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Blippy [CrunchBase] is a social network that automatically shares your purchases. It's like Twitter, where your feed looks something like this:

philipkd spent $9.61 at Little Mexico Restaurant
pud spent $398.50 at AT&T Wireless
cte spent $127 at Zappos

When I explain this to people, the first reaction is always, "Why on earth would you share that?" However, to those who are actually on Blippy, the answer is obvious: people want to show off. The friends who I know on it (and myself) are insanely addicted to it.

In addition to the addiction potential, it also has an obvious business model. If people are talking exclusively about purchases, that just gives you an opportunity to insert highly targeted advertising. Not to mention all the analytics possibilities.

In addition to the addiction potential and obvious business model, its more trustworthy than Twitter. Twitter was supposed to be all about getting links from trusted sources, and yet now, nobody is sure what is real and what's not half of the time. Twitter often seems like a repeater cable or a me-too chain. On Blippy, users are putting their money where their mouths are.

Having said that, the real existential question is whether the service is compelling enough for enough people to overcome their privacy qualms. There's two points in favor of Blippy:

1. The future is heading toward more and more letting go. Six months ago, people gave me a skeptical eye when I said I used Mint.com to organize all my financial information. Now everybody is curious about it. Plus, the big picture is that security technology scales. Blippy and Mint.com have better security that your personal accountant. So it could be that the hesitation to Blippy is the same as the hesitation to Facebook and MySpace, where your children are actually safer spending an hour online than at the mall.

2. People take many more risks in real life to display wealth. What is a fancy-looking house with a visible front yard and luxury cars parked outside? It's an invitation. What is strutting down main street with your jewelry and expensive shoes? It's a status update. Blinging is timeless.

So the Blippy idea has a handful of solid starting aspects in its favor. Whether it succeeds or not, as it is with all new social networks, will then be matter of execution and chance.

Over the next ten years, watch for the rise of the "corporate culture consultant." This person's job will be to reorganize a company such that its employees are more creative, that problems are reported more quickly, and that multiple departments synergize better.

What you see today is that certain industry leaders have uniquely claimed their spot because of their cultures. When you think of Google, Netflix, Amazon, and Apple, you think of companies whose excellent products are an expression of their excellent places of work.

And I think this is a new idea. I think there was a time, ten years ago perhaps, when idiosyncratic corporate cultures at places like Google were considered quaint. If you approached a CEO of the average, troubled, Fortune 500 company, and said, "in order to succeed, you need flat corporate hierarchies, exceptional pampering of developers, 20%-time, and free 5-star cuisine for grunts and execs alike," they'd all laugh.

But today, I think they're listening.

The big telecoms have spent billions of dollars to try to reach The Promised Land of meaningful mobile experiences. And now we see that its the hippies at Google and Apple who came out of nowhere and stole the show.

It may be the case that unenlightened companies can play catch-up. After all, Microsoft's Bing is often said to be nearly as good as Google. And we see HTC and Motorola catching up quickly to Apple's iPhone. But what if that's not good enough anymore. What if the increasing pace of technological change demands more than just catch-up. You need a company flexible and innovative enough to be there with the best-of-breed product right as consumer demand picks up. And you can't just buy innovation by throwing money at talented people. You have to give them a place where they can thrive, where they don't feel stifled by middle management or overruled by sales or marketing.

The Nexus One launch yesterday was really interesting when you compare it to the way Apple markets. So, rewind back, and it was around a month ago that Google simply gave its employees a Nexus One as a Christmas present and then permitted them to tweet about it. Then a few top bloggers were given review copies of it. And then there was a launch yesterday. That's it. No heavy marketing buys. No complex hype machine.

The big "what if" then, is what if this beats the iPhone? What if this strategy prevails over the Apple reality distortion field?

I'm reading Ken Auletta's book Googled, and he describes Google, for better or for worse, as being all about engineering. For example, some top designers have quit Google in frustration because design ideas based on intuition and holistic thinking get overridden by usability and focus tests. It's numbers over moxie. The engineers are running the mad house, and my guess is they override marketing as well. When you think of Google, you probably don't think about them for their stellar marketing.

Or maybe you do, but it's the kind of marketing that Seth Godin promotes, wherein you make your products so extraordinary, that they market themselves.

But taking that a step further, what if that's more than just a strategy, but an actual representation of where industry is going? In an ideal world, with efficient markets, nobody would need to tell you about their products. The good products would already be known. What if ten years from now, Godin's strategy is the only way to market your products, by investing in stellar product development.

If you step back and take the broad view of technology, you'll see that one thing it does well is cut out the middlemen. It nixes all the people in between the product and the customer. That has been Dell's strategy with its trademarked "Be Direct" slogan. And that is what the Internet has been doing all along.