That last one made me laugh almost out loud:

Wondering if we'll get numbers soon on how many viewers watched the Super Bowl and simultaneously were on their smartphone or iPad. I know I was one.

I have a growing suspicion that the very savvy Sheryl Sandberg and the exceedingly wise Mark Zuckerberg read my work. From the beginning of this site I have argued that the smartphone is a completely new and transformational shift in personal computing, not a supplement.

The smartphone is the computer. The mobile web is the web.

This portends many changes in how we connect, learn, work, play and empower. It also reveals that what worked, even what worked very well, may not work at all in this new world.

Google Adwords, for example.

As I've documented, long before the bloggers and pundits clued in, wtih such posts as:

• The biggest question facing Google and its future: are mobile ad revenues supplemental?
• How much value does Android contribute to Google ($GOOG)?
• Google to the left of me Facebook to the right here I am stuck with no money again
• How does Facebook make money on mobile?
• No Facebook Phone? Okay, Facebook, show me the money.
• Facebook's future is mobile? Does that mean it's a future with no money?

…and many more...

There is no guarantee that even the sainted search-advertising-content presentation-display advertising model that has made Google one of the richest, most profitable companies in the world can deliver equivalent revenues, even when we have 5 billion smartphone users rather than the paltry 1 billion PC users.

Just late last year, in "Is Android bad for Google?" I stated:

Are we at Peak Google?

Google has spent billions on Android. With their planned purchase of Motorola Mobility, I estimate the costs of Android to Google to be approaching $20 billion.

Where is the return?

While Android quickly became the most popular smartphone platform in the world, thanks to Google's commitment to using its monopoly search profits to buy market share, actual revenues have been minimal.

What if they *always* will be? 

More frightening, for Google and others, but no less unlikely: what if mobile advertising revenues are always minimal *and* are not merely incremental? That is, as hundreds of millions and soon billions of users have smartphones, which we take with us all the time, everywhere, it is reasonable to expect that the smartphone becomes the *primary* platform for advertising. Rather than search for (often static) information on our PCs, at our desks, we instead use our smartphones for real-time, location-aware information that we can take advantage of at that moment at the point of presence. 

In such a world, which I find to be an extremely likely scenario of our very near future, advertising quickly evaporates on the PC and is shifted to the smartphone. Which may mean: Google is screwed. At least, Google as it exists today.

All Google's actions with respect to Android, the mounting costs of Android, their depressing, duplicitous statements re "managed" traffic instead of net neutrality, and their perversion of terms like "open" and "standards" all make sense when you realize that Google views the smartphone as I do. That is, as the future of the web and (nearly) all our web-based activities.

Except, there is simply no guarantee that advertising revenues on the smartphone are incremental. I believe that within only a few short years, smartphone 'search' and advertising will *replace* the bulk of search and advertising generated from the PC.

In Q3 2011, Google's quarterly revenues were nearly $10 billion. When providing its revenue numbers, Google noted that, at that time, (officially sanctioned) Android was already at about 200 million activations and that *annual* "mobile" (not Android) revenues were nearing $2.5 billion.

Facebook, apparently, understands what Google may not. From their S1 filing (via Business Insider):

Growth in use of Facebook through our mobile products, where we do not currently display ads, as a substitute for use on personal computers may negatively affect our revenue and financial results.

Mobile use of Facebook is growing faster than stationary/desktop use. Facebook claims over 400 million active mobile users. These users are spread over multiple platforms, such as iOs and Android, that could -- theoretically -- block or limit Facebook.

Yet the company focuses not on that potentially limiting factor but on monetization of mobile:

Although the substantial majority of our mobile users also access and engage with Facebook on personal computers where we display advertising, our users could decide to increasingly access our products primarily through mobile devices.

We do not currently directly generate any meaningful revenue from the use of Facebook mobile products, and our ability to do so successfully is unproven. Accordingly, if users continue to increasingly access Facebook mobile products as a substitute for access through personal computers, and if we are unable to successfully implement monetization strategies for our mobile users, our revenue and financial results may be negatively affected.

Second to Google, and possibly second to no one, no company knows more about us than Facebook. And no service is more regularly used by more people around the world, across mobile platforms, than Facebook. 

