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In the closing keynote of the DLD Conference in Germany, soon to be former Google CEO Eric Schmidt took the stage, notably less than a week after passing on the reins of the company to Google co-founder Larry Page.

These are my live notes from the keynote:

Thank you for inviting me. I wanted to take a moment to praise mr. Burda for what you have accomplished in general, and with this event. I don’t know of a more better-done invitation-only event on the globe, so my congratulations to you.

I hope you do this for many years to come.

I have a lot of things I wanted to talk about. Important announcement for starters: we had a good year and very strong last quarter.

Our businesses are doing very well around the globe, and as a result I’m happy to announce we’ll be adding 1,000 new employees in Europe and make some significant investments.

Hundreds of these people will be located right here in our technology center in Munich.

So, I think my next decade at Google will be even more interesting than the first. Technology will finally start doing what we want, instead of us telling technology what we want it to do.

(He’s giving some examples of innovation in computing)

Three things I want to highlight. In the area of mobile, the smartphone is the device of our time. In all forms, so including tablets, there are examples abound. If you have a child, you’ll notice they’ll have two states: asleep or online.

In two years, smartphone sales will surpass PC sales, and the growth factor is increasing. Mobile is growing 8 times faster than the equivalent of the PC at its time. We see it in our data at Google, and I’m sure you can see it too.

The majority of people will soon go online from their phones more than from their computers. Landlines will disappear.

If you think you like your mobile phone, image if you’ve never had any computing device and a solid smartphone is your first. That’s transformative, a mobile revolution.

That’s where my ‘mobile first’ motto comes from.

Another trend I want to highlight: I would argue that devices that are not connected to the Internet are no longer interesting. Take every single device you know that has a CPU, and start thinking what will happen if it can connect to your WiFi network.

The networks, by the way, are seeing their own evolution – look at LTE networks that are forthcoming. It’s an order of magnitude of improvement, and it will be global, even amazingly in the United States.

Interestingly, Germany is the leader in LTE deployment in Europe. One of the interesting estimates is that there are about 35 billion devices connected to the Internet. Soon, there will be so many that we’ll stop counting. We need to give credit to the backend part of the equation.

Typical example: we have this voice translation feature, real-time translation from one language to another using nothing but voice. It’s magic, but at the same time it isn’t, so we look at ‘how did this happen’?

In the backend of that service, there are thousands of servers, which by the way you don’t have to pay for. We need to talk about that at some point.

But to me, this changes the game. How many wars have started because of miscommunication? Now we can try and solve that.

You can do other things with your phone, but we must always remember that there’s a lot of infrastructure and things going on in the background.

Now, of course, we can digitize everything. If you think about it, computers can give you digital senses you didn’t even know about. Think of it as augmented humanity, computers actually making us better humans.

Take location-aware apps. For example when you’re walking on a street and your phone can tell you that you need something from a store that you’re walking by. That’s the future.

What drives us at Google? We basically want to give you your time back, make things faster, speed up search and especially more personal. But always with your permission, I have to stress. You decide where the boundary lies.

So imagine your phone knowing you really well, your likes and dislikes – the perfect walking companion.

(Schmidt mentions the huge growth of Android and Chrome, which I’m leaving out)

The Internet is the greatest disruptor of all times. It has replaced the economics of scarcity with economics of abundance. You’re everywhere all the time. It’s going through industry after industry after industry. You can now literally reach a billion people online, every day – who would have imagined?

It’s also terrifying, because it has a lot to do with information, and information is still power. I don’t know how society will work out conflicts on a variety of levels, but I do know people care a lot about it.

I don’t think society has fundamentally figured out how to deal with this abundance of connectivity, but it’s something I think needs to be figured out soon.

We’re just at the beginning. Which I think is why you need to keep doing this conference, by the way.

I’m a computer scientist, so I think computer sciences can solve a lot of problems – I may be a little biased.

Imagine a near future where you never forget anything, because computers, with your permission, remember everything. I used to love getting lost, wandering about without knowing where the hell I was. It’s terrible, you can’t get lost anymore.

You know your position to the foot, and by the way, so do your friends. With your permission. Computers can predict whether you’re meeting your friends as you’re walking towards their house, for example. With your permission again.

