The founder of Text Link Ads (which was acquired by Media Whiz in 2007) Patrick Gavin, is launching another startup related to search engine optimization. Search marketing is a fast growing industry and becoming a vital part of a businesses strategy to maintaining a presence online. There are many firms out there that have developed products and software to aid businesses search, including Conductor, Marin Software and Kenshoo, but Gavin is trying to create solutions for small businesses who can’t afford to throw a ton of money towards SEO.

Gavin is launching DIYSEO, which just raised $500,000 in seed funding from angel investors, to target small businesses who only have a $500 budget and can put 25 man hours per year towards online marketing. Gavin is mum on the details but says that the product will be semi-automated yet highly customized.

Gavin says the product is primarily targeted towards small businesses who have little resources to put towards the web, including real estate agents, small car dealers, restaurants, and part-time entrepreneurs. But SEO is a crowded and competitive space and with the decline in the economy, SEO providers are all looking to provide cost-effective options for SMBs. It should be interesting to see how DIYSEO will fare in this climate.

Not since Apple stunned a developer/media crowd by giving away free iSight video cameras has a company gone to the heart of what Jonathan Schwartz calls the tendency of not just software but hardware to trend to free. Google’s giveaway of 4,000 Android phones and 30 days of 3G answers the musical question: is that an Android phone in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?

Google’s HTML 5 pitch got a whole lot more interesting when developers realized the company was moving into the kind of viral marketing Apple seemed to own until recently. The App Store has created an always-on version of the developer evangelism connection, and we’ll see how effective Google is in building on the momentum created by the phone toolkit. The iPhone 3.0 release continues to keep Apple ahead in lining developer pockets with money through increased monetization scenarios. Now the differentiator will come on the media side of the equation.

Google has maintained good relationships with both mainstream and blogger press, but free phones will need to be backed up with the only coin media respects, namely access. Tim O’Reilly released a wrap-up post that quoted several of the keynoters before they actually delivered those remarks. Scoops are scoops, but this takes the concept of live blogging a step further. But that kind of media sequencing is not how Apple turned the press into a subsidiary.

Instead, they did it by capturing the imagination of the bit-stained wretches. As users, we’ve accepted years of incremental development – the long evolution of Windows from a band-aid on top of DOS to NT to something indistinguishable from most of OS/10. Then the browser – from a crippled container firewalled off from Office to an iteratively updated application framework that, with HTML 5, makes Java an irrelevant stub on the desktop and Flash in big trouble on the phone. Today’s free phone is the razor for creating the HTML 5 habit, and video is the nicotine.

Battery life will continue to be the great leveler here, but even that bolsters the free phone as a backup when the iPhone dies, or vice versa. As planes adopt WiFi, I’ll use my MacBook Air as a charging station, and switch between the smaller devices for as much of the communications time as I can lay off. Streaming video servers will become the gas stations of the near future, parking enough bits to finesse the look-ahead of new video as it hits the network, perhaps caching your favorite sites or follows based on your and your affinity cloud’s behavior.

Though much is made of open versus closed in the messaging around these technologies, in fact these are all very savvy serious commercial players. All is not exactly as it seems. Google challenges Apple, but releases advanced versions of Gmail on the iPhone to build demand for that type of app as it proliferates across the other platforms. Chrome is the overt browser play, but Firefox is the stalking horse through which Google seeds the broader market. Microsoft may seem to be the odd man out, but there is ample room for Redmond to adopt enough of the HTML 5 characteristics as to make staying with Windows Mobile attractive to the larger audience. Again, Java… look out. Nokia too.

I was hoping to get down to the 140 Twitter conference today in Mountain View, but FriendFeed proved too efficient at carving up today’s developments in realtime. Robert Scoble’s live microblogging suggests Twitter is feeling the heat from Facebook and FriendFeed, but the Track report was murky, with no chance of rain anytime soon.

Track is coming back, but not from Twitter anytime soon. It’s coming from FriendFeed, and it’s coming in weeks not months. Track is realtime search of the present, not the past, and FriendFeed has most of the ingredients already in place. You can monitor the flow of various users (essentially the Group function Twitter has been talking about and various clients have been providing) in a realtime flow. A new AIR-based notification service acts in concert with the main flow, allowing you to monitor incoming while moving back in time to catch up.

