It’s Google’s World…We Just Live in It

Posted on May 23, 2013 by Tim Judd

If you were expecting a splashy launch of a Google Flying car or Google Tats (a transparent ink which allows users to program their tattoos to be anything they want to be as often as they like) at the recent Google I/O developers conference you would have been disappointed. At last years show Google announced Glass, the creepy wearable spyglasses that is currently getting them into a world of pain as the real world looks at their wearers as potential serial killers, but this year it was a major launch free occasion. That’s not to say there wasn’t a lot to talk about. If there is one word which comes to mind looking at the very wide range of stuff our friends at Google would like to offer us, that word is “Pervasive”.

It used to be that Apple was the one word answer to all of our technology needs. Yes you had to give up a little bit of freedom and a pretty hefty chunk of change, but Apple would wrap you up in love and join all your tech ends together for you. Now you have a choice… you can be apple flavored or Google flavored, or be like me Google flavored but mostly on Apple devices… oh and one Windows thingy still.

As always… outside of search, where they continue to be pack leaders; Google is following its spot-a-trend-and-copy-it solution. Some of the latest innovations include:

Google TV – which is Apple TV or Ruku.
Google Hang Outs – which is Skype plus GotoMeeting and YouTube.
Conversational Search – which is a Smarter Siri.
Google Play – which is Spotify meets YouTube (ad free).
And lets not forget (though, many wish they could) the horrible Google+ – which wants to be Facebook when it grows up.

The list goes on. Some of these will be great, some will fail horribly; but Google has the brains and the bucks to pursue these avenues. Clearly their bottom line is to offer an attractive and typically free solution for every possible online/new media point of exposure. For the likes of Apple or Samsung, it must be like trying to fight the Hydra. They don’t mind who they copy (go ahead and sue them it will take four years, and four years is an awfully long time in tech) and eventually when the dust settles they will be everywhere. Now, where is Steve Jobs when we really need him?

The Quest for and Ad Free Life Continues

Posted on May 9, 2013 by Tim Judd

If there is one trend driving the ad business crazy right now, and has been for a while, it the active flight by content consumers from all things advertising. The major TV networks put the excellent HuluPlus together as a way to offer recent and past TV with “limited commercial interruption”, which means roughly 30 seconds of commercial per break rather than the more traditional 2-3 minute slots. As someone who is pretty much physically allergic to all forms of commercials, I regard that as a step in the right direction. Although the move to DVR has been slower than I would have thought the amount of people actually watching long form TV complete with commercials has now dropped to below half (44% in a recent survey). Add to that the growth of Video on Demand and all forms of online content the days of the traditional commercial seem to be headed into new territories. Radio has been in a death spiral fueled by the excellent Pandora and the horrible Sirius for a while. Newspapers, which used to weigh measurable fractions of entire pounds, now merely weigh a few grams. The online media world is rapidly moving to a more personalized kind of exposure with advertisers bidding on very detailed profiles of consumers targeting them closely with messages, which they think will resonate.

In another step in this direction, the recent discussions between Google and the major music labels seem to be headed in a similar direction. Google’s goal is to play catch-up to the trendy Spotify music solution, and their approach is interesting. Google hasn’t traditionally had a meaningful music offering, missing out to iTunes, Pandora, and others. But, they did buy YouTube and they see that as their grubstake. Google has been slathering YouTube with pre-run commercials for a while now, to the point where it’s almost unwatchable. In addition to pestering seekers after amusing kitten videos with ad after ad to the point where the Ad-allergic like myself find it unusable.

Now there is a solution. In a supposedly private negotiation, which is such a poorly kept secret that I just hear about it from my Bulldog (who isn’t that much of a news junkie), Google is cutting a deal with the major labels to offer their music content as part of a (presumably) Google Play branded initiative which will offer a Spotify like music service which also removes the ads from your YouTube viewing experience. It’s a cunning plan… let’s annoy the consumers to the point where they will pay a small amount to get rid of the commercials. Oh, and we will throw in all the music you can eat for good measure. The controversy comes over how the music guys get paid for their content. They would like a per-track feed, Google is offering a rev share on what they get. Either way it’s another short step to an ad free environment.

Why Everyone Hates Google

Posted on May 8, 2013 by Tim Judd

Why Everybody Hates Google

If you were Google, you might be forgiven for wondering what’s in the water that is prompting the world to hate you quite as much as they are this week. The answer is easy… a goal of owning and managing the worlds data to your own advantage is getting folks a little jumpy. In a crowded week for Google haters, the launch of the very cool Google Glass product is getting push back from state legislators who are already pushing to make them illegal for driving to casino operators who are already banning them from the gaming floor. Civil rights groups and privacy activists are forming strange bedfellows with bar operators and strip club proprietors against these devices. None of this stops me wanting to buy a pair (as long as they come in my prescription).

