Here are a few audio snippets from a Q and A session with the president of Google’s Enterprise division, Dave Girouard. The session took place on August 5th at the Pacific Crest Technology Leadership Forum in Vail, Colorado.

Girouard talks about Cloud Computing, Google’s new App Engine, the Google Apps productivity suite, competition versus partnerships, and how Google faces the challenges of protecting its users’ privacy and security.

Read more…

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I’m seeing a trend as I continue to download and test many of the 1,500+ and growing iPhone applications currently available on iTunes: Few of them are really taking advantage of the network effect to build any kind of competitive barrier to entry.

Some apps are safe because they are simply iPhone versions of their normal web service. Google and Yelp are two examples out of hundreds of applications that are simply marking their territory for now.

But most applications are unaffiliated with an established website, which means they need to be able to build a sustainable business on the iPhone alone unless they’re just there for fun. Already we’re seeing applications that are effectively identical to others. There are two chess games for example (Chess Classics and Caissa Chess), both priced at $9.99. There are at least three movie theater apps (Movies.app, OneTap Movies and Box Office). Etc.

There are few feature differences between the applications, which can be quickly updated to match what competitors offer. Those that are trying to charge for their applications are at an extreme disadvantage when they have comparable free alternatives. There’s a march towards free with these apps, and it’s unclear they’ll be able to make money via advertising or other channels.

Take Advantage Of The Network Effect

Without a compelling existing brand or a really innovative product with protectable intellectual property (some of the games fall into this category), the only chance these apps have for long term success is to start thinking about ways to have users interact with each other in order to build network value.

I’ve long argued that social networking on the iPhone is a huge opportunity, and the fact that the big guys are ignoring it for now leaves the door open for a newcomer to get long term market share.

But there are endless other opportunities as well. Take those chess applications as an example. Neither support multiplayer games on different devices. I can play against a friend if he’s here with me, but I can’t have my dad download the application to his phone and play a game of chess with me asynchronously from two states away. The functionality is available to developers, they simply didn’t build it. If they did, there would be a big incentive for chess lovers to flock to that particular application, and it would then be hard for the others to compete. The same thing goes for other games like Scrabble, etc.

My guess is the first breakout hit on the iPhone will be a multiplayer game that is played real time or asynchronously, with each user installing the app on their own phone. I’ve played too many games of Halo on Xbox Live against people who live God Knows Where to not understand the power of distributed game playing to drive software, hardware and subscription sales.

If you are building this kind of application, we want to hear all about it. Someone is going to do this right, and then a flood of copycats will enter the market. Don’t be second to market. And stop treating the iPhone like it isn’t connected to every other iPhone and iPhone user out there in the world.

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See our review of the YouNoodle startup valuation predictor from a couple of days ago (as well as our skeptical post from earlier this year). The product just came out of private beta. Look for a tab in the top right corner of the site called “startup predictor”, or just click on younoodle.com/predictor and fill in the questionnaire.

The company, which is funded by The Founders Fund, Max Levchin and Peter Thiel, uses detailed data about startups and a proprietary algorithm to make a guess on the likelihood of success of a startup. They even go so far as to estimate the value of the company three years out.

The key factors in determining likelihood of success are the team, financial factors, the concept and advisors. The tool wants to know everything. For the founders, their age, education, previous startups (and how they did), and their long term relationship to the other founders. For the concept, YouNoodle gathers information on the business idea (probably extracting keywords for analysis), where it’s located, and lots of other data.

See our previous post for valuation predictions for a few high profile startups like Slide, RockYou, Twitter, FriendFeed, Cuill and Mahalo. Then cast your aspersions appropriately. The most interesting and insightful (or just plain funny) commenters get a TechCrunch tshirt in the size of their choice.

