Ivey, PayPal founder, got around that problem by using PayPal. Since 1998, PayPal had enabled people to transfer money to each other instantly. For the most part, its powers were confined to eBay, the online auction company that purchased PayPal in 2002. But last summer, PayPal began giving a small group of developers access to its code, allowing them to work with its super-sophisticated transaction framework. Ivey immediately used it to link users’ Twitter accounts to their PayPal accounts, and his new company, Twitpay, took off. Today, the service has almost 15,000 users.

That may not sound like much, but it sends a message: Moving money, once a function managed only by the biggest companies in the world, is now a feature available to any code jockey. Ivey is just one of hundreds of engineers and entrepreneurs who are attacking the payment ecosystem, seeking out ways small and large to tear down the stronghold the banks and credit card companies have built. Square, a new company founded by Twitter cocreator Jack Dorsey, lets anyone accept physical credit card payments through a smartphone or computer by plugging in a free sugar-cube-sized device — no expensive card reader required. A startup called Obopay, which has received funding from Nokia, allows phone owners to transfer money to one another with nothing more than a PIN.

In recent years, many other companies have come up with their own PayPal-like innovations, creative tweaks to further squeeze some margins out of the traditional credit card model. Apple’s iTunes and Research in Motion’s payments program reduce transaction fees by bundling a customer’s purchases before sending them to a credit card company for processing.  Virtual currencies, from Microsoft Points to Linden Dollars, encourage “in-world” trade, incurring credit card and banking fees only when their users buy in. By reducing their exposure to traditional transaction systems, these companies are able to wring extra pennies of profit out of each sale — which can aggregate into millions of dollars, turning their payment platforms into profit generators in their own right.

Will it be interesting if PayPal opened up its code, embraced its developers, and turned its service into a platform? What if PayPal asked its users to create the tools and applications that would make it grow ? It will be amazing , a world where your cash sits on the cloud servers.

In some ways location is already ubiquitous. It’s already built in to most of our favorite applications. When we use Yelp’s mobile app, we can find nearby restaurants. If we share our location with Flixster on our mobile devices, the app shows us movies and theaters that are within a certain radius.

Location is relevant in almost any equation, which means applications, web sites, and services will push to integrate even more location functionality. A Google search for something like “food” already returns local place results based on your IP address. Are we that far off from the same search returning both places as well as real-time tweets from people nearby on food ? The answer to that question is a definite no.

Location privacy is a timely issue here at the dawn of the location-enabled Web: ensuring that location information is subject to neither commercial nor government misuse – but is instead transmitted and accessed in a privacy-protective way – is essential to the long-term success of location-based applications and services. Beyond the risks to individuals’ privacy, the present lack of privacy protection also creates market risks for the very companies seeking to capitalize on location services.

But does location data need to be default private like medical information in order to prevent misuse, and to support an economy of innovation? Some people believe that it is the culture of sharing by default that makes location-based services what they are.

OnLive

OnLive is launching the world’s highest performance Games On Demand service, instantly delivering the latest high-end titles over home broadband Internet to the TV and entry-level PCs and Macintosh® computers. OnLive has secured an undisclosed series C funding from AT&T this year.

Gaikai

Gaikai is a revolutionary new technology that lets you play any game online in your browser. In the age of the cloud, when all your documents, email, photos and videos are instantly reachable online, it seems archaic that you still need to install gigabytes of game files on an expensive PC with an even more expensive video card. And even then you can only play from that specific computer! Gaikai takes a radical new approach – we host the games, we run them, we worry about hardware and software updates, and we stream them to you. Full resolution, full speed, stereo sound, low lag, no compromise. The only thing you need is a browser and an internet connection. Gaikai raised a $5M funding in January 2010.

Otoy

Cloud service that runs in any browser, including Safari for iPhone. OTOY is 100% browser-based, and works is all modern web browsers. All it requires is a broadband connection, and that will give you 720p (HD) graphics, with no plugins and no downloads.

It’s not clear who invented the “spin-in” term, but it has popularized by Cisco. Over the past decade, Cisco has fired up a few spin-ins where employees break off from the company for about two years to run their own venture and then rejoin their mates once Cisco acquires the start-up. It is an interesting concept of rejuvenating the company with old bloods that left the company at good times. At Cisco, the Spin-In was not just a corporate strategy, but an employee career growth strategy, too.

It’s very difficult to make big leaps and moves internally at Cisco or at Google and employees leave, start-up, and ultimately get acquired back so that they can jump up a few notches on the ladder and/or move to entirely different parts of the organization and come back in with a leadership role. Staying inside and accomplishing the same is often really difficult. In that sense, Spin-In is an excellent strategy for a career growth.

If you look at Google’s spin-in pattern, some other ex-Googler web startups that can potentially get acquired by Google include Ooyala, TellApart, Red Beacon, MyLikes, OpTrip, Cuil, imo.im, Chai Labs and Howcast.

