GOOGLE UNVEILS EVERYTHING APPLE LAUNCHED, ONLY CHEAPER

Original Story: marketwatch.com

Apple: iPhone 6S and iPhone 6S Plus. Refreshed Apple TV. Enterprise-focused iPad Pro.

Google: Nexus 5X and Nexus 6P. Refreshed Chromecast. Enterprise-focused Pixel C tablet.

Those lineups show the similarities between the new products Google Inc. GOOG, -0.01% GOOGL, +0.00% announced Tuesday and those Apple Inc. AAPL, -1.05%  announced earlier this month. The big difference between the two companies’ new offerings is price, with Google undercutting Apple across the board.

Smartphones

Google introduced two new Android smartphones, the Nexus 5X and Nexus 6P, at a product event on Tuesday. Both phones — manufactured by LG and Huawei, respectively — will be sold as unlocked devices, meaning they can be purchased directly through Google’s digital store or at partner bricks-and-mortar retailers and used with a wide variety of carriers. They will also be compatible with Project Fi, Google’s new WiFi program, part of a trend among Google, Apple and others to take over parts of the wireless business previously reserved for carriers. Google SEO deliver top organic keyword rankings in all of the major search engines.

The 5.2-inch Nexus 5X will retail for $379 and up, while the 5.7-inch Nexus 6P will start at $429. Both devices will come equipped with fingerprint technology similar to Apple’s TouchID, though the sensor is on the back of its phones, and will operate on Android’s upcoming Marshmallow operating system.

Apple’s AAPL, -1.05%  4.7-inch iPhone 6s and 5.5-inch iPhone 6s Plus, unveiled at Apple’s product event earlier this month, can also be purchased as unlocked phones directly through Apple for $549 and $649, respectively. Apple also is offering a monthly pricing plan that allows consumers to upgrade every time a new iPhone hits the market.

Also Read: Apple breaks another iPhone record, but China was included this time

Google is sweetening the deal by offering a $50 credit for use at the Google Play app store and a free three-month trial subscription to Google Play Music. Apple also offered a free three-month trial for Apple Music.

Enterprise tablet

Tablets for the workplace are all the rage this year. Google on Tuesday launched its answer to the iPad Pro and Microsoft Inc.’s Surface Pro with a new tablet called Pixel C that will start at $499, versus $799 for the iPad Pro. Pixel C will also come with a detachable keyboard, which can be purchased separately for $149; Apple’s keyboard costs $169. Microsoft’s MSFT, +0.75%  Surface Pro 3 starts at $699 and offers a $129.99 keyboard.

Unlike both tablets from Apple and Microsoft, Google is not marketing the Pixel C with a stylus.

Video streaming

Google launched its second-generation Chromecast device that will retail for $35. It will receive support for Showtime content immediately, and Sling TV and Spotify will join within a few weeks. The device already supports Netflix NFLX, -0.14%  , Google Play Movies, HBO Now, Hulu, Pandora P, -0.07%  and many other streaming services. Google also launched a $35 Chromecast Audio device with a plug-in that can turn a user’s existing speaker into a conduit for music streaming.

Earlier this month, Apple unveiled its fourth-generation Apple TV, which comes with a remote control, Siri compatibility, and content from similar streaming services for $149, though Apple’s TV streaming device does not natively support Apple Music’s rival streaming services.

The only place where Google is not trying to undercut Apple by price is music streaming. Both Apple and Google offer music streaming services for $9.99 a month. Google unveiled a six-person family plan on Tuesday that will cost $14.99 a month, matching the price of Apple’s six-person family plan launched earlier this month.

Shares of Google rose ahead of its product event but declined slightly after it kicked off, ultimately closing down 0.3% at $622.61. Apple’s stock declined throughout the day, with the fall accelerating after the Google event, and shares ultimately closed down 3% at $109.06.

GOOGLE IS SUING A ROBOCALLER THAT TARGETED ADWORDS CUSTOMERS

Original Story: theverge.com

If you answer a phone call and hear a recording claiming to be Google, the odds are good that you're being scammed. That's the message of a new Google Business post and a new lawsuit from the company, targeting a company that used robocalling to target businesses using Google Adwords. A San Diego unfair competition lawyer is following this story closely.

According to the complaint, a company called Local Lighthouse Corp. made telemarketing calls to Adwords customers, using misappropriated logos and other methods to represent themselves as agents of Google. Once they gained a target's trust, they attempted to milk them for $100 fees in exchange for Search benefits like "front page domination." Based on those claims, the lawsuit alleges trademark infringement, false advertising, and unfair competition. A Roseland trademark lawyer is reviewing the details of this case.

Google says such scams are routine, but the company is usually unable to prosecute because scammers are too successful in hiding their tracks. In this case, the accused party is a California search engine optimization company, making it significantly easier for Google to take action. Still, the company reminded users that it rarely contacts Adwords users over the phone, and never does so through pre-recorded calls. Anyone receiving such a call should contact both Google and the Federal Trade Commission to lodge a complaint.

GOOGLE HIRES TRUECAR PRESIDENT TO HEAD SELF-DRIVING CAR PROJECT

Original Story: fortune.com

The project might have a CEO, but Google isn’t ready to make self-driving cars an official Alphabet company.

Google has hired automotive veteran John Krafcik as CEO of its self-driving car project, a signal that the company is preparing to turn its experiment into a business.

Krafcik will take over the newly formed position in late September, Google announced Sunday. Most recently, Krafcik was president of online car shopping service TrueCar  TRUE , a position he has held since April 2014. A Detroit automotive attorney has experience representing clients in automotive matters involving technological developments and general commercial transactions.

“This is a great opportunity to help Google  GOOG develop the enormous potential of self-driving cars,” Krafcik said in an emailed statement. “This technology can save thousands of lives, give millions of people greater mobility, and free us from a lot of the things we find frustrating about driving today. I can’t wait to get started.”

Krafcik has deep automotive roots that include management stints at Ford  F and Hyundai Motor America. However, he’s not just some automotive management flak. He’s really known for his product development prowess—a strength that Google is likely attracted to.

Krafcik has a mechanical engineering degree from Stanford University and was one of the first engineers for New United Motor Manufacturing Inc., or NUMMI, the former joint-venture plant in Fremont, Calif., operated by Toyota and General Motors  GM . The NUMMI plant, which closed in 2010, is now owned and occupied by Tesla Motors  TSLA . An Atlanta joint venture lawyer is reviewing the details of this case.

He went to work at the International Motor Vehicle Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before signing on at Ford, where he held various product development leadership positions over 14 years, including as chief engineer for the Ford Expedition and Lincoln Navigator vehicles. Krafcik later joined Hyundai Motor America and eventually became president and CEO, a position he held for five years. After presiding over a period of expanding market share and consumer regard for the brand, Hyundai suddenly replaced Krafcik in late 2013 with David Zuchowski, who had been head of sales for the automaker.

Google launched its self-driving car project in 2009 and until recently has primarily tested its software in Mountain View, Calif. In July, the company began testing its outfitted Lexus RX450h sport-utility vehicles in Austin, Texas.

Google has 23 Lexus RX450h SUVs self-driving on public streets in Mountain View and Austin. The company also has 25 two-seater prototypes, five of which are self-driving in Mountain View. These prototype cars, which look more like gumdrops on wheels, are coming to Austin later this month.

Google says it still has a lot to learn about how people perceive its vehicles, and hopes to run pilot programs with its built-from-ground-up prototypes at some point, spokeswoman Kara Berman told Fortune. For now, the company says it’s focused on building out a team. Chris Urmson, the former director of Google’s self-driving project, will stay on and lead technical development.

The Krafcik hire illustrates Google’s need to find someone with the technical and auto industry expertise to expand the project—possibly into a business. But not just yet. A Detroit automotive lawyer is following this story closely.

Google was quick to note in an email that the “self-driving car project is not becoming an Alphabet company at this stage, though it’s certainly a good candidate to become one at some point in the future.” The self-driving project is still part of the company’s X lab. In August, Google announced it had created a holding company called Alphabet. Google, which is under Alphabet, is the company’s legacy business and includes search, advertising, YouTube, and Android. Meanwhile, Alphabet houses its experiments, including Google X, health-related investigations as well as Nest and two investment arms.

