It’s fast. It’s satisfying. But if respected critics like Nicholas Carr have raised the alarm that Google’s legacy search product might make us stupid - what might Google Instant do to our brains and thinking? There are at least two ways to look at the question.

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Google Instant as a Mental Limit

“The normative influence of Google just got a lot stronger,” Kevin Marks, a British Telecom technologist, former Googler and internet intelectual, said today on Twitter.

In other words, Google’s influence over what we consider the norm, or what we take for granted as an assumption, regarding any particular topic, will become stronger now that we’re instantly given suggested search queries and answers to questions we haven’t even finished asking yet.

When the Great Google in the Sky interrupts you asking it a question and says (effectively) “don’t even bother finishing, we know what you’re going to ask and here’s the answer” - how many of us might just concede to ask what Google expects we were going to?

Google Instant as a proscriptive and limiting influence over the boundaries of our consideration; that’s something to think about.

Google Instant as Brain Stimulation

I’m not sure yet, but I don’t think I experience Google Instant as a limitation to my brain’s power to consider infinite possibilities. I really like it, so far. Perhaps that’s just the comfort of clear, controlled and limited choices, though.

Think of this, however. Google executives said in a press Q&A session about Instant today that users participating in tests of the service quite often saw links they were interested in at the bottom of the page and then extended their search queries with text that would bring those results up to the top of the page.

Google Instant Search feels to me like a call-and-response exchange with the Google robots. “If I type this in, what are you going to say?” I ask. “Ok, I see that now, but what if I type this in” is the logical next step.

My theory: by making search a more interactive, call & response activity, Instant Search could stimulate mental activity, as opposed to Google making us stupid.

“That’s very true,” says Dr. Ellen Weber, President of the MITA (Multiple Intelligences Teaching Approach) International Brain Based Center in New York, “in that the brain holds multiple intelligences - and to engage more and diverse types of thinking is better than to engage less and with the same. Every time you do a thing the same way - you grow new neuron pathways for that same way of doing things. Do things differently, and engage your curiosity, and you physically rewire your brain.”

Weber has written about how to use social media effectively to support healthy brain development.

The essential core of the idea is a timeless one, before Instant Search, before computers even: interact with new and different people and perspectives in order to expand your horizons and keep your brain functioning sharply.

Is that what Google Instant offers? I think it may; with its pleasing combination of rapid results, sneak peeks into potentially related topics as we begin to explore, and a responsive interface that encourages more sophistication in our interaction with search engines than the classic 2-word grunt-queries typically deliver. I’m not sure yet, but that’s my theory.

What do you think? Is Instant Search a potential boon or bane for the health of our brains?

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Is there a benefit to one over the other? As Founder Collectvie’s Eric Paley said in a blog post on the topic earlier this week, “the world isn’t so black and white.” When it comes down to it, every startup is unique, just as every VC is unique and every angel is unique - so there is probably no blanket assumption that can be made about the industry. For startups setting their sights on the beast of the early-stage funding market, Chip Hazard, a partner at Flybridge Capital, suggests to simply figure out what works best for your company.

“Put together an overall multiyear plan for your business, assume it takes longer and more money than what the plan suggests, and then determine what that means,” writes Hazard. “The simple point here is that the financing sources that are appropriate if you need a total of $1 million are different than if you need $10 million or $100 million.”

He also notes that while many would prefer to raise all of this capital at once, the smart decision is to raise it piece-be-piece.

“Funding through milestones such as these will allow you to raise subsequent rounds of capital at higher prices,” he says. “Reducing risk and demonstrating potential upside will always translate into higher valuations.”

Because every VC and angel is unique and has their own idea about where your company is headed and how involved they should be, picking one or another is not a decision to be made lightly, says Hazard. “One of the greatest sources of conflicts between entrepreneurs and investors happens when this alignment is not in place from day one,” says Hazard.

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While Google would probably deny any elements of black magic with the latest evolution of their search engine, what couldn’t be denied were the wide variety of interesting reactions to Google’s latest opus from the ReadWriteWeb community on Twitter and Facebook.

Shortly after today’s Google’s event wrapped, I tossed up the following grapefruit:

Reactions ranged from disappointed…

To incredibly optimistic….

To downright paranoid…

For curating responses, we test drove Curated.by, which our own Marshall Kirkpatrick covered recently. It turned out to be a pretty quick and efficient way to capture what our followers were thinking. Even cooler, we’re able to embed the rest of the reactions in this here blog post. Behold:

In addition to the Twitter, we also asked our Facebook community to give us their thoughts on Google Instant. Head over to our Facebook thread to see the responses and leave your own.