FriendFeed’s realtime search already provides immediate filtering around keywords, but because it’s not yet realtime in display it doesn’t allow conversations to spring up between people outside of existing conversation threads. Once the conversation is engaged, the interface updates immediately in context, enabling the kinds of swarms that have grown around Gillmor Gang recording sessions. But finding these swarms requires an overt search or the serendipity of a Tweet. As I said, a realtime stream of such a search will be available within weeks.

The next step is to enable users to effectively splice Track streams in with the main flow, or specific groups, or even multiple filters. That will come soon but not at the same time, though the two technologies are apparently proceeding on parallel tracks, pardon the expression. While some services have already delivered something similar to this, they are leveraging the Twitter search functionality along with its much larger cloud, attendant scaling issues, varying business relationships, and rate limiting. FriendFeed Track is a superset of those Twitter subservices, failing as other services do when Twitter stumbles but offering a constant realtime conversation regardless.

Track solves several problems in this hybrid world of cross-cloud communications, making it irrelevant what version of @reply functionality is in place by tracking usernames as a replacement for following mass numbers of people. FriendFeed conversations encourage discovery of new participants by including anyone regardless of subscription status, and Tracking lets you discover conversations of interest outside of your existing threads. Stream splicing closes the loop by interleaving both kinds of discovery, most likely with some form of visual cue to indicate what the context is.

Blending streams and Track also provides some aid to the problem of disconnected FriendFeed conversations, first by alerting you to the existence of those threads by Track and then by encouraging the participants to consolidate around one or several. It’s conceivable that a Track filter with several thread IDs would make it seem like one conversation regardless of the originating streams, and that kind of view will grow popular and perhaps encourage FriendFeed to create intelligent filtering features attuned to the popularity for such mults.

As Twitter’s leaders have suggested, the service’s rapid growth is a double-edged sword. It may be that the company has been able to regroup by crippling features that don’t work at Oprah scale, but it’s another story to revamp the architecture sufficient to match what FriendFeed can do with Track plus splicing, or other capabilities such as a more granular Like at the comment level. It’s comparable to Microsoft’s dilemma with Windows, where moving its huge installed base into the future that’s been carved out by OS/10 is gated by the size and downlevel constraints of its target machines and peripherals.

It would be a mistake to underestimate Twitter’s team and find comfort in their difficulties with transparency and developer trust. The company clearly understands where nimble competitors such as FriendFeed and well-funded engines such as Facebook and Google are ahead in flexibility and resources respectively. Like Twitter, these companies are not in the market for acquisition. Each company’s customers may overlap, but in important ways they have specific strengths that protect them from each other. And together, they appear less vulnerable to a Microsoft counterattack or one or the other pulling out of the pack.

With these forces in counterbalance, FriendFeed remains in a very powerful position to define the leading edge of the realtime platform. Whether this will result in the kind of hyper-growth of the others is up in the air, but what is not is the effect FriendFeed’s success has and will have on its competitors. By offering a better, more efficient experience for power users, Twitter is encouraged to keep itself open enough to keep its third parties from leaving. If they were to start drifting, it would accelerate Facebook’s investment in a similar open platform as well as provide Google more time to rework RSS properties like Google Reader, Feedburner, and YouTube as stream-ready.

By next week we’ll know where Apple is going with the iPhone platform, with pressure from the G1 and the Pre potentially forcing the 3G hole open a bit more. Already, it’s easier to stream video to the phone in lieu of syncing via enclosures. Perhaps Apple will expand iTunes to accept Twitter urls as direct links to stream content, keeping control of the pipeline for its installed base while going realtime with a behavioral contract with users. Amazon may do the same with the Kindle. Microsoft stands ready with Silverlight and its IIS Media Services on top of Azure.

In the weeks since I published my Ode to RSS, I’ve seen a rapid shift in understanding about the nature and speed of this transition. Even if we factor out the disagreements over the degree of the upheaval, we’re still looking at a wave of innovation and public engagement unlike anything we’ve seen in years. As I type these words, an Evan Williams snapshot of backstage at the D conference flashes on my screen, followed by Dan Farber’s quote about Rupert Murdoch calling a “huge turning point for media and the world” followed by Dave Winer saying that “In the end, whether Ev, Biz, Jack, Bijan and Fred like it or not, Twitter is going to belong to the people, not the celebs.”