I’ve been surprised how much we can know about the earth thanks to Google Earth. We have the ability to know everything that goes on, anywhere, at all times. We know climate change is real, and we need fact-based discussions about it ,and technology helps us do that.

At Google, we’ll help you sort things out.

You never travel alone anymore, your friends are always with you. You’re never bored again, you ‘waste your time’ going online instead of watching television.

You’re never out of ideas.

And what is it about this car thing? Don’t you think computers should be driving cars? We’re doing some things at Google to experiment with self-driving cars, which I think is very exciting.

So never lonely, never bored, all the world’s information at your fingertips.

And importantly, not just for the elite. Historically, information has always been reserved for the elite, for various reasons. Our vision is that information will be accessible to every single people on the planet, and we’ll help sort it.

And it will not just be in the Western world. There are about a billion smartphones in the world, and in emerging markets the growth rate is much faster.

Our next achievement is bringing people in emerging markets into ‘our’ world.

I would argue that the future of all of us should be organized around a future of trying to do good. It’s pretty clear to me this is going to happen. This is a future that gives people time back to do things that really matter.

At up to £725 to get into a final, the entry fees will be too steep for the average punter

Taxpayers have stumped up billions to build the Olympic venues in London, yet with ticket prices of up to £725 for track and field finals, many will feel that only freebie-grabbing politicians and corporate hospitality guests will see the benefit. But are the London 2012 prices significantly higher than those charged at previous Olympics?

Compared to the Beijing Olympics in 2008, prices are certainly steep. Tickets for athletics finals in Beijing started from 200 yuan (£5.80), around a tenth of the minimum price demanded for London. But organisers say that given the much lower local incomes in China compared to the UK, it is fairer to compare prices to the earlier games in Athens 2004 and Sydney 2000.

But the figures suggest that even on this basis, London 2012 is very pricey. Athletics finals in Athens 2004 were a maximum of £255. Organisers have divided the athletics finals into two brackets – “finals” and “super finals” – with the latter covering the premium events such as the men’s 100m final. The cheapest price for a ticket at a “super final” will be £50, but then it rises rapidly through the various seating brackets.

The best bargain for London 2012 is the opening ceremony tickets at £20.12, although quite how many will be made available at that price has not been revealed. In Athens and Sydney, minimum prices for the opening ceremony were much higher. But the best seats will cost more than £2,000 – four times the price in China and double any previous Olympic opening ceremony price.

A games spokesman said: “We finalised our pricing having gone through a careful process of benchmarking and analysis of previous games, other UK events and sporting events, as well as undertaking research. The desire has always been to balance our budget, but also to ensure that as many tickets as possible are priced in an accessible way and giving us full venues.”

If you see the Olympics as a big yawn, yet live not too far from the action, then you should consider renting your property out. Tim Boughton of rental agency HomeAway Holiday-Rentals (holiday-rentals.co.uk) says homeowners could pick up as much as £2,000 a week.

“If the rental price rises seen in the South African World Cup are repeated, homeowners could generate an average of £4,500 by renting their houses during the 16-day event – an average of £2,000 per week,” he says. “Even at this increased rate, holiday home rentals still often work out cheaper than similar standard hotels, making them an attractive option.” But listing your home on the site costs £239 and any income from rents will be liable for tax.

Even the long fawning UK press is now saying what any startup who has tangled with the music industry has said all along: Spotify will not be able to launch its free any-song-you-want-to-hear-the-second-you-want-to-hear-it service in the US. The Telegraph is reporting that at the last minute the labels demanded too much upfront cash, killing a hard negotiated potential deal.

This is sad, but not a surprise. Despite all the reasons consumers would love it and labels should be empowering a rival for iTunes, the labels are in defensive mode and have never been rational when it comes to these things. My issues with how Spotify has handled this aside, I actually didn’t want to be right on this one. It’s a sad day for users.

But this will be the interesting thing to watch: Does Spotify just roll these we’re-definitely-launching-in-the-US assurances forward to 2011, the way the company has the last two years or does it pivot, and focus on building a profitable site for Europe and other less guarded pockets of the emerging world? In the Telegraph link above an unnamed source says the year of brutal negotiations has forced Spotify to “stop and think about whether it can afford the move to the US and indeed whether it is worth it,” while the article quotes a Spotify spokesman as saying the negotiations are “on-going.” Oh, Spotify.

