Credit Suisse has pushed its 12-month price target on Google from $800 to $900, causing the stock to regain some of the 125 bucks it's lost to the market roiling since Google grazed $750 earlier this month. Most of Wall Street believes in its heart that Google will see a dizzying $1,000 but few have written it down. Credit Suisse analyst Heath Terry believes Google will drive out all contenders and effectively own 100% of search, which he describes as a 'natural monopoly,' and that all advertising, including TV, radio and outdoor, will eventually go digital using Google as its 'de facto operating system.' He is figuring on upwards of 35% sales growth over the next five years and at least 30% earnings growth.

According to the Wall Street Journal this morning Google's preparing a service that would let users store on its computers essentially all of the files they might keep on their personal-computer hard drives - such as word-processing documents, digital music, video clips and images. Or, as CBS News says it, 'Google Wants To Be Your Hard Drive.'

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) has just memorialized the Affero GPLv3, a version of the GPL that was created to cover software that runs over a network such as the Internet, which these days would mean, oh, SaaS stuff and Google Apps, Web Services, game servers, web and e-mail servers, that kinda stuff. It's based on the GPLv3 but adds a codicil that lets users who interact with AGPLv3-licensed software over a network get the source code to that program. It's meant to force more software modifications to be shared by removing the protection of the server. The Affero license started outside the Free Software Foundation - the operation behind the GPL - but it concert with it because the GPL hadn't anticipated protecting works accessed over the Internet. The FSF now maintains the Affero license and published two drafts of AGPLv3 this summer seeking feedback.

Reminding people of how its backing was the making of Linux, IBM, to no one's surprise, has thrown its support behind cloud computing, that delicious nexus of every chi-chi buzzword technology currently in vogue: Web 2.0, rich Internet applications, software-as-a-service, SOA, grid computing, Web Services, virtualization and utility computing. IBM calls its initiative Blue Cloud - like it could have another name - and claims it's a 'game-changing model for Internet-scale computing,' providing customer with just the right size computer power while at one and the same time being 'green' as well as 'self-healing and self-managing' based on open standards and Linux. Lordy, if this thing was a cute guy with money, it would be every mother's dream.

Keynote Competitive Research announced Europe's first performance index for the mobile Web. The Keynote Europe Mobile Index is a weekly performance ranking of 10 popular European mobile sites compiled from more than 26,000 measurements taken on multiple carriers from different geographical locations. Keynote recently announced a U.S. mobile index. The Keynote Europe Mobile Index provides insight into the overall performance and availability of popular mobile sites and can be used by customers to benchmark their mobile site performance against the biggest names in the industry.

Looks like Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz should have waited for his boys to give Google's Android spec the once over before endorsing the thing last week expecting Java to get a 'massive endorsement' out of it. Oh, Java gets a 'massive endorsement' all right; it's just not standard off-the-shelf Java. Android calls for a special Google Java that now has Sun folk nibbling their fingernails and worrying out loud to the press about 'write once, run anywhere' Java ME/MIDP fragmenting.

Google, as promised, put the Android SDK out in early access - along with a $10 million pot for the best apps written for its open Android mobile platform by third-party developers. It said the platform would be open and it's going about proving it. It also needs the buzz - and a killer mobile app - for Android to hit a homerun. The first $5 million will be paid out in $25,000 prizes for the continued development of the 50 most promising entries submitted between January 2 and March 3 2008 to the Android Developer Challenge I.

After Google's Android announcement, at least four big guys should be irritated: Sun Microsystems, Apple, Adobe and Microsoft.Google approaches telephony from the open source side - Linux-based platform, uses Java but does not care about sticking to Java ME - they are planning to use fast OpenGL libraries and are not afraid to be hardware-specific.

I asked what she did for a living. She said she was a software engineer working with SOA. I did not think about my plane ride much until I arrived in San Francisco to attend the SOA World Conference & Expo this past Monday and Tuesday. The first day of the conference as I walked into the hotel, guess who I saw? My friend who I met on the Turkish Airlines flight from Istanbul. What a small world, isn't it? Her company was one of the sponsors of the event.

The Android Developer Challenge will provide $10 million to developers who build mobile applications for Android, a complete, open, and free mobile platform. The Challenge is designed to support the developer community and spark innovation on the Android platform by awarding cash prizes ranging from $25,000 to $275,000 to developers whose applications are picked by a panel of judges.

