Amid ongoing debates over the hazards of excessive digital exposure through such Web 2.0 social networking platforms as Facebook and Twitter, a new book by Viktor Mayer-Schonberger extols the virtues of forgetfulness.

Since the emergence of digital technology and global networks, forgetting has become an exception, Mayer-Schonberger writes in "Delete".

"Forgetting plays a central role in human decision-making," he argues. "It lets us act in time, cognizant of, but not shackled by, past events."

Mayer-Schonberger shared his theory on how to fight back against the digital panopticon with Reuters before giving a lecture at the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce in London.

Comcast Chief Executive Brian Roberts took time out from strategizing over his company’s reported bid to buy NBC Universal to speak at the Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco on Tuesday. As expected, Roberts declined to comment on any ”specific” deals including NBC. But he did indicate as he has done in the past that content will be an important part of his company’s future and that it is always “prudent” to take a look at opportunities as they come up.

While he remained on message (or is that off message?), Jeff Immelt, his counterpart at NBC Universal’s parent General Electric, was a little more forthcoming, saying the company is considering its options for NBC Universal which could include keeping it.

In this 43 minute interview, Roberts also talked on a range of other topics including the importance of building faster Internet services and gave a demostration of his company’s On Demand Online service which he said will be launching nationally before the end of the year.

Twitter love was in full bloom at the Web 2.0 conference on Wednesday, with Microsoft and Google each announcing deals to partner with the microblogging service.

But marring the Twitter hoopla were no-shows from two of the event’s highest-profile speakers.

A day after Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz skipped the company’s quarterly earnings conference call (because she had “come down with something” as CFO Tim Morse explained), Bartz skipped the Web 2.0 conference, where she was scheduled to kick off Wednesday’s events with a 30-minute talk.

Web 2.0 organizer John Battelle told the crowd Bartz had come down with “a very, very, very bad flu.”

Before the day was through, Battelle delivered news of another absentee.

New York Times Chairman Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., slated to be part of a panel on the future of journalism in the online age, was also hit by the flu, Battelle said moments before the panel began. Fortunately, Martin Nisenholtz, the New York Times head of digital operations, was there to stand in as Sulzberger’s second.

With one more day to go, attendees at the event are hoping no one else gets afflicted.

Let the second-guessing, the mock horror, the disbelief, the crowing begin.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt has acknowledged he realized upfront that he was overpaying to acquire YouTube, to the tune of $1 billion, judged by any conventional measures.

The many critics of Google's $1.65 billion deal to acquire the video-sharing site three years ago will claim this confirms everything they have always said about the deal. Not quite.

In fact, not really at all.

Schmidt came clean in a deposition by lawyers in the Viacom copyright lawsuit that there was very little revenue coming into YouTube to justify the price his company paid.

No surprises here. There were intangibles to consider:

1. YouTube's popularity was sky-rocketing, making it the runaway market leader among video-sharing sites.
2. It was crushing his company's own site, Google Video.
3. YouTube was up for auction and would be sold to a competitor unless Google jumped first.
4. Google overbid to ensure YouTube didn't fall into rival hands.

The Google CEO said he told his company's board of directors that the 18-month-old video-sharing site was worth $600 million to $700 million, according to CNet, which obtained a transcript of his testimony. Of course, he fails to mention the potential costs of copyright lawsuits that already loomed for YouTube.

"In the deal dynamics, the price, remember, is not set by my judgment or by financial model or discounted cash flow. It's set by what people are willing to pay," Schmidt says.

So the real justification for the 150 percent premium Google paid was in derailing, or at least delaying, the rise of a potential competitor. Of course, Google has faced a long struggle to find ways to make advertising work on the site in order to pay the costs of free video. Only last quarter could Google say YouTube would be profitable in the "not long, not-too-distant future."

Of course, all the fuss over YouTube's valuation is not really Google's problem. The real issue is the extrapolation of valuations of all the Web 2.0 companies since then which have used the YouTube price as the benchmark for all the other-worldly valuations of their unproven business models.

