#crowdcloud

Most companies that aren’t focused on technology are facing a new dilemma: how do we make an app for people’s smart phones? It’s becoming, as time goes on, a key part of most company’s strategies. The amount of people with smart phones is growing fast, and the amount of apps those people download is growing even faster.

So, if you’re wholly unfamiliar with apps and you raise an eyebrow when someone says “iOS,” then maybe white-labeling is the way to go. White-labeling involves working with a developer who customizes their software to work for you. It allows you to have total brand control and ownership over your app. Ideally, it is all easy to use and customize, and working with a flexible provider helps out, too.

One huge benefit of white-labeling is the speed in which it can be implemented. The groundwork is already in place; all you need to do is work with the provider and customize it to your liking. If you work with the right company, it should be a painless and simple process that produces a nice-looking branded app in no time at all.

Before Google ruled the world of search engines, there was quite a bit of competition with AltaVista, Dogpile, Lycos, Infoseek, etc. Now, in this Google-run world, the only other major search engines are heavily backed products, such as Microsoft’s Bing.

However, a challenger to the throne has been gaining steam since its September 2008 launch. DuckDuckGo is a search engine site that gathers information from sources such as Wikipedia. In that basic sense, it’s not terribly different from Google. However, it doesn’t record any user information, which is something that Google does in spades. Using DuckDuckGo, every search result of a phrase is the same; it isn’t tailored to what the search engine thinks you want.

DuckDuckGo offers a focused set of search results, and a variety of useful keywords, such as !bang, which lets you search one of hundreds of websites using DuckDuckGo. There are also a wide variety of other “goodies” to help expedite your searching experience. Those goodies are likely the most confusing thing on the entire site, as the rest of it is a very no-frills presentation.

All of these enhancements and features have been refined (and continue to be refined) into an attractive product that has seen traffic skyrocket, up nearly 300% monthly compared to late 2011. Every day, DuckDuckGo gets close to 1.5 million direct queries. Its rapid expansion still pales in comparison to Google (around 3 billion per day) and Bing (around 50 million per day), but it’s something.

The “slowly but surely gaining more steam” trajectory of DuckDuckGo is reminiscent of another company’s trajectory. This company started up in 1996, trying to build a search engine that made more sense to use, eschewing the idea that searches should be based on repetition of the phrase and putting forth the idea that sites should be ranked for quality of content and relevancy. That company, if you couldn’t guess, is Google, which began with two students making a search engine and ballooned into a multinational company employing more than 30,000 people.

Who knows if DuckDuckGo will ever reach those heights, but big things have small beginnings.

From Stacey Higginbotham @ GigaOM, on CPUsage:

The eight-month-old startup wants to pay folks so it can harness their idle compute time to sell to corporations. CEO and co-founder Jeff Martens estimates an average user donating four hours of compute time every day could score about $10 a month.

I remember discussing a very similar idea to this with Andrew Savory what must have been 11 or 12 years ago now. Like most of my ideas, I did nothing with it. Proof positive that without execution, a good idea is worthless.