When William Gibson said “The future is here. It’s just not evenly distributed yet“, he could have been talking about how Google is reinventing its search results right now and incidentally altering the likelihood your software company will be found in 2010 Q1 by prospective customers worldwide.

There are three big changes confirmed and now being rolled out:

1. Adding real time search results to your Google results,
2. personalizing those results like never before and
3. giving every Google user a sidebar of options controlling the freshness of their results.

And there’s two other changes – Page Preview in results and the Wonder Wheel (no, I didn’t make this up) – that are not confirmed, but are also getting rolled out piecemeal at least in the United States and are strong bets for next quarter worldwide.

ReadWriteWeb - Web technology blog

Bob Walsh’s new book, “The Web Startup Success Guide” has just been officially launched on Amazon. As promised in my previous post, here is another example of what you’ll find in his book after purchase. It’s a cool interview he made with Marshall Kirkpatrick, Lead Writer at  ReadWriteWeb, who gives advice to tech startups on approaching him with newsworthy information. Hope you’ll find it useful as well, here’s the interview:

Bob: What’s the right way for startups to approach you who want you to write about them? What’s the wrong way?

I’m really excited to bring to your attention the brand new book written by our friend and collaborator, Bob Walsh.  It’s called “The Web Startup Success Guide” and its official launch date is next week, on the 22nd of July, 2009 (you can find it on Amazon). The book promises to be a great resource for startups, the must-read type and I can’t wait to get a copy:). I promise a larger review after I read the whole book, until then, just wanted to share with you a short excerpt about Avangate.

Of course, other eCommerce providers are shortly reviewed in Bob’s book, but Avangate is his “no 1″:D. So here’s the whole description of Avangate in “The Web Startup Success Guide”:

"The Web Startup Success Guide", by Bob Walsh

The first alternative to PayPal I recommend is Avangate (http://www.avangate.com), for two reasons. First, over the years I’ve met and talked with a lot of Avangate’s management and staff at all sorts of startup/microISV conferences and events they sponsor or at which they speak or participate. This is a company that well and truly likes and supports startups.

Second, and more tellingly, when people running startups and microISVs swap recommendations as to who to use for e-commerce at those various conferences or at huge public forums such as Joel on Software Business of Software (http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?biz) or private boards such as that run by the Association of Shareware Professionals (http://www.asp-shareware.org), you find nothing but positive recommendations when it comes to Avangate.

Avangate does more than process payments. From fielding a solid affiliate program to robust sales and lead analytics, software download, and physical fulfillment and registration key delivery, this company can make a lot of your startup’s headaches go away. Of course, more service means you pay for more than bare-bones credit card processing – depending on which services you want, you’ll pay somewhere between 4.9% and 8% per sale.

So here you are, another ordinary day running your microISV. Pretty much like yesterday; not unlike tomorrow.

You’re doing what you’ve done, you’re all nice and cozy in your daily routine. The problem you have is that while you’ve been sleepwalking along, the rest of the world has been very much awake. And unless you wake up and stop drifting you’re going to be like someone falling asleep while driving: fine, until you hit the oncoming truck in the other lane.

Let’s take a little test, shall we? Maybe you don’t need a wake up call and can skip the rest of this post.

There’s two trends – the Cloud and the Crowd – afoot in the software world, and if these trends have gotten buried by all the day to day trivia, let me give you a quick rundown on how they’re changing our industry.

Way back say two years ago, one of the first checks you’d write launching your startup would be to a graphic artist for a couple thousand dollars to execute your new company’s logo. It wouldn’t be cheap, but it would be good and they’d been recommended to you as someone who did good startup logos.

Now what you’d do is spend $39 at 99designs.com to post a design contest for your new company logo for say 1/4 of what you would have paid and let the crowd of 31,000 graphic artists submit designs to you. Then watch as 56, 92 or 124 (actual numbers) designers submit logos for your consideration. Joe the Graphic Artist might be good, but is he better than a hundred other graphic artists?

Right around this time of year, you’re going to start seeing Predictions for 2009. Let me post mine: 2009 is the year you as the CEO of your microISV, startup or ISV get on Twitter.

For those of you who’ve managed to avoid Twitter, or dismissed it as some pointless flakey time waster, here’s a few current facts you should consider:

• Twitter usage is skyrocketing. In October alone, Twitter experienced a 25% climb in traffic, according to comScore, bringing the number of active Twitterers in the U.S. alone to 1.45; worldwide in September it was 5.6 million.
• Twitter has just about retired the “fail whale”. While in the first quarter of 2008 Twitter had more than a few crashes, those issues have been resolved, as this chart from the Royal Pingdom Blog shows:

• Companies – both micro and not – are being wildly successful using Twitter as a way of providing online customer service (read marketing). More about two examples of that next.