Here’s my advice: Pivot. Spotify has spent two years, and undoubtedly plenty of money and focus, fighting what was always a Don Quixote like battle to make the US labels listen to reason. This is the same industry who sued their users. It was a valiant effort, but it didn’t work. We can argue why they should back Spotify all day long, but the last two years has proven that they are just not going to listen without Spotify having to make some major concessions.

I think Spotify should walk instead of making those concessions. No matter how hot of a startup you are, money and time are exhaustible commodities. Spotify should start directing them at challenges elsewhere until there is enough of a sea-change in the US music market that labels see reason. Giving into the labels’ demands isn’t the answer. Instead, Spotify should retreat, build in other countries, perfect its model, get to profitability, and then come back to this market when the labels are weaker and Spotify is stronger, boldly proving cynics like me flat wrong. Use your international headquarters as an advantage, not a liability.

Spotify board member Klaus Hommels told me in an interview late last year that he believed Spotify may be the venture industry’s last-ditch effort to build an online music company. (Other than Pandora, of course, the online music company with nine-lives that finally won the right to exist.) He told the labels in negotiations that if they opted instead to drain Spotify’s venture cash and leave it for dead the way they have to so many others, they may never get another hot upstart to back. And that would resign them to an Apple dominated world.

He may be right. So why not play the long game, instead of the short one?

(Note: Don’t worry, I’ve put two dollars in the TechCrunch Pivot/Swear Jar.)

So this service Quora, it’s getting pretty hot. But up until now, we’ve only be able to guestimate how hot it actually is. But today they’ve finally shared some actual information — on Quora, naturally.

Specifically, Quora engineer Albert Sheu has put up a long answer to the question: Why did the Quora website get so slow at the end of December 2010? The reason Sheu gives includes a brief explanation of how the service works. When someone adds an answer or updates one, everyone else on that page sees the new information in realtime. That’s obviously not easy to scale, and Sheu says they’ve never tested it beyond 2 to 3 times their normal load. That was an issue at the end of December because they started seeing spikes of 5 to 10 times their normal activity.

Why was that? Sheu credits a few things, namely, us:

On December 28th, we saw between 5-10 times more activity on the site than usual. A number of blog posts, including ones on TechCrunch, Scobleizer, CNN, and others fed a huge number of new users to the site. Later in the day, “Quora” hit the San Francisco trending topics list on Twitter, pushing our system beyond its ability.

Sheu credits Amazon’s EC2 system with allowing the service to get back up to speed relatively quickly. But the fact of the matter was that they simply weren’t really prepared for such a spike. And given how big it was, that seems understandable. Further, Sheu writes, “We take site downtime very seriously here, and so we did an extensive post-mortem of our site scalability during peak usage, and while usage was lower over the New Year’s, we upgraded and migrated almost all of our servers, removed a lot of inefficient code, and distributed some of our previously non-distributed systems.”

And it’s a good thing they did that, because this week, just one week later, the service has seen even bigger growth. Look at the two graphs below that Sheu has shared. The first one represents the late December explosion in signups. The second one is the explosion this week. As you can see, the giant growth from the December week has been far eclipsed by the growth this week. In fact, he says the signup surge this week has been twice as big as it was in the late December period.

“This round however, we were much, much better prepared for the increased load. While a few of our services still saw delays, for example with email deliverability and picture uploads, our main web servers stayed up all through Monday and Tuesday,” Sheu notes, thanking the engineers that helped keep things up.

It seems as if most Quora users had seen the massive influx of new friend requests on the service in the past week or so — now you know why. I wondered if it was something Quora changed with regard to autofollowing, so I asked the company. “Nope, we haven’t changed anything recently. There has been a lot of activity and growth the last week especially,” co-founder Charlie Cheever told us last night. Sheu’s data clearly confirms that. And he seems like a good resource to have for scaling — he’s previously worked at both Twitter and Facebook.

So we’re sorry Quora for contributing to the problem. But it sure is a nice one to have.

