Fortune writes: "The hottest vehicles driving sales leads online are search engines—and small businesses found them first."

keyword bidding is evolving into part of an overall strategy using search engines as a lead generator. "Marketing on the Internet isn't about finding one method that works; it's an all-around process," says Mark Fiala, director of Internet operations for California Breath Clinics in Los Angeles, maker of the TheraBreath line of oral-care products. The $3 million business researched better, cheaper keywords, routed leads to specific product pages rather than the home page, and set up a way to solicit e-mail addresses to turn lookers into buyers. It reduced its monthly marketing tab from $8,000 to $4,000 while increasing its return on investment to some 275%.

The complete RISC document, co-authored by Atanu Dey and Vinod Khosla, is available for download from Vinod Khosla's webpage. It is a longish document, but gives a fascinating perspective into what is needed for the economic transformation of rural India. It is what we are working to implement in Deeshaa.

Ray Ozzie writes:

In a pre-WinFS world, each application has managed its own "documents" and "records" and "collections" as an island unto itself - each with its own indexing and interaction mechanisms, each with its own solution-building mechanisms. Good 'nuf. But in a WinFS world - just like in a Web Services world - we have the opportunity to explore what would happen if we dared to "deconstruct and refactor" our concepts of traditional client-side applications into a mesh of separately-built application components that "meet" at the level of common persistent objects and relationships.

Imagine what a traditional PIM might look like if it were possible to build it in a modular fashion, with each modules' underlying object schemas, store, and methods exposed as standards so that others could build upon them? Imagine building custom domain-specific client-side CRM/SFA solutions that might leverage these common standards. Imagine the deconstruction and refactoring of traditional desktop applications so that higher-level domain-specific applications and solutions could be built from components currently embedded in larger integrated packages. Imagine what "content management" might become in an era where collections of objects can be created, retrieved, cached, replicated, published in conjunction with service-oriented systems, yet one in which a variety of content creation and manipulation applications can effectively leverage common storage and synchronization mechanisms.