The Seattle-Search.com Blog

Google’s stock will top $900 next year. Online voting won’t happen in our lifetime. And Microsoft Corp. will make a big push into virtualization, possibly buying Citrix.

Those were among the forecasts Tuesday night at the WSA annual predictions dinner as five panelists from the Pacific Northwest technology industry — Matt McIlwain of Madrona Venture Group; Kelly Smith of Curious Office Partners; Jonathan Sposato of Picnik; Enrique Godreau of Voyager Capital; and Steve Lidberg of Pacific Crest Securities — fielded a variety of questions about the future of the industry.

Moderator and P-I columnist, John Cook, has the story.

Costco.com is the newest member of the online billion dollar sales club.

For the year Costco Wholesale Corp. grew its e-commerce sales by about 39% to $1.22 billion compared with web sales of $880 million in fiscal 2006.

At the same time total revenue rose by 7% and same store sales by 6%. The company, No. 21 in the Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide, reported net income of $1.08 billion on revenue of $64.4 billion for the 2007 fiscal year compared with net income of $1.1 billion on sales of $60.1 billion in the prior year. Amazingly, the Web still accounted for only 2% of total sales.

Alaska Air Group will test satellite-based wireless Internet access on an Alaska Airlines jet in hopes of offering inflight Web and e-mail service to attract more customers.

The technology developed by closely held Row 44, based in Westlake Village, California, will be installed on a Boeing Co. 737 early next year, Seattle-based Alaska Air said in a statement today.

Passengers with Wi-Fi-enabled devices will connect to the Internet through wireless hotspots inside the aircraft, linked to a satellite receiver on top of the plane, the company said. Alaska Air, the ninth-largest U.S. carrier, said it’s been working with Row 44 on the system for two years.

American Airlines and Virgin America are working with closely held AirCell to develop air-to-ground broadband Internet service.

JetBlue Airways is studying ways to offer inflight e- mail and text-messaging through its LiveTV subsidiary, and Southwest Airlines said it may equip planes with wireless Internet connections.

Attending the Search Engine Strategies show in San Jose this week along with the annual Google Dance event, it’s easy to see the ascendancy of Search across so many categories.

The Google Dance, Google’s open house and social mixer held on the Google campus in Mountain View features Google product demonstrations, an “Ask the Engineers” breakout session,  and a carnival like atmosphere under the California moonlight that is festooned with multicolored lights and Google T-shirts, plus everything from karaoke contests, billards and beach volleball to stations where you can build your own root beer float.

The date of this year’s Google Dance coincided with Google looking skyward in a stellar direction.  The company announced the debut of Google Sky to allow searchers to peer into the cosmos and study astronomical photos, Google Sky being a supernatural extension of Google Earth.

Meanwhile, on the shores of Lake Washington, Google is breaking ground on a new Googleplex which will surely be the site of a future northwest edition of The Google Dance.  The LakeView Plaza campus is a  three-building, 195,000-square-foot development currently under construction in Kirkland.  You’ll soon be able to spot it on Google Maps, and Google Earth of course, even from millions of miles away in space!

Seattle-headquartered EarthClassMail, the postal mail digitizer that converts your paper mail into scanned images delivered to your email account (making it the ultimate PO box replacement for anyone who wants to exchange trips to the letterbox, eliminate junk mail from their lives) has officially changed its Web domain from RemoteControlMail.com to EarthClassMail.com.

The new online home for Earth Class Mail is http://www.earthclassmail.com

Trusted by thousands of subscribers in 80+ countries, Earth Class Mail services work for personal mail use, business mail use as well as enterprise mail receiving and forwarding.

Melodeo Inc. has gone nuTsie, with a new mobile music service that allows consumers to get their entire iTunes library on their mobile phone.  The nuTsie free public beta (available immediately at www.nuTsie.com), allows anyone to easily shuffle through all of their iTunes music and playlists in hi-fi quality on their mobile phone or on the Web.nuTsie allows users to access all of their favorite iTunes music on a wide variety of today’s most popular phone models, with no expensive device upgrade required.  nuTsie is built on Melodeo’s proven high-quality, low-bandwidth mobile streaming technology, which means consumers never have to hassle with synching their phone to a computer, downloading music or dealing with limited storage capacity on their phone.

“nuTsie is part of the next generation of music services that will make listening to the stuff you like fun and easy while also taking care of the artists, labels and music publishers,” said Dave Dederer, Vice President of Music Content at Melodeo and a founding member of the GRAMMY-nominated, multi-platinum rock band The Presidents of the United States of America. “nuTsie represents the first mobile music service where everybody wins.” 

From YouTube to Yahoo!, iFilm to vSocial, Father’s Day 2007 is about to be televised. This Father’s Day, Web video-sharing has captured the world’s attention and imagination like never before.For what could be considered to be the Web’s first video-enhanced Father’s Day, Seattle Internet company Efinancial.com has posted a moving tribute to fathers and daughters everywhere. The online music video, starring award-winning R&B recording artist E. Walter Smith and American Idol contestant and StarSeach teen singing sensation, Tatiana McConnico, is being viewed and voted on by Web watchers worldwide on YouTube, Google Video, Yahoo! Video, Metacafe, iFilm, Revver, Vimeo, Vsocial and Glumbert, making Dad’s Day a truly multimedia affair.

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Avvo, the new national online rating service for attorneys, opened its doors last week, not with a beta but with a bang. Founder Mark Britton, a former Expedia EVP, was in Italy when he conceived the idea for an attorney referral service and named it for the Italian word for attorneys, Avvocato. His Expedia colleague, Rich Barton, was also in Italy at the same time where he was conjuring the concept for another Seattle-based rating service, that one called Zillow.

If enough lawyers feel slighted by lackluster ratings, Avvo could feel the slings of its targeted audience, as individuals or as a class, for defamation or worse. Perhaps Britton should have started with chiropractors or podiatrists as a group, before ranking and rankling lawyers.