Today in Technology Spectator, I have a piece on collaboration based around the Google and Deloitte paper released last week.
At the moment Google are on a marketing campaign promoting Apps for Business, for a previous campaign I prepared The Future of Teamwork which examined the benefits of cloud computing for industry.
It’s interesting how the message hasn’t changed a great deal in the last five year, despite it being valid.
Google’s quarterly results are in – revenue up 22% on the previous year with a gross profit margin of 300%. Although the adwords river of gold still makes up 90% of the company’s income.
investor.google.com/earnings/2014/Q2_google_earnings.html
While spectacular, such a reliance on one product line is a vulnerablity. It’s not surprising Google’s leadership is experimenting with new businesses.
It’s also notable that payments to network partners fell as a proportion to revenues, which explains some of the pain sites that rely on Google Adsense checks are feeling.
A Virginian restaurant, the Serbian Lion, went out of business because its Google Places listing was hacked, reports Wired.
The proprietor of the Serbian Lion, Rene Bertagna, wasn’t aware his online listing showed the restaurant as being closed on weekends and as a result customers stopped showing up, he alleges in a law suit against Google.
As a result of result of the drop in earnings, the restaurant entered a death spiral of falling service standards, declining customers and further cuts until the place closed down.
While it’s difficult to judge how true Bertagna’s claim is – it’s quite possible the listing was a mistake by Google’s data scrapers or an oversight by a customer putting the data into the services – the story does illustrate how important getting the correct information into online services like Google Places, Microsoft Bing and Yelp.
Bertagna himself appears to be a classic case of roadkill on the information superhighway with his claims not to be a computer or internet user.
Bertagna immigrated to the U.S. from northern Italy when he was young. He’s 74 now, and, he says, doesn’t own a computer—he’d heard of the Internet and Google but used neither. Suddenly, a technological revolution of which he was only dimly aware was killing his business. His accountant phoned Google and in an attempt to change the listing, but got nowhere. Bertagna eventually hired an Internet consultant who took control of the Google Places listing and fixed the bad information—a relatively simple process.
The sad tale of Rene Bertagna and the Serbian Lion illustrates just how important it is for operators in the hospitality industry to be on top of their listings and online presence. This is where the customers are.
Sadly, this story isn’t news – that customers are using the web to find local businesses and read reviews of neighbourhood establishments has been the case for a decade, the move to mobile has been obvious for over five years.
For all local businesses, it’s a core responsibility to make sure online listings are correct along with having an up to date website. If you don’t, you only have yourself to blame if the customers don’t show up.
James Temple writing in on tech website Re/Code has an excellent profile of Google Ventures founder Bill Maris and his quest to re-invent the venture capital industry.
Certainly the Silicon Valley venture capital industry is ripe for disruption; Maris is not alone in pointing out that most investors in the sector and focused on short term incremental gains like shopping apps and online stores.
Probably the biggest thing that Temple points out in the story is the importance of Big Data to the Google Ventures model, although Maris seems to be acutely conscious of the limitations of relying on algorithms to make decisions;
Because you can 100 percent use data and statistics in exactly the wrong way. That’s a trap some fall into, one that we really try hard to avoid. But I think it’s important to use that as a tool.
The data is a support. It’s just like having your other partners there.
Being skeptical about the infallibility of Big Data and algorithms seems a very un-Google thing, but it may work well for Bill Maris and his team.
Whether Maris and Google Ventures can upend the Silicon Valley investment culture remains to be seen; the real message though is that the venture capital industry is just as vulnerable to disruption as any other.
Today Amazon is expected to launch a smartphone which the New York Times suggests will tether consumers to the company.
With 240,0000 apps in its Kindle store, Amazon will be formidable competitor to Google Android devices and Apple. Like iTunes, Amazon also have a strength in already knowing the customer’s credit card details.
The question is can Amazon be trusted? As we see with the Hachette book publishers dispute, Amazon is a company that’s ruthless in bullying suppliers and has a mandate to do so from its shareholders.
With the smartphone becoming the centre of the connected lifestyle, the stakes are high as whoever controls the customer’s pocket controls the customer’s smarthome, smartcar, retail and health applications.
Of course whoever wins this battle, they’ll still have to pay Microsoft for patents.