So, the great news over at TechCrunch today were that Google has added a feature called Mail Fetcher to GMail, which basically allows you to grab email from other services, such as Yahoo.

This sounds great, and it probably is for GMail users, but it is also great for Google. Someone with legal wits should point a browser towards GMail’s terms & services, and check whether there are any provisions to exclude or include, explicitly or not, the scanning of all incoming and outgoing email from these other services. Maybe Google will also scan the contents of the additional email services you add to your GMail account to send you targeted ads. Maybe Google will have even better demographics by tying the IP addresses found in the headers of all the additional emails with their own database of registered users. There is a saying that nobody sells dimes for 9 cents, it’s a rather good saying to move your wallet by.

Any lawyers in the audience?

Robert Scoble writes about whether having a decent WiFi connection at a conference is something that important, and concludes that if you can afford the $3500 price tag to get in, you can also afford a $80 a month Verizon mobile data plan. Ethan Kaplan thinks it is important, and I agree, but for different motives.
What Robert fails to appreciate is, that while Web 2.0 may be more US-centered in terms of visitor origin, there are many conferences where the bulk of atendees come from abroad. In this case, it makes little sense to get into a Verizon plan just for the few days when you are visiting. Roaming data charges (when roaming data connections such as GPRS even work, which I found impossible around California) are astronomical.

I am in favor of event organizers providing a good quality, solid and stable WiFi connection, even though it can be very expensive. An example was the WOMMA conference at the San Francisco Hilton, which didn’t provide WiFi, as the hotel wanted $20.000 to put a router in the hall. However, a compromise between the two postulates would be for Verizon to offer a rent-a-card service. Just like I pick up my car at Hertz for a week at SFO, I could also pick up a Verizon card, use it while moving about, and return it at the airport before leaving the country. I can already hear critics saying “but people would just keep the cards” – maybe, but what good would they be to them? Additionally, just like you have a retainer placed on your credit card when you rent a car, the same could apply to the card, if you don’t return it, Verizon actually could make more money!

Reading with interest the flurry of posts about Google’s purchase of YouTube for around $1.6 billion, it seems the main worry right now is that since Google is a very rich company ($131 billion cap!), the lawsuits for copyright violations will start raining faster than you can say MPAA. Mark Cuban is particularly pessimistic about the business decision.

My take is that Google in general, Larry and Sergey in particular, are rather smart, and would not have taken this step, putting the entire company at risk, without first having an agreement with the main content providers that would be likely to sue. This would include TV networks, MPAA, RIAA and the usual suspects. A very obvious conclusion is that if there is money to be made placing ads on content, or selling premium accounts the way Flickr does, why can this not be shared with the copyright owners?

A more twisted conclusion is that the copyright owners could be giving up on microcontrolling every individual byte in an Orwellian manner, and see the light. What is better at promoting new content than the word-of-mouth of millions of fans?

YouTube videos are of notoriously bad quality for the most part, in essence, making it possible to turn the originals into streamable flash clips. Have you ever tried to watch a video full screen? It sucks. What the clip may do is convince me to go out and buy the DVD!

Time will see, but I place my bets on a blanket all-you-can-eat license that will allow YouTube to promote content, keeping both users and moguls happy. 15-second ads at the start of each video? Maybe, but then if you pay us $19.95 a year…