GOOGLE LAUNCHES STREET VIEW APP WITH 360-DEGREE IMAGES

Original Story: latimes.com

Google is retiring its Photo Sphere Camera app on iOS and the Street View feature from the Google Maps app on Android in favor of a new app for both operating systems: the Street View app.

The tech giant announced Thursday the standalone app will let people explore collections of 360-degree panorama photos of locations (both interior and exterior), and make their own contributions to public photo galleries.

Users can snap 360-degree “spherical” photos directly from their Android phone or iPhone, or use a dedicated 360-degree camera such as the Ricoh Theta S or NCTech iris360. They can then geotag the images and upload them directly to Google Maps. Other users can then view those images when they tap on a map location within the app.

“In one gallery, you can explore Street View collections and content from Google Maps alongside photo spheres contributed from people around the globe,” said a product manager at Google Maps, Charles Armstrong. “So whether you want to track the Loch Ness monster in Scotland, scale the famed rock wall El Capitan in Yosemite, or hike Mt. Fuji, the Street View app has you covered.”

To combat inappropriate content that often goes hand-in-hand with user-generated content, the app will have a feature that lets users report problems.

ALPHABET/GOOGLE HAS GIVEN BIRTH TO A HEALTHCARE TECH COMPANY

Original Story: latimes.com

Over the past couple of years, Google has hired experts in diseases and physiology, pairing them with top software engineers, to tackle major healthcare issues.

Projects include developing contact lenses to allow diabetics to constantly monitor glucose levels, defining “healthy” traits and testing disease-detection pills capable of communicating to a special wristband.

None of that is a part of Google anymore but there is still a connection. The 150-employee Life Sciences team is becoming its own company within Alphabet, a corporation Google recently formed to organize its array of offbeat ventures. Life Sciences becomes a sister company to Google, which includes the search engine, Gmail, Maps, Android and other familiar offerings. An official corporate name is coming soon, a Google spokeswoman said.

Changing the reporting structure could give Life Sciences more autonomy while providing Alphabet, nee Google, executives a clearer picture of the division’s spending. Google’s new Chief Financial Officer Ruth Porat counts Life Sciences as a forthcoming source of significant long-term revenue.

The group’s goal won’t change, said Google co-founder and Alphabet President Sergey Brin in an online post Thursday.

“They’ll continue to work with other life sciences companies to move new technologies from early stage R&D to clinical testing—and, hopefully—transform the way we detect, prevent and manage disease,” he wrote. Rankin Biomedical is a leading provide of remanufactured histology equipment for medical testing needs.

One partner, Dexcom Inc., announced earlier this month that it will make and sell miniature glucose monitors based on Google technology. Life Sciences collects an upfront fee, additional payments throughout the development and then revenue-based royalties after a certain sales level, Dexcom said.

Andy Conrad, a co-founder of the National Genetics Institute who had been leading Life Sciences, becomes the new company’s chief executive. Life Sciences will be separate from Calico, an Alphabet division working to counteract aging. BrightStar Care specializes in Plymouth elder care services providing customized companion and healthcare needs.

THE HOUSE THAT HELPED BUILD GOOGLE

Original Story: usatoday.com

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — Susan Wojcicki is reminiscing about her old home in Menlo Park, Calif. "It's a very humble house, less than 2,000 square feet," she recalls fondly. A cozy, four-bedroom home — and incredibly historic.

After earning her MBA in 1998, Wojcicki bought 232 Santa Margarita Ave. for about $600,000. She rented the garage to two Stanford students for $1,700 a month to help with the mortgage. The renters: no ordinary slackers, but the Google Guys, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who incubated Google (GOOG) right there.

"It's a good reminder for the company that we did come from a small house, not a fancy house," says Wojcicki.

Her life-changing decision to open her home to Brin and Page did more than just help start the world's most-popular search engine. It also:

• Landed Wojcicki a key early job at Google less than a year after purchasing the home. Today, she's one of its top-ranked executives, overseeing the crucial online advertising business as vice president of product management.

• Introduced a future husband to Wojcicki's younger sister Anne, who recently married Brin on an island in the Bahamas. Google has invested $3.9 million in Anne Wojcicki's biotech start-up, 23andMe.                                           

• Created a cottage industry for the Wojcicki family. Susan Wojcicki's husband, Dennis Troper, is an operations executive at Google. Brother-in-law Gregor (married to middle sister Janet) is a former Googler who worked in the finance department. Mom Esther Wojcicki, a teacher, has consulted for Google on educational issues.

If you've ever clicked a text ad on MySpace, About.com or any thousands of blogs with "Ads by Google," you've got Susan Wojcicki to thank. Expanding ads beyond Google's own search pages was her idea. Now, Google has asked her to further grow the empire by bringing its advertiser base to old media such as newspapers, magazines, radio and television.

"There are no sets of words that can be used to describe Susan's contribution to the company," says Google CEO Eric Schmidt. "She's historic, in terms of our company's founding. She's also one of those people who thinks very broadly and quickly, and (it's) deceiving because she's so pleasant."

Wojcicki is Google employee No. 18. Her early duties included refining the original Google logo designed by Brin and the overall spare look of the Google home page. She came up with the first of Google's "doodles," the remaking of the logo for holidays and other special events. Her first artistic doodle: an alien lands on Google.

In Google's fledgling days, Wojcicki, a former junior staffer for chipmaker Intel, was in charge of marketing efforts. Brin and Page charged her with spreading the word about Google on a shoestring. Her big idea: stir word-of-mouth by putting Google's search engine all over the Web. She reached out to companies to license Google search for their websites and offered it free to universities.

In 2003, she came up with her multimillion-dollar brainstorm: AdSense.

'A really novel idea'

AdSense is an extension of a program Google had successfully launched in 2002, called AdWords. AdWords offers advertisers sponsored search ads, those little text ads that appear near search results. Advertisers have to pay only if the ads get clicked.

Wojcicki's suggestion: Why not offer these same ads all over the Web, on blogs and websites? Entice Web "publishers" to participate by giving them a portion of the ad revenue. In other words, every time someone clicks on an ad on your site, you get a check.

Here's how the ads are targeted: Let's say you're reading about computers at tech site Engadget. An ad might appear offering special deals at Dell.com. Or, if you're reading an article at a news site about Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, you might see an ad for a local criminal-defense law firm.

That's AdSense.

"It was a really novel idea at the time to serve ads that were targeted dynamically" to a specific Web page, says Wojcicki, sitting in a conference room at the "Googleplex" company headquarters.

"People were saying, 'This is a sports site, so we'll serve a sports ad.' And we were saying, 'No. We can actually look at the page in real time and figure out what this page is about.' "

Wojcicki's idea turned into a runaway smash. Google doesn't break out revenues from AdSense and AdWords. But the company recently reported quarterly profit of $1 billion, virtually all derived from both ad programs.

Thousands of tiny entrepreneurs make substantial livings by hosting Ads by Google links at their websites. "More people make money from AdSense than any other vehicle on the Web," says Jennifer Slegg, who runs JenSense, a blog devoted to AdSense. "There are many, many AdSense millionaires."

AdSense "basically turned the Web into a giant Google billboard," says Danny Sullivan, editor of Search Engine Land website. "It effectively meant that Google could turn everyone's content into a place for Google ads."

For her efforts, Wojcicki earned a Google Founders' Award, a financial incentive provided to employees to create new ideas. Spokesman David Krane says it's designed to keep employees and give them the same kind of economic award they would receive if they had formed their own companies.

Krane won't disclose how much current Founders' Awards are worth, but the first two awarded to Googlers (not to Wojcicki) were $12 million each.

Venturing into offline ads

Creating things has kept Wojcicki at Google over the years. "I love taking an idea … to a prototype and then to a product that millions of people use," she says.

"People write in from all over the world giving you feedback, telling us how a product (AdSense) changed their lives, how they were able to start a business with it, and that's just incredibly rewarding."

Her next big challenge: translating Google's simple, measurable advertising network to radio, TV and print.

Ever wanted to run an ad on the radio but didn't know how to set it up? Google has an Audio Ads section on its website with links to radio producers who will create an ad for $75 to $100. Select stations and time slots, and you're on the air.

