Company / division: Alphabet
Google starts flagging offensive content in search results – USA Today (Mar 16, 2017)
Human curation feels like an interesting way to solve a problem with an algorithm, and it’s striking that Google pays 10,000 people to check its search results for quality in the first place. As I’ve said previously, the specific problem with “snippets” in search is better solved by eliminating them for obscure or poorly covered topics, but the issue with false results is certainly broader than just snippets. It sounds like this approach is helping, but it doesn’t feel very scalable.
via USA Today
Google Home is playing audio ads for Beauty and the Beast – The Verge (Mar 16, 2017)
This feels like an extremely stupid move for Google. Though Google claims this wasn’t an ad, that’s utterly disingenuous, and inserting ads this early in the Google Home lifecycle (if ever) is a huge mistake – this is just the kind of thing that will put people off buying a Google Home, especially because it fits a narrative of Google only being interested in advertising. This is a hardware product, for which users have paid a decent price, and it shouldn’t be playing ads, especially without an opt-out – there is no indication that users would hear ads in any of the marketing material. I just tried my own Google Home to see if it would play this message, but it didn’t, suggesting that Google may have stopped playing the message. If so, good, but it never should have happened in the first place, unless Google wants to kneecap its own product this early in its competition with Amazon’s Echo.
via The Verge
Want to use Google, kid? Now there’s an app for that – Mashable (Mar 15, 2017)
If you’re a parent of kids under 13, you’ve likely encountered the COPPA law, even if you might not know it by that name, because your kids will have found it impossible to sign up for an online service or account without either lying about their age or going through a very involved process. As a result, I suspect many kids either do lie about their age (perhaps with their parents’ support) or piggyback off a parent’s account, neither of which is ideal. Google now has a service that lets kids legitimately sign up for their own account even if they’re under 13, as part of a family account tightly controlled and supervised by parents. That feels like a great solution, and it looks like these accounts can effectively graduate when the kids reach an appropriate age. I wish more companies would think about how to help parents help their kids use technology, and this feels like a good step. Of course, this does mean that Google is now capturing information about your kids for a future profile, even if that data collection is limited in unspecified ways.
via Mashable
Google, Facebook Increase Their Grip on Digital Ad Market – eMarketer (Mar 14, 2017)
The timing of this new data from eMarketer is perfect, because I just wrote a piece for Techpinions subscribers today about the battle for third place in online advertising. The reality is that Facebook and Google have been dominant for some time in this space and that shows very little sign of changing. As I argued in my piece this morning, some of the big Chinese names are actually the strongest contenders for third place on a global basis, but they mostly operate only in China, so it’s largely other US companies which are competing in the rest of the world, and they’re all pretty small in comparison to the big two. Between them, Google and Facebook appear to have search and display advertising pretty well sown up, with only the crumbs left for other players, who largely have to compete among themselves rather than having any prospect of taking meaningful share from the big two. As I also pointed out this morning, though Snapchat gets lots of attention, it’s currently behind even Amazon, let alone other bigger names like Microsoft and Yahoo, and will have to wait years to break into the top five. Meanwhile, Twitter is a cautionary tale about even once promising companies stalling before they reach their perceived potential.
via eMarketer
Apple Joins Group of Companies Supporting Google in Foreign Email Privacy Case – Mac Rumors (Mar 14, 2017)
Given the way other big tech companies had weighed in on the related Microsoft case over the past few years, it was a little odd that more hadn’t sprung to Google’s defense in this one, but it’s good to see that they are now doing so. These cases have far-reaching consequences not just for user privacy but for the ability of US companies to do business in overseas markets, and those companies need to defend themselves vigorously. The final outcome of both cases is therefore worth watching closely.
via Mac Rumors
Google’s Allo app can reveal to your friends what you’ve searched – Recode (Mar 14, 2017)
Now that I’ve finally got around to writing this up, it appears Google has patched the specific issue highlighted in this piece, but it’s still worth talking about for a couple of different reasons. For one, anytime you bring a virtual assistant into an existing conversation between two or more human beings, there’s a tension between the bot knowing as much as possible about each participant and using that to be helpful on the one hand, and avoiding exposing personal information about the participants on the other. Google appears to have screwed that up here in a way that could have been damaging or embarrassing for users, though it has now been patched. Secondly, this kind of thing can only happen when you collect and keep enormous amounts of data on your users in the first place – a company that neither collects nor retains such data in a profile could never expose it. It’s clear that Google didn’t intentionally do so here, but it was able to do so anyway because of its business model. Competitors such as Apple might argue that not collecting such data, or keeping it secured on a device rather than in the cloud, would make it impossible for a cloud service to share it with others. We’re going to have to work through lots more of these scenarios in the years to come, and the competition between companies that strictly preserve privacy and those that use personal data to improve services will be a critical facet of that evolution.
via Recode
Huawei Watch 2 review: No time for this half-baked sequel – Android Central (Mar 14, 2017)
I linked to reviews of Android Wear 2.0 and the LG watches that launched at the same time a few weeks ago, and those were pretty negative. Now, here we have another entry from a major Android vendor and it seems to be at least as bad as LG’s. At this point, it feels like some Android vendors have given up on the platform entirely, while others seem to have given up trying to make a smartwatch competitive with the Apple Watch but are still putting what they do have out into the market. None of this is going to help Android Wear or smartwatches in general. I’ve said before that I think it will take a Pixel-style first party entry from Google to give this platform the boost it needs, because for now Android Wear continues to be more or less irrelevant in the smartwatch and broader wearable market. Even if Google does get into this market directly, however, it continues to be far smaller and narrower than many people originally thought, and it’s currently dominated by Apple.
via Android Central
Uptime is a goofy video sharing app from Google’s Area 120 startup incubator – The Verge (Mar 13, 2017)
Google was once famous for the 20% time it gave its employees to work on passion projects, but then word started to spread that this wasn’t really happening anymore. And then last year Google announced the creation of an incubator for employees’ projects, which seemed to be trying to resurrect the spirit of 20% time if not the details. The first app from that incubator just launched, and it’s a co-watching app for YouTube videos. On the one hand, there’s an obvious fit with an existing product at Google, which is a good thing, and on the other it’s not clear why the YouTube team didn’t build this. I’m not sure what value is added by having this be a separate app that doesn’t carry any Google branding (even in the App Store, it’s listed as being offered by Area 120, the name of Google’s incubator). If the main purpose of Area 120 is to keep entrepreneurial employees onboard, then perhaps this will serve its purpose, but on the evidence of this first app, I’m not sure it’s going to lead to anything all that compelling. Having tested the app briefly, the overwhelming impression I was left with was that it was incredibly privacy