This past December, I used Airbnb for the first time. After two years worth of buzz reading about the startup on TechCrunch and other places, I was interested, but skeptical. Turns out, it is just as awesome as it sounds. You can get a room, in various places around the world, in great neighborhoods, for bargain prices. And apparently I wasn’t alone in using the service in 2010. They saw nearly 800 percent growth for the year, co-founder Brian Chesky tells us.

More specifically, they went from about 100,000 nights book in January, to just about 800,000 nights book by the end of the year. “Travelers came from over 160 countries, and booked places in 89 different countries. We expect to hit 1 million nights booked sometime this spring,” Chesky says.

To make sure that happens, Airbnb continues to expand their coverage around the world. Chesky lists Hawaii, Sydney, Tokyo, Lake Tahoe, and Austin as places that have gotten recent traction.

They’ve also created a slick new video to explain exactly what Airbnb is to those, who like me previously, might be skeptical. Chesky says it was filmed at 13 different actual Airbnb locations around the world. It’s nearly as nice-looking as their iPhone app.

Around 2006 there was a sudden increase in so-called “partial liquidations,” where entrepreneurs could take some money off the table during a mid-stage funding round. Considered unheard of at the time, now they’re the norm for companies doing well.

Then in 2009, we saw the rise of secondary markets, which allowed early stage investors and employees to take some money off the table at more frequent intervals. That’s still controversial in some quarters, but becoming the norm for hot companies– and at huge sums.

And now, Dow Jones VentureSource has been tracking a new trend in the same vein: An increase in private equity money not just cashing out some founder or early investor shares, but buying the whole company as a way for everyone to exit and still keep the company private. In 2010, there were 23 buyouts of venture-backed companies by private equity firms totaling $1.9 billion. That’s a small percentage of the overall liquidity last year, but more than half of the $3.4 billion brought in by IPOs. And like IPOs, these buyouts usually represent larger exits than corporate acquisitions.

These three trends–partial liquidations, secondary trades and private buyouts– are all intermingled and all symptoms of the same problem: Most startups hate the idea of being a public company. In most cases, this urge to find liquidity elsewhere has nothing to do with Wall Street demand for growing companies; it has to do with companies and founders not wanting to file. That’s a massive cultural shift from the ecosystem on which the Valley and the Internet was built. It also is emblematic of the strong divergence between short-term flips for the singles, increasingly long-term investment horizons for the homeruns and the relative lack of doubles and triples in the middle that we wrote about yesterday.

Interestingly, this buyout trend isn’t just because IPOs have been out of favor for the last few years. In a poll, more than 50% of VCs told Dow Jones VentureSource that they expected private buyouts to increase as a viable exit strategy in 2011 even as the number of big IPOs increase. In many cases, the buyout is a just step to an eventual IPO, in others it may be the final destination.

This is strange, because buyout firms and venture capital shops used to be the polar opposites of the private equity world. One was known for taking has-been public companies and helping streamline and relaunch them anew inspiring books like Barbarians at the Gate, and the other was known for creating huge, new companies from nothing but an idea inspiring books like The New, New Thing. Few people saw a trend of one cashing the other out coming.

Jessica Canning, research director for Dow Jones VentureSource, joined us via Skype to talk about the trend, whether it’s a good or bad thing for venture returns over time, and who is most likely to write the biggest checks as the trend continues.

Half of all those online have visited the social networking site. Soon it may become synonymous with the web itself

Mark Zuckerberg faced a make-or-break year in 2010. From its first incarnation in 2004, Facebook had expanded effortlessly to a point where nearly half of the global online audience had visited the site but it was beginning to face a backlash from tech geeks, who accused founder Mark Zuckerberg of going too far in declaring the age of privacy over.

Flash forward to the start of 2011 and the outlook could hardly be more different. Bolstered by Facebook hitting the 500 million user milestone in July, a $450m (£290m) backing from Goldman Sachs and immortalised on film in Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Network, Zuckerberg seems more confident, skilled and omnipotent than ever. And Facebook appears to achieved the ultimate coup: threatening to unseat the mighty Google as the superpower of the web.

There are some things money can’t buy and, for Google, they are market-leading social media propositions. Despite its position as a technology superpower and with an estimated $33bn in the bank, it has largely failed to deliver a convincing consumer proposition for social networking.

