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Google I/O 2016
Google I/O 2016 happened on May, 18 – 20. There had been a lot of pieces of coverage about the different products and services released. But I wanted to spend a bit of time reflecting on what Google I/O 2016 told us about their viewpoint on technology.

Giving apps a second chance

Google knows as well as anyone that the app moves towards a maturity model where consumers stick with the core apps that they want and then don’t go any further.

Data shows that consumers use their top five apps 88 per cent of the time. So why would Google care when it knows that 60 percent of the top apps on the Android platform?

The reasons for an expanded app usage include:
- A proportion of Google’s advertising (like Facebook) is derived from the promotion of app downloads
- Android devices are reaching market maturity in many markets, growth is likely to come from new uses – at least some of which will be derived from third party platforms
- Google has staked its ambition in the PC sector on its Chrome operating system being able to run apps from the Android eco-system. In order for that to happen there needs to be a healthy community of developers
- In the same way that DoubleClick’s ad network greatly expanded the inventory of Google’s advertising business, third party applications offer Google an additional source of usage for its own services. If you want to see the future of Google Apps look at the the way the likes of Baidu and Tencent allow third-party integration with their own tools
Streaming or ‘instant’ apps is part of Google’s efforts to encourage consumer trial of new apps and enhance relationships with developers. Firebase, it’s new analytics platform for mobile developers helps them have a better relationship with their installed user base allowing them to use data to target notifications and campaigns.

More faith in wider area networks (WANs) than personal area networks (PANs)

Android Wear’s updates were interesting. Put simply Google has more faith in data being delivered in a timely manner over cellular or wi-fi networks than it does for inter device transfers over variants of Bluetooth. Both the Apple Watch and Android Wear products suffered from performance lags when the watch was a thin client of a phone. Having a cellular radio on board the phone presents challenges with battery life, but speeds up real world performance.

The original design failure wasn’t down to network performance, but is likely to have implications for personal area network technology like Bluetooth in its different variants or ZigBee. These technologies are all about scale, lose a scale advantage and it poses a problem for future adoption by others. This can happen in a virtuous way. Apple’s adoption of USB benefited the standard greatly and drove interest in peripheral development for both Mac and PC. Apple’s abandonment of FireWire and the 3.5″ diskette marked their decline.

Lots to be concerned about from a privacy point of view?

Google Home moved yet another pair of Android powered ears into our environment. It was obvious from Google’s description of services that a paid marketing model to be the ‘car booking’ or equivalent service of Home could be very lucrative for the search giant. How this device could be used for market research, tracking brand mentions or government surveillance also poses some conundrums moving beyond smartphones to brown goods.

Android N features file based encryption rather than treating the whole device as an encrypted disk. This raises questions around the comparative ease of access from a privacy perspective. Secondly, SafetyNet allows Google to reach into a phone to remove pre-existing applications without user permission. There is no explanation if they also have write privileges to the phone as well. If so, expect law enforcement and intellectual property owner interest. From the way it reads this would affect apps and content that have been side loaded as well as got from an app store.

Android is giving the high ground to Apple on privacy presumably because it considers its own customers don’t care about it that much.

Reference designs in VR to drive adoption and commoditisation

Google’s Daydream project looks to provide standardisation in hardware. By going down this route, Google hopes to spur on the sensor market required for improved AR experience and drive uptake. These will likely be a very different experience to the computer workstation powered Occulus Rift. Driving this technology into the smartphone market may combat the current stagnation in phone sales growth.

More information
Google I/O 2016 event page
A16hz on Google I/O 2016
Everything Google just announced at its I/O conference
Palm, Apple, Google and the whole mobile device thing
The Limits of Google
If Google’s right about AI, that’s a problem for Apple – Marco.org
ISIS’s Mobile App Developers Are in Crisis Mode | Motherboard
June 8, 2016
Crush Google Plus + more

How Mark Zuckerberg Led Facebook’s War to Crush Google Plus | Vanity Fair – Zuckerberg et al were helped by Google Plus having a poor product experience and dumb rollout approach. This has been evident across Google’s products from Google Wave to GTalk and the Google Cloud service. Facebook didn’t need to crush Google Plus, it just needed to do a better job on a consistent basis. More on Facebook here.

