Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Tag: google

  • Facebook has another attempt at local search

    Facebook has another attempt at local search

    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.

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  • Google restructures its venture capital arm

    Google restructures its venture capital arm

    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.

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  • Open sourcing artificial intelligence

    Open sourcing artificial intelligence

    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.

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  • Eric Schmidt on managing Google

    Eric Schmidt on managing Google

    “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.”

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  • Twitter could be about to go Google

    Twitter could be about to go Google

    The turmoil at Twitter continues with the directionless service announcing they will lay off eight percent of its workforce – over 300 jobs.

    At the same time, the company also announced Google’s Chief Business Officer,Omid Kordestani, would become Twitter’s Executive Chairman.

    To compound Twitter’s problems payment system Square announced it will have a stock market IPO, given the two companies share the same CEO and co-founder it’s hard to think Twitter will get the management attention it desperately needs.

    It’s hard not to think that Twitter is going to be absorbed by Google, certainly the search engine giant can afford it and they have struggled with social media – although it’s questionable how much Twitter’s star struck management understands its own users, let alone social media in general.

    A combination of Twitter’s ineffectual management coupled with Google’s which has consistently shown it struggles with the concept of social media and has a horrible habit of neglecting then shutting down services it loses interest in would probably prove fatal for the service.

    Should Twitter fall into Google’s arms and then die of neglect it will be the case of a good idea that was monetized too fast and a management that never quite understood what it was doing.

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