YouTube, which Google owns, has a vast network that reached 30 million monthly users in Britain alone last October, according to comScore, yet has little coherent, constructive community. Any enthusiasm for Google Buzz evaporated in a cloud of privacy controversy, while its Orkut site may be a Brazilian favourite but has failed to gain ground in Google’s home market.

Google is very far from anything like a crisis but it has been slowly undermined by Facebook’s audacious and rapid development, the realisation of Zuckerberg’s plan to reconfigure the web through social navigation and Facebook’s exploitation of its popularity to recruit some of Google’s hottest talent.

Google has never underestimated Facebook. In 2007 it attempted a major investment in Facebook but was beaten by Microsoft, which took a 1.6% stake for $240m. Facebook’s extraordinary, exponential growth – up to 633 million global users by October, according to comScore – is positioning it as the most powerful site on the web. Already secured as the busiest website in the world, Zuckerberg envisages a future where we will navigate the web through our social graph – our network of friends and contacts – with recommendations rather than searches determining what we buy, watch and discuss.

The statistics, as estimated by comScore, speak for themselves. By October 2010, Facebook had already become the UK’s largest display advertising publisher, showing 24.4bn ad impressions, or five times as many as Microsoft, to about 30 million web users. The number of advertisers tripled in a year. Revenues are estimated at $2bn for 2010, which would mean Facebook has raised revenues faster than Yahoo and almost as fast as Google.

Facebook also had the third highest number of video viewers, behind YouTube and just behind the BBC, with 9.4 million unique users. And 47% of the global online population visited the site in 2009. Facebook’s UK audience hit 31.6 million unique users for October.

“Facebook, along with Google, is now one of the titans of the internet universe,” said Simon Carmichael, of merchant banking firm Torch Partners. “Look at the audience it has and how they monetise that; advertisers are already very keen and they are creating a whole ecosystem around Facebook.”

Peter Thiel, an entrepreneur and hedge fund manager who was an early investor in Facebook, said in September that the company would not go public until 2012 at the earliest. Carmichael agrees. “Facebook doesn’t need to IPO to raise capital as its stock is already very widely spread, and there’s a very lively secondary market for Facebook stock in the US. But it would be good for the tech industry and an IPO at that level would make it easier for $1bn businesses to get out.”

Investors cannot get enough of Facebook on these secondary markets, which allow Facebook shareholders – though not current staff – to cash in on their stock. Trading has surged since November when Accel, one of Facebook’s largest investors, sold 15% of its stake for $517m, valuing the company at $35bn.

Under US law, firms with more than 500 different shareholders must go public but Facebook won an exemption in 2008 by stating that most shares were held by staff. Regulators are looking again at these markets because of the volume of trading. Facebook’s stock is by far the most popular and trades hands at rates valuing it at more than $50bn.

With investors convinced the Facebook phenomenon is only just beginning, how will does the firm plan to it grow? Zuckerberg has said that Facebook is “almost guaranteed” to reach the one billion user mark – and is attacking on every front.

The list of Facebook products introduced in the past 12 months testifies to Facebook’s ambitions to move beyond a simple network of social connections to become the default navigation tool for our online experience. From dominating photos and gaming, as well as expanding its email system, Facebook has now added features designed to add revenue potential to gaming and local commerce, including credits, deals, places, and a Q&A tool.

Juniper’s principal analyst, Windsor Holden, Facebook’s future domination depends on mobile. “Mobile usage is far more engaging because it taps that dead time, like waiting for a train. Previously it was sitting on a desktop – a primary activity – but now it is like snacking.” says augmented reality, where images and information services are overlaid on a phone’s camera, will explode in 2011. “The industry so far has catered for a niche community but there are 100m augmented reality-capable smartphones in use. That could be powerful for Facebook’s advertising as it’s a natural fit for advertisers.”

Facebook faces challenges in reaching one billion users, not least because Europe and North America will soon reach Facebook saturation, and markets such as China and Russia are dominated by domestic rivals. But the developing world is a huge opportunity for Facebook and one it has already begun to address by working with at least 50 local operators to offer Facebook Zero, a pared-down version of the site that users can access for free via mobiles.