At the same time, a ground swell against Glass is getting underway. Monopoly regulators in Europe are calling foul on Google’s aggressive use of patents it purchases from Motorola against arch nemesis Apple in Germany. In a double EU whammy, the tax regulators are clearly coming after Google for their creative financial planning. Just in case you thought Google was in fact a warm, fuzzy Silicone Valley Company it’s not… it’s really based in Bermuda. It’s EU operations are ostensibly transacted through Ireland with a pass through to Bermuda… minimizing EU tax exposure. Unfortunately recently they recruited a bunch of folk for “sales” roles in UK, France, and Germany… and by doing that, they inadvertently qualified themselves to be more aggressively taxed in those countries. Clearly the EU has it in for big G, and is determined to get them any way they can.

The problem Google faces is that they make a great target for anyone with a beef against corporate America, technology in general, and information in particular. They are also incredibly secretive and harder to get a straightforward answer from than Ben Bernanke on Quaaludes. Apple gives us cool toys and Amazon let’s us buy pretty much anything we want to any time anywhere, Google seems to be infiltrating pretty much a very place where we touch information. If they didn’t invent, it they “borrow it” (witness Android and AdWords both critical products they “borrowed” from Apple and Yahoo respectively). Add to that their enthusiasm for minimizing their tax burden which enrages legislators, their willingness to use patents to hobble competitors, and their absolute power over how we navigate the Internet; and it’s not hard to see why they are getting increasingly rough treatment… and it doesn’t seem to bother them very much.

Are We Virtually There Yet?

Posted on May 2, 2013 by Tim Judd

The Tom Cruise movie Minority Report is often held up as an example of what the future may hold, a world where the digital world overlays the real one and retailers greet shoppers with digital assistants offering deals customized to your interests. That’s still a ways off…well the time travel part is anyway, but Google is clearly leading the charge to get us there. I’m reading the new book from Eric Schmidt (Google’s Chairman) at the moment, and it’s clear that he sees the future in very Minority Report ways. He envisages a digital world where the rich countries live in an immersed digital culture and even Kalahari bushmen have cellphones to report in on herd movement.

This week has seen progress in multiple Minority Report ways. For example, the first reports are coming in from the lucky folk who were able to pay $1,500 to get hold of a pair of Google Glass glasses. The initial results are mixed but encouraging. It seems that if you actually read the instructions they apparently they work pretty well. They understandably garner lots of interest from passersby… much like early horseless carriages must have done. A widely reported side effect is the ‘creep’ factor that people assume they are being recorded by the wearers… and don’t appreciate it. The glasses communicate with your wireless phone to display search results, maps directions etc directly to the user. Another example of the importance of the mobile device in your pocket… in fact you could think of Glass as not much more than a wearable heads up display for your phone.

Another Google step towards Minority Report World comes in the release in the Apple App store of Google Now. The release is a few months behind the release on Android but now it’s made it into the store so even us poor iPhone users can play with this neat App. The premise is that your phone takes notes on what you are interested in, where you go, and where you are. It also gives you heads up on your schedule, email, and other essential parts of your digital world. Combine Google Glass with Google Now, and the digital overlay tailored to your world gets a couple of steps closer.

The part which isn’t getting as much play as the Gee Wizardry of Glass is how all this monetizes. It’s fair to say that Google missed the boat with the tablet and is still playing catch-up with Android on the iPhone. If the future is at least in part a digital overlay, then Glass represents the first serious take at delivering it. The fact that Google has amassed the largest basket of advertisers who will already pay for clicks in search, plays directly into this opportunity. When I look at Google Now I’m presented with cards for various local restaurants, it’s only a short step from there for Google to present me with offers from local retailers since Google Now knows my location and has been collecting my interests. Now add Google Glass to the mix as a way to deliver information and commercial messages as I move around, and we really do have the potential for the Minority Report experience which customizes commercial messages to my interests and locations. It also makes sense for advertisers to bid more for an impression on Glass when the wearer is in proximity to the product or location. Being in proximity to an object or location is a different kind of search… and arguably a very powerful kind of search as it took effort and time to get there. It truly is a brave new world, very much in line with Schmidt’s vision… and (so far anyway), a world pretty much controlled by Google.