Do you have any fascinating insights on Google Instant? Please take the opportunity to leave them in the comments!

Until next time, Community Manager out.

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Civic Commons will help 21,000 local jurisdictions share code and work out best practices for developing them, all on an open source basis.

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In an era of extraordinary economic challenges, Civic Commons believes governmental software development is, among other things, a fertile area for saving money.

“For the most part, each city, county, state, agency and office builds or buys their technology solutions independently, creating huge redundancies in civic software and wasting millions of tax-payer dollars. They should be able to work together.”

Alex Howard of O’Reilly, the company that put on the summit, explained some of the problems cities had encountered that inspired the project.

“The inspiration is drawn from the issue of cities developing code for the same problems but not sharing it. Of getting proprietary solutions that weren’t transferable. Of open source projects that were redundant, unknown or left to lie fallow. Of having valuable open source code like the IT Dashboard but no place to store and share it.”

District of Columbia CTO Bryan Sivak told Howard the solutions his city alone had created, and not shared, were legion. They included a data warehouse application, a new agency performance management application and a host of GIS apps. The hope is by sharing each municipality’s code, the best will become standard and the wheel will not need to be so relentlessly re-invented.

The code will be shard on an open source basis, creating an app catalog that Civic Commons is calling an “Open Civic Stack.”

“Civic Commons’ role is to be an information exchange, to provide discoverability, and to provide advice where needed; not to set up barriers or process requirements.”

The latter is an issue in a world where bureaucracies expedite or block innovation and too often choose, or fall into, the latter.

Civic Commons’ first step is an attempt to survey all the software municipalities have already created, then “identifying their licensing, installation processes, and code repositories.”

Want to get involved? Civic Commons encourages you to join as “a partner organization or advisor; share your code” or just take part in the discussion.

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Now, employees of the Detroit Media Partnership, which includes the Detroit Free Press and the Detroit News, and are using Facebook to Say No to -12%.

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In an area rocked by persistent declines in central industries, like automobile manufacture, a group of Detroit journalists are being asked to accept a 12% wage cut. Unwilling to do so, they’re publishing their distress to 100 Facebook friends and interested visitors.

In his Sunday introductory post, page administrator Matt Helms, a journalist with the Detroit Free Press, explained the situation.

“We’re in negotiations now with the Detroit Media Partnership, which wants 12% pay cuts, a wage freeze (which we’ve had for two years) and higher worker payments for a crappier health care plan than we’ve already got. We’ve already kissed raises goodbye, switched to a less-than-good health care system …and took furloughs while the higher ups in corporate get raises and bonuses. Enough is enough.”

The newspaper industry has itself been in decline for quite some time. But a commenter, Steve Nealing, noted a discrepancy.

“While Gannett CEO Craig Dubow slashed thousands of jobs last year without regard to newsroom quality, he took home $4.4 million, up from $3.1 million in 2008. And he wants to cut the salaries of hard-working journalists by 12% and gut health care coverage while he pockets a 41% raise? Dubow, that’s how you spell the demise of newspapers.”

Is this page just a place to air grievances and blow off steam, or can it be used to sway public opinion? Will it prove to be a powerful way to funnel unwelcome attention on the Gannett chain’s demands or a less-than-passing annoyance? As much as Facebook has grown, does the management of an old-guard chain even understand how much attention it can focus on a labor dispute most won’t have been aware of?

Rich Harshbarger, Vice President for Consumer Marketing and Communications for Detroit Media Partnership, the company that manages business functions for The Detroit News and Detroit Free Press, responded. Sort of. (The first sentence is strange, but the second is pretty standard.)

“Social media is a communications tool for companies and organizations to share information almost immediately. It would be inappropriate for Detroit Media Partnership to comment further while negotiations are ongoing.”

What do you think of the use of social media in labor issues? Valuable tool or time-out room?

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According to the company’s release, “if everything goes well, VLC for the iPad should be available next week”.

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The free video player supports “nearly every video format” and when we asked Romain Goyet, co-founder of Applidium, if it supported Flash (the most obvious and controversial of missing video formats), he told us “This unfortunately I cannot answer right now (you guess why ).”