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Jajah, a popular VoIP service provider, has released a new English/Chinese translation service called JAJAH.Babel just in time for the Olympic Games. The service, which was developed in conjunction with IBM, allows users to call a free number to get a near-instant translation of spoken sentences. The service isn’t meant for voice calls abroad - instead, it’s a handheld translator. After speaking your message into the phone, you hand it to the person you’re speaking with, and the phone spits out the translated message.

Using the service is fairly simple, and should work from any phone line:

How does JAJAH.Babel work? From English to Chinese or in reverse:
Dial JAJAH.Babel from any phone. U.S. local access number: +1.718.513.2969
Choose which language you want your message translated into (either English to Chinese or Chinese to English)
Say your message and press #
You will be able to confirm that your message was properly understood by the system.
The message will automatically be played back in Chinese. If you wish, simply hand your phone to the other person or put the phone on loudspeaker so they hear the message.
The other person can then record a message in Chinese, following the steps above, and you will hear their message in English.

To help test the service I recruited TechCrunch intern Matthew Schulz, who is fluent in Chinese. His conclusion was that it worked surprisingly well. The translation from English to Chinese sounded a little bit awkward, but the meaning was obvious. As for speech detection, the service had some trouble when he spoke Chinese in his normal tone, but when he enunciated a bit more than usual the results were almost perfect.

For now, the service is limited to translations between English and Chinese Mandarin, but the companies plan to release new languages in the near future. You can get more information about the service along with more local access numbers here.

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TokBox, the Sequoia backed video chat startup, has closed a $10 million Series B round led by Bain Capital Ventures, with Sequoia also contributing. The round brings TokBox’s total funding to around $14 million. As part of the deal, Bain’s Scott Friend will join the company’s board.

TokBox offers a Flash-based video chat service that requires no extra plugins. The service has gotten rave reviews from a number of our readers for its ease of use. While the service offers basic social network functionality, there’s no account required to participate in a chat - users need only browse to the URL that gets assigned to each chat room.

Last month TokBox positioned itself to more directly take on traditional web chat and IM clients like AIM and Skype by releasing a new AIR desktop client.

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The web is full of hipsters scouring the indie music scene for the next big thing. And while there is no shortage of communities where these trendsetters can share their picks, they’ve never stood to gain anything from being ahead of the crowd (aside from a slight sense of superiority). Popcuts, a Y Combinator-funded music store that launches today in public beta, is looking to reward these early adopters by paying store credit to the first people who buy a song that later goes on to become popular.

When an artist signs on to the store, they allocate a certain portion of the revenue generated by their songs to go back to their fans. This money is then distributed according to how early each user purchased a song (the earlier you buy, the more you make). For example, the band My First Earthquake has decided to pay out 30% of its revenues to its fans. The earliest adopters (say, the first dozen people to buy the song) will break even after the song has been purchased by around 25 other people. Fans buying the song later on will still earn credit, but it will be earned at a much slower rate (the site will tell you how quickly you’ll be earning credit before you buy a song).

For the time being Popcuts is only selling music from unsigned indie artists, but CEO Kevin Lim says that the company will pursue deals with record labels once it has perfected the new payment model.

Popcuts has a compelling idea, but its success may well lie in the generosity of the artists it signs. The store’s default split gives 60% of revenues to bands, which is competitive with other online stores. But the default 30% allocated to fans may not be enough of an incentive to drive many more purchases, and bands may find they have to give up more of their proceeds to drive sales. In any case, it’s an experiment that the music industry will probably be following closely.

There are a number of other music stores experimenting with new pricing models for music. Most notable is Amie Street, which initially sells a song at 1 cent and increases the price as it rises in popularity (like Popcuts, this rewards early adopters, but it does so in a different manner).

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Another Y Combinator startup, ididwork, announced its launch yesterday. In short, the web-based service lets employees keep record of work they have completed. Employees can then submit a weekly or monthly report to their manager in the form of a chart, graph, or simple summary, and receive feedback through the system. The service is designed to drive performance reviews, eliminating the need for status meetings, and allowing employees to be evaluated based on concrete information rather than a manager’s impressions.

