Sometime in September, Google turned 10. The exact date would have been September 4 however Google choose not to commemorate that date and since Google is the unofficial arbiter of all that is true online, their official birthday falls on whatever the heck day they want it to fall on. Me, I figure with the month of September rapidly receding, today is as good a day as any to commemorate.

Eleven years ago (Sept. 15, 1997), two Stanford university students registered the domain name Google.com/. Those students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, had devised a tool that sorted web documents based on the number of links pointing to one document from a variety of others. They called it Backrub.

Encouraged by the founders of Yahoo!, Stanford alumni Jerry Yang and David Filo, Page and Brin started showing their search engine around Silicon Valley. In August 1998, they received their first investment from Sun co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim, who wrote a cheque for $100,000 to a company that didn’t even exist, Google Inc. Two weeks later, on September 4, 1998, Page and Brin incorporated their new business under the name Google, opened a bank account and deposited their first six-figures. Ten years later Google is arguably the most important online application.
(Google Ten Year Timeline)

Over the past decade, Google has rewritten the rules for online advertising, created the world’s most efficient (and apparently fairest) grassroots wealth re-distribution machine, become a verb, noun and an adverb (often all in the same paragraph), and created technologies that far surpass those of its competition. In fact, Google’s very existence threatens many larger and older organizations that might compete with it. They have even managed to make a lot of headway in their quest to fully organize the world’s information.

Now, on the heels of their 10th anniversary, Google has announced an even more disruptive initiative, one that stands to remake the mobile telecommunications industry in Google’s image.

In a patent published today, Google outlines its plans to make mobile telephone contracts a thing of the past. The patent, titled, “Flexible Communication Systems and Methods” was filed at the US Patent Office on March 17, 2007. It covers how Google wants to carve up the mobile carrying and transmission business much as it has the online text ad business. Google would like to help consumers by forcing wireless service providers to bid auction style for the right to provide the lowest-cost signal at any given location. In other words, when you use your cell phone or mobile access device, that device would constantly look for the access provider with the lowest rate for the location you were in. As you move from place to place, the service would continue trying to find the lowest cost data-rates and transfer your signal to that provider.

The abstract of the patent reads:

A method of initiating a telecommunication session for a communication device include submitting to one or more telecommunication carriers a proposal for a telecommunication session, receiving from at least one of the one or more of telecommunication carriers a bid to carry the telecommunications session, and automatically selecting one of the telecommunications carriers from the carriers submitting a bid, and initiating the telecommunication session through the selected telecommunication carrier.

Happy tenth birthday Google. If this is the way you celebrate turning ten, the next decade is obviously going to be interesting.