This is a speech I gave at the LIFT Conference last week where I highlighted some of my favorite companies and explained my view of the Silicon Valley bubble.

I’m making a more complete list that I’ll introduce in the future. What are your favorite new startups?

Today Rocky and I visited Yammer’s headquarters and had an interesting chat with founder/CEO David Sacks.

Don’t know what Yammer is? Two-and-a-half years ago they won Techcrunch 50 for its enterprise collaboration system (think Twitter for businesses). Now they are a lot more than that, and growing fast. Tons of big businesses like Chevron are using Yammer to help people work together.

That interview will be up soon, but during our chat I asked him when companies would be compensating people based on the value they are pouring in the system.

I got a very strange look.

A year ago I asked Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff the same question and got the same strange look.

Tells me I’m onto something.

Here’s what I am thinking of.

If someone adds a lot of value into a company’s internal system Yammer could keep track of that (thanks to engagement, etc) and when yearly bonuses get handed out management could just look to see who has put the most value into the system.

Fairly straightforward, but it’s interesting that both Sacks and Benioff don’t want to push this potential use of their systems. At least not in public.

Why would that be?

Well, they are both in adoption mode. They are still trying to convince people and companies to use these systems instead of more private email.

Remember back when I worked at NEC (a huge world-wide company?) When I left there all my email was private. I don’t have access to it anymore. Neither does the company.

Lost value.

But now Yammer and a host of other companies are trying to convince people to do their work “in the open.” In other words, instead of writing down some detail about a sales account in email, or in a contact manager only one person has access to, put that up on a news stream and into a contact manager everyone can see.

This freaks many employees out.

Why? Being open is antithetical to how they were trained. Many people think they are compensated by the value they hoarded.

Think about a lawyer. They went to school to gain exotic knowledge that they hoarded. People paid them for this hoarded knowledge.

Today? We’re asking people to blog, Tweet, put up YouTube videos, and to use Yammer and other systems like Salesforce.

That’s scary for a lot of people.

So, when I go and ask whether we should compensate people based on the information they SHARE with a company, that’s a topic these new CEOs aren’t quite willing to talk openly about.

Why? It freaks the information hoarders out and makes them less likely to change to information sharers. In such a world old systems like Microsoft Sharepoint stay relevant and new systems like Yammer don’t get adopted.

I’m quite convinced though that in the future at least some of big-company compensation will come from whether you have good knowledge sharing skills.

It’ll just take a couple of years to get there. In the meantime these new CEOs will remain a bit cagey about the potential for compensating people based on how good their Yammering is.

Oh, and now you also know why they are watching reputation systems like the ones that Quora just put in place.

Photo credit: David Sacks photo shot by Robert Scoble in Yammer’s San Francisco headquarters.

UPDATE: Brian Solis talk at lift, called “Digital Currencies” gives a further hint as to what this world might look like.

So, in this dream, er, nightmare I have, I walk into Steve Ballmer’s Microsoft office back in 2006 and say:

“Hi Steve, I gotta talk to you about our tablet strategy.”

“Sure, Scoble, what you thinking about?”

“Well, it sucks. It just isn’t working. Customers aren’t delighted. The market isn’t afire. Our employees are even bored with it.”

“So, what should we do?” he asks.

“We should ship a device that doesn’t run Office. Indeed, doesn’t run any Microsoft application. Doesn’t do multitasking. Doesn’t run Flash. Doesn’t have a camera. Can’t print. Can’t use a Microsoft Mouse or Keyboard, either. Oh, and just to be really revolutionary, we can’t put any of our normal packaging or stickers on the device or around it. Finally, we can’t sell it at Best Buy, but we have to build a new series of stores to distribute it in.”

“What the f*** are you smoking, Scoble? Get the f*** out of here before I call security. That’s the stupidest idea I’ve heard. Ever.”

Then I wake up and realize, no, I’m not Steve Jobs.

Yesterday I recorded a 12-minute demo of the HP TouchPad with my Canon 5D MK II so that you can see what we were shown in the hall after the event.

If you watch it, make sure you switch to 480 resolution (unfortunately YouTube picks the lowest resolution by default).

By the way, in the hall I also met MC Hammer (who, like me, is a huge Apple iPad fan) and we talked about our reactions to the HP TouchPad. We also talked about the “Beats” feature and technology, which makes music sound better on HP devices than on other devices.

One of the shockers at the HP event is that these two guys (Todd Bradley and Jon Rubenstein) fired Microsoft.

Whoa?

Well, they announced that the WebOS behind the TouchPad and other devices is being ported to laptops and other form factors.

Imagine telling me 10 years ago that HP would announce a family of products that aren’t running on Windows.

Whoa!

So, as soon as I got together with HP’s CTO, Phil McKinney, after the demos were over that’s what I asked about. His answers are telling.

HP’s Jon Rubenstein just showed off the HP TouchPad.

I’m so glad that I told my readers to wait before they bought a tablet until at least today.

What did HP just do?

1. Showed it can bring some innovations (especially in power charging and multitasking) that Apple hasn’t yet shipped.

2. Totally made the other, non-Apple, players on the board look lame.

3. Further weakened Microsoft’s stance in the marketplace. If you told me 10 years ago that HP would introduce a major new consumer product that’s not based on Windows I would have said you are totally crazy.

4. Made a major Apple fan (me) think twice about buying another iPad.

5. Helped keep Adobe Flash relevant. The movie they showed in Flash and games makes Apple’s anti-Flash stance look lamer than when just Google was pointing that out.

6. Showed off how to compete with Apple: have better cross-app communication. They showed how you could search or tweet all from one interface, which is quite nice.

So, where does the HP effort fall short?

1. Not many apps. That’s one reason it’s going to be hard to rip me away from the Apple ecosystem (I’ve now spent about $300 on apps). Plus, most new cool apps are coming out on iPad, not on Android or HP or RIM.

2. They are making us wait until summer to get one, with wifi, or later with 3G. In that time it’s expected that Apple will have iPad 2 out and we haven’t yet seen how Apple will refresh its OS to add some of the capabilities.

3. As of this moment they haven’t announced a price. If it’s less than $500 it will be a sizable winner, if more, we’ll quickly forget it like we are forgetting about the Motorola Xoom. I’ll update this post as soon as they introduce the price (within seconds).

Short? HP has a winner that other players MUST consider now. That is a major winner and, so, we must name this man a genius:

Who is he? Phil McKinney, HP’s CTO. He’s the one who spent three years building his own tablet, but decided it wasn’t good enough, so went and bought Palm.

UPDATE: I just interviewed Phil after the demos were done. He gave me some details behind HP’s purchase of Palm and plans to use Palm’s WebOS in other, laptop devices.

That looked like a strange decision at the time, but look at what it did for HP:

1. Put it on the innovator’s table.
2. Got it out from under Microsoft’s thumb.
3. Made HP cool again and made it something that RIM, Google, and Nokia needs to pay attention to (just when they thought they had figured out the game they were going to have to play in 2011).

Why do I say RIM isn’t in the game? They weren’t even the coolest tablet at CES (Motorola Xoom won that title) and app developers just aren’t taking them seriously. At least with HP’s effort they are betting big time on web apps, and their developer tools are easy to develop for and, even, loved by developers who have tried them. Microsoft? Sorry, not in the game at all. Neither is Nokia.

Congrats Phil and Jon. I can’t wait to get my hands on one.