The radio venture recently left test mode and is open to the general public. Google is testing the concept in print and on TV; that test is available only to a small percentage of advertisers.

Sullivan and other Google analysts are skeptical about the nascent program's chances. With radio ads, Sullivan says, Google "will give information on when the ad played, with more data than before, but that still doesn't prove that anyone heard the ad. They haven't done anything innovative or different to show if the ad really worked."

'A real challenge' ahead

Bringing the Google ad network to old media "will be a real challenge," says Greg Sterling, an independent analyst at Sterling Market Intelligence. "The ability to serve a relevant ad against someone's query is one of the great innovations of the Internet, and it's not transferable to other media, where people are more passive."

Wojcicki concedes that ads on TV and radio won't be as measurable. But she says such ads placed through Google will have more data to mine than old media currently provide, thanks to Google's obsessive tracking of numbers via its network of computers. "For example, in TV we can provide second-by-second data on what's being watched on the ad," she says.

She cautions that it's still very early for Google Radio: "The first things we're doing are really just providing online ways for people to purchase the inventory easier."

Raised in Silicon Valley

Wojcicki has plenty of experience at being eyewitness to a forming business. Brin and Page originally met her and landed at the Menlo Park house via a friend of Wojcicki's who was dating Brin.

The house that gave birth to Google was always filled with mutual friends, Wojcicki says. Most of them techies themselves, their No. 1 question for Brin and Page back then: Who needs yet another search engine?

The answer: " 'Not another but a better search engine,' " Wojcicki recalls. "From the beginning, they had a very clear vision that they could build something much better than what existed at the time."

Wojcicki grew up in Palo Alto on the campus of Stanford University. Dad Stanley Wojcicki chairs Stanford's physics department.

Mom Esther, a journalism teacher at Palo Alto High School, says she expected Susan to become an English professor. Instead, after a post-college job at educational software firm MagicQuest, she was bitten by the tech bug.

Now, Google is "such a presence" in their lives that the Wojcickis try to limit family-time chatter about the company, Esther says, though not always successfully. "It's so innovative and exciting. They're doing all sorts of interesting things, and it's fun to hear about it."

That so many of her relatives were drawn to Google isn't unusual, says Susan Wojcicki. "There are lots of people in the Silicon Valley who are interested in working at a fast-moving, dynamic company like Google," she says. "Not just my family members."

Meanwhile, the humble house where Google was incubated was purchased by Google in September. Google won't disclose how much it paid, but homes in the neighborhood sell for more than $1 million. "I haven't had time to think about what we'll do with it," says CEO Schmidt. "But I figured we should buy it sooner rather than later."

GOOGLE IS REORGANIZING AND SUNDAR PICHAI WILL BECOME NEW CEO

Original Story: theverge.com

In a blog post today, Google co-founder Larry Page announced a massive restructuring of the company, instituting Sundar Pichai as CEO and shifting himself and co-founder Sergey Brin to a larger holding company called Alphabet. As CEO and President of Alphabet, Page and Brin will oversee Google as well as affiliated companies like the life-extension project Calico and a drone delivery venture called Wing. Alphabet will also direct Google's early-stage funding operations, dubbed Capital and Ventures. Under the new organization, each of those operations will have its own CEO and leadership, while Pichai and Google retain control of search, ads, maps, the Google Play Store, YouTube, and Android. A San Francisco M&A lawyer assists clients in joint ventures, company reorganizations and in financial restructurings.

The reorganization also involves significant financial restructuring, as detailed in an associated SEC filing. All Google shares will now be traded as shares of the larger Alphabet holding company, news that drove the company's share price up more than four percentage points in the wake of the announcement. "We’ve long believed that over time companies tend to get comfortable doing the same thing, just making incremental changes," Page writes in the post. "But in the technology industry, where revolutionary ideas drive the next big growth areas, you need to be a bit uncomfortable to stay relevant."

It also means a prominent role for Sundar Pichai, the former Chrome OS and Android chief who has played an increasingly central role in Google's day-to-day operations. "It is clear to us and our board that it is time for Sundar to be CEO of Google," Page said in the post. "I feel very fortunate to have someone as talented as he is to run the slightly slimmed down Google and this frees up time for me to continue to scale our aspirations." A Rochester business lawyer represents clients in company formation matters, asset protection, and confidentiality agreements.

While the news has caught Wall Street and much of the tech world by surprise, it's an extension of a shift that's been ongoing within Google for some time, with Brin and Page increasingly interested in ambitious projects launched through Google X or outside funding. Alphabet formalizes that division, separating Google's traditional products from the more ambitious ventures that critics have accused of distracting from the company's core strengths. It remains to be seen how the new divisions will play out in practice, but the intention seems to be a renewed focus on both Google's current products and the moonshots that aim to replace those products as Alphabet's focus in the decades to come. "From the start, we’ve always strived to do more," Page writes, "and to do important and meaningful things with the resources we have."

GOOGLE WANTS TO HELP YOU AVOID THE LINES WITH NEW "POPULAR TIMES" FEATURE

Original Story: wxyz.com

(WXYZ) - No one likes to get stuck in line at their favorite coffee shop or local eatery—and now Google wants to help.

It’s a new feature labeled "popular times"—and the goal is to save you time.

It appears when you do a simple Google search of a restaurant or business on your mobile device. For iOS devices, you can use the Safari app to see the feature. If you have an Android, reports indicate you can find the feature using the Google app.

When you see the spot you're looking for with the address and hours of operation, just click on the "more" button. You’ll then see the "popular times" section.

The section helps users avoid busy times at that place throughout the week. You can scroll through the neat bar graphs to see what the peak hours are day to day.

A spokesperson for Google tells me in an email, "Much like we compute traffic data based on the anonymized aggregated movement of people on the road, we are able to determine relatively how busy a place is."

It’s a pretty neat feature; you can test it out for yourself. It’s just beginning to roll out, so if you can’t see it yet, be patient.

THIS WALL STREET VETERAN IS WHIPPING GOOGLE INTO SHAPE

Original Story: bloomberg.com

Google is known for multicolored bicycles, nap pods, and complimentary meals—and the free-spending ways that come with those perks. Now it wants to be known for something else: financial discipline. To whip the numbers into shape, it’s brought in Ruth Porat, an almost 30-year veteran of Wall Street.

She’s off to a good start. Porat, who joined Google as chief financial officer in May after five years as Morgan Stanley’s CFO, on July 16 unveiled second-quarter earnings and sales that topped analysts’ estimates. Impressed investors sent the shares to a record the next day, adding $65 billion to the company’s market value and more than $4 billion each to the fortunes of co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. An Atlanta securities lawyer is following this story closely.

Shareholders cheered Porat, 57, with her strong finance background, as the right person to help instill more discipline at a company that’s invested in everything from driverless cars to giant barges. Now she must prove she can create efficiency without crimping the creative culture that’s helped Google dominate the online advertising market. “No one really knew her before, because there’s no reason a tech investor would really know her,” says Gene Munster, an analyst with Piper Jaffray. When she announced the second-quarter results, the idea that a Wall Street hand was whipping Google into shape “kind of went viral,” he says. “This perception of a real, hard-nosed woman who has something to prove—I think that inspires confidence.”

During the second quarter, Google’s operating expenses grew 13 percent from the same period a year ago, the slowest rate since 2013, and declined from the previous quarter. “A key focus is on the levers within our control to manage the pace of expenses while still ensuring and supporting our growth,” Porat said on a call with analysts. Her remarks also left open the possibility of Google returning cash to investors in the form of buybacks or dividends, something Wall Street has been asking about for years. At a companywide meeting following the earnings report, she talked about the importance of disciplined execution at Google even as she thanked employees for their work, according to a person familiar with the remarks. A Google spokeswoman declined to comment. A Boston investment lawyer represents clients in banking matters, project finance and private equity finance.

Porat benefited from the efforts of her predecessor, Patrick Pichette. Google’s increase in expenses started slowing during the first quarter. “Everything was probably already in motion by the time she came along,” says Sameet Sinha, an analyst with B. Riley & Co. Even so, the quarterly numbers seemed to resonate with investors, as did Porat’s résumé. “She comes with a pedigree from Morgan Stanley of doing a good job of enhancing shareholder value over her tenure there,” says Walter Price, co-manager of the AllianzGI Technology Fund, which owns shares of Google.