Yet their ability to effectively monetize this information, in a manner that will earn them enough monies to justify their $100 billion valuation, or even a $50 billion valuation, is highly, and now formally, suspect. 

And, no, it is not because they are unable to build an ad platform just like Google's. Remember, Google isn't making money off mobile advertising either. 

The smartphone is not simply destroying old businesses and industries, it is destroying old business models. Google makes a fortune by having what is -- to date -- the world's most profitable business model. 

That is going away.

The entire *mobile advertising* industry is expected to generate about $2.5 billion in revenues this year. This is less than one quarter of Google's Q4 2011 revenues. 

This is not to suggest that the smartphone won't generate unimaginable sums of cash. Rather, despite the 1 billion and soon to be 5 billion smartphones in use -- these sums are likely to come from new sources and new economic models. Why do you think Google is spending tens of billions on Android, Google+, media subscriptions and other services, applications and platforms? 

Because they have no idea.

This is what makes the smartphone wars so fascinating -- and so deadly. This is also why I think Facebook has a legitimate shot of surpassing Google in both revenues and profits this decade. Not simply because lucrative PC-based/stationary web search is, I believe, not likely to survive this decade. Rather, it's that Facebook's "social platform" has, in my view, a greater potential to offer more valuable information, feedback and services than Google. Plus, unlike Google, Facebook is not wedded to a 20th century business model. 

Whereas nearly all Google's revenues (still) come from advertising, only 85% of Facebook's revenues do. Moreover, this percentage has been dropping each of the past 3 years. 

Additionally, even with Android and Gmail, Google Search and Google Maps and Google+ and GoogleOther, it's very possible, maybe likely, that more people will use Facebook more often than all Google properties combined and also be more *engaged* with Facebook. Already, the company has 845 "monthly active users" including 425 million mobile monthly active users. 

That is power, and power always generates wealth. Will it generate $100 billion of wealth we cannot say, not yet. 

Along with the filing, CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote:

By helping people form these connections, we hope to rewire the way people spread and consume information. We think the world’s information infrastructure should resemble the social graph — a network built from the bottom up or peer-to-peer, rather than the monolithic, top-down structure that has existed to date.

We also believe that giving people control over what they share is a fundamental principle of this rewiring. We have already helped more than 800 million people map out more than 100 billion connections so far, and our goal is to help this rewiring accelerate.

That, dear reader, represents a fundamental remaking not just of the web but of personal connectivity on a hyperglobal scale. Facebook is already well on its way to achieving -- and capitalizing -- on this vision. Yet to date, that capitalization has generated less than $4 billion in revenue. 

What this reveals, then, is that the killer business model of our new social, mobile, always-connected world has not yet been discovered. True, the odds are that the leaders in mobile, those companies with the most aggressive strategies, the most users, the most cash, the best talent, are likely to discover it first and possibly exclusively.

Google and Facebook are the leaders, possibly also Twitter. 

Still, their odds can't be considered great, nor even good. Think of all the portals and search engines that existed prior to Google stumbling upon Adwords, for example. Or how many mobile phones were in use and generating revenues for Nokia, Sony and others when Apple introduced the iPhone. 

Money -- big money -- from the mobile web remains an undiscovered country. Keep searching. 

I've been told that, in America at least, urban gentrification follows a pattern, no matter the city:

1. The artists move in, buying up cheap property and using it as their base studio
2. Next, come the gays -- men -- who seize upon the opportunity to make a particular almost-gentrified area a base of their businesses
3. Hipsters arrive shortly thereafter
4. Followed by the poseurs
5. Now, with a hip, cool, chic thriving urban neighborhood that's getting lots of attention, restaurants crop up, a Starbucks opens, and soccer moms spend their mornings there and suddenly recent college grads take their dates  to this now thriving locale

I don't know. Not sure there's any real data to support this. Seems more like something somebody made up. 

But I do know one thing: they will all leave. Everyone of them.

For a single reason: and it's not because of cost or because once popular the place was no longer cool or because of crime or because they all soon flock to some other new cool spot.

They all leave because the biological (and cultural) imperative takes over and they partner up and have children.

And the thing about having children is, you want the best for them.