Already the web’s biggest photo site, Facebook has disrupted sites such as Photobucket and Yahoo-owned Flickr. Facebook has provided a vast platform that allowed games studios Zynga and Playfish to flourish; Zynga’s revenues alone are estimated at $600m for 2010.

Television is lined up next; Facebook is an important app being built into many internet-connected TVs from Samsung’s Smart TV to Yahoo’s Connected TV that will allow users to Facebook message friends about the shows they are watching together, finally giving TV the potential for targeted advertising.

The volume of information generated by Facebook globally is daunting. In any 20 minutes, Facebook typically sees 1m shared links, 2.7m photos uploaded and 10.2m comments. Facebook also records 7.7m “likes” every 20 minutes, generated not just by users on facebook.com but on more than 2m other sites across the web that have embedded Facebook’s commenting tools.

More than 10,000 sites are adding Facebook’s tools each day, and about a third of users access the site this way at least once a month. Facebook hopes this strategy will make the site ubiquitous by allowing users to take their Facebook identity with them throughout the web.

Until Facebook goes public, its priorities will be growth in users and revenues, which means more of these aggressive plans to expand. Those plans have just been boosted by a fresh investment round. With momentum like that behind Zuckerberg’s plans to dominate the web, it might be easier to ask what isn’t a target for 2011?

“In the next five years almost every major product vertical [specialist industry] is going to get rethought to be social,” Zuckerberg said, revealing his vision to the Web 2.0 Summit in November. “You’re either going to have an incumbent turn their business around, or some creative entrepreneurs with great engineers who are rethinking the product from scratch. Get on the bus.”

This semester, my students at the School of Information at UC-Berkeley researched the VC system from the perspective of company founders. We prepared a detailed survey; randomly selected 500 companies from a venture database; and set out to contact the founders. Thanks to Reid Hoffman, we were able to get premium access to LinkedIn—which was very helpful and provided a wealth of information.  But some of the founders didn’t have LinkedIn accounts, and others didn’t respond to our LinkedIn “inmails”. So I instructed my students to use Google searches to research each founder’s work history, by year, and to track him or her down in that way.

But it turns out that you can’t easily do such searches in Google any more. Google has become a jungle: a tropical paradise for spammers and marketers. Almost every search takes you to websites that want you to click on links that make them money, or to sponsored sites that make Google money. There’s no way to do a meaningful chronological search.

We ended up using instead a web-search tool called Blekko. It’s a new technology and is far from perfect; but it is innovative and fills the vacuum of competition with Google (and Bing).

Blekko was founded in 2007 by Rich Skrenta, Tom Annau, Mike Markson, and a bunch of former Google and Yahoo engineers. Previously, Skrenta had built Topix and what has become Netscape’s Open Directory Project. For Blekko, his team has created a new distributed computing platform to crawl the web and create search indices. Blekko is backed by notable angels, including Ron Conway, Marc Andreessen, Jeff Clavier, and Mike Maples. It has received a total of $24 million in venture funding, including $14M from U.S. Venture Partners and CMEA capital.

In addition to providing regular search capabilities like Google’s, Blekko allows you to define what it calls “slashtags” and filter the information you retrieve according to your own criteria. Slashtags are mostly human-curated sets of websites built around a specific topic, such as health, finance, sports, tech, and colleges.  So if you are looking for information about swine flu, you can add “/health” to your query and search only the top 70 or so relevant health sites rather than tens of thousands spam sites.  Blekko crowdsources the editorial judgment for what should and should not be in a slashtag, as Wikipedia does.  One Blekko user created a slashtag for 2100 college websites.  So anyone can do a targeted search for all the schools offering courses in molecular biology, for example. Most searches are like this—they can be restricted to a few thousand relevant sites. The results become much more relevant and trustworthy when you can filter out all the garbage.