At Morgan Stanley, Porat helped the bank recover from its near-death experience during the financial crisis and developed a reputation as a cost-cutter who focused on boosting shareholder returns. In 2013 she laid out expense-reduction targets of $1.6 billion and last year gained approval for the bank’s biggest share buyback in four years. This year, the company more than doubled the share repurchase plan. Since the end of 2012, Morgan Stanley stock has climbed from $19 to more than $40. An Encino CPA assists companies with pension and profit-sharing plans.

Porat, a physicist’s daughter who was born in England and grew up in Silicon Valley, is no stranger to technology. As Morgan Stanley’s top Internet banker during the dot-com bubble, she advised clients such as EBay and Amazon.com and made pitches to tech startups considering going public, accompanied by her close friend Mary Meeker, the research analyst who was called “Queen of the Net.” Porat showed a passion for work, quickly diving back in after having each of her three sons and after a battle with breast cancer.

Connecting with Google shareholders will be a priority. After the earnings call, Porat, who traded pantsuits for jeans at Google, planned to begin meetings with investors in cities such as New York and Boston, making the case for Google’s prospects.

Announcing Porat’s hiring in March, Page said she would “invest in a thoughtful, disciplined way in our next generation of big bets.” She received a pay package worth more than $70 million that will vest from this year through 2019, according to a company filing. In her first months on the job, she’s been reviewing programs throughout the company. They include driverless cars, which seek to use technology to take humans out of the process; Project Loon, an effort to deliver Internet connectivity to rural and remote areas via high-altitude balloons; and Google Fiber, its broadband and TV service in select cities, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Some of those initiatives may have to be abandoned. “She might have to go and tell Larry and Sergey, ‘Here are 10 projects, pick five—let’s go with those,’” Sinha says. The Google Fiber project could get a hard look, according to Munster, because it competes with established companies such as Verizon Communications and AT&T that are focused on building and delivering broadband and TV services.

Lifting the share price is crucial for Google, where many employees get much of their compensation in stock and can easily jump to a rival such as Apple. In the year before Porat was named to the job, the shares had fallen 4.5 percent while the Nasdaq Composite Index had climbed 17 percent. “Retention is the biggest challenge,” Munster says.

Google’s issues go beyond cost control. They include a threat to its core business of selling ads next to search results. As consumers access the Web via smartphones instead of desktop PCs, they’re increasingly likely to tap on an app rather than open a browser.

At the same time, Google faces stronger competition in online commerce from Amazon, which is grabbing more users who skip comparison shopping on Google and buy from the retailer. Also, Facebook, growing more quickly than Google, is competing for advertising and is a threat to Google’s YouTube business as it pushes video options to its users. “It was a good quarter, but it doesn’t mean there aren’t a lot of the same structural and competitive concerns,” says Ben Schachter, an analyst at Macquarie Securities.

WSJ: GOOGLE WILL ADD BUY BUTTONS TO SEARCH RESULTS ON MOBILE

Original Story: engadget.com

Google's getting ready to face Amazon and eBay, according to The Wall Street Journal, and will be adding buy buttons directly to its search results. You'll see those buttons accompanying sponsored results under a "Shop on Google" heading -- they won't be used for non-sponsored links returned by the algorithm -- when you search for products on mobile devices. Upon clicking one, a separate product page will load where you can pick sizes, colors and ultimately complete your purchase. Any product you buy will still come straight from retailers, the WSJ says, so it doesn't sound like Google's stocking up warehouses with goods like Amazon does.

However, some major retailers are apparently worried that they'll get stuck with back-end order fulfillment with no real customer interaction. Since Google wants to remain in good terms with them (they are some of its largest advertisers, after all), it will give shoppers the choice to subscribe to their marketing programs. That typically means mailing lists and the like, so the company's giving them access to customers' info, most likely names and addresses.

In addition, Google promised them that the product landing pages will be heavily branded with their names and will link to more of their products. The company also won't take a cut from their sales and will only get paid for every person that clicks their links. Mountain View will reportedly offer several payment options, "including digital payment methods from other providers," but it (thankfully) won't be giving retailers access to payment details. If you input credit card info to make a purchase, the website will save it for future transactions, but it will remain with the company.

As for why the feature will only be available on mobile, well, Google has a plethora of reasons. The biggest one is most likely the fact that more people now perform searches on their phones than on computers. Search engine optimization allows businesses to maintain premium keyword positions in organic search results, so products are easily found by consumers. According to the WSJ, you might spot a buy button or two as soon as the coming weeks. We don't have a list of official partners yet, since Google hasn't officially announced anything, but Macy's might be one of the first retailers available.

GOOGLING ON MOBILE DEVICES SURPASSES PCS IN US FOR 1ST TIME

Original Story: nytimes.com

SAN FRANCISCO — Google's influential search engine has hit a tipping point in technology's shift to smartphones. More search requests are now being made on mobile devices than on personal computers in the U.S. and many other parts of the world.

The milestone announced at a digital advertising conference Tuesday serves as another reminder of how dramatically online behavior has changed since 2007. That's when Apple released the first iPhone, leading to a wave of similar devices that have made it easier for people to stay connected to the Internet wherever they go. Mobile optimization allows users to stay connected on the go.

The upheaval has rocked PC makers and other tech companies such as Microsoft with businesses tied to sales of desktop and laptop computers. Google has been able to adapt better than most companies, partly because its search engine and other services are embedded in the popular Android mobile operating system, but it hasn't been totally unscathed.

Google's average ad prices have been declining for the past three-and-half years, partly because marketers so far have been unwilling to pay as much for the commercial message displayed on the smaller screens of smartphones. The company, though, says mobile ad prices have been steadily climbing and will continue to do so as marketers recognize the value of being able to connect with prospective customers at the precise moment that they are looking for someplace to eat, or comparing products on a smartphone while standing in a store.

"The future of mobile is now," says Jerry Dischler, a Google Inc. vice president in charge of the company's "AdWords" service for creating online marketing campaigns.

Besides in the U.S., Google's mobile search requests are outstripping requests in nine other countries. Japan is the only other country that Google is identifying.

The Mountain View, California, company isn't specifying just how many mobile search requests it is getting. Google processes more than 100 billion search requests worldwide each month, including queries on PCs.

As part of the mobile transition, Google last month overhauled its search-recommendation system to favor websites that are easier to read and load on smartphones. That change, known as "Mobilegeddon," prodded millions of websites to make changes to ensure they work well on smartphones to avoid being demoted in Google's search results. Mobile friendly websites provide added value to users.

Google also has been introducing advertising formats that tend to work better on mobile devices. For instance, rooms can now be booked within hotel ads, and car ads can now be swiped across a screen to make it easier to comparison shop.

In addition to announcing the milestone in mobile search, Google also introduced on Tuesday a service for comparing mortgage rates in the U.S. The mortgage product expands upon a similar service for auto insurance policies that Google unveiled in California in March. Google is adding three more states — Texas, Illinois and Pennsylvania — to the auto insurance service.

WSJ: EU IS GEARING UP TO FILE ANTITRUST LAWSUIT AGAINST GOOGLE

Original Story: engadget.com

Google might have avoided going to court over antitrust charges in the US, but it could still face a lawsuit in Europe. According to the Wall Street Journal, the European Commission has started asking companies that filed complaints against Google's practices for permission to publish the details in those documents. A Brussels lawyer representing one of Mountain View's competitors said: "The fact that the commission has been seeking fuller [information] from complainants, against short deadlines [of] a couple of days, shows it is in the final stages of getting a statement of objections together. It's part of the choreography you always see."

Most of the companies involved in the case run shopping, travel and local websites. If that sounds like deja vu, that's because the complaints Google is facing in the EU are similar in nature to the ones filed against it stateside. European companies also accuse the tech giant of gaming search results, placing its own products such as Google Shopping or Local in more prominent positions in the list, as well as burying competitors' websites. The commission is also investigating whether Mountain View really scrapes content from its rivals' websites to use as its own.