Keeping up with Google

Posted on April 22, 2013 by Tim Judd

As an avid Google watcher it’s been almost a full time job just trying to keep up with the guys. There are probably a good dozen Google related stories moving and shaking as we speak. In broad terms you can classify these developments as falling into several themes.

The PR Battle

Google used to be cute, now it’s a monster which eats it’s own and grinds the face of its critics into the dirt… a perfectly logical progression in business, but it’s clear Google themselves have a problem being seen as the ogre they are rather than the cool kids they think they should be. Putting aside the fact that the German authorities just hate Google and all things Google, the German regulators have just handed down the largest fine they were able to for the reckless collection of non-map data as they built the German street view component a few years back. Although Google claimed it was a problem caused by over enthusiastic geeks; the Germans weren’t having any of it. Indeed, they made it clear in their ruling that had they had a larger book to throw at them, they would have been happy to oblige. At almost the same time, Eric Schmidt continued to defend Google’s legal but creative way of reducing taxes as much as they can. The BBC chewed him up and spat him out, and other media rushed in to pile on. The Brits love paying taxes, so for them to see Google gleefully avoid paying taxes they can legally avoid, it makes them see red.

Focus, Focus and Focus

Google used to throw off pet and or goofy projects with gay abandon… now not so much. Indeed they are thinning the herd. They let their digital children persist of kill them off depending on revenue and potential, and or the phase of the moon. Recently they have been killing products at a faster clip than usual. They killed off their very popular RSS reader, and last week they axed the Google Affiliate Network… to the consternation of many who have scratched out a living in this industry. The affiliate network wasn’t a huge contribute, but it’s interesting that they axed the product which was (presumably) profitable. The logical successor to the late and not very lamented GAN, is the shopping search they introduced last year as a paying service. That’s an enormous opportunity which will likely eclipse the rather clunky GAN…indeed it’s probably already done that.

Colonizing the Future

Google won the search war by doing one thing supremely well, and “borrow” anything else they may need. They pretty much invented the search category and have benefited enormously from that initial win. The classic example of this strategy is the ad product, which they built on their first empire. That platform is powered by an auction bid platform, which they simply stole from Overture (then Yahoo). They spent good parts of the next year or so in court settling with Yahoo. That legal process allowed them enough room to solidify their market share so that even though they were paid fortunes when they settled, Yahoo lost. The odd thing is that although they innovate like crazy, they rarely get it right in house and have to use their checkbook to play catch-up. They missed video (and bought YouTube), they missed social media with the awful Google Buzz and have foisted Google Plus on a reluctant world. Apple beat them to the punch on phones, and Android is a good copy – albeit under legal attack. ITunes rules paid downloaded content; Google play is a distant second place. They missed local reviews and couldn’t buy Yelp. They missed classified to Craigslist, and the quilter market to Pintrest. The list goes on. The list is complicated by the sea changes underway in both how we experience all things digital (mobile, iPads, etc), and the places we go to search (Amazon represents a huge threat to commercial search).

All this puts them under what I have to imagine is intense pressure to second-guess the future to consolidate their hegemony. Google Now is interesting as a potential digital assistant, which will follow you around and be your constant digital helper. Google Glass represents a new category… and maybe their first, truly new category, useful digital overlay. Some are skeptical but I’m already a believer (after a fashion). My new car has a rather cool Heads Up Display feature; where it projects basic travel data and directions in the screen so that you can gauge your speed etc. without ever taking your eyes off the road. After only a week or two of using it I’m hooked. As long as Google Glass comes in my prescription, I’m going to be an early adopter.

RSS RIP

Posted on March 14, 2013 by Tim Judd

Okay, I’ll admit it I’m more than a little ticked off at Google today. I fully realize that is about as meaningful as being mad at the weather (and as effective), but on PI day and Einstein’s Birthday, Google killed Google Reader. My lovely wife asked me this AM, “what is Google reader and why do I care?” Reader is the RSS platform which a ton of cool and interesting, but not typically very commercial, stuff is based. It’s the glue behind things like Digg and Reddit (my wife Loooves Reddit), and Google just announced that it goes away on July 1st.

Google has made a tradition of trying out lots of stuff and letting it run for a while. Then, either expanding it or shutting it down depending how it does. Not everything they do makes money, but the stuff that does makes absolute fortunes for them. Reader never made much money (as far as I can tell they never really tried to make money with it), but it was widely available easy to plug into as a way to manage RSS, and it worked really well. It worked so well that lots of other folk hung businesses around it. When it’s gone, unless someone like Digg or Reddit steps up and develops an open source replacement, it will likely stick a stake through the heart of RSS as a whole.