And yet, here I am on this newfangled CB radio of the future, watching and interacting with the stream as it plays out on the elegance of the MacBook Air. The littlest player and the biggest, the In crowd and the outliers, the old and the new, all acting in a collaboration that rewards us with a box seat in the Big Show that is the realtime moment.

Mark Logic, an IT company that creates software to host large amounts of content, has raised $12.5 million in Series D funding led by Sequoia Capital, with participation from Tenaya Capital. This latest round brings Mark Logic’s total funding to $45.5 million.

Founded in 2001, Mark Logic says it will use the funding to grow sales channels, expand to international markets and develop new verticals. Mark Logic’s software is an XML server that allows users to store content in a platform and serves as a platform for rich applications.

Amazon Web Services just launched the beta version of Import/Export, a feature that lets users move large amounts of data into and out of AWS using portable storage devices for transport. AWS will transfer large data sets into Amazon S3 faster using Amazon’s high-speed internal network and bypassing the Internet. Amazon says that AWS Import/Export can often be faster than the internet for large data sets and more cost effective than upgrading a user’s connectivity.

The Import/Export feature, which costs $80.00 per storage device and $2.49 per data-loading-hour (Partial data-loading-hours are billed as full hours), can be used for data migration, offsite backup, direct data interchange (you can have data sent from outside sources directly to AWS to be imported into S3 buckets), and disaster recovery, which can be used when a business needs a large backup stored in Amazon S3 and can use AWS Import/Export to transfer the data to a portable storage device and deliver it to your site.

Amazon’s CTO, Werner Vogels, writes in a blog post that enterprises are steadily processing more and more data and Amazon’s new feature helps businesses to handle the challenges of these large data sets. Vogels also included a chart to show the time it takes to move large data sets over the internet:

AWS also recently unveiled a suite of new and useful features for Amazon EC2 which will help users monitor cloud capacity, scale on demand, and spread incoming traffic across multiple web servers.

Microsoft’s Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie made some interesting predictions on the future of cloud computing at J.P. Morgan’s Technology, Media and Telecom Conference in Boston today (see below for the full transcript). Ozzie says that while the IT community is in the very early stages of cloud computing innovations, the future for companies’ data hosting will be in the mixture of cloud computing and on-premise data centers.

“But the high level pattern, which really I think we would all agree on, is that at some point in time every major enterprise, every company, every ISV is going to have some blend of software that runs on-premises and some that runs in the cloud, and everyone wants tools that they can use to in essence deploy some apps to part of their organization that might be in the cloud, another part of their organization that might be on-premises, to do that on an application by application or region by region by region or program by program basis.”

Ozzie continues that Microsoft is in an optimal position to be the provider of both cloud computing services and on-premise data solutions, especially considering the company’s release of their cloud computing platform Microsoft Azure, which is expected to be released at the end of this year. Ozzie forecasts that cloud computing will be a have the biggest impact on Microsoft services like Exchange and SharePoint, the server programs that support MS Office.

He highlighted five significant areas where Microsoft will be leading competitors like Amazon-experience, technology, partners, developers, and customer momentum. Emphasizing the dual strength of Microsoft’s platforms and applications, Ozzie says that the company is positioned well to be a cloud computing provider because of its lengthy experience serving both the consumer and enterprise spaces.

The full transcript is embedded below:

05202009 JP Morgan Ray Ozzie –

NetQoS has updated Performance Center, a platform for managing applications, with new features including new data collection, analysis, and reporting capabilities to help IT personnel, engineers, and executives deliver application performance across their networks.

NetQoS has added a “Performance Dashboard” that provides an view of response times per application and site across an organization. The dashboard is meant to help isolate the cause of a problem in the network, server, or application. The new version also includes maps that show performance and application availability, giving users a real-time, visual perspective on the health of the entire IT infrastructure and its effect on application performance.

The last feature, which seems to be the most useful addition, is an API that was created to to help customers quickly build custom reports in Excel using data from the Performance Center. NetQoS said that they created this in response to customer demands for having the ability to easily (and quickly) package data into a readable form. With this feature, the process of compiling data, which used to take weeks, takes engineers and IT staff hours and enables more frequent reporting of application health and usage.

The last feature seems to be the most compelling feature and will surely save time for staff that are evaluating applications. Competitors include ExtraHop and NetScout.

Here’s a video explaining NetQoS’s Excel integration:

Amazon Web Services unveiled a suite of new features for Amazon EC2 which will help users monitor cloud capacity, scale on demand, and spread incoming traffic across multiple web servers. Amazon originally announced these features last fall, but the applications didn’t enter public beta until today.