Here are the relevant excerpts from Schmidt's deposition by Viacom lawyers, via CNet:

Viacom attorney Stuart Jay Baskin: And what was management's valuation?

Eric Schmidt: Much lower than we paid for it.

Baskin: And how was that communicated to the board?

Schmidt: I told them.

Baskin: So why don't you tell us what you remember telling the board in connection with the valuation?

Schmidt: I believe YouTube was worth somewhere around $600 million to $700 million.

...
Baskin: What methodology did you use to come up with that number?

John P. Mancini, an attorney working for Google, objects.

Schmidt: My judgment.

Baskin: Was it based on cash flow analysis? Comparable companies? What were you using as the basis for your judgment?

Mancini objects.

Schmidt: It's just my judgment. I've been doing this a long time.

...
Baskin: I'm not very good at math, but I think that would be $1 billion or so more than you thought the company was, in fact, worth.

Mancini objects.

Schmidt: That is correct.

(Photo credit: Reuters/Jonathan Ernst)

Technology market research firm Gartner Inc has published the 2009 "Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies," its effort to chart out what's hot or not at the cutting edge of hi-tech jargon. It's just one of an annual phalanx of reports that handicap some 1,650 technologies or trends in 79 different categories for how likely the terms are to make it into mainstream corporate parlance.

Jackie Fenn, the report's lead analyst and author of the 2008 book "Mastering the Hype Cycle," delivers the main verdict:

Technologies at the Peak of Inflated Expectations during 2009 include cloud computing, e-books (such as from Amazon and Sony) and internet TV (for example, Hulu), while social software and microblogging sites (such as Twitter) have tipped over the peak and will soon experience disillusionment among corporate users.

Click to enlarge

What's most interesting in the report, now in its 14th year, is what the corporate research firm says is a long way off from the mainstream.

It will take up to five years for many of today's trendy technologies to become mainstream, including Web 2.0, cloud computing, Internet TV, virtual worlds, and a true corporate mouthful, service-oriented architecture (SOA).

Funny how long hype cycles take to pay out. Three years ago, in its 2006 Hype Cycle Report, Gartner predicted Web 2.0 would go mainstream within just two years.

More than five years out, which means nearly dead in terms of industry attention, are technologies such as the once hot radio-frequency ID (RFID) concept, along with mobile robots and human augmentation and some absurdly high concepts like context-delivery architectures.

The second chart, on the right, describes Gartner's methodology. It's all very imprecise, but a game worth playing.

Images: Gartner (August 2009)

Emerging Technology Hype Cycle archives
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There’s not much news coming out of D7, the Internet executive chat fest, other than that Yahoo’s new CEO is willing to accept “boatloads of money” to sell the company’s Web search business, if Microsoft were willing to pay. They are still talking, sort of. But that is so-o-o last’s year’s story. Move on.

Confererence organizers Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg are looking to stir up a debate by declaring that the Web 2.0 era of the internet is over and Web 3.0 is underway.  

We think something major is happening at the intersection of tech and media, and we think it deserves its own new hyped-up name: Web 3.0.

Their definition of Web 3.0 centers on the rise of cloud computing and the delivery of a host of Web services to easy to use mobile devices running simple clean software. The iPhone, Blackberry, Google, Twitter. In the absence of news, let’s dredge up an old buzzword.

The death of Web 2.0 doesn’t go down too well with computer publisher Tim O’Reilly, who was the first to comment on the Swisher/Mossberg Web 3.0 declaration:

There’s no question that what’s happening in the marketplace is as significant a step forward as Web 2.0, but calling it Web 3.0 seems a bit silly. After all, Web 2.0 was not a new version of the web, but a name that tried to capture what distinguished the companies that survived the dotcom bust from those that survived, and point the way forward for new companies entering the market.

Of course, O’Reilly was the popularizer of the Web 2.0 term and has created a lucrative business out of defining the term to the rest of the world. 

