At the Four Seasons Hotel in Palo Alto, Silicon Valley – I attended a luncheon as one of Australia’s ’50 for the Future’.

50 for the Future is part of Advance’s global program to profile some of Australia’s exports who are shaping Australia’s innovation agenda. The 50 were chosen via a consultation process and it was an honor to be in the company of so many talented Australians who are inspiring to create strategies to foster Australia’s innovation footprint.

Thanks to Serafina Maiorano, the CEO of Advance.org and her team for inviting me and putting on such an event.

I’ve been critical of Twitter in the past for it’s frequent meltdowns. Unless you’re a celebrity, not everyone’s micro-movements and thoughts are interesting. Retweeting someone else’s work in my opinion is just viral plagarism.

On a recent trip to London, I saw Zeebox and met up with the founder/CTO Anthony Rose. WOW! What an amazingly rich web and mobile application for watching television that actually brings meaning to Twitter. Perhaps Twitter is the interstitial for television delivered on web/mobile. It scrolls constantly as you’re watching the program and you can follow people related to the show. You can join and watch with friends, commenting about it with them in a private IM and then following stars in the show. Pretty darn cool for the ultimate couch potato!

But watching Zeebox on the iPad is the game changer. That is it’s sweet spot and brings an experience of web 2.0 tagging (using real time natural language processing) and links to ecommerce sites where you can buy products contained in the television content.

Tweet Tweet just might have found it’s home and saviour in Zeebox.

It was bound to happen. Last week I visited the product marketing folks at www.elance.com to give strategic input into their product and was greeted by this robot. Rachael’s voice boomed “Good Morning” and I thought the lady was in the office behind the empty reception. She wasn’t.

It was a freelancer located in the mid west of America which was sourced from www.elance.com. That’s the kind of receptionist that a cloud based crowdsourcing company that just hit $US 500 Million in gross revenue with 60 staff has. Only in the Valley….

The bottomline is that Google+ means you’re now working for Google! Huh? Well, YOU are doing the work. And what’s more, the quality of the output from Google results now includes what your Google circles have searched on.

Try it, do you really want Google – a great intent based directional search engine – to include what your co-worker or friend or family member has searched on. Where’s the church and state divide gone? The team at Mountain View, CA are now playing the social game that Facebook wrote the book on.

For the first time, Google is following Facebook – chasing down eyeballs and using a business model that isn’t their own. Google works just fine. I don’t need “Circles” to tell me what Google can already tell me pretty darn well.

No clouds in the sky today in Las Vegas… with CES underway,  Ray Mercedes from Panasonic Cloud  explained their cloud based phone system offerings for small and medium sized businesses.

The consumerization of the enterprise is a term more commonly used here in Silicon Valley – referring to enterprise software which is being hosted in the cloud and sold on a monthly fee versus an annual licence fee.

The Panasonic Cloud Service Pricing starts at $39.95 per month and offers businesses a real advantage on cashflow in these challenging economic times. Ray is leading the charge in this nationwide rollout in the USA for Panasonic Cloud.

This meeting would not have been possible without the super-human co-ordination skills of Mr. Raymond Norwood (the best dressed man in Brooklyn). Here’s a photo for you big guy…. we missed you!

Several of our clients are working with Google Maps Premier Edition – which offers some incredible functionality with respect to creating slicker interface designs, more customizable features and even has HTML5 compliance.

Click http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF&msa=0&msid=114790027484863334369.00048ca58081513464dbe to view some of the applications in the Enterprise Edition. There are some incredible applications for mapping for optimization websites such as Asset Tracking but perhaps the biggest benefit is “Control of advertising” – so competitors can’t advertise on your locations!

We have built a very interesting product called Skumatic – which automates the process of installing your product catalogs on Facebook with 1 simple click!

Our client BrandsDirect has this app installed on http://www.facebook.com/pages/Brandsdirectcom/215196058543841 (select “Product Catalog” on the Left Hand Side menu to launch the application).

Users can click on the “Friends Advice” button and can ask a question to their social network about the product. The aim is to provide greater engagement on Facebook with product catalogs and drive sales via the “Shop Now” buttons – which takes the user back into the shopping carts on their own merchant sites.

SearchForecast is managing an increasing number of local pages on Google for clients. These “Place Pages” present fantastic opportunities for retailers to create ‘free’ pages on Google and appear highly in targeted search listings. One of our real estate clients has over 3M impressions and 250,000 clicks in the past 9 months. That’s $500,000+ in free clicks!

Google are increasing going Local with the acquisition of Zagat.com and as Wall Street demands more ads as a percentage of their webpages to increase revenue, they’ll continue to focus on taking market share away from Yellow Pages, Yelp and other business directories.

  On Friday, 23rd September, I’ll be moderating a panel at the DailyDealsSummit in San Francisco on the “Impact of Deals on Yellow Pages”. We’ll be discussing the deal space and even though companies like GroupOn focus primarily on local, they aren’t a natural competitor to the beleaguered Yellow Pages whose advertiser base is 3/4 service oriented businesses. Deals though seem to be an avenue for growth for the local sales force strong yellow page companies.

Yesterday, I met up with some friends who know more than most about the cyber crime world. Over the past few years, SearchForecast has recommended Security-Art  to our clients.

Many businesses are feeling a bit left out when it comes to the security of their websites, especially after all the major breaches lately that affected companies such as RSA, Lockheed Martin, ADP, Sony, Nintendo, Sega and even the American CIA. Nevertheless, as businesses know what kind of impact a breach on their electronic infrastructure can have, they often fail to find the appropriate solution to even tell them at what maturity level they are security-wise.

Most of the market is filled with expensive offerings of large scales security assessments, when in a lot of cases all that is really sought after is a quick-and-dirty “how do I fare up” review. Such a review should not cost an arm and a leg, and a few clients here have already acquired such services for as low as $5,000 and managed to identify, prioritize and fix issues that were critical to their security posture, all in less than a week.

SearchForecast often asks Security-Art ( a unique provider of high-end security services) to undertake a security audit and provide recommendations. DDOS attacks, SQL injections, Flooding, Data Input Form security checks are all part of their services.

Itay Sagi can be contacted at itay.sagi@security-art.com and would be happy to provide additional details on how their security engagements area carried out.