Tag: google

How Green is the Internet?

What are the environmental costs of the internet, cloud computing and big data?

Earlier this month Google hosted “How Green is the Internet?“, a summit which looked at the environmental costs of the connected society and technologies like cloud computing and Big Data.

The environmental impact of the internet and related technologies is a subject worth exploring, like all industries there are real costs to the planet which usually aren’t bourne by those who make the profits or reap the benefits.

In complex modern supply chains which often span the globe, the costs are not often apparent either. What appears to be a relatively clean, innocuous product to city consumers could have terrible environmental consequences for others.

Google’s summit is a good example of overlooking many external costs in that most of the conversations looked at reducing energy usage, understandable given the company’s dependence on power hungry data centres which drive their cloud computing services.

move-to-cloud-cost-savings-on-the-internet

Energy usage is important in the discussion about digital technologies – the businesses of bits and bytes almost wholly relies upon having constant and reliable electricity supplies and power generation is one of the most environmentally damaging activities we engage in.

Focusing on energy consumption though is not the only aspect we need to look at when examining how green the internet is, there’s many other costs in building the supply chain that enables us to watch funny cat videos in our homes or offices.

The entire supply chain is complex and the session on infrastructure costs by Jon Koomey of Stanford University touched on this; there’s the environmental costs of building data centres, of manufacturing routers, of laying cables and – probably the most difficult question of all – what do we do with the e-waste generated by obsolete equipment.

Little of this was touched on in the Google conference and it’s interesting that the tech industry is focusing on the energy costs while overlooking other effects of a global, complex industry.

That isn’t to say the energy story isn’t valid. A number of the Google speakers emphasized the indirect energy saving costs as cloud computing and Big Data allows more intelligent business decisions that make industries and daily life more efficient.

A favourite example is the use of car parking apps where drivers save energy and reduce pollution because they aren’t driving around looking for the parking spaces. This puts Google’s acquisition of traffic app Waze into perspective.

Reducing driving times is just one area of where the internet is improving energy efficiency and these are important factors when considering the ‘greenness’ of the web.

However without considering the full impact of building, maintaining and disposing the equipment that we need to operate the internet, we aren’t really looking at the entire impact the internet is having on the planet.

Google’s conference though is a good starting point for that discussion which is one that every industry should be having.

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Steve Ballmer’s big platform change

Microsoft contemplates big changes as the computer market evolves around portable tablets and smartphones.

All Things D today reports that Microsoft is considering a major restructure to reflect changed computing markets.

One of the big messages from The State Of The Internet report is we are seeing three simultaneous changes to the computer industry – the shift from personal computers to smartphones, tablet computers and wearable systems – and Microsoft is at the centre of these transformations.

One graph, first released by Aysmco and expanded in the Meeker presentation, illustrates how fundamental these shifts are to Microsoft’s business.

mary meeker computingmarketshare-640x480

Microsoft’s domination of the computer industry was almost total at the beginning of the century and remained so until the iPhone was released in 2007. Then suddenly things changed.

With the success of Android and the iPad, the market shifted dramatically against Microsoft and the WinTel market share is now back to 1985 levels when the Commodore 64 was a credible competitor.

The change that Microsoft faces shouldn’t be understated, although the company’s strengths with products like Office, Azure and Hotmail (or whatever this year’s name for their online mail product is) give the once untouchable incumbent some opportunities, particularly in the cloud.

At the end of Mary Meeker’s presentation at the D11 conference, Walt Mossberg asked her about Microsoft’s view that tablets and smartphones are just new computing platforms. Meeker dismisses that with the observation that the data is clear, the market has shifted to Apple and Google.

“Google and Apple are driving innovation,” says Meeker. “Microsoft is not.”

The numbers aren’t lying for Microsoft. That’s why Steve Ballmer has to move fast and think creatively about the company’s future.

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Discovering an online media model

Who will be the David Sarnoff of the web?

Peter Kafka of the Wall Street Journal’s All Thing D blog has been closely following Google’s attempts to position YouTube as a successor to television.

Key to that success is getting advertisers on board to spend as much money with online channels as they do on broadcast TV.

To date that’s failed and most of the online ad spend has come at the expense of print media – the money advertisers spent on magazines and newspapers has moved onto the web, but TV’s share of the pie is barely changing and may even be increasing.

The challenges facing web advertising is discovering what works on the new mediums.

McDonalds Canada Behind The Scenes campaign is touted as one of the success stories of YouTube advertising, although Kafka isn’t fully convinced.

McDonald’s modest ad tells a story, flatters viewers by telling them they’re smart enough to go backstage, and still ends up pushing pretty images of hamburgers in front of them. That’s pretty clever advertising sort-of masquerading as something else but not really.

We’re trying to apply old ways of working to a new technology something we do every time a new technology appears.