The European Union's antitrust authority has been looking into these supposed unfair practices since 2010. Google and EC's previous chief made numerous attempts to settle over the years, but they all ended up in failure. The new boss, Margrethe Vestager, isn't one for settlements, though, and has been very vocal about her preference for court proceedings. Mountain View, by the bye, continues to deny any wrongdoing. Just last week, general counsel Kent Walker listed a number of failed products (including Google+) during an event in Berlin, which he said serves as proof that his company plays by the book.

If the commission does file charges, Google will only have three months to convince the court that it didn't do anything to violate laws in the region. It could also try to come up with settlement terms politicians and corporations in the EU will finally agree to. If it fails to do so, it might have to pay an exceptionally hefty sum, seeing as Microsoft was fined $1.35 billion for antitrust charges a few years ago.

GOOGLE WORKING ON PROJECT TO LET YOU RECEIVE AND PAY BILLS DIRECTLY INSIDE GMAIL

Original Story: recode.net

Google’s mission to organize the world’s information is now targeting your physical mailbox.

The company is currently working on a project that will allow Gmail users to more easily receive bills in their email inbox instead of their mailbox. Called Pony Express, the service also is designed to let people pay their bills within Gmail, rather than having to go to a telecom or utility company’s website to complete a payment.

Those details are outlined in a lengthy document viewed by Re/code. The new service is scheduled to start in the fourth quarter, according to the document. It’s not clear whether Pony Express is a code name or one that’ll be used if it comes to market. A Google spokeswoman declined to comment.

Such a service fits Google’s ongoing desire to bring all of the world’s information online, most notably its Google Books project, which has so far digitized well over 30 million volumes.

With Pony Express, Google could suck in the type of financial data that would allow it to expand into new businesses. Credit card bills and payment history would be a gateway into industries such as personal finance or lending. And the data could be used to refine how advertisements are targeted to individuals on Google, YouTube and partnering sites, though such a move would likely stoke privacy concerns. It’s not clear whether Google would generate any revenue directly from the Pony Express service.

The document features a step-by-step walk-through of how people can sign up. A Gmail user provides personal information such as their name, address and partial and full Social Security number to a third-party company that vets their identity. Users might also have to provide information such as a full credit card number or telephone service account number to get started, too.

According to the documents, it appears Google is partnering with third-party vendors that print and mail out bills on behalf of service providers such as insurance companies, telecom companies and utilities. It’s not clear whether Google is also working directly with the service providers, too.

Once a user is authenticated, he or she can start receiving bills or other mail in Gmail or the Inbox app (Google’s new email app). E-billing is not a new thing as pretty much all major financial, telecom and utility companies allow for paperless billing. But Google could play up the fact it can organize a Gmail user’s bills automatically in a special Pony Express folder.

The most useful part of the service could be the payments feature. The service appears to let people choose to pay a bill right from within Pony Express, using a link with a bank account or a debit card.

Pony Express also allows users to share a bill with another Gmail user, with the added option of automating the process, a feature that appears to be catered to roommates who typically split utilities. Another feature pulls up customer service contact information for a given service provider. Then there’s one that appears to show the capability to take a photo of a piece of mail to have it archived in digital form in Pony Express.

Google would not be the first company to attempt to help people organize and pay bills from a centralized location. A startup called Manilla, backed by Hearst, offered a service like this for several years before shutting down last year. An app called Check also allows people to view and pay for their bills through the app. Intuit bought Check last year for $360 million. Google’s potential advantage? The millions of people who already use its email services.

GOOGLE HIRES WALL STREET'S RUTH PORAT AS NEW CFO

Original Story: mercurynews.com

MOUNTAIN VIEW -- One of Wall Street's most powerful women will become one of Silicon Valley's most powerful women when Ruth Porat joins Google this spring as its chief financial officer.

The Internet search giant on Tuesday announced the hiring of the 57-year-old Porat, a longtime Morgan Stanley banker who became its chief financial officer in 2010. She will become Google's highest-ranking female executive when she starts her new job on May 26.

Porat described the post as a kind of Silicon Valley homecoming. She grew up in Palo Alto, studied economics at Stanford University and was later a top banker dealing with technology firms.

"I'm delighted to be returning to my California roots and joining Google," she said in a statement.

Porat has been the public face of Morgan Stanley and been referred to in reports as the most senior woman -- or most powerful -- on Wall Street. Key positions she has held at the firm include vice chairman of investment banking and co-head of technology investment banking. She was the lead banker on financing rounds for tech companies including Amazon, eBay, Netscape and Priceline. An employment lawyer regularly negotiates employment agreements and severance packages for high level managers and executives.

"We're tremendously fortunate to have found such a creative, experienced and operationally strong executive," said Google CEO Larry Page in a written statement. "I look forward to learning from Ruth as we continue to innovate in our core -- from search and ads, to Android, Chrome and YouTube -- as well as invest in a thoughtful, disciplined way in our next generation of big bets."

Porat will be the only woman among Google's five top executives, though the company also has three women in senior leadership roles: Susan Wojcicki, who heads YouTube; Lorraine Twohill, the marketing chief; and Rachel Whetstone, senior vice president of communications and policy. Other women who were part of Google's senior leadership team have gone on to high-profile executive positions elsewhere, such as Marissa Mayer, now Yahoo's CEO; and Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer at Facebook.

Google announced just two weeks ago in a regulatory filing that its current CFO, Patrick Pichette would be retiring. Pichette, who joined Google in 2008, wrote a widely shared post on Google+ explaining his decision to step down to spend more time with his family.

Google shareholders are likely to welcome Porat's experience in "dealing with complex global operating environments and regulatory challenges," said Peter Stabler, an analyst at Wells Fargo Securities, in a written note Tuesday, but whether she signals any big changes in Google's philosophy remains unclear. An employment lawyer is following this story closely.

Pichette had arrived seven years ago during a recession and became known for trimming costs, from unsuccessful business ventures to the hours at the campus cafeterias. In more recent boom years, however, he's been a staunch defender of the company's cutting-edge risks on a wide assortment of research that reflect Google's experimental approach but can make investors nervous.

Other tech companies have lured executives from Wall Street, including Twitter, which appointed Anthony Noto as its CFO last year. Noto hails from Goldman Sachs.

Porat declined interviews Tuesday but her rise through the Wall Street ranks was profiled in a 2010 book, "How Remarkable Women Lead: The Breakthrough Model for Work and Life," written by authors Joanna Barsh, Susie Cranston and Geoffrey Lewis, who work for management consulting firm McKinsey & Company.

The book described her working parents as an inspiration.

Her father, Dan Porat, 93, was an electronic engineer at Stanford's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory from 1962 to 1988. Her mother, Frieda Porat, was a psychologist and teacher who wrote books about organizational management. She died in 2012.

Ruth Porat describes herself on her Twitter profile as a breast cancer survivor and proud Stanford alumnus.

She is also vice chairwoman of the Board of Trustees at Stanford. She has advanced degrees from The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and the London School of Economics.

After studying economics at Stanford, she took a job at the U.S. Department of Justice in the early 1980s. But she was also fascinated with mergers and acquisitions, which drew her to Morgan Stanley in 1987, according to the book.

Revealing her challenges, and successes, as a woman on Wall Street, Porat told the authors that "biases are deep" and it's important to find the right boss.

"One of the biggest problems women have is they work really hard and put their heads down and assume hard work gets noticed," she said. "And hard work for the wrong boss does not get noticed. Hard work for the wrong boss results in one thing -- that boss looks terrific and you get stuck."

THE 'DIRTY LITTLE SECRET' ABOUT GOOGLE'S 20% TIME, ACCORDING TO MARISSA MAYER

Original Story: businessinsider.com

One of Silicon Valley's most famous human-resources policies may not actually exist, according to Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer.

Almost since its beginning, Google has had a well-known policy called "20% time."

Under this policy, employees get to work on whatever personal projects they want during one-fifth of their week — a whole day.

Supposedly, lots of big Google products came out of 20% time. One you've definitely heard of is Gmail.

The 20% time policy is considered so successful at Google that policies like it have spread to several other companies in Silicon Valley, from LinkedIn to Google.

But here's the thing.

It turns out 20% time doesn't really exist at Google. Not according to Mayer, who used to work at Google. A Google SEO Consulting Company can help your business with organic search engine placement.