The three-year-old Dojo Foundation has put out version 1.0 of Dojo, an open source JavaScript toolkit for AJAX development meant for building rich Web 2.0 applications without proprietary plug-ins or single-vendor solutions. The widgetry makes use of Google Gears, Google's solution for making applications work both on- and offline. What Dojo calls Dojo Offline is based on it. The toolkit is all of 25K in size and supports progressive enhancement and animations and is supposed to open the door to a wealth of high-quality widgets and extension modules. Dojo also supports the Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer and Opera browsers and the OpenAjax Alliance Hub 1.0 to guarantee interoperability with other toolkits IBM, Sun, BEA and AOL are Dojo backers.

Open source provides an incredible amount of technical leverage for small companies. No matter who productive your rock-star programmers are and no matter how much judo you apply to your problems, solid infrastructure takes a long time and benefits immensely from broad involvement. It really does take a village to raise great infrastructure. The Ruby on Rails framework of today is a lot more productive than the one I was using before it was open sourced. I use features every day created by others, enjoy polish done by others, evade bugs caught by others. All work I would otherwise have to do myself. So I simply get more done for less effort than it would otherwise have taken. The same holds true for the other open source projects that have been cultivated in 37signals, like Prototype and Capistrano.

To take advantage of the OpenSocial implementation in Orkut sandbox, you have to create a Google Gadget with the OpenSocial feature, post the gadget on the Internet, and then add the URL of the gadget as an application. As I looked into the Google gadget API to build this, I found something interesting, the Google Gadget framework exposes the function _IG_FetchContent() that can be used to asynchronously fetch the text at any URL.

Less than 24 hours after the launch of OpenSocial, not only was it running live in Plaxo, but there were already several first-class gadgets from top developers like RockYou and Slide. 'This is just the beginning - there's so much more to do to truly open up the social web,' wrote Plaxo's Joseph Smarr, in his personal blog on web development, tech, and life.

So what kind of real social networking applications would Silverlight enable? Would it be network visualization or media playback or mash-ups? Google with its Orkut online community (a closed-source ASP.Net application) created an API for social applications so that developers can build applications that can then run inside other social networking applications. They then opened up the specification for that API to other social networking applications so that all other social networking sites can (if they want to) make their sites containers for third-party applications. So I started playing with it.

One of the Google folks working on OpenSocial sent me a message via Facebook asking what I thought about the technical details of the recent announcements. Since my day job is working on social networking platforms for Web properties at Microsoft and I'm deeply interested in RESTful protocols, this is something I definitely have some thoughts about. Below is what started off as a private message but ended up being long enough to be its own article.

There are 50 million Facebook users who don't know what OpenSocial APIs are...and don't care. There are about 5,000 tech bloggers and developers who think it is a revolution that will 'Checkmate' Facebook and leave them with no moves. TechMeme has over 100 stories saying that OpenSocial is awesome and Facebook is dead. MySpace joins Google on OpenSocial initiative. OK, surely that settles it, Facebook is toast. Nope, not in my opinion.

A broad alliance of leading technology and wireless companies today joined forces to announce the development of Android, calling it 'the first truly open and comprehensive platform for mobile devices.' Google, T-Mobile, HTC, Qualcomm, Motorola and others have collaborated on the development of Android through the Open Handset Alliance, a multinational alliance of technology and mobile industry leaders.

In a move likely to be hailed as the final blow for the walled gardens favored till now by the wireless operators, Google is leveraging Linux and Java to open up the wireless handset market in the same way that it just launched OpenSocial to break open social networking and get beyond the walled garden approach of, for example, Facebook.

We already brought word last week of Marc Andreeseen's detailed overview of OpenSocial, but what of other leading participants in the introduction of common APIs to the world of social networking? Here is a round-up of what is being written, thought, and said about OpenSocial by those most closely involved either as innovators or users.

Google saw a problem with the way social networks were going, according to Joe Kraus, Director of Product Management, and OpenSocial was its way of overcoming it. Till now, to get an application to run on all the diferent social networks a developer had to customize their application for each one. 'When your 'development team' is just one or two people,' notes Kraus, 'the proliferation of APIs forces you to make tough choices, because you can't do that much one-off work.'

OpenSocial, the industry-backed application programming interface (API) developed by Google to promote interoperability and shared data across all online social networks, is gaining momentum at a rapid pace. The sites that have already committed to supporting OpenSocial - Bebo, Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, mixi, MySpace, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo, and XING - represent an audience of about 200 million users globally.