Moving from silent movies

Probably the best example of this is the movie industry – if you look at the early silent movies they were staged like theatrical productions. It took the best part of two decades for movie directors to figure out the advantages of the silver screen.

Shortly after movie directors figured out what worked on the big screen, the talkies came along and changed the rules again. Then came colour, then television, then the net and now mobile. Each time the movie industry has had to adapt.

It isn’t just the movie and advertising industries facing this problem; publishers, writers and journalists are struggling with exactly the same issues.

Most of what you read online, including this blog, is just old style print writing or journalism being published on a digital platform. Few of us, including me, are pushing the boundaries of what the web can do.

Waiting for Sarnoff

David Sarnoff figured out how to make money from broadcast radio and television in the 1930s with a model that was very different from what the movie industry was doing at the time.

Sarnoff built Radio Corporation of America into the world’s leading broadcaster and the modern advertising industry grew out of RCA’s successful model.

Today both the broadcasting and advertising industries are applying Sarnoff’s innovations of the 1930s to the web with limited success. Just like movie producers struggled with theatrical techniques at the beginning of the Twentieth Century.

Figuring out what works online is today’s great challenge. Google are throwing billions at the problem through YouTube but there’s no guarantee they will be the RCA of the internet.

We may well find that a young coder in Suzhou or a video producer in Sao Paolo has the answer and becomes the Randolph Hearst or David Sarnoff of our time.

The future is open and it’s there for the taking.

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Securing the security system

The hacking of a Google building management system shows how important it is to take security seriously.

How vulnerable building management systems can be hit me ten years ago when working at an expensive Sydney harbourfront home a decade ago.

The householder – a rich banker – had spent millions on physical security to insulate his family from the outside world. Yet anybody could dial in and monitor what was happening in the house through the building’s CCTV and management systems.

Not only were the building’s CCTV and management systems were open to the net, but that the system’s serve ran on an antiquated and unsecured version of Windows 2000 that shared the home network with a couple of enthusiastically downloading teenagers.

It was a matter of time, perhaps hours, before the system was compromised with worm or virus. The security implications were enormous.

Even the banker’s business was vulnerable as a targeted hack into the home would allow people to monitor traffic on the network and intercept work related messages.

What was really shocking however was how the system vendor and integrator who’d installed it simply didn’t care about the client’s security problems.

So the news that one of Google’s Sydney offices BMS is exposed to the net shouldn’t be a surprise. Building Management Systems, as we saw with the rich banker’s house, are notorious for their poor security.

For Google this security breach is embarrassing although the responsibility for this flaw lies firmly with the building owner who should have made sure their systems are locked down and properly secured. You can’t throw this problem over the fence.

One wonders just how widespread these problems are with other industrial systems like SCADA devices and other remotely operated equipment.

Internet connected systems have been around now for twenty years, there are no longer any excuses for not taking these issues seriously.

Image courtesy of Tacluda through RGBStock

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Can maps change the way we work?

Big data and mobile computing are changing the way business operates as maps become an important part of our normal work and leisure time.

“Work the Way You Live” is Google’s motto for their enterprise maps service which the search engine giant hopes to make as ubiquitous in business as it is in the home.

At Google Atmosphere the company showed off their mapping technology and how it can be used by large organisation. It’s a compelling story.

The technology behind Google Maps is impressive – twenty petabytes of images, one billion active monthly users, 1.6 million map tiles served every second and a target of getting those tiles onto the users screen within ten milliseconds.

Maps are one of the Big Data applications that cheap computing makes possible, until a few years ago even desktop computers would have struggled with the sort of mapping technology that we take for granted on our smartphones today.

Rethinking products

google-street-view-enabled-treadmill

Adding mapping technologies to products allows businesses to rethink their products. A good example of this is the internet connected treadmill.

Using the treadmill a jogger, or a walker, can map out a route anywhere in the world and the screen will show them the Google Street View as they travel along the route. The treadmill even adjusts to the changing gradients.

The Google Maps driven treadmill is a trivial example of the internet of machines, but it gives a hint of what’s possible.

The search for truth

ground-truth-and-google-maps

The success of a map depends on whether it can be trusted – this is what caught Apple out with their mapping application which was released before it was ready for prime time. Google, and most cartographers, take seriously errors and changes.

In the early days of Google Maps, the company would pass errors and changes onto the private and government mapping providers they licensed the data from. It could take months to fix a problem.

“It was really hard, you have to get maps from all over the world to create the product,” says Louis Perrochon, the Engineering director of google maps for business.

“That’s a limitation if you work with third party data so we started a project called Ground Truth where we build our own maps.”

Google pulls together its Street View data, satellite images and information sent in from the public through their Map Maker site and the Maps Engine Lite to build an accurate map of an area.

Changing consumer behaviour

Having accurate and accessible maps has changed the way consumers have behaved; “this revolution hasn’t happened slowly,” says Google Enterprise Directore Richard Suhr, “it’s happened really quickly.”