While doing reporting for my new book, "Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo!" I learned that in the spring of 2013, Mayer stood up on stage during an all-employee meeting at Yahoo and debunked the 20% time myth.

Mayer was announcing something called the CEO Challenge — an initiative where teams that came up with cool new product ideas would get spot bonuses of $250,000. Mayer warned Yahoo employees not to work on CEO Challenge products instead of doing their regular work.

"It’s funny," she said. "People have been asking me since I got here, 'When is Yahoo going to have 20% time?'"

"I’ve got to tell you the dirty little secret of Google’s 20% time. It’s really 120% time."

She said that 20% time projects aren't projects you can do instead of doing your regular job for a whole day every week. It's "stuff that you’ve got to do beyond your regular job."

If you're the kind of person who likes these sorts of inside details, you're the kind of person I wrote my book for, and you should buy a copy — or three dozen for all your friends. Google SEO Services greatly enhance your businesses organic search engine results.

ROBIN WILLIAMS WAS GOOGLE’S TOP TRENDING SEARCH OF 2014

Original Story: time.com

Robin Williams topped a list that also included the World Cup, Ebola, ISIS and Flappy Bird

Robin Williams topped Google’s list of the top trending searches in 2014.

The comedian and actor, who died in August, led the list of the people, places and things that got the biggest boost in search traffic this year compared to 2013. The list of actual “most searched” terms is actually pretty boring, Google says, because it includes generic terms like “weather” and website names like “Google.”

Overall, the list reflects the way global crises co-mingle with pop culture phenomena on the Internet. Second to Robin Williams was the World Cup, which sparked widespread discussion across the Web. Third was Ebola, the viral epidemic that sparked scares in West Africa and elsewhere around the world as it emerged in different locales. Fourth was Malaysia Airlines, which was in the news first for a plane that mysteriously disappeared in March and later for a second plane that was shot down over Ukraine in July. Rounding out the top five was the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, in which people recorded themselves being doused in cold water to raise money for charity.

Check out the full Top 10 below:

Robin Williams
World Cup
Ebola
Malaysia Airlines
ALS Ice Bucket Challenge
Flappy Bird
Conchita Wurst
ISIS
Frozen
Sochi Olympics

GOOGLE'S LATEST INNOVATION: A SPOON?

Original Story: cnbc.com

Just in time for the holidays, Google is throwing its money, brain power and technology at the humble spoon.

Of course these spoons (don't call them spoogles) are a bit more than your basic utensil: Using hundreds of algorithms, they allow people with essential tremors and Parkinson's Disease to eat without spilling.

The technology senses how a hand is shaking and makes instant adjustments to stay balanced. In clinical trials, the Liftware spoons reduced shaking of the spoon bowl by an average of 76 percent.

"We want to help people in their daily lives today and hopefully increase understanding of disease in the long run," said Google spokesperson Katelin Jabbari.

Other adaptive devices have been developed to help people with tremors — rocker knives, weighted utensils, pen grips. But until now, experts say, technology has not been used in this way.

"It's totally novel," said UC San Francisco Medical Center neurologist Dr. Jill Ostrem who specializes in movement disorders like Parkinson's disease and essential tremors.

She helped advise the inventors, and says the device has been a remarkable asset for some of her patients.

"I have some patients who couldn't eat independently, they had to be fed, and now they can eat on their own," she said. "It doesn't cure the disease, they still have tremor, but it's a very positive change."

Google got into the no-shake utensil business in September, acquiring a small, National of Institutes of Health-funded startup called Lift Labs for an undisclosed sum.

More than 10 million people worldwide, including Google co-founder Sergey Brin's mother, have essential tremors or Parkinson's disease. Brin has said he also has a mutation associated with higher rates of the Parkinson's and has donated more than $50 million to research for a cure, although Jabbari said the Lift Labs acquisition was not related.

Lift Lab founder Anupam Pathak said moving from a small, four-person startup in San Francisco to the vast Google campus in Mountain View has freed him up to be more creative as he explores how to apply the technology even more broadly.

His team works at the search giant's division called Google(x) Life Sciences, which is also developing a smart contact lens that measures glucose levels in tears for diabetics and is researching how nanoparticles in blood might help detect diseases.

Joining Google has been motivating, said Pathak, but his focus remains on people who are now able to eat independently with his device. "If you build something with your hands and it has that sort of an impact, it's the greatest feeling ever," he said. "As an engineer who likes to build things, that's the most validating thing that can happen."

Pathak said they also hope to add sensors to the spoons to help medical researchers and providers better understand, measure and alleviate tremors.

Shirin Vala, 65, of Oakland, has had an essential tremor for about a decade. She was at her monthly Essential Tremor group at a San Ramon medical clinic earlier this year when researchers developing the device introduced the idea and asked if anyone was interested in helping them.

As it was refined, she tried it out and gave them feedback. And when they hit the market at $295 apiece, she bought one.

Without the spoon, Vala said eating was really a challenge because her hands trembled so hard food fell off the utensils before she could eat it.

"I was shaking and I had a hard time to keep the food on a spoon, especially soup or something like an olive or tomatoes or something. It is very embarrassing. It's very frustrating," she said.

The spoon definitely improved her situation. "I was surprised that I held the food in there so much better. It makes eating much easier, especially if I'm out at a restaurant," she said.

EX-GOOGLE WORKER SAYS COMPANY 'F***ED UP'

Original Story: cnbc.com

A former designer at Google took to the blog site Medium to explain—in strong but not virulent language—that the company has uncharacteristically missed a big opportunity with Google+, its three-year-old answer to Facebook.

The former employee, Chris Messina, said in his somewhat lengthy post that the company has missed so many opportunities to make a unique, industry leading product with Google+ that it's hard to understand what purpose the platform still serves.

Or, as Messina put it: "So what the f*** is Google+ for anyway?"

With privacy both an important and misunderstood concept in cyberspace, Messina wrote that the Google's lack of strategic thinking means that the development of online identity—with all its positive and negative connotations—has been essentially ceded to Facebook.

Google did not respond to a request for comment. Read the entire post below.

Thoughts on Google+
I fucked up. So has Google.

It’s been over a year since I left Google. Over 450 days, actually. During that time, I joined and left a startup; traveled to Paris (twice). I got divorced. I started a new relationship, moved, and became a bonus dad. Now I’m on the cusp of starting a new company (I think, details pending).

Any of these changes could be significant on their own, but I bring them up merely for comparison’s sake. I’m one person and these things happened to me over the course of a year. If there are roughly 3000 people working on Google+, what have they been doing during the same period?

While this post touches on the recent-past, present, and future, I’m going to start with a stupid mistake I made earlier this week.

I fucked up

I need to make a retraction. I fucked up. Publicly.

I cast aspersions where none were warranted. I called out Google+ on Twitter (in front of 68K followers no less) for a bug that—I argued—proved that they’d stopped doing QA (an essential step in the launch of any product at Google) and must have therefore and finally abandoned its social network.

But I was wrong.

The problem—as diagnosed by Googler Melissa Chang —was interference from Jesse Middleton’s Better BCC extension. Once I disabled it, the problem went away. (He tells me that he’s updated his extension to address this.)

Egg on my face. My bad. And apologies to my Googler friends Ade and Paul, in particular, for pointing out my mistake.

So what the fuck is Google+ for anyway?

When I thought about what motivated me to lob this snarkbomb, I realized I was looking for a reaction. I wanted some kind of defiant response to questions that’ve recently bugged me—What’s going on with Google+? Where is it headed? What the fuck is it for, anyway?

The last time David Besbris (Vic Gundotra’s successor and top exec on Google+) was interviewed by Recode, he said nothing. Literally.

No vision. No insight. Just pollyannaish platitudes: “We’re … very happy with the progress of Google+.”

The most salient thing he said was, “[The Google+ audience sees] Google+ as a social network for their interests.”, which at least suggests how the team must be thinking about the network internally. But if they’re more worried about Facebook, Snapchat, or Pinterest—I can’t tell. And if they have a plan and a vision for creating something new and wonderful in the world, I certainly can’t deduce it from their Oct 9 feature release: Polls (a feature I contributed to over a year and a half ago when I was a UX designer on the team).