The feature that I’ve found most useful is the ability to order search results.  If you are doing searches by date, as my students were, Blekko allows you to add the slashtag “/date” to the end of your query and retrieve information in a chronological fashion. Google does provide an option to search within a date range, but these are the dates when website was indexed rather than created; which means the results are practically useless. Blekko makes an effort to index the page by the date on which it was actually created (by analyzing other information embedded in its HTML).  So if I want to search for articles that mention my name, I can do a regular search; sort the results chronologically; limit them to tech blog sites or to any blog sites for a particular year; and perhaps find any references related to the subject of economics. Try doing any of this in Google or Bing

The problem is that content on the internet is growing exponentially and the vast majority of this content is spam. This is created by unscrupulous companies that know how to manipulate Google’s page-ranking systems to get their websites listed at the top of your search results. When you visit these sites, they take you to the websites of other companies that want to sell you their goods. (The spammers get paid for every click.) This is exactly what blogger Paul Kedrosky found when trying to buy a dishwasher. He wrote about how he began Googleing for information…and Googleing…and Googleing. He couldn’t make head or tail of the results. Paul concluded that the “the entire web is spam when it comes to major appliance reviews”.

Unfortunately, it isn’t just appliance reviews that are the problem. Almost any popular search term will take you into seedy neighborhoods.

Content creation is big business, and there are big players involved. For example, Associated Content, which produces 10,000 new articles per month, was purchased by Yahoo! for $100 million, in 2010. Demand Media has 8,000 writers who produce 180,000 new articles each month. It generated more than $200 million in revenue in 2009 and planning an initial public offering valued at about $1.5 billion. This content is what ends up as the landfill in the garbage websites that you find all over the web. And these are the first links that show up in your Google search results.

The bottom line is that we’re fighting a losing battle for the web and need alternative ways of finding the information that we need. I hope that Blekko and a new breed of startups fill this void: that they do to Google what Google did to the web in the late 90’s—clean up the spam and clutter.

Editor’s note: Vivek Wadhwa is an entrepreneur turned academic. He is a Visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School and Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University. You can follow him on Twitter at @vwadhwa and find his research at www.wadhwa.com.

My advice for the new year: go East and South, young man and woman … and investor. America, Europe, and Japan are stagnant and ponderous. More and more, in the coming years, the real moving and shaking will happen elsewhere.

“2011 will be the year Android explodes!” cried a recent headline, citing a new Broadcom chipset that will reportedly make sub-$100 unsubsidized smartphones ubiquitous. Maybe so, but I second MG’s skepticism: North American carriers will fight this tooth and nail, and even when they lose, we’ll still have to wait for the three-year contracts that are status quo here to finally die. If that chipset is real, though, the headline’s not wrong; Android will explode … in the developing world, where virtually all phone service is pre-paid. (As, ahem, I predicted 20 months ago.)

There’s a larger trend here. Mobile phones and 3G service became ubiquitous in Africa so rapidly in part because they never had to compete with landlines. Kenyans flocked to mobile-phone money transfer services, because they had no consumer banks: now M-Pesa, the largest, handles money equal to a mindboggling 10% of Kenya’s GDP every year. (The US equivalent would be $1.4 trillion/year. By contrast, PayPal handles less than $100 billion/year worldwide, of which mobile-phone payments are but a small fraction.) Now much of Kenya is quickly adopting distributed, flexible, resilient solar power, largely because their monolithic, sclerotic, vulnerable grid doesn’t reach much of the country.

As the poor world grows richer, we can expect more of the same: unencumbered by entrenched customs, regulations, special interests and legacy infrastructure, they’ll make the most of new technologies far faster than us laggards in the West. Why does cable TV still exist, in this BitTorrent era? Because the cable companies are like tapeworms in our economies’ guts, sucking life from their hosts as they die with agonizing slowness. Why are universal electronic health records so hard to implement? Because the multi-trillion-dollar health industry is set firmly in its antediluvian ways and has no incentive to change. But these parasites and foot-draggers are far less established in the developing world, and that’s why the future will increasingly happen there, not here.

This doesn’t mean they’ll be better off – we’ll be vastly wealthier for some decades yet – but they’re using their blank-slate advantage to evolve far faster. if you want to see the world’s real hothouse of change, or build a business that can change the lives of (or make money from) many tens of millions in the space of a few years, get ahead of the curve and aim at the 70% of humanity who live in Asia, where they already get new smartphones first, or Africa, which despite its Dark Continent reputation is rapidly growing wealthier.

“May you live in interesting times,” says the alleged ancient Chinese curse. If only. Here in the First World we’re increasingly trapped in yesterday’s tedium. In the 21st century, it’s the rest of the world who will live on the bleeding edge of the future.