UC Berkeley is easily one of the most recognized institutions of learning with 70 Nobel Laureates to their name, so when they say something about tech you’d better listen up. This time however, it’s that big battle in the cloud between Google Apps and Office365 or as I would call it – The Battle for the Doc Cloud. The question is Who Will be the Last Cloud Standing?

As more people start to use cloud based applications, it’s getting more apparent that this little space in the cloud is about to see a boom pretty soon. Now consider this, the Microsoft Business Division unit is the largest revenue contributor to Microsoft, bringing in a total of $5.62 billion in the first quarter of 2011 (that’s the quarter ending sept. 2011). That trumps the Windows division with just $4.87 billion in revenue, now the difference doesn’t look like much (and probably doesn’t to Microsoft), but what that means is that the Business Division (with things like office, lync, sharepoint and exchange) brings in nearly $4 billion dollars of revenue MORE than Windows. Say it with me now people – WHAT THE #$%^.

That’s just one division of one company.

If the 5 of you can’t decide where to eat lunch without saying the dreaded words “up to you”, how in world can 100,000 or even 1 million people combine together to solve a problem? The answer is through a mixture of the right collaborative systems enabled by the right technology and people with the right skill-sets motivated by the right things. Get all 4 components right, and you’ve got yourself the answer to any problem.

However, getting these 4 components right is very very tricky.Some might argue it’s more difficult than solving the task at hand, but a handful of successful crowdsourcing projects have broken the mold and set the tone for others to follow. Today I want to focus on what is quite possibly the biggest crowdsourcing project ever, and with the exception of wikipedia is probably the most successful as well. ReCaptcha.

I’ve long been a great fan of all things Google, even when they weren’t exactly producing top quality stuff (like Google Wave), I stuck by them through thick and thin. That being said, it’s been more good than bad, sure they had a rough patch with Wave and Google Buzz, and yes Google+ isn’t exactly the Facebook killer it was tauted to be. However, think of all the really cool stuff they’re doing, consider the fact that I literally LIVE on Googles Cloud, all my email is on GMail, there isn’t a single day that goes by that I don’t get my daily dose of blogs via Google Reader and I do Google Searches at least 10 times a day. So overall Google is still pretty good in my book.

Be that as it may though, one of the hallmark of successful innovators is that they know when to call it quits. Google has already shelved Google Buzz, and spun off Google Wave as Apache Wave. Which begs the question of what would replace Buzz.

I’ve started this blog ‘journey’ about 7 months ago and so far it’s been great. The experience has been a real eye opener on how technology and social media work, and now I’m beginning to develop an understanding on how hits make their way over to keithrozario.com.

For instance, even though I grew my twitter followers from zero to 350, the traffic from twitter seems really paltry. Something of the order of 2-3 hits/month. With the amount of effort I put into twitter, to say 2-3hits/month is disappointing is an understatement. I think the reason for this is that people go on twitter to search for news, not for tutorials or how-to’s.Most of my blog entries are either reviews of certain web apps or tutorials, and not so much ’news’, and that’s probably the reason twitter isn’t getting me those hits. Another possible reason is 350 isn’t the right amount of people to generate those hits.

Apparently Google isn’t content being the number one place you have for your knowledge thirst. Google is working on being the number place you’d look for anything and everything, from the price of gold to currency exchange and now even flight schedules.

Typing in a flight number (with no spaces) directly into Google yields the flight status in terms of departure and arrival times. Not to mention letting you know of delays ahead of time, the flight data is pulled from flightstats.com and Google does a fine job of displaying the data directly before the query results.

Sometimes life throws you surprising ironies that you can’t help but just bury your head in sorrow, like an ex-girlfriend becoming your boss or the office jerk winning the lottery.

Google aspires to overcome facebook as the number 1 social networking site by launching things like +1 and Google+, however in a surprising twist of fate the number 1 user on Google+ was none other than Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. You almost hear the collective ‘DOH!’ from the googleplex echo through silicon valley. Homer Simpson would be proud.

The situation is made even worse by the fact that the 2nd most popular user on the social networking site is Google co-founder Larry Page, missing out on the  number 1 spot by more than 20,000 followers. Marks probably thinking to himself, If Google can’t even beat me in their own back yard how do they intend to beat me when facebook really starts competing?

The recent events in the UK while tragic have unveiled some new uses for crowdsourcing. Some time ago people used Google Wave (now called Apache Wave) to help find a criminal murder suspect, which was amazing news if you ask me, but it still didn’t save Google Wave. Now however, the guys over at a website called Zavilia had a brilliant idea of using crowdsourcing to solve the London rioting problem, the premise was simple, users would upload photos of the looters and rioters and those photos would then be posted online.  Each rioter would be labled with an alphabet, and finally other users could check out the pictures and begin identifying anyone they knew…brilliant solution.  Personally, I can’t imagine solving this problem without crowdsourcing, and it just goes to show that in the future we will solve problems together via collaboration on a massive scale rather than a few geniuses leading the way.

The guys over at zavilia have shutdown their website claiming:

The development of Zavilia: Identify UK Rioters has been temporarily paused due to a decrease in traffic and in user interactions. However, we fully intend to continue development at some point in the near future.

Amazing.