Furthermore, if you simply look at the velocity of iOS releases across the most popular social apps over 2014, you’ll see that Google+ and Hangouts lag significantly behind (WhatsApp was acquired by Facebook this year, which likely explains their lack of updates).

Why do I care about Google+?

Dear reader, I wouldn’t fault you if you’re wondering why I give a shit. It’s not like I work there anymore. Sure, I have a few friends who do but most rolled off to work on other projects at Google, left, or started new companies. And yes, I run a popular mixology community, but it’s not like it’s blowing up or anything.

So why do I care?

Simple: for the same reason that motivated me to join Google in 2010— that the future of digital identity should not be determined by one company (namely, Facebook). I still believe that competition in this space is better for consumers, for startups, and for the industry. And Google still remains one of the few companies (besides Apple, perhaps) that stands a chance to take on Facebook in this arena—but Google+, as I see it, has lost its way.

(Or maybe never found its way. I dunno.)

It matters to me because there’s a lot at stake here—way more than the success of a mere social network. What’s at stake is how individuals participate in the web ecosystem, and whether one company will determine how we get online, gain access, connect and communicate through the increasing number of apps, devices, and digital experiences that we rely upon.

If you take the long view, you’ll understand why this moment in time is important: the companies and apps that solidify their position in our lives today will likely live on far into the future. Google is one of those companies that has already done this. I believe Facebook will too. So the fundamental problem that I have with Google+ is that I just don’t understand it. And what I don’t understand makes me nervous—and should make you nervous too.

Digital identity, circa 2014

I’ll be the first (well, maybe the second) to admit that we’re no longer living in the golden era of social networking. We’ve migrated away from the mouse and keyboard era of computing and replaced them with glossy, touchable surfaces that we carry around in our pockets and alert us to all of our friends’ most recent doings. We have access to our contacts, to information, and to superpowers that we’ve never had before. And not only are we starting to take this all for granted—there’s a younger generation growing up without any conception of a time Before Siri, and are living Post Browser.

All this is perfectly normal to them. Things are exactly as they should be, and always have been.

So why does the competition for control of digital identity matter anymore? Frankly, because as I’ve long held, identity is the platform—the killer app of networked personal computing devices (even more so as we increasingly depend on more than one authenticated device at a time!).

Digital identity unlocks universal personalization (i.e. better ads), payments and commerce (i.e. Snapcash), environmental adaptation (i.e. an Uber that plays your Spotify music), communications (i.e. Path Talk), and access (i.e. Sosh Concierge). Today’s most exciting apps are barely scratching the surface of what will be possible when there are years of preferences data stored up on each of us, that we can leverage at a moments notice, in any context.

Privacy is a four-letter word

But before you go get your pitchfork and scream bloody murder about the loss of individual “privacy”, stop for a second.

This word, privacy ?— it’s a problem.

It’s one of those words that puts a stop to useful conversations and prevents us from actually engaging with what’s going on in our digital lives. It obscures and glosses over.

WAKE UP!

Maintaining your privacy doesn’t strictly mean keeping people from having data or information about you. Certainly not preventing yourself from having access to data about yourself. Privacy is about the ability to be left alone, or about not being watched, if you don’t want to be. Which is fine. Turn on Do Not Disturb. There—you’ve got a bit of your privacy back. But that has nothing to do with the huge amounts of data you’re still producing and is being tracked.

So, given that expectations of privacy are changing (or being changed), I challenge you: what if you want to be watched? What if you were offered an outsize amount of value in exchange for allowing someone else to watch you? What would you do? Who would you want to watch over you? Who would you want to look after you and your best interests? Who would you trust? Do you feel like you have reasonable choices in today’s marketplace?

This, my friends, is the dilemma presented and the opportunity omitted by an overused term like “privacy”.

Taking the data-positive perspective, it seems completely reasonable to me that companies would vie to become my lifelong “data bank”. Ultimately I do want companies to know more about me and to use more data about me in exchange for better, faster, easier, and cheaper experiences. But I also want to be treated like an adult when talking about my data. Watery terms like “cloud” or “dropbox” or “backup” sound utilitarian but mask the true aspirations of these service providers. They should just come out and say it: they want all this information to establish a competitive advantage in delivering more personalized services to me and people like me. Backing up my files is absolutely not the long game (but it’s a convenient lock-in strategy in the meantime).

Seizing your data capital

Here’s the thing: you and me, we’re being tracked whether we like it or not. Use a web browser, use apps —and there’s a company or companies out there amassing huge amounts of data about every click, tap, photo, notification, or icon in your digital life. Sometimes they anonymize it so that your preferences or behavioral data can’t be easily tracked back to you, but then you have no way of auditing that information, accessing it, or perhaps granting access to some other trusted party of your choosing. This may reassure you that your data won’t be that valuable if its leaked when there’s another breach, but this also means that you’re leaving a ton of value on the table. And frankly, most of these companies (especially the ad-driven ones) don’t really care about your data specifically. They can target you just as effectively through other means. And frankly, most would rather anonymize it to avoid embarrassing moments than do the heavy lifting to make your data accessible to you in more useful formats.

Taken at the individual level, you’re just a rounding error at the millionth decimal. And yet this data could be hugely valuable to you if you collect and let it accrue for long enough. This is why I’ve called this kind of information exhaust “data capital”. If you think of this data as your money being burned, maybe you’ll rethink what “privacy” is all about, and what stake you should claim in the data being captured about you.

So what about Google+?

So what does this have to do with Google+?

As it stands, Facebook, Apple, and Google (and to some degree Amazon) are in a battle to know you better than you do. Facebook is pretty clear about what they’re doing, and do a fair job explaining it—and have improved over the years. Apple recently came out aggressively about their own commitment to user privacy (but they make money from hardware, rather than ads). Google’s efforts, meanwhile, seem disjointed and confused, despite significant improvements to their settings and security features. If Google+ was intended to serve as Google’s “social backbone”, it should be the locus of control and access over the kind of information I’ve described above. And yet… it’s not. Far from it, in fact.

To my point, most people would likely describe Google+ as a newsfeed, a kind of Facebook-lite. Sure, it’s got neat photo and video chat apps hanging off of it. And die-hard users would call out the interest-based communities as the reason they return, as Bez did. But few if any would say that it’s where they go to understand the data that Google holds about them, or where they go to adjust their preferences, or to adjust how people see and find them online. And maybe that’s intentional and maybe that’s the point—but if so, then I don’t get it. Why did the world need another Facebook, unless to benefit Google by making their ad targeting more effective? Why wasn’t Google+ one of Google’s famous moonshots, intended to improve personal social networking by 10x? Why did they take a conventional approach to social networking rather than think about what controls people might need in the next 5–10 years in their digital lives? Moreover, how does Google+ help deliver better, richer, more interesting, and more personalized experiences, to motivate people to store more information with Google? I mean, why did Google hitch their digital identity strategy to 2004-era social networking trends?

And damnit all, why am I so disappointed?!

When it comes right down to it, maybe I just don’t want to admit that I spent 3½ years working on something that will become irrelevant. Even if Google+ regains focus and simplifies its mission, I want to believe that we were working on something significant and that had an opinion about what the world should look like. Lately, I just feel like Google+ is confused and adrift at sea. It’s so far behind, how can it possibly catch up? I mean, Facebook launched a polling ad unit in 2009; five years later, Google+ launched their own. Is mentions really a differentiator? (Nope, Facebook has a dedicated app for that, and it’s been baked into Twitter for how long?) Is this kind of slow-following going to win the future?

I’m disappointed because I expect better from Google. Like, self-driving cars better, or hot-air balloon internet access better. I don’t want excuses. I don’t want to hear about how competitive or political the internal environment is. Larry is a strong leader. Sundar is too. And I know that they’re getting a ton of mileage (and cash) out of ads, Chrome, and Android —there are plenty of resources. Leaving internet identity in Facebook’s hands would be a massive fail. At least Twitter is making a go at it with Digits. But how does Google[+] fit into this picture? Will it ever? (And no, Google+ Sign In isn’t enough.)

Is there any hope that Google+ will find a compelling reason to continue to exist, and perhaps deliver on the data-positive vision I’ve outlined above?