What differentiates the service from the many performance monitoring platforms out there is that the managers don’t have to participate. It is designed to be useful solely from the employee’s perspective, letting them track their own progress and analyze trends over time. The service does not have to serve the enterprise, but rather can spread amongst individual users. Employees can decide to forward performance breakdowns to managers, who then have the option of joining the network. There is clearly a viral aspect to the service that could make it work, but it is dependent on how necessary employees find it to record their own progress, and how informative it can really be.

The idea seems simple but it tackles a big problem: it is difficult to judge productivity in big companies. In employee reviews managers often have very little idea of what an employee has done, which leads them to make judgments based on behavior that seems productive; like staying late everyday, or sending out company wide emails at three in morning. It also gives employees an idea of what their associates are working on with a news feed, eliminating the need for status meetings.

As far as competition goes, there are many similar services but not many that follow the same model. There are work logging services, but they focus on billable hours, and there are many performance review platforms, but these target HR departments rather than individual employees. 37 Signals‘ BackPack has some similarities, but it is more suited for coordinating operations within a group rather than tracking individual performance.

The founders plan on eventually charging employers after the service takes off, allowing early adopters to continue using it free of charge. To expand, the service plans on integrating desktop widgets and customizing performance breakdown charts in the distant future.

The founders of ididwork previously started Expensr, which was bought by MyStrands. Prior to that, they worked in large consulting companies where they derived the idea for their newest project.

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Mozilla Labs announced a new project today called Snowl. It is an add-on for Firefox that aims to bring all of your messages together in one place, whether it is from email, SMS, Twitter, or RSS/Atom feeds. The project right now is an early, buggy prototype that only supports RSS/Atom feeds and Twitter. So that is nothing special.

But once email and SMS is folded into the mix, it could become a very powerful messaging center, built right into the browser. It will allow you to search through all of your messages and feeds, both public and private, no matter where they originate.

The current version of Snowl shows messages in one of two ways: in a three-paned window much like a traditional e-mail client, and in a river-of-news view. This is a separate project from Mozilla’s Thunderbird e-mail client, although it does overlap somewhat. The point of Snowl is specifically to “help you follow and participate in online discussions.”

You can download Snowl here (for those brave enough to try it—Mozilla warns that it is ” primitive implementation with many bugs, and subsequent versions will include changes that break functionality and delete all your messages, making you start over from scratch.”)

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In a post to the official Digg blog, Kevin Rose has announced a new Digg extension for Firefox 3 that incorporates a toolbar and notification system into the popular browser that should appeal to heavy and casual Digg users alike.

In a video introducing the extension, Kevin Rose says that its main purpose is to get a feel for what features users would like to see incorporated into future releases. The extension was developed for Firefox 3, but users can download a Firefox 2 compatible extension here.

Small notification messages now appear in the bottom right of the browser window, displaying updates on topics you’re covering along with your friends’ recent activity (you can specify what events you’d like to receive notifications for). The collapsible toolbar includes a counter that indicates how many Diggs and comment the current page you’re browsing has received, and includes a “Digg It” button that allows you to submit and Digg stories without having to visit the site.

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Wikia Search, the human edited search engine which we trashed at launch, continues to make incremental improvements (and thankfully they’ve turned down the “This is a Google-killer” hype machine).

Today they did something really smart - they released a Firefox Add-on that lets users add search data without going back to the Wikia Search site itself. That lets casual users who want to contribute to the project to do so with less effort, meaning they may contribute far more data.

The toolbar also alters search results pages from Google and Yahoo (sorry, Microsoft, you didn’t make the cut) and adds a rating widget and an Add button next to each result. Again, this makes it super easy for Wikia Search users to improve the project’s data without actually visiting the site.

Overall Wikia Search is starting to look like a real search engine, with decent results for a lot of queries. They’ve made a lot of progress in the last few months.

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