And, in America, sending your child to big city "public" schools is a near-criminal dereliction of duty. The violence in the schools, the drop-out rate, the shockingly high illiteracy rate of even high school students, the obvious waste of resources, the patently clear reality that the institution, not the child nor the child's parents have complete say in the direction of the schools and the overall learning environment. 

No parent will willingly subject their child to Big City schools in America.

That's what keeps the suburbs thriving. And it's why the urban planners and supersiliious "progressives" -- who wed themselves to a early 20th century business model of education -- are constantly proven wrong, every time, when they predict the "death of the suburb".

Yes, I fully realize that we are in Decade 2 of the 21st century and still educate our children at large, centralized schools, where they are segegated by age, must sit all day long, are talked to by a "licensed" teacher who is part of a union which has deep, powerful and very profitable ties into government and thus all the monies spent on education flow not to the parent and not to the child but to the "school district".

Yes, I fully realize that more than ever our children need a great education to help them -- and the nation -- prosper. Yes, I realize this is not happening.

Parents, even the artist parents and gay parents and hipster parents do their best: move to the suburbs and hope to afford a home in a neighborhood whose school district is superior. 

Until the destruction of the archaic, patently limiting, 20th century government-union-education complex, there's not much else parents can do.

There is an alternative, of course: homeschooling.

There are issues with homeschooling, however. At least one parent must be home and most parents need to work.

For those that do not need to work, they nonetheless choose to work because the extra money is good and, well, spending hours and hours every single day educating their children and being effectively cut off from adult interaction isn't terribly appealing, quite frankly.

But for a growing number, all the downsides of homeschooling are easily mitigated. And it is these people, I suspect, that will help America fashion a truly great educational system for our new millennia, and restore America's place as the leader in smart, well-educated children. Our tools are personalized, empowering and accessible. Yet, not our schools. Which is a tragic waste.

From Newsweek:

We think of homeschoolers as evangelicals or off-the-gridders who spend a lot of time at kitchen tables in the countryside. And it’s true that most homeschooling parents do so for moral or religious reasons. But education observers believe that is changing. You only have to go to a downtown Starbucks or art museum in the middle of a weekday to see that a once-unconventional choice “has become newly fashionable,” says Mitchell Stevens, a Stanford professor who wrote Kingdom of Children, a history of homeschooling. There are an estimated 300,000 homeschooled children in America’s cities, many of them children of secular, highly educated professionals who always figured they’d send their kids to school—until they came to think, Hey, maybe we could do better.

Many of these parents feel that city schools—or any schools—don’t provide the kind of education they want for their kids. Just as much, though, their choice to homeschool is a more extreme example of a larger modern parenting ethos: that children are individuals, each deserving a uniquely curated upbringing. That peer influence can be noxious. (Bullying is no longer seen as a harmless rite of passage.) That DIY—be it gardening, knitting, or raising chickens—is something educated urbanites should embrace. That we might create a sense of security in our kids by practicing “attachment parenting,” an increasingly popular approach that involves round-the-clock physical contact with children and immediate responses to all their cues.

Typical urban homeschooled kids do tend to find the space they need by the time they reach those teenage years, participating independently in a wealth of activities. That’s just as well for their parents, who by that time can often use a breather. And it has made them more appealing to colleges, which have grown more welcoming as they find that homeschoolers do fine academically. In some ways these students may arrive at college more prepared, as they’ve had practice charting their own intellectual directions, though parents say they sometimes bristle at having to suffer through courses and professors they don’t like.

Power to the people, yo.

Google, along with Twitter, is taking flak for its revised practice of effectively enforcing country-level restrictions on content and access. It begins with their Blogger tool but expect this for everything Google has, does and offers:

At some point “over the coming weeks,” Google’s Blogger will begin redirecting users to country-specific domain names — think Google.fr in France rather than Google.com — to avoid universally removing content that would not be tolerated in specific jurisdictions.

Readers will be redirected to sites with their own country’s domain name when they try to visit blogs recognized as foreign, as determined by their IP addresses.

“Over the coming weeks you might notice that the URL of a blog you’re reading has been redirected to a country-code top level domain, or “ccTLD.” For example, if you’re in Australia and viewing [blogname].blogspot.com, you might be redirected [blogname].blogspot.com.au. A ccTLD, when it appears, corresponds with the country of the reader’s current location.”

