Today, I came across a new service that Google has introduced. Free. Google 411. Yes, a directory service that is free (and only costs what you have already paid for the telephone company). I tried it out and it works! Granted it has some constraints for now ... but that will be easily remedied, given that Google has a large army of talented software engineers.
Tom Friedman has earned himself a place in the history books by writing the book The World is Flat. The implication of Google 411 is enormous. Anyone in the world can find out, for a relative pittance, this kind of local information. Even though most of this information is already available through Google Local and such, the simplicity of the man-machine interface of the telephone service is what will make this usable by many more.
If someone - Larry Page or Sergey Brin or, even, Eric Schmidt- were to take the trouble to describe in a book how they have built Google so far, that will be immensely valuable to entrepreneurs!