Huawei Draws From Apple Playbook, Narrows IPhone Market Lead | Digital – AdAge – Guo Ping talks a good game, but why would someone develop specifically for Huawei rather than Android?

Smart TVs are a dumb idea | TechEye – really nails it in terms of the value created and consumer behaviour

The foibles of freemium – …turn the commercial model upside down by no longer relying just on journalists to report the news but also articles from a raft of other contributors – including corporate brand and advertising PR people. City AM goes all Forbes and Huffington Post blurring the line in editorial and advertorial content

Samsung’s subtle nudge to get potential customers to upgrade – interesting acknowledgement that the competition is existing devices in mature markets like Europe and North America

Huge: Microsoft opens up its Windows Holographic platform to third parties – In what could be a defining moment in the nascent augment reality and virtual reality spaces, Microsoft Corp. has opened up its Windows Holographic platform – trying to become the OS for immersion in the same way that AltSpace is the social platform for VR interactions

SMARTPHONES: Microsoft Puts Smartphone Bets on Xiaomi Bottom line: Microsoft probably took a 10-20 percent stake in Xiaomi as part of the pair’s deal. At least Xiaomi doesn’t have a carrier relationship to burn by bundling Skype on a handset – let’s hope the do a lot better than Nortel, Nokia, Motorola, Palm, Sendo or LG. All of whom had been in bed with Microsoft at one time or another

Mobile location data is accurate up to 30 meters: report – Location data accuracy fluctuates which isn’t terribly surprising

June 5, 2016
Google design

Google design has had a transformative effect on the world. It reminds me of Dieter Rams on the concept of design had said something to the effect of good design being invisible – once you see the product you couldn’t imagine things exist any other way.

That’s a really good description of the web with Google design. In the markets where it operates (with the exceptions of Czech Republic, South Korea, Japan and Russia) it’s a monopoly. Different regulatory authorities are investigating them for leveraging their monopoly into market domination in other categories.

With SERP (Search Engine Results Page) like this one above, I am not surprised that antitrust authorities are gaining an upper hand. This Urban Dictionary integration seems to cross the boundary from being useful to feature bundling. It deprives Urban Dictionary of an opportunity to put ad inventory in front of its audience. Urban Dictionary makes it’s money from retargeted banner ads and its own customisable merchandise. You can get any phrase in Urban Dictionary with its definition on a coffee mug, coaster set or tote bag.

It would be interesting to see if Google got into some sort of content agreement with Urban Dictionary. However I suspect that they have just gone ahead and done this? More about Google here.

May 11, 2016
The Google search post
the Charles Arthur wrote an an interesting analysis piece on Google search business which I have linked to in the more information section called Google’s growing problem: 50% of people do zero searches per day on mobile.

According to Fortune, Google search and display advertising counted for 90 per cent of Google’s revenue stream in 2014. By comparison Tencent makes just 17 per cent of its revenue from advertising; its revenue instead comes from payments a la PayPal, premium accounts (brands pay for specialist facilities on WeChat for instance) virtual goods including gaming and stickers. Whilst Google has tried to diversify beyond advertising (payments, paid for content on YouTube, enterprise product sales), it has failed to change the balance of revenue. Any disruption of their Google search advertising unit represents an existential threat to their business.

