Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Tag: google

  • Google goes alphabetical

    Google goes alphabetical

    As announced two months ago, Google quietly morphed into Alphabet after stock trading closed on Friday. The Wall Street Journal describes the new structure and the rationale behind it.

    It’s hoped putting the smaller, more speculative operations into a separate business units from the company’s core search and advertising businesses will allow managers to be more focused on the business while giving more flexibility to the newer divisions.

    One of the major reasons for Google’s reorganisation is the company had become too unwieldy with the WSJ story quoting one former employee who illustrates the problem.

    Many entrepreneurs believe “it’s easier to do their business outside Google rather than inside,” said Max Ventilla, who left Google in 2013 to found an education startup. “There’s a lot of red tape for head count and money to get through at Google.”

    At the moment it’s not clear that headcount is going to fall under the new structure and certainly some more revisions to the core business are going to be needed to get focus back for products like Google Docs and the local business search operations which have been drifting for some time.

    Over the next two years we’ll see how successful the new structure is. If it works, then Alphabet could be showing the new model for corporate conglomerations.

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  • Slaying the internet’s goliaths

    Slaying the internet’s goliaths

    Techmeme has long been one of the most useful sites for technology news and this week it celebrates its tenth year.

    For those, like me, who write every day on tech issues the site has been a godsend. Many a time with the end of the day approaching Techmeme has pointed me an article that has got the creative juices flowing.

    Gabe Rivera, the site’s founder and CEO, tells of the lessons learned over the past decade with a repeated theme of ‘Techmeme killers’ regularly coming along.

    Prominent among them was Google’s relaunch of its Blogsearch product which was billed as a ‘Techmeme killer’. Like so many of Google’s products, Blogsearch was quietly retired two years ago while Techmeme is still around.

    Techmeme’s success in the face of an attempt by Google to take over their market isn’t surprising, marketing guru Seth Godin described how his startup, Knol, survived an onslaught from the giant company in 2013.

    Despite Google’s cash and market strength, execution matters and often larger companies lack the committed evangelists that give the smaller businesses their energy.

    Both Techmeme and Knol show that no company is guaranteed success, despite its resources or power.

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  • Life at the data frontline

    Life at the data frontline

    One of the defining features of the next decade’s successful businesses is how they manage data. No company has a greater challenge in dealing with information than Google.

    In a feature tracking Google’s evolving data centres, Techcrunch describes how the company has dealt with the challenge of being the web’s repository.

    The challenge has been huge, Google’s current Jupiter network delivers a petabit each second, a hundred times more capacity than its first-generation network and in 2005.

    Google boasts 10,000 of their servers are capable of reading all of the scanned data in the Library of Congress in less than a tenth of a second.

    While most businesses won’t need that sort of capacity in the near future, the exponential growth Google has dealt with is the same issue facing most managers and business owners as more devices, staff and customers become connected.

    For most organisations, dealing with that dramatic growth is almost impossible and this is why automated services running on the cloud will become even more a part of daily working life. Those services will be running on the technology Google is developing today.

     

     

     

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  • Mimecast and the future of email

    Mimecast and the future of email

    Email remains the biggest business app in the world says Peter Bauer, the CEO and co-founder of mail management service Mimecast.

    Boston based, South African born Bauer founded his company to “make email safer for business” and after launching in his home country and attracting 14,000 customers and spoke in Sydney about his company and how email is changing in the world of the cloud.

    In many respects email is one of those applications – like SMS – that happened by accident. In it’s early days no-one intended or expected those messaging systems to become key communications services.

    “I started my IT career in the mid-1990s as an e-mail systems engineer and if you think back to the mid 90s no business cared much about email at all,” says Bauer who believes the experience gave him a unique perspective to how the service evolved into a key business application.

    Over the next ten years Bauer saw how email became the personal filing systems for most workers and put systems under pressure as companies had to manage large file stores with the associated compliance and discovery risks.

    The security risks too were huge as email became the preferred malware delivery system as virus and spyware writers used infected messages to get onto users’ systems, a problem that has become worse as ransomware and phishing attacks have become common.

    “Because business operations and process became dependent upon email, it became necessary to make the service highly available,” says Bauer in emphasising how important it has become to most large and small enterprises.

    Even with the shift to the cloud, most companies have remained with email with companies moving to Microsoft’s Office365 – Bauer claims the take up has doubled in the last twelve months. Google’s Apps are gaining traction in the small end of the industry but the enterprises are really wedded to the Microsoft platform.

    Bauer sees that shift to cloud based services as changing the risk profile for businesses and this is another opportunity for his business.

    Email faces a number of challenges as social media and instant messaging apps become preferred communications tools for younger groups while some businesses are banning email.

    For the moment though, it looks like the service is safe as companies remain wedded to email as the preferred form of business communication.

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  • Project Ara starts looking lonely

    Project Ara starts looking lonely

    Two years ago this site interviewed New Deal Design’s Gadi Amit about Google’s Project Ara.

    Project Ara is an experiment in creating a modular phone where users can customise their devices by adding or removing components.

    PC World now reports the mooted soft launch for the Project Ara phone in Puerto Rico has been cancelled.

    While Google aren’t saying the project has been shut down, the sporadic and cryptic messages around Ara don’t bode well given the way the company loses interest in and then abandons products.

    If it is being abandoned, it will be interesting to see where the intellectual property from the project ends up.

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