Web 3.0 afficionados will recall John Markoff of The New York Times tried a similar manoeuvre in 2006 when the Web 2.0 craze was in full flower. His declaration of the coming of the Web 3.0 era was timed to coincide with came in the wake of the Web 2.0 Summit, another big annual Internet conference, started by O’Reilly to cash in on the concept. 

Markoff defined Web 3.0 as a coming era when computers would scour powerful Web databases to deliver highly personalised results to Internet users.  His view of Web 3.0 resurrected the decades-old ideas of natural-language search, the capacity to ask a computer a simple question and get a sensible response. 

By that definition, Web 3.0 may take another decade or two.

(Images: D7 Conference site; Nova Spivak)

Google famously made “don’t be evil” its official mantra a few years ago.

But a new, 7-word phrase may well end up Google’s most-used, unofficial slogan, as company officials take turns repeating “we don’t comment on rumor or speculation” in response to reports that Google is in talks to buy microblogging startup Twitter.

The topic inevitably came up at the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco on Friday morning, where Google Engineering VP Vic Gundotra was on stage for a keynote presentation.

Gundotra, who oversees Google’s mobile applications, said he was a big fan of Twitter, which lets people broadcast 140-character text messages to a network of friends. He also confessed that he was enjoying the online debate/blog-battle about whether his company was preparing to acquire Twitter.

Michael Arrington, of the blog TechCrunch, initially reported that Google was in late-stage discussions to buy Twitter, but rival blogger Kara Swisher later said on AllThingsD that no such deal was in the works.

“I’m friends with both Michael and Kara and I’m enjoying their conversation,” Gundotra said.

When it came to helping resolve the matter though, Gundotra proved of little help, offering but a slight variation on the mantra.

“Google doesn’t, as a matter of policy,” he said, “comment on rumor or speculation.”

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg may have traded in his Adidas flip-flops for tennis shoes, but he was as coy as ever when it came to talking about the social network.  On stage at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, host John Batelle asked Zuckerberg about Dubai, referring to rumors that Facebook CFO Gideon Yu was in the Middle East seeking financing from the sheikhs.

“I’ve never been to Dubai,” Zuckerberg said. “I’m told it’s nice at this time of the year.”

Never one to give up easily, Batelle dug deeper: “Gideon must have told you that.”

Zuckerberg’s silence was long enough to make a point before he said, “Oh.”

Never mind, Batelle just continued lobbing the questions at Zuckerberg, who was dressed down as usual in a black Northface fleece.

“Do you need money?” Batelle asked.

“No,” Zuckerberg responded.

Batelle then tried another tack to get Zuckerberg to answer the money question. Perhaps Facebook needs to worry about money because it’s running out of it faster that previously thought?

Zuckerberg answered that one. Kind of. He said Facebook’s focus has been on expanding its membership base this year, and the site now boasts 120 million users. Also, the ability of users to translate the site into their native language has helped it expand internationally.

“Growth is our priority,” Zuckerberg said. “We’re not focused on optimizing revenue. Some people have taken that to mean… we don’t have a revenue strategy, which is completely wrong.”

Facebook’s two main revenue streams — direct sales and online sales — are both doing “really well,” Zuckerberg said, adding that the social networking site is on track to make “hundreds of millions of dollars” in revenue this year. It’s an estimate Facebook has given before.

Batelle then asked Zuckerberg about Facebook’s “third revenue stream - Microsoft.” Last year, the software company invested $240 million in the start-up, valuing it at $15 billion.

“We don’t feel any type of pressure to live up to 15 billion dollars,” Zuckerberg replied. “On a day-to-day basis there is no thought that we need to do this… to justify a 15-billion-dollar valuation.”

And no, the company doesn’t have a hiring freeze in place. Now 700 employees strong, Facebook is still looking to hire technical and sales folks. “The key focus right now is hiring really good technical people,” the CEO said. So if you’re looking for a job, just Facebook Mark Zuckerberg.

Photo credit: Reuters