The key points in Charles Arthur’s article:
- Consumers are using apps on smartphones rather than searching for a given services (which puts to rest the app versus mobile web argument mobile developers have)
- This will have a more pronounced effect as the world internet population starts to level out next year
- New internet users in the developing world may not be worth having (from a commercial perspective ‘An ad click from the US/Germany/Japan/Taiwan can be worth from 5 cents to $1 depending on the day/season, but clicks from China/India/Brazil/Vietnam are worth fractions of a penny to maybe 1 penny’
Arthur’s assertions represent a huge change in consumer behaviour. Working for Yahoo! in the mid-naughties, we used to cite a Morgan Stanley quoted statistic that seven out of ten web journeys started with search. Search Engine Journal cites Forrester as the source of a claim that 93% of online experiences started with search.
Mobile application is just one part of a wider change:
- Google started to see a decline in the growth rate of search volumes to about 10 per cent a year, yet the amount content to be indexed continues to rise on a non-linear scale
- Whilst the internet usage has been expanded by cheaper broadband with wi-fi and the rise mobile devices (both feature phones and smartphones) there hasn’t been a universal adoption of the open web. Yes smartphones have apps which disrupts the open web, but in places like Indonesia a lot of new feature phone surfing netizens don’t realise they are online and only go as far as Facebook
- Amazon has risen as a wide ranging threat to Google. If you want to buy a book, many people’s evoked set is to go on Amazon. Amazon is not only an e-tailer but a vertical search engine across an increasing number of retail categories. Eric Schmidt claimed that about 30 per cent of purchase web journeys started on Amazon, that represents a significant lost opportunity for Google
More information
Google’s growing problem: 50% of people do zero searches per day on mobile | The Overspill
10 Stats to Justify SEO | Search Engine Journal
Is Tencent leading the way or lagging behind Facebook? | Walk The Chat
In online search war, it’s Google vs. Amazon | Fortune
Google’s Eric Schmidt: “Really, Our Biggest Search Competitor Is Amazon” | Search Engine Land
Amazon Vs. Google: Understanding the buyer’s search engine | Wordtracker
Millions of Facebook users have no idea they’re using the internet | Quartz
Google Search Stats | Internet Live Stats
October 22, 2015
Half of Google searches + more
Worldwide, More Than Half Of Google Searches Happen On Mobile | SearchEngineLand – this is really big. A few thoughts on this:
- Half of Google searches will be about very different things, for instance searching for things like coffee shops in the vicinity of the searcher
- Advertising is likely to see a higher amount of real world performance marketing solutions. This also counteracts Amazon becoming the default product search engine for a lot of web users
- It means a move away from organising all the world’s knowledge. There will be a move to national language search and probably taking away Boolean from power users who make up way less than half of Google searches
- This is a big step in bringing what I call the web of no web into being; where the real world and digital world provide a symbiotic experience. More related content here.
Light’s L16 is a DSLR-quality camera that fits in your pocket — for a stiff price | ExtremeTech – interesting idea

Apple: Semi Advisors Ponders Fallout from any Potential iPhone Battery Issue – Tech Trader Daily – Barrons.com – it’s possible with different tape-out and manufacturing processes I guess?

Sony may consider options for struggling smartphone business | HKEJ Insights – will Qualcomm help them with market access? Interesting example of the commoditisation of Google Android’s eco-system

Amazon launches marketplace for handmade goods | RTE – Amazon wants more of the consumer spend and is going after craft shops and Etsy to get more of the hipster dollar

China launches international payment system | Shanghai Daily – competition with Hong Kong ramps up. By regularising this, it also give the government a chance to regulate and prevent irregular outward capital flow

Twitter’s new Moments spotlights events as they unfold – CNET – its about getting users moving from casual to serious, an ‘on ramp’

“Just Googling it” is bad for your brain | Quartz – Google is killing your memory

Apple Watch releases a new series of short ads, emphasising functionality | Creative Review – these are stylish, looks as if I am not the only person who was wondering what the use case for an Apple watch was

YouTube Goes To War: The Dangers Of ‘Radical Transparency’ « Breaking Defense – it looks like the US military is starting to consider the impact of smartphones in a combat zone

Review: SIG Sauer Introduces The Legion Series & The New Legion P-229 – The Firearm Blog – this almost feels like SIG Sauer is positioning their product (and that of collaborating partners) as a luxury product

Facebook | Atlas Solutions – interesting piece about Facebook’s Atlas model

Apparently Porsche thinks Google’s Android Auto asks for way too much sensitive data | VentureBeat | Business | by Michael de Waal-Montgomery – Google scraping compete data?

Quentin Tarantino: Netflix isn’t for the famed Pulp Fiction director | BGR – artefacts and the peculiar version of serendipity you get in ‘crate digging’

Thin blue likes: Four Facebook lessons Hong Kong cops can learn from police around the world to make friends online | South China Morning Post – Hongkongers are big fans of the social media site – there are more than 4.4 million Facebook users in the city according to the company, one of the 10 largest usages in the world per capita (paywall)
October 10, 2015

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