google | Paul Wallbank - Communications Professional

Google bets on artificial intelligence

Google bets on artificial intelligence and machine learning as the company deals with the shift to mobile

Breaking with the company’s tradition of the Sergi, Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai writes this year’s founders letter laying out how the search engine giant is focusing of artificial intelligence and the machine learning.

Pichai’s view of the world seems to tie in very closely with founders Larry Page and Sergei Brin with him laying out a vision of making the internet and computers accessible to all.

The challenge for Google is the shift away from personal computers, something that the company is struggling with and a factor that Pichai acknowledges.

Today’s proliferation of “screens” goes well beyond phones, desktops, and tablets. Already, there are exciting developments as screens extend to your car, like Android Auto, or your wrist, like Android Wear. Virtual reality is also showing incredible promise—Google Cardboard has introduced more than 5 million people to the incredible, immersive and educational possibilities of VR.

Whether Google can execute on that vision and manages to diversify its revenues away from depending almost exclusively upon web advertising will be what defines Pichai’s time as the company’s CEO. He has a challenging task ahead.

Google’s plans for the smartcity

Google Sidewalk may be considering building its own smart city, but will it’s lack of commitment and locked in technology be a turn off?

Last June Google launched its Sidewalk Labs project to explore smart city technologies. At a conference this week the scheme’s director, Dan Doctoroff, hinted they may be looking at building an entire digitially connected town from scratch.

Planned cities don’t have a good track record, as Disney discovered in Florida with their community named Celebration, so the odds are against Google from the start in this.

Google adds to the challenge with some distrust towards the company following the shutting down of the Revolv device — even the slightest risk of a service or device being shutdown or discontinued is enough to dissuade even the most eager smartcity enthusiasts.

Making Google’s task of successfully rolling out smartcity products, let alone build a smartcity from scratch, is the company’s notorious attention deficit disorder where management struggle to maintain focus on products or projects.

For anyone thinking of living in a smartcity, the commitment of developers, vendors and authorities towards the technologies is an essential consideration. It’s also why open source software and standards are essential when building a community around technology.

Google focuses on the short term

Google’s reported divestment of Boston Robotics could mark a fundamental change in the business’ culture.

Just over two years ago Google acquired high profile robot developer Boston Robotics, at the time it appeared a major step both the search engine giant and the industry.

Today, Bloomberg reports Google are looking at divesting Boston Robotics as the company is not proving to be fit into the company’s other divisions while management sees better revenue prospects in other ventures.

If the latter is true then the sale marks a shift in Google’s attitude towards long term investments. That may mark a turning point in the company’s development.

How artificial intelligence can outguess people

Google have developed a tool that determines a location from a photograph

It’s hard to spot locations from a photograph and it’s something people can’t do this very well. MIT’s Technology Review reports Google’s researchers have developed a tool that figures out the location of an image with twice the accuracy of humans.

To illustrate their point Google have their Geoguesser game that allows people to pit their knowledge against the computer.

While this could be seen as a gimmick, it again shows how computing power is being used in areas that were seen as being immune from technology not so long ago and how artificial intelligence will be applied in various fields.

For the moment, applying artificial intelligence to seemingly trivial fields like games gives researchers to opportunity to test it before being applied to areas like cancer treatment.

As artificial intelligence advances, a whole range of existing fields are going to be disrupted – particularly in ‘knowledge industry’ fields like law, consulting and management – while new industries and occupations will arise out of these technologies.

The opaque Alphabet

Alphabet’s results are impressive but the lack of detail remains troubling

Late last year Google announced it was restructuring and creating a new holding company called Alphabet, at the time I hoped it would bring more accountability into a business that’s becoming notable for easily distracted management and sprawling bureaucracy.

Yesterday the company released its latest quarterly reports and it appears far from improving transparency, the restructure has resulted in the operation of ‘moonshots’ – termed ‘Other Bets’ in the reports – becoming even more shrouded in mystery.

Other Bets, which includes Google Fiber, Ventures and Google X, made a stonking $3.1 billion loss while 90% of revenues still comes from the advertising business.

Even within the advertising arm there’s little transparency as the division includes Apps, Android and YouTube along with the lucrative Search and Ads business. There’s little information of how these divisions are travelling on their own.

As Dennis Howlett at Diginomica points out, there will come a time when shareholders demand some accountability as the losses in the Other Bets are not trivial but it seems that time is some way off.

For Google, the biggest risk is being disrupted themselves. Their ‘river of gold’ is not dissimilar to that the newspaper industry floated along prior to the web – and Google – arriving.

Another aspect is that of culture where most parts of the business are free of accountability as the lucrative Ad division’s revenues allow disinterested management and needless bureaucracy to thrive.

While Alphabet’s revenues are impressive, this is a company dangerously reliant on one line of business. History has not treated such ventures well.

Google’s locksmith problem and the perils of crowdsourcing

Google’s continued disinterest in local search continues to hurt honest business and consumers

An ongoing frustrations of this blog is Google’s failure to execute in local business search despite the massive advantage it has in that field.

One notable aspect of Google’s failure is the locksmith problem where thousands of fake businesses have slipped into the company’s database. The result is thousands of consumers being ripped off and honest local businesses being overlooked in search results.

Spam in Google’s local business search is not a new problem, Search Engine Land reported it as being an ongoing issue in 2009 and the New York Times ran a feature on it two years later highlighting how genuine local businesses and consumers suffer.

Now, five years on, the New York Times has revisited the problem of Google business listings and finds the problem hasn’t changed a great deal with locksmiths and other local search engine results being hijacked by scammers filing false listings.

It’s hard not to conclude that the local listing service isn’t really a high priority to Google’s attention deficient managers and it isn’t surprising given maintaining databases is nowhere near as sexy as being involved in moonshots or as lucrative as the company’s core adwords business.