The first feature, Amazon CloudWatch, provides customers with real-time visibility into resource utilization, operational performance, and overall demand patterns—including metrics such as CPU utilization, disk reads and writes, and network traffic. The metrics are rolled-up at one minute intervals and are retained for two weeks.

Amazon’s scaling feature, Auto Scaling, allows you to automatically scale your Amazon EC2 capacity up or down according to metrics you receive from CloudWatch. With Auto Scaling, you can make sure that the number of Amazon EC2 instances you’re using scales up during demand spikes to maintain performance, and scales down automatically during demand lulls to minimize costs.

Elastic Load Balancing will automatically distribute incoming application traffic across multiple Amazon EC2 instances. The feature will detect problem instances within a group and will automatically reroutes traffic to working instances until the unhealthy instances have been restored. Users can also implement “Health Checks” to figure out the viability of each instance via pings and URL fetches.

The new features, which were added due to customer demand, are aimed to give EC2 customers greater visibility of the cloud while still being able to scale on demand, direct traffic and manage overloads easily. It appears that these features would be fairly useful for customers and definitely makes AWS a more powerful cloud computing platform.

While we continue to debate the Death of RSS, another more interesting battle is taking place inside the walls of some important companies about the shape of the new realtime network. Though Google has seemed to capture the imagination of the Valley and the respect of Microsoft, it is Redmond where the impact of realtime is most sharply felt.

Google’s 20 percent project has finally reached official mainstream status: Google Apps, Gmail/Chat/Reader, and its attendant Open Social constructs are sufficiently mature to garner structural attention within the search giant. Loss leaders including Android/Chrome and YouTube are about to pivot from bottomless pits to viral attention farms. YouTube in particular is poised to capture the lion’s share of realtime video as it becomes the hard drive for the Twitter DVR.

How a virtualized media network transforms our usage patterns is already understood by the networks and their more aggressive forward scouts such as the New York Times. Many see this period as the death of the newspaper, but watching how the Times and Murdoch’s Journal are crushing the second tier of almost-but-not-quite national publications suggests the papers are girding for battle not with each other but with the cable networks. It may look like a collapse, but who better to compete with for the attention of news-hungry desktop and mobile users.

These are the same users who’ve been fleeing RSS for Twitter in recent weeks as the message bus gets clogged with old-media marketing crud and Brittany trivia. Users still want their gossip and such, but they want it prioritized behind any significant realtime information that can help them save/keep/find revenue and outlast Depression 2.0. It’s not that RSS has suddenly stopped working; it’s just that realtime is faster, and it increasingly is using custom transports that are more socially attuned. The results of an affinity cloud increasingly trump other notification engines.

With high priority signals clamoring for position at the center of the desk/phone top, those networks with pole position will push out the rest. If it’s video, it’s YouTube. For that matter, if it’s audio, it’s YouTube. Podcasts? Sorry. Streaming notified over the realtime bus. H.264 across the iPhone and Silverlight. The rest will follow. Notice for the first time I include a Microsoft pole position. Google builds the standard, Microsoft ratifies it.

Microsoft must move quickly in this environment to align with winners in the message bus prioritization queue. I’m not talking here about Silverlight v. Flash adoption; that’s marketing blocking and tackling while waiting for the viral events that fuel the rollout, what John Borthwick calls bursts and what Ray Ozzie discovered in the swarm accelerator he called Groove. We don’t know what those swarm events will be, but we know what they look like when they materialize. And those technologies that accelerate swarms will also proliferate, and in the process overwhelm and dominate the attention of developers, innovators, entrepreneurs, money, and the media.

Swarm technologies thrive on the extended efficiency of social properties. Take links, for example. Swarm technologies depend on speed and economy of gestures, or actions. If I have to choose between a static link that appears embedded in a document and a dynamic link emanating from a tweet, I’ll choose the combined authority of the original author plus the tweeter (who I’ve followed or tracked). Likes or retweets accelerate the swarm further with additive or iterative influence. This is why Twitter’s @reply attack strikes at the heart of idea discovery too. A link to someone not followed from cross-talk with someone I do follow is a strong signal of potential value. The cross-talk may seem diffused, but users will migrate to tools that let them make the most efficient assessment of value.