What makes me sad (apart from the likely impact it will have on stuff I love like FlipBook), is that the money it costs Google to keep this excellent public service going has to be absolutely minimal. The other day I blogged about the trivial $7Million dollar fine imposed on them by states AG for collecting personal data they shouldn’t have been. I don’t think this is a spiteful revenge act on the part of Google to a society, which doesn’t anymore always worship its every move, but taking away one of our best and most useful public service components feels a bit mean. I’d be happy to trade Google Translate (bablefish works fine), the useless Google talk, and maybe Fusion Tables (whatever the heck they are), for the beating heart of RSS. Once Reader is gone, how much longer will RSS last?

The Five Hour Fifteen Minute Fine

Posted on March 12, 2013 by Tim Judd

I keep pretty current with all things search, yet even I was a little taken aback by the fine on Google just announced today. In this case, the attorneys general of 38 states settled with Google by fining Big G seven million dollars. Any Google watcher will initially be surprised that Google settled at all. Google is famously combative, they took on and took down the FTC before Christmas, and if you come after them you had better have a great case and deep pockets. In this case the states AG had exactly that. What Google is being fined for is a by-product of their Street View project. Back in 2008-2010 when they send goofy looking cars to photograph everyone’s house from a pedestrian point of view the cars also collected other data like your emails, financial records, browser behavior, and for all I know your inside leg measurement, from unencrypted WiFi connections.

Putting aside the question “who in their right mind leaves an unencrypted WiFi connection out there (remember it was a few years back)… the bigger question in my mind would be, why on Earth would you equip a fleet of cars with the infrastructure needed to harvest data which you have always said you weren’t trying to capture? A street photo is not financial data; browser behavior is not a street photo. Google used the (oops) defense. It claimed it collected WiFi data because of “rogue code” mistakenly included in the software by a lone engineer. Yeah right. I think a better, more honest and quite reasonable, answer would have been “Back then we thought it might be cool to map as much data as we could since we were in the neighborhood anyway we took what we could find. The team working on it was over zealous, we collected more than we intended, we never wanted or used the data, we have destroyed it and we will work hard to preserve private data doing forwards.”

I just don’t buy the “rogue coder” defense… (BTW The Rogue Coder Defense would be a great title for a Big Bang Theory episode)… with “rogue” teams fitting “rogue” WiFi data collector systems into thousands of “rogue” vehicles which were then scouring the country uploading non existent data to “rogue” servers. Why is it I can’t beat a speeding ticket but Google can sell that ration of nonsense to 38 states AG? The topper for all this silliness is the fine. Google does roughly 32 Million a day. The laughably small $7 Million dollar fine will take roughly 5 and a quarter hours to earn out… oh well… I wasn’t using my forth amendment rights anyway.

The Distraction Conundrum

Posted on March 7, 2013 by Tim Judd

I’m easily distracted… always have been. Had I been born in the 80’s rather than the 60’s, I’d probably be a life long Ritalin user. My internal hamster is running a mile a minute and if what’s happening right now isn’t getting to the point fast enough I reach for the zapper… I have often thought how neat it would be to have a human zapper, which allows you to fast forward through lackluster conversations. This impatience extends to media. I was raised in the UK on commercial free BBC TV and radio with the result that I am physically unable to sit through more commercials than the concise 30 seconds offered by the brilliant people at HuluPlus. I’m clearly not alone in this; media companies and advertisers are in constant conflict with consumers who don’t want the distraction. Placing ads anywhere, especially on social media, draws cries of outrage from consumers who have gotten used to the price of admission being free… both from cost and distraction.

So, it is with interest that I started playing with Vine recently. If you haven’t tried it already you are probably using an Android phone… so far it’s only available on iPhone and iPod Touch. What this cunning, but evil little App does is allow you to create six second long stop-motion micro movies on your iPhone. If you ever watched Wallace and Gromit, or anything by Ray Harryhausen, you will be familiar with this technique. It’s very easy to do and kinda fun, but in the same way that Twitter drove the wannabe witty commentators to compress their deathless prose into 140 pithy characters, so Vine is going to turn a good number of us into six second animation crazy people. The app allows you to post direct to your twitter feed or Facebook, and it’s pretty addicting. I haven’t had the nerve to post my first efforts yet, but I’m working on it.