Google’s bureaucrats think so little of the service that they give the task of maintaining its integrity to an army of unpaid volunteers. The New York Times tells the tale of one of these ‘Mappers’, an unemployed truck driver named Dan Austin, who proved so good at the role he was ‘promoted’ – still unpaid of course – and then ‘sacked’ when he demonstrated how easy it was to plant a false listing.

That weakness in Google’s system shows how crowdsourced services can be subject to abuse and how volunteers themselves are abused by companies taking advantage of ‘free’ labour.

Another weakness illustrated in the Locksmith story is the collateral damage of the ‘fail-fast’ mentality where features are released without the developers really understanding the consequences. The cost of failure may be felt by innocent parties more than the company that’s ‘failed’, as Search Engine Land flagged in its 2009 article.

Google has continued to release features into local that are open to abuse. Google has used its release early and iterate tactic to gain market share at the expense of more circumspect competitors and on the fragile incomes of small businesses.

The continued failure of Google’s local business service remains frustrating for small businesses, having destroyed the Yellow Pages and local newspaper advertising models most neighbourhood services have few places to advertise. While Google and the other internet giants remain focused on other matters, local business search remains a great opportunity for a smart entrepreneur.

Bringing the Internet to the masses

In India and Myanmar we may be seeing the effects of the internet on developing economies

For the developing world, broadband and mobile communications are helping

In Myanmar, the opening of the economy has meant accessible telecommunications for the nation’s farmers reports The Atlantic.

At the same time, Indian Railway’s Telecommunications arm RailTel is opening its fibre network to the public, starting with Wi-Fi at major stations.

What is notable in both cases is the role of Facebook. In India, Facebook’s project to offer free broadband access across the nation is meeting some resistance and it’s probably no coincidence Indian Railway’s WiFi project is being run as partnership with Google.

In Myanmar on the other hand, Facebook and Snapchat are the go to destination for rural communities, it will be interesting to watch how this plays out as farmers start to use the social media service for price discovery and finding new markets – as Tencent Chairman SY Lau last year claimed was happening with Chinese communities.

One of the promises of making the Internet available to the general public was that it would enable the world to become connected, thirty years later we may be seeing the results.

Facebook has another attempt at local search

Facebook has another attempt to capture the small business search market

Before the web came along, advertising for the local plumber or hairdresser was just a matter of placing an ad in the local newspaper and a listing in the Yellow Pages. Then the internet and smartphones swamped those channels.

One of the greatest missed opportunities has been small business online advertising. With the demise of phone directories, particularly the Yellow Pages, it’s been hard, time consuming and expensive for smaller traders to cut through the online noise.

This market should have been Google’s for the taking however the local search platform has been drifting for years in the face of company apathy, mindless bureaucracy and silly name changes to fit in with the Google Plus distraction.

While Facebook has been playing in the local business space for a while they are now ramping up another service with a new site for local services search.

TechCrunch reports Facebook are experimenting with the local search function and while it isn’t anywhere near as comprehensive as Google’s at present the rich data the social media service has been able to harvest could well make it a far more useful tool.

However it’s not Facebook’s first attempt and Apple too has been playing in this space albeit with little traction.

If Facebook or Apple does usurp Google, the search engine giant will only have itself to blame for missing the opportunity as it was distracted by loss making ventures while letting potentially lucrative services pass.

The local business search market should be a lucrative opportunity for the business that gets it right. It may well be that all the big tech giants are unable to make this market work.

Google restructures its venture capital arm

Even for the biggest companies finding good investments isn’t easy

Things haven’t been going too well at Google’s European venture capital firm so the company is restructuring its investment operations into one global organisatio reports Tech.Eu.

Even for the biggest company spotting opportunities isn’t easy.

Open sourcing artificial intelligence

Google making some of its artificial intelligence open source could change the software industry.

Yesterday Google open sourced many of the features in its Tensorflow artificial intelligence service.

Making the services available to the community will mean many more opportunities to develop the technology. It could well prove to be a turning point for Artificial Intelligence in making it more accessible to the general public and business community.

Eric Schmidt on managing Google

In an interview with LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, Google chairman Eric Schmidt describes how he managed the company’s high growth.

“In all my issues at Google, I knew I had no idea what to do, but I knew that I had the best team ever assembled to figure out what to do,” says Google – and now Alphabet – chairman Eric Schmidt in an interview with LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman.

Schmidt’s interview is a great insight into managing fast growth companies,”almost all small companies are full of energy and no process”. While he reflects on his early days at stricken companies like Sun (“tumultuous and political”) and Novell (“the books were cooked, and people were frauds”).

Moving to Google he found all of his management skills exercised at a company with a unique culture and rapidly growing headcount.

One notable anecdote is how Larry Page kept a 100k cheque from an early investor in his pocket for a month before cashing it.

Compare and contrast that attitude with the current startup mania where by the end of that day a media release would be issued proclaiming the company to be a new unicorn on that valuation.

Schmidt’s view, like many others, is that the real key to success in the company is the people. This echoes the interview with Meltwater’s CEO earlier this week where Jørn Lyseggen described how the key to starting a venture in a new country was the first five people hired.

One great takeaway Schmidt has from his time at Google is how great companies are created through the Minimal Viable Product method, “the way you build great products is small teams with strong leaders who make tradeoffs and work all night to build a product that just barely works.Look at the iPod. Look at the iPhone. No apps. But now it’s 70% of the revenue of the world’s most valuable company.”

Ultimately though Schmidt’s advice is to make decisions quickly, “do things sooner and make fewer mistakes. The question is, what causes me not to make those decisions quickly.”

“Some people are quicker than others, and it’s not clear which actually need to be answered quickly. Hindsight is always that you make the important decisions more quickly.”