Every once in a while Google comes along with a great idea that really upsets the apple cart.  Lots of other companies and people have these same ideas, but Google has the ability to rock the boat because of its size and visibility.

The other day my son was showing me how to tell if money is real by looking at the watermark on a dollar bill.  The dollar bill looked like this.

They taught him this in school.

I asked him if he knows what money is.  He held up the dollar bill and said "this is money".

A piece of junk mail was lying on the kitchen counter.  It looked something like this:

Except that it also had a coffee stain on it.

I asked him if the junk mail with coffee stain on it was money, and he said "no".  I asked him why, and he looked at me like I had just crossed my eyes. 

"Because it doesn't have a watermark on it?" I suggested helpfully.  He agreed with that.  So I drew a watermark on the junk mail with the coffee stain, and asked him if it was money now.  Now he gave me that look he gives me when he figures out that I'm making something up.  (I like to yank his chain a little, I can't help it sometimes.  Besides, I'm hoping it keeps him from growing up gullible :)

He was unable to tell me why the dollar bill was worth more than the junk mail.  I began to suspect that learning math by adding and subtracting quarters and nickels is numbing us to what money actually is.  By the time we can think for ourselves we have been adding and subtracting pennies and nickels for so long that we don't even think to question it. 

My son has no clue about what money is.  I am not impressed with the education he's receiving.  I'm going to have to try to explain it to him myself.

Over the past several weeks the financial markets have undergone a tremendous amount of stress. What you are witnessing is the result of common sense being thrown out the window.

The abomination of legislation which has resulted from this mess includes, among other horrible things, permission for Hank Paulson to unilaterally spend your money without permission from ANYONE and with complete protection from any court or legislative body:

Sec. 8. Review. Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.

Welcome to the USSA.

The other day I was thinking about how trust is the exposed Achilles heel of the SaaS model: if the customer can't trust the service they're using with their confidential data, they won't use the service. This is a really big problem for startups in particular, because they have no brand equity to take advantage of. Getting new (and especially LARGE) customers to trust them is a pretty steep barrier to entry--especially for inherently confidential data such as financial data or M&A data. Then there's also the issue of the startup potentially failing and going out of business, and all the data built up in the application going "poof" along with it.

But the compartmentalized architecture that's becoming popular on the Web these days just may offer a solution. I've had some thoughts around this, and I've come up with a solution that would make me more comfortable storing my data with a startup that's an unknown quantity: Cloud Storage. While I haven't seen this model used very much at all yet, it makes a lot of sense to me and I can see it building some momentum over the next year or two.

In case you haven't noticed, the wheels are coming off the international financial system.   Banks and investment banks are dropping like flies, and the derivatives market is coming apart at the seams.  The waste of money that was the Bear Stearns bailout (and Fannie, and Freddie) did not accomplish anything.

We are now in a real, honest-to-goodness deflationary credit collapse.  The REAL money supply (which includes credit) is shrinking at an incredible rate.  Oil is back below $100 a barrel, real estate is crashing, and just about everything is getting cheaper.  Deflation is in full effect, and even if the Fed WAS inflating (which it isn't), there's no way it could print fast enough to compensate for the credit destruction.

The credit collapse claimed Lehman and Merrill Lynch today, and Larry Dignan took a swag at what, if anything, this means for IT.  Rather than looking at Merrill and Lehman directly, I think it's a little more interesting to look at the conditions that drove those firms into oblivion and the effect they'll have on IT.  I've written before about what the recession will do to IT spending, but what does a deflationary credit collapse mean?

I put a new coat of paint on the blog today.  The old blog design was getting a little long in the tooth, and I've been wanting to redo it for a while.  I had a dream of putting it off until the ideal personal identity platform was available, but I've resigned myself to sticking with Typepad for the next 3 years or so.  So I spent a few hours this weekend spiffing it up and adding some things I've wanted for a while like Lijit integration for search and Disqus integration for comments.

I also decided to refocus the site a bit.  This blog has always been about whatever I feel like writing about, but the focus has shifted over time from startup-related content to commentary on bleeding edge Internet technology.  It may shift back at some point, but for the time being I think it's probably more helpful to people who find me on Google if the title reflects what I'm currently writing about.

I've had OpenID integration on the site for a while, which I really love.  I can just use www.jasonkolb.com on many sites around the Web as my universal username, and it's a breeze to use.  Next I need to get my FOAF graph updated, unfortunately Typepad doesn't make that easy to do.  Maybe next weekend.

So what do you think of the site?  I've tried to clean it up a little and make it easier to look at, let me know if you think I've succeeded.

I guarantee you that every time someone decides to use a Software as a Service (SaaS) solution for their company, there's a specific thought that runs through their heads:

Can I trust this service with my confidential data?

This is a legitimate concern.  When you use a SaaS solution, you're basically making your company an open book to that service.  When I took Yammer for a test drive the other day and scribbled my thoughts about it, a few people told me I was a little harsh on them.  My concerns with it were primarily around trust and how ready it is for a mid-to-large enterprise.  I love the concept, I've been pushing for it ever since I started using Twitter.  But, that doesn't give companies aiming at enterprise users a free pass.  But that did get me thinking about the concept of Trust and how it relates to SaaS.

I've blogged before that I thought that a Twitter clone aimed at the enterprise world would be a stupendous idea for improving team communication and collaboration.  (I prefer to call this form of communication conversation clouds, because that's what they are in my opinion--a distributed conversation with a broad surface area.)  Today I got to take the concept for a spin, and it didn't disappoint.

I've been playing with Google's brand new browser, Chrome, over the past 24 hours and it's already my favorite browser.  I love it.  It's everything a browser should be, and nothing that it should not be.