If Microsoft wants to engage with realtime prioritization, what assets does it have? Office, for one. If we follow the logic of swarm economics, it’s not a contest between Office Live and Office Dead, but between Office Static and Office Dynamic. Since Office 2010 is already in BitTorrent release, there’s not a lot of time to jump into the stream. Where is the entry point? A quick look at Google will tell an interesting tale:

Email? Gmail didn’t incorporate Google Reader, because RSS is static not in design but in contrast to realtime streams. Instead, they integrated chat over XMPP, which was then bootstrapped by Twitter for 2 way Track until it was withdrawn from circulation. By tracking my user name (stevegillmor without the @ sign) I set up a notification point for anyone to signal that I might be interested in a link, whether to a post or a person). These dynamic links quickly stole my attention because they were weighted with social gravity, not to mention the rest of the context and metadata embedded in the message.

I won’t examine the rest of Google’s Office because we already have the answer in the preceding sentence. The stream of social gravity, layered with context (the message) and (perhaps encrypted) metadata via the URL shortener gateway, becomes the rich center of the desktop and beyond. Google’s recent experiments with context switching and synchronization between desktop and mobile device can be seen as dynamic link conversion at their core. A search for a restaurant before leaving home is wrapped as clickable phone number or on-deman map while fumbling at a traffic light.

Microsoft has some significant skin in this dynamic on-demand link game, what with Mesh now a part of the Windows/Windows Live core. Silverlight is the wild card here, politically charged with its implications for a cross-platform Office. It’s also the likeliest host for a dynamic link hub utilizing Mesh’s social constructs and Azure’s scalable back end. On the media side, Microsoft competes with Apple and Amazon with the Kindle platform for the deep but frightened pockets of the record, movie, book, and magazine businesses. Look for those industries to collapse into one, starting with newspapers and magazines blurring into dynamic books. Imagine a FriendFeed realtime chat appearing inside a manuscript as it reacts to realtime events.

A quick check of the calendar reveals how quickly this will happen. Windows 7, Azure, and a mindshare edition of Office will ship by November. Track will reappear first on FriendFeed, then Facebook, and probably simultaneously in Twitter. Microclients will unpack dynamic links and present them for consumption and contribution, updating those dynamic links with contextual social gestures that will hit the prioritization engines and synthesize swarms. It’s gonna be a hot summer.

Opensource wiki developer MindTouch has released a desktop suite of productivity tools that lets you publish and edit information from Windows applications to MindTouch’s wiki. MindTouch’s portal connects teams, enterprise systems, web services and Web 2.0 applications with IT governance, enabling users to access, publish and organize data and systems. Customers include Mozilla, Microsoft, Intel, Intuit, The Washington Post, US Army, EMC, Harvard, Timberland, and The United Nations.

Here are the three major tools that MindTouch unveiled:

Aurelia Reporter: The Aurelia Reporter tool works with any Windows application and allows users to publish as MindTouch pages. The content that is published is editable, indexed by an enterprise search engine, versioned, and is able to be permissioned for specific users and groups. So PowerPoint and Excel presentations can all be captured, archived, indexed by search and editable from the web-browser with this tool.

Desktop Connector: This allow users to drag-and-drop files, including rich text with images, and folders from the desktop to MindTouch, maintaining folder hierarchy.

Microsoft Word and Outlook Connectors: Users can publish via one-click from within Word and Outlook to MindTouch. The Outlook Connector lets users publish full email conversation threads along with attachments. MindTouch says this feature helps with collaboration because the wiki serves as the main portal for gathering both documents and emails.

The tools appear to be useful for seamless collaboration between Windows applications and MindTouch’s wiki via the browser. Competitors to MindTouch include Socialtext and pbworks.

Here’s a video detailing MindTouch’s new offering:

Today, IBM rolled out the availability of its cloud computing software, called IBM System S, that enables massive amounts of data to be analyzed in real-time. System S is designed to help clients become more “real-world aware” by accessing live data and responding to changes across complex data systems.

IBM, which is making System S available as a trial at no cost to help clients to better understand the software’s capabilities, is designed for constant, real-time analytics. Using a newly developed streaming architecture and mathematical algorithms, System S creates a forward-looking analysis of data from any source – narrowing down precisely what people are looking for and continuously refining the answer as additional data is made available.

For example, IBM says System S can analyze hundreds or thousands of simultaneous data streams – stock prices, retail sales, and weather reports and then deliver nearly immediate analysis to users who need to make split-second decisions.