The challenge this very cool App, and the social integration it brings with it, goes beyond the interest it may generate in millennial cineasts or middle-aged goof balls like me. In the same way twitter declared 140 characters to be the required length for any conversation (commercial or otherwise), so Vine and the compressed media featured on Hulu is driving the attention span and the media window ever closer. Advertisers are responding by attempting to build their brands into successful vehicles much like Hyundai and the Walking Dead. That’s a show where no matter how horrific the zombie attack may be, you can be sure that our heroes will escape in a weirdly clean Hyundai… makes perfect sense. I’d much rather be trying deal with zombies in a shinny new Hyundai rather than (say) a Humvee. Mobile is further compressing the real estate available to target. The end product is an audience which is highly fragmented, talking to itself or just the people it likes, consuming media on multiple screens often in time shifts who is increasingly intolerant of the distraction commercial messaging creates.

What was that?… Sorry, I wasn’t paying attention.

The Mobile Stampede Accelerates

Posted on February 15, 2013 by Tim Judd

There were a couple of interesting items this week which point to the continuing ascendancy of mobile. Google inked a deal with Apple; Google will pay Apple a cool 1Billion in cash “unmarked 20s I imagine” to remain the default search on iPhones through 2014 and Comscore announced over all search data for 2012 and although search continues to grom desktop search saw its first decline since…well since ever. The rapid growth of mobile and vertical search growth on sites like Facebook and Amazon contributed to the overall decline.

In parallel announcements Google’s Q4 was good but not great. It continues to see a decline in click prices (6%) YOY a decline which is now 6 quarters old….and again driven by the ocean of mobile clicks with in sufficient inventory to support the price. This is a tough spot for big G. In an attempt to at least partially stem the bleeding they recently announced a self service online package incorporating desktop and mobile targeted at local businesses. It’s a clever product which (in theory) let’s SMBs target searchers based on location and time. For example a doughnut shop might want to focus on the 7-9 AM slot whereas a wine bar might target happy hour.

As always adoption by traditionally recalcitrant SMBs is going to be the main issue. Cost is also going to be a factor. The bundling Google is offering essentially rolls the mobile clicks involved up to a desktop click price…which is usually significantly higher than mobile. That’s great for Google but not such great value for the SMB. You have to wonder why Google continues to treat SMBs as cattle fattened for slaughter with their ‘do it for me’ packages which consistently maximize Google’s value ratether than SMB returns.

There’s also an interesting trend I have observed from various recent Google presentations (especially to local/SMB audiences) where they focus of ROI which shows up all over the place not just in the obvious places. It’s an argument which is well made, but sounds a little desperate “don’t just look at directly track-able obvious conversion metrics, check behind the sofa too”. That’s a tough message to receive from the super thin smart young things which Google sends out to preach to the masses. In all my years of knowing Googlies I have yet to meet any with any kind of weight issues…there are literally no over weight Google employees. That’s perhaps not surprising when you read about the latest Google project to provide street level views. Over the summer they send a bunch of their brightest and best to cool hard to reach places like the Grand Canyon to show the rest of us what it looks like. This week they released detailed renditions of 38 top Ski resorts….come on guys we know you are super rich…but what’s next great yacht basins of the world? I will be off line probably all of next week looking for Googlies doing street level views of Maui. Aloha till then.

Google Bug Watching for Beginners

Posted on February 13, 2013 by Tim Judd

Google watching is endlessly entertaining….today it got entertaining in an unexpected way. A geek with I’m guessing way too much time posted on Quora that some searches which should be impossible to resolve rather than returning no results at all actually return tons of porn.

This isn’t something the average user is likely to have come across accidentally, most people don’t do advance syntax based searches on Google…but if you did and asked Google for an answer to a logically impossible query like “-4 “1 4″ in which you are essentially asking for results which don’t contain the number 4 but do contain the number 1 space 4, rather than returning no results in this case Google returns 808,000 results most of which (upon very cursory inspection) are porn links. This trick even works with “safe search” filter turned on. Weirdly, similar impossible queries like -4 “4″ return no results and -4 “14″ returns results which don’t have porn links.

Leaving aside what kind of extreme search jiggery pokery you would need to be doing to even find this effect it’s a hilarious bug. According to Google engineering post on the topic sadly it’s not a secret lonely nerd feature, it’s just a bug. This is fascinating. We don’t often get to see explicit bugs in Google search in real time…especially not bugs of this magnitude. This presents interested parties with the opportunity to witness just how long the Googlies take to track down, fix and deploy a really clear bug in main search. I’m guessing less than two days. The clock is running, let’s see how long it takes.

ThinkJudd

I think therefore I search

Category Archives: Technology