The missed opportunity

I remember the primordial days of Emerald Sea (the codename for Google+). Its original name was Google Me (at least until Kevin Rose leaked the name and a new name needed to be chosen). I loved the name, not because it was a good name, but because of what it implied: “Just google me and I’ll be there”. Google Me was necessary to improve Google’s profile and social graph to make search more personalized and humane. It was like Google was saying, “We’re going to be your trusted partner in cyberspace, and we’ll help you surface the right information to the people you choose, at the right time.” The value proposition was search oriented, rather than social.

So, if I searched for my mom’s phone number on Google, I could find it—because it‘d be on her profile and she would have shared it with me. An obvious query like “mom’s phone number” would work.

“Google is where I search for things and I should be able to find useful information about my friends if they’ve shared it with me.”

But when the name to Google+ (cue terrifying echos of Microsoft Plus!), the focus shifted. Now, not only was Google+ fast-following Facebook, but the name of the product was a hedge against another Buzz-like debacle. If for some reason the product failed (and lots of Buzz veterans actively worried about this), Google could just drop the “+” and pretend the “project” never existed. Genius.

But this was all wrong. By starting off on a defensive footing, Google+ didn’t defiantly stand for something special in the world. Instead it defined itself by what it wasn’t—i.e. Facebook—though it was positioned internally as chasing after their success. And while Facebook executed a bold, ambitious (and uncomfortable) plan to create a “more open and connected world”, Google+ confusingly claimed to be rethinking real-life sharing on the web, with “nuance and richness”, even though we clearly hadn’t figured it out. Indeed, our solution (Circles (read: “lists”) put the onus on the user to manually curate groups of people—a great concept in theory, but too arduous and awkward in practice.

Now, it’d be one thing if Circles and “better privacy” (there’s that word again!) were merely a launch ploy to drum up interest (it’s worked for others in the past). Instead, Google+ continued to throw its weight behind this narrative long after Facebook overhauled its privacy features, and “grew up”. To this day, I still don’t know what Google+ is for, let alone better at than Facebook. Some might argue it’s “cleaner” and has fewer ads, but even those won’t be lasting competitive advantages.

What’s sad to me is that the promise of Google Me could be found in launch post: “We want to make Google better by including you, your relationships, and your interests.”

Yes! Yes!

But by launching a conventional social network, Google missed the pivotal opportunity to establish a data-positive paradigm for sharing, individual control, and personalization that set itself apart from Facebook. Ultimately it offered too little, too late.

More recently, the Google+ marketing team came back to the message of personalization— at least for Google’s own apps. Instead, Google+ was about uniting Google products with one user account —something that should have been inevitable after Eric Schmidt’s tenure ended anyway.

So now what?

I read this passage from the launch post for Google+ and I get excited, to this day. The sentiment here echoes Ello’s claims upon their launch. The difference is that I actually believe Google to make good on these promises.

You and over a billion others trust Google, and we don’t take this lightly. In fact we’ve focused on the user for over a decade: liberating data, working for an open Internet, and respecting people’s freedom to be who they want to be. We realize, however, that Google+ is a different kind of project, requiring a different kind of focus?—?on you. That’s why we’re giving you more ways to stay private or go public; more meaningful choices around your friends and your data; and more ways to let us know how we’re doing. All across Google.
Yes! Yes!

But now what? Google’s work here is far from over.

The Google+ feed does nothing towards addressing the issues I’ve raised about data capital and privacy. Sure, Google gives you controls to set your ads preferences, but this framing is all wrong. Whereas Pinterest helps you express your aspirational self, Google pigeonholes you into what you already are, based on your previous search activity. This is where improving the data that Google has about you—in turn trusting Google as a steward of that data—changes the nature of the conversation by making it less about “privacy” and more about empowerment. While some people will freak out (as they always do), this would be a bold, productive, future-forward direction to take. Hell, we’re living in this reality already—but few give straight talk about what’s going on, and how their data is, or could be, used for their benefit. If Google took the approach I’ve suggested here—becoming more user-centric—I’d finally understand why what they’re doing is different. And then I could evaluate Google on being a steward of my data, and acting as my universal user agent in my digital life.

But until that happens, [object Object] makes just as much sense to me as their strategy.

HOW GOOGLE "TRANSLATES" PICTURES INTO WORDS USING VECTOR SPACE MATHEMATICS

Original Story: technologyreview.com

Google engineers have trained a machine learning algorithm to write picture captions using the same techniques it developed for language translation.

Translating one language into another has always been a difficult task. But in recent years, Google has transformed this process by developing machine translation algorithms that changing the nature of cross cultural communications through Google Translate.

Now that company is using the same machine learning technique to translate pictures into words. The result is a system that automatically generates picture captions that accurately describe the content of images. That’s something that will be useful for search engines, for automated publishing and for helping the visually impaired navigate the web and, indeed, the wider world.

The conventional approach to language translation is an iterative process that starts by translating words individually and then reordering the words and phrases to improve the translation. But in recent years, Google has worked out how to use its massive search database to translate text in an entirely different way.

The approach is essentially to count how often words appear next to, or close to, other words and then define them in an abstract vector space in relation to each other. This allows every word to be represented by a vector in this space and sentences to be represented by combinations of vectors.

Google goes on to make an important assumption. This is that specific words have the same relationship to each other regardless of the language. For example, the vector “king - man + woman = queen” should hold true in all languages.

That makes language translation a problem of vector space mathematics. Google Translate approaches it by turning a sentence into a vector and then using that vector to generate the equivalent sentence in another language.

Now Oriol Vinyals and pals at Google are using a similar approach to translate images into words. Their technique is to use a neural network to study a dataset of 100,000 images and their captions and so learn how to classify the content of images.

But instead of producing a set of words that describe the image, their algorithm produces a vector that represents the relationship between the words. This vector can then be plugged into Google’s existing translation algorithm to produce a caption in English, or indeed in any other language. In effect, Google’s machine learning approach has learnt to “translate” images into words.

To test the efficacy of this approach, they used human evaluators recruited from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to rate captions generated automatically in this way along with those generated by other automated approaches and by humans.

The results show that the new system, which Google calls Neural Image Caption, fares well. Using a well known dataset of images called PASCAL, Neural image Capture clearly outperformed other automated approaches. “NIC yielded a BLEU score of 59, to be compared to the current state-of-the-art of 25, while human performance reaches 69,” says Vinyals and co.

That’s not bad and the approach looks set to get better as the size of the training datasets increases. “It is clear from these experiments that, as the size of the available datasets for image description increases, so will the performance of approaches like NIC,” say the Google team.

Clearly, this is yet another task for which the days of human supremacy over machines are numbered.

GOOGLE, YOU'VE GOT IT WRONG: PAY ME $1 A MONTH

Original Story: mediapost.com

Google has got it all backwards for its Google Contributor plan, which will ban ads for certain sites if users pay them $1, or $2, or $3 a month.

Nom Google. I don’t pay you; you pay me.

If you believe long-term customers are important, I propose that viewers will be friendlier, more engaged, and more likely to buy products, from publishers (and their advertisers) sites. All you need to do is pay them -- a little.

And perhaps I’d let Google offer up PBS- or NBR-like sponsored statements, those little brought-to-you-by announcements.

It’s all about subtlety in marketing. Advertisers shouldn’t be so apt to hit media users/viewers over the head with big advertising announcements, which are most likely to insult my intelligence.

Google, a dollar a month doesn’t sound like much to send to me. And considering that you have a nearly 70% market share when it comes to search marketing, odds are you are going to still get back your money, in a big way. You’ll net out doing fine with this customer.

A dollar isn’t going to make or break either one of us. But it’ll show your engagement in me. In turn, I might be endeared to you, a bit.

Native advertising? No, you won’t be slipping that stuff by me in your new non-advertising effort.

TV networks might wonder how to play the same game. Many TV networks have already trimmed back commercials on time-shifted airings of their expensive TV shows on video-on-demand, through mobile apps, or elsewhere.

You can, of course, see reruns of TV shows on Netflix or Amazon without TV commercials, also for price that can run around $10 a month and include a lot of other stuff.

Maybe TV networks might think of an advertising-free night, week or month for themselves. And for a select group of viewers, like what Google is considering, they might offer this to viewers for a price.

But right now, it’s time to pay up. I’ll be waiting by the mailbox, and maybe not watching much TV or using much digital media.