What if location-aware advertising is coupled with web’s click-through technology – it is going to be a great consumer centric concept.  For example, when you are at a BMW car shop, you get push advertisement on Audi car mobile coupons which entitle you for a discounted price for Audi.  That marks the dawn of a new advertising concept – a less annoying location based Push advertising driven from a mobile application -  that can be turned on/off.

I call this type of click-through advertising as Physical Click-through. It is a well-balanced model – one that’s an attractive proposition to advertisers and adds value for the consumer by delivering ads that are relevant without being intrusive.

Technologists at corporations are not paid to take risks, but rather to not make mistakes, to make the safe choice.  And guess what, paying Gartner Group for an annual subscription to its content and for access to its analysts helps IT buyers make the safe choice.

So how does a company navigate the Gartner Quadrants?  First, you should read this overview from Gartner to understand how they think and rate vendors.   Secondly, you should contact the relevant analyst to set up a meeting to discuss further.  We must understand that developing a relationship with the analyst is key to helping you improve your standing in the quadrant.  This means buying a subscription to Gartner and then hiring the analyst for some consulting.  If you can have your Gartner analyst take your thoughts as his own then you know you have really done a great job in discussing the market.  What many companies don’t know is that you also have to be proactive about the Magic Quadrant.  As you sign up new customers and partners, share them with Gartner so they can call every new customer and partner in advance.  Many times companies wait until the last second and inundate Gartner analysts with numerous calls and information and many times these analysts cannot process all of that info which means it will have to wait until the next release of the Quadrant.  So all in all, be proactive, don’t be afraid to pay as you may learn something and it is a necessary evil, and build a relationship with your analyst.

A summary of the pricing is below and more details can be found here:

- Compute @ $0.12 / hour
- Storage @ $0.15 / GB stored
- Storage Transactions @ $0.01 / 10K

SQL Azure:

- Web Edition – Up to 1GB relational database @ $9.99
- Business Edition – Up to 10GB relational database @ $99.99

.NET Services:

- Messages @ $0.15/100K message operations, including Service Bus messages and Access Control tokens

Bandwidth across all three services will be charged at $0.10 in / $0.15 out / GB.

The Windows Azure blog details a service-level agreement that covers service uptime, connectivity, and data availability. The Azure SDK can be downloaded here. It remains to be seen how Azure pans out but I am sure it will be a serious cloud player and it is nice to see a little pressure put on Amazon and Google not only in terms of pricing but also for the intellectual ‘one-man upmanship’ this is sure to bring which can only be good for all companies working with cloud.

It is hard not to have been surprised by the rapid rise in recent buzz surrounding the Google Android Smartphone OS. Every mobile manufacturing company wants to build phones that uses Android as OS. With Blackberry and iPhone grabbing more and more customers, the carriers were losing control of the customer UI, which undoubtedly represents power and future monetization opportunities.With Android, carriers could re-claim their customers. Additionally, because Google has created an open source version of Android, carriers believe they have an “out” if they part ways with Google in the future.

Google provides a licensed version of Android OS which gives you ad splits on search if a mobile user search from that phone. That’s right; Google will pay you to use their mobile OS. It’s exactly “less than free” business model. “Less than free” may not stop with the mobile phones; Google has applied the same model to Netbook as well.If Sony or HP or Dell builds a netbook based on Google Chrome OS, they will make money on every search each user initiates. Google will gladly pay the ad splits. This is a business model inversion of epic proportion – from “free” to “I pay you.” It’s really hard to build a compensation package for your sales team on those economics.

“The most successful people are those who are good at plan B.” – James Yorke

2009 was the year that taught me the importance of having a Plan B in career.  A Plan B which can be summarized this way: the best you can make of a worst-case scenario, the deal you cut with a fate you might be unable to avoid. “Plan B” is your back-up plan. It is what you are going to do, in case your first choice for a career path doesn’t work out the way you had expected. Developing a back-up plan is a good way to approach major/career planning – and life in general! It is essential to develop multiple approaches to your future.

I’ll explain what kind of Plan B I’m referring to:

• What is your Plan B if you’d lose your current job tomorrow?
• What is your Plan B if you can no longer continue your career within the same company, the same type of role ?
• What is your Plan B if you were being asked to sell yourself into an entirely different profession?
• What is your Plan B to take on a role at least 3 levels higher?
• What is your Plan B to increase your income with 5, 10 or even 20 times?

A Plan-B job might not be a step down at all and could be more rewarding than the Plan-A job. For many Plan-B jobs, you don’t have to earn an additional degree, or even obtain a certificate, but they do require a re-positioning of your existing skills. The most important thing in a good economy or bad is to keep expanding your skills and knowledge. You don’t need to be a jack of all trades, but if you stay current on what’s going on in your industry and update your skills to what’s needed today, you won’t work yourself out of a job.

I have found my ‘Plan B’ and planned for it in 2009.  What about you ?  If you still haven’t found one, it is high time to think over it.