While he expects the player to be available in the App Store for download by September 14, it will initially only be available for the iPad, with a version for the iPhone and iPod Touch in the works. Goyet had a few other details to offer about the potential release:

As compared to the “desktop” version, the user interface will be quite a lot different, to fit the iPad.
Behind the scene, the engine is the one from the “ususal” version of VLC, so it should play pretty much anything you throw at it.
One small difference though : even though the iPad is a really neat device, it’s nowhere as powerful as your desktop machine / laptop. So it might have a hard time decoding HD movies, but that’s a hardware limitation.

According to a recent tweet, a pre-release version will be given out to a small number of users this weekend, before it hits the app store.

Of course, inclusion in the app store is not guaranteed. Mobile browser Skyfire was submitted to the App Store just over a week ago and there is still no word on its acceptance or rejection. The browser aims to bring Flash video, not applications, to Apple’s mobile devices using transcoding. Although Goyet doesn’t directly speak to whether or not Flash video would be supported, it could be a point of contention for accepting the app. And if the app isn’t trying to vie for Flash support, there are a number of other media types that would be great to see on the iPad, outside of those currently supported.

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We have a few thoughts of our own but what do you think were some of the most significant developments that emerged from VMworld?

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Our Pick: Hybrid Clouds

The hybrid cloud has arrived. Is it a more sane alternative to the private cloud? We think so. It looks like a smart move for VMware. It extends its partnerships with cloud services providers like Verizon, BlueLock and Savvis. Plus, it gives customers the benefits of extending to a public cloud infrastructure.The hybrid cloud movement shows how Vmware is evolving. Last year, it was all about managing the data center and establishing a virtualized infrastructure. This year, it was about managing the connections between the data center and public cloud infrastructures.

This greater theme of a hybrid cloud surfaces a lot of question. Is the enterprise going through a deeper level of abstraction? It seems to be. You get that sense from hearing many of the vendors discussing the greater need for automation. In our conversations with SpringSource executives, we asked what they thought of the DevOps movement and the emergence of companies such as Puppet Labs and Opscode. These companies are definitely in their scope. These young companies are automating the processes for deploying virtual machines. That’s important as more companies are getting used to the idea of deploying thousands of virtual machines at any one time. These virtual machines may need to be deployed in the data center or a public cloud environment.

Managing the connections is the next big step. It’s why VMware acquired Integrien and TriCipher. Integrien tracks performance in a virtualized infrastructure. TriCipher manages identity issues, critical for the deployment of SaaS services across a hybrid cloud.

Security companies showed up in a big way at VMworld, exemplifying the demand for services required in a virual environment. Computerworld’s Eric Ogren highlighted his top security picks.

He cited TrendMicro for its enhancements to anti-malware and data protection for hybrid clouds. He also called out the demonstration of Intel, RSA and Terremark’s use of Intel’s Active Management Technology (AMT) in a real-world environment:

“Shown was the Terremark service provider reaching out through AMT to wake up the endpoint, authenticate the endpoint as a customer device (RSA key management) and validate the compliance of its software configuration. Potentially, the SP could enhance bandwidth utilization by scheduling PC maintenance tasks in off-hours, identify the device as a customer and check SLA terms, download patches or a refreshed VM, and upload regulated data for backup and retention.”

VMworld showed that the public cloud is core to an enterprise strategy. But it’s only part of the equation. Companies will continue to build out their data centers. They will migrate to a hybrid environment as the connection points can be better automated, monitored and secured.

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Appcelerator’s platform is responsible for aiding the development of over 4,000 applications across the App Store and Android Market. The company also expects to break 10,000 applications by the end of the year.

“Since the release of Appcelerator’s all native platform in March, we have seen an exponential increase in the pace of application development,” says CEO Jeff Haynie. “Some developers are on their sixth app in just a few months, and several have seen their applications hit the top of the charts.”

Companies like eBay, NBC and Budweiser have made both inward-facing enterprise apps, and outward-facing consumer apps using Titanium. Smaller startups, like GetGlue, have also used the platform to expand their offerings to mobile devices across several platforms.

The Next Steps

Appcelerator’s Scott Schwarzhoff told ReadWriteWeb that the company plans to begin bundling additional packaged features into its SDK that aren’t natively provided on various mobile platforms. Many app developers want features like barcode scanners or augmented reality functionality, but these features aren’t natively available across all platforms.

Boulder-based image-recognition company Occipital is working on tools like these in the augmented reality space, and recently sold it’s popular barcode scanning iPhone app RedLaser to eBay. Appcelerator says it will be looking to package features like barcodes and AR into its SDK for platform agnostic development.

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