“Customers have become savvy about spatial. What this means is that businesses are starting to rethink the problem.”

“What are the exciting things I can do with maps, what else can I do with my data.”

That’s a big question of all businesses – how they use the massive amount of information in their organisation will mark the winners from also runs over the next decade. Maps are one way to visualise their data.

While Google Atmosphere was a marketing event for the companies mapping technologies the message is clear – mapping is changing the way we work and play and it’s affecting business.

How is mapping changing the way your business works?

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Does Google have corporate Attention Deficit Disorder?

Are Google paying the price of not paying attention to their core business?

The news that Google were releasing a service called Keep designed to store things you find on the web for future reference received a hostile response yesterday.

It seems the company’s dropping Google Reader into the deadpool proved the final straw for many of the tech early adopters who’d invested too much time building their feeds and other digital assets only to find services taken away from them.

This isn’t just Google Reader, various other services are suffering; Google Alerts has become functionally useless while the Frommers guide book franchise is slowly dying after the company bought it from John Wileys.

Corporate Attention Deficit Disorder

Google are suffering corporate Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) where management find a bright shiny thing, play with it for a while then get bored and wander off.

This is trait particularly common amongst cashed up tech companies. In the past Microsoft and Yahoo! were the best examples, but today Google is the clear leader in the Corporate ADD stakes.

Corporate ADD requires a number of factors – the main thing is a big cash flow to fund acquisitions.

In companies with this luxury, bored managers find themselves looking for things to do with all the money flowing through the door and when a hot new product or market sector appears those executives want to be part of it.

So a company gets acquired or a project is set up and the advocate drives it relentlessesly within the corporation, usually with lots of PR and write ups in the industry press.

Then something happens.

Usually the advocate – the manager or founder who drives the project – gets bored, promoted or sacked and the project loses its driving force within the organisation.

Without that driving force the service stagnates as we saw with Google Alerts or Reader and eventually company closes it down.

This has unfortunate effects on the marketplace, users invest a lot of time in the company’s service while  innovators in the affected market struggle to get funding as the investors say “we can’t compete with Google’.

A changed perspective

What’s interesting now though is the sea-change in the attitude towards Google’s Keep announcement – rather than dozens of articles describing how competing services like Evernote are doomed in the face of the search engine giant entering their market, most are saying this validates the existing startups’ investment and vision.

More importantly, most commentators are saying they are going to stick with the services they already use because they no longer trust Google to maintain the product.

This is what happens when you lose the trust and confidence of the market place.

One of the mantras of the startup community is “focus” – focus on your product and the problem you want it to fix. That large businesses lack that focus shows how far from being a lean startup they have become.

Google’s real challenge is to regain that focus. Right now they have rivers of cash flowing through their doors but in an age of disruption, it may well be that they could dry up if no-one pays attention.

Ritalin image courtesy of Adam on Wiki Images

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Will Google Deals be the next service to join the graveyard?

Google Deals was an attempt to compete with group buying services like Groupon, that experiment has failed and another tombstone for Google’s Graveyard should be on order.

Google’s graveyard of discontinued services is getting crowded, with Google Reader being one of a dozen services to bite the dust in last week’s springclean.

As Google ruthlessly cut services that don’t make the grade, the question is ‘which ones are next’?

Towards the top of the list has to be Google Offers, the group buying service that was set up in a fit of pique after Groupon spurned the search engine giant’s $6 billion acquisition offer.

Google Offers has only rolled out in 45 locations across the United States over the last two years and the deals in recent times have become increasingly desperate, here’s a recent New York deal.

an example of how Google offers is dying

Schmakery’s Cookies may well be fine products, but getting one free cookie isn’t exactly a jump out of your seat experience and it shows just how Google are struggling with this service.

That Google are struggling with Offers isn’t surprising though, the daily deals business relies on sales teams working hard to acquire small business advertisers. Small business is a sector that Google struggles with and running people focused operations is the not the company’s strong point either.

Google’s exit from the group buying market may be good for Groupon and other companies in the sector. The Economist makes the point that Google’s presence in these markets distorts the sector for other incumbents while scaring investors and innovators away.

This is rarely permanent though as companies like Google and Microsoft often suffer a form of corporate Attention Deficit Disorder – Knol is a good example of this and Seth Godin describes what happens “when the 800 pound gorilla arrives”.

Eventually the 800 pound gorilla finds there aren’t a lot of bananas, gets bored and wanders off.

Which is what has happened with RSS feeds and Google reader. Now the little guys can get back to building new products on  open RSS platform while Google, along with Facebook and Twitter, try to lock their data away.

For Groupon, the departure of Google from the deals business may not be good news as it could mean smart new competitors enter the field. Either way, there’s some challenges ahead for the owners of group buying services.

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