that Google plans to use its free and open Web strategy to attack Microsoft, but based on the PDC announcements last month the Windows company has a lot of ammunition to fight back.