In a move to bolster its attempt to add a social layer on top of the entire suite of Google services, Google yesterday joined other leading social networking players in introducing a common set of standards to allow software developers to write cross-network programs. According to The New York Times the sites in the OpenSocial alliance 'have a combined 100 million users, more than double the size of Facebook.'

Google, whose shares hit a record of $641.41 a week ago, reported that sales in its third quarter had surged by 57% compared with the period a year ago, and net income by 46%. 'We are very pleased with the impressive growth we experienced across our business,' said CEO Eric Schmidt, who also told analysts, drily: 'It is obvious to us that our model continues to work very well.'

Larry Page and Sergey Brin registered the google.com domain in 1997, and Google was officially launched one year later, making Google 9 this year. Google's birthday has alweays been celebrated on September 27th with a doodle displayed on the homepage, and today is no exception.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin registered the google.com domain in 1997, and Google was officially launched one year later, making Google 9 this year. Google's birthday has alweays been celebrated on September 27th with a doodle displayed on the homepage, and today is no exception.

Google Gears specifically allows AJAX web apps to run offline without a net connection. An open source runtime, it allows you to build offline Web applications, so presumably the bright folks at the Googleplex are keen to eat in their own kitchen.

September 13 being Roald Dahl's birthday (he was born September 13, 1916), Google is celebrating today with a special celebration logo on the Google search page featuring items and characters from Dahl's world famous children's books.

Many companies, including IBM, are beginning to find enterprise uses for Web-based Google Gadgets, including intranets, extranets and Internet applications. This talk gives an update on this fast-moving world, and the surprising ways people are taking advantage of this technology. Adam Sah is the architect of Google Gadgets and the Gadget Content Directory. Prior to Google, he was a founding engineer at several startups, among them Inktomi and Sensage, where he is a member of the board. He holds several patents in databases and Web systems.

The architect of Google Gadgets and the Gadget Content Directory, serial entrepreneur Adam Sah, will give a session at AJAXWorld 2007 (East) in New York City on 'Google Gadgets and Componentized Websites.' AJAXWorld 2007 East is taking place at The Roosevelt Hotel in midtown Manhattan, and 1000+ developers, architects, UI experts, IT managers, VCs, analysts, and interested generalists are expected to attend what will be the biggest east coast conference ever devoted to AJAX, RIAs, and Web 2.0 issues.

The year 2006 in which YouTube became culturally ubiquitous, Flash video became the de facto Internet video standard of the Web, Microsoft beta-launched Vista, and the Wii entered our lives - was also memorable for one or two other real-world events such as the hanging of Saddam Hussein, prompting the obvious question: Is the progress of i-Technology front-runners like Google and eBay more, or less, important than the trial and execution of Saddam.

In a not very innovative move Google is going to try to copy Wikipedia's shtick with a soup-to-nuts, online, user-generated encyclopedia of all human knowledge dubbed Knol that's currently being beta tested by a reportedly small group of invitees. Contributors, who are supposed to sign their pieces, not be anonymous like Wikipedia - a good thing - will be able to monetize their individually written, Creative Commons-licensed articles with ads, sharing the revenues with Google. Google will provide the tools and rank entries. Fact checking will supposedly be left to the readers - (who will go to the library and look things up in a book?). Wikipedia currently has 8.2 million articles written in 200 languages. Tit for tat, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has been working on a for-profit Wikia search engine due out any minute now.

Six of the Web's brightest and best minds - Google's Adam Bosworth, Laszlo Systems founder David Temkin, coiner of the term 'AJAX' Jesse James Garrett, Paul Rademacher of HousingMaps.com and Google, Web 2.0 Journal editor-in-chief Dion Hinchcliffe and Microsoft MVP Sahil Malik - wrestle with a host of issues in this 'AJAX Power Panel' moderated by SYS-CON Media Group Publisher and Editorial Director, Jeremy Geelan.

Does the arrival of 'Google Apps for your Domain' sound the death-knell for Redmond's world domination? That is the question sweeping the industry this week as the owner of the world's most-used search engine released a set of hosted applications 'for organizations that want to provide high-quality communications tools to their users without the hassle of installing and maintaining software or hardware.'

Yahoo and eBay have announced a multi-year 'strategic partnership' with four major components: search (along with graphical advertising), online payments, a co-branded toolbar, and the emerging 'click-to-call' functionality. The companies said their agreement will be fully up to speed in 2007.