Google says migrating users to local domains will help promote the freedom of expression while allowing the flexibility to abide by local law.

Of course, Google wasn't upfront about this change.

Yes, "migrating users to local domains will help promote the freedom of expression" is an offensively insulting utterly duplicitous remark. Which we've all come to expect from Google. Fuck, seems as if Google are incapable of speaking the adult truth to their adult customers, er, users, on any issue; the fuckers.

Still...anger over Google's use of country-level domains to abide by country-level content restrictions -- censorship -- is misplaced, I think.

Google is a giant, for-profit business. There is nothing wrong with that, per se. What? You expect Google to offer services in, Egypt, for example, yet not abide by Egypt's rules?

That's awfully naive on your part, isn't it?

Clever people with empowering tools will find a workaround. Hopefully, such people will likewise find many friends and allies around the world. But at the end of the day, Google will act in its own self-interest, as it *always* has. So will Microsoft, so will Apple, so will General Motors.

A useful analysis of why Facebook's advertising platform can sometimes prove superior to Google's, and why Facebook will not kill Google but will limit Google's potential advertising revenues grab:

For while Google allows you to narrow down the geographic territory in which your ad will appear, Facebook allows you to pick the type of person who will see your ad. And that is why I think of Facebook as the Cable TV of the Internet.

But the magic of Facebook’s targeting doesn’t stop with countries or education.  If I wanted to, I could advertise to all 10,141,480 Facebook users with birthdays that happen in a week or less.

 Think about that.

 And if you really want your head to spin, think about this: according to a friend in retailing, the average Facebook woman updates her relationship status to “Engaged” within two hours of the guy actually proposing…so Facebook sells that relationship status information to retailers who have bridal registries.

 As my pal told me, “We’ve been looking for this for fifty years.”

Facebook is social. Google+ is business. Right now, that means far more money for Google. Say what you will about them, Google does not leave their monopoly profits to whither on the vine. They use them to crush upstarts, innovation and competitors. For the benefit of users.

It's just that, for Google+, the users are businesses and the new platform is for their beneift.

Not that there's anything wrong with that. It's just that despite all their examples, I'm not terribly interested in interacting -- on a social level -- with the various businesses I transact with. No matter how hipster cool and, you know, personal they tell me they are. And no matter how much they believe they have a mission "to inspire" when really their mission is to sell flour.

Share it fairly 

But don't take a slice of my pie 
- Pink Floyd

Square and Team Obama, along with Team Romney, were eager to tell the world:

President Obama’s re-election campaign announced that it would immediately begin using Square, a mobile payments start-up company based in San Francisco, with campaign staffers and some approved volunteers. “Squares are being sent to our campaign offices across the country,” said Katie Hogan, a spokeswoman for Mr. Obama’s re-election campaign.

The announcement is just the first part of the strategy the Obama campaign plans to employ for mobile donations over the coming months.

“Eventually we want to make a version of the Obama Square application available to everyone from within the App Store,” Ms. Hogan said, referring to Apple’s iTunes store for apps. “Someone who is a supporter of the campaign can then download the app, get a Square attachment and can go around collecting donations.” The application would automatically send donation money directly to the Obama campaign.

Ms. Hogan said the Obama campaign has worked with Square to develop a unique mobile application that allows people to make mobile donations that are compliant with the Federal Election Commission’s rules.

An F.E.C. spokeswomen said the Square application would need to collect the name, address, city, state and ZIP code, and occupation and employer of the donor on a smartphone. All of this information, along with the date of the contribution, would be collected from a Square-enabled smartphone application.

Which is awesome!

Smartphones, mobile money, crowdsourcing.

What's not to like?

Nothing. Except for all the other stuff.

Look, I'm a believer. I realize that smartphones can connect us all. They are the most personal computing devices ever and offer creative and economic liberation potential.

But let's not kid ourselves about the US presidential election this year. The driving force behind Obama's campaign stops and relentless advertising and the various "issue" infomercials, will come primarily from big money donors.

Not from little $5 and $10 donations. Which, admittedly, make for a nice feel-good story but aren't the real story.