Financial services firm TD Securities is already using System S to ingest more than five million bits of trading data per microsecond to make faster financial trading decisions. IBM says that to match the capacity of the system, a trader would have to be able to read the entire works of Shakespeare 10 times in less than one second and then identify and execute a stock trade faster than a hummingbird flaps its wings.

IBM says System S took more than 100 patents and seven years to develop.

Yesterday’s rollback of Twitter @replies and subsequent shift to technical explanations has predictably riled the Statusphere. But beneath the frustration and pushback is the suspicion that neither celebrity spamming nor scaling problems are at the root of the changes. Regardless of the outcome, Twitter is risking more than might seem apparent based on user and third party developer complaints.

As Twitter becomes more fundamental to the realtime revolution, the company is being forced to act like the common carrier utility it has inherited. Even though Twitter has lobotomized many of its realtime features, other services such as FriendFeed have picked up the ball and kept Twitter realtime operational for all intents and purposes. Twitter’s gating of the firehouse (whether due to instability or business concerns) has only served to encourage FriendFeed users to route around latency by using the native realtime swarms that are now commonplace with the redesign.

The @reply changes also underline the more powerful FriendFeed analogs such as Like that, combined with the bridging tools to Twitter, produce threaded conversations complete with pointers back to the source with a single click. This kind of overloaded metadata outside the 140 character window illustrates the direction Twitter is having trouble moving to even as it tweaks its static interface by abandoning user options. The underlying risk: training users to exploit other tools during “outages” that are being marketed over Twitter in the realtime they can’t manage.

Google’s search announcements suggest a go-slow approach to realtime that may offer Twitter some breathing room. But the intersection between Google’s support for microformats and the open stack work on activity streams may produce rapid consolidation around a more unified micromessage stream ripe for Track and filtering. From the outsider’s (everybody) perspective, what Twitter does or does not do with @reply visibility will be meaningless except as a form of feature limiting inside the Twitter cloud.

It’s possible Twitter is trying to control cross-cloud communications by tying @replies to bi-directional following in a Facebook-like blockade that can then be extended to outside services under cover of celebrity spam. But if that were at the core of this, the pressure to deliver Track would only increase as a way of filtering the resultant Scoble-like flow. And anyone who tired of waiting would just use FriendFeed as a realtime client like we already are, and simply not care one whit about Twitter’s shifting sands. It’s no accident that FriendFeed threads quickly wound through the issue while the hashtag workaround on Twitter made a lot of noise but produced only a single response from Evan Williams and the technical excuse of the next morning.

Indeed, as I write Twitter is down for maintenance, and for those of us who rely on the existence of the realtime network, it makes perfect sense to use FriendFeed links as a way to minimize disruptions by individual nodes. As we build out a failover version of the Statusphere, those services who use aggregation to maintain connections during outages of whatever motive or duration will prosper. That’s what Twitter should recognize as its greatest challenge: the use of the service to amplify its shortcomings.

Since Gmail’s birth in 2004, Google has steadily built a powerful cloud-based email platform that’s chock full of innovative features including offline access, chat, search, mobile access and more. Google saw the opportunity to integrate Gmail and apps, like docs and calendar features, into the enterprise space and rolled out premier editions of Apps catering to the business community. Today, Google announced that it has struck a partnership with Valeo, an automotive components manufacturer, to deploy Google Apps on the company’s entire global workforce, which totals about 30,000 internet-using employees.

“The cost savings and innovation made possible by cloud computing help businesses better respond to a global and mobile workforce – especially in today’s difficult economic environment,” said Dave Girouard, President, Google Enterprise. “We’re thrilled Valeo has selected Google.

Google says more than a million businesses and ten million users are implementing the Google Apps suite currently but to date, the Valeo partnership is the largest single enterprise deployment. Genentech may be the second largest, with 20,000 users. Valeo is moving to the cloud with the support of technology consulting firm Capgemini.

When Google Apps first launched in 2006, it was free. Since then Google introduced a new model, where the free Google Apps account could be used by 50 users and the premier edition of the service, which as more storage and an uptime guarantee, costs $50 per user.

Google Apps is not directly competitive to MS Office (Google Apps is cloud based), but could be disruptive to Microsoft’s office suite, especially as Google continues to adds features to its own suite and builds on real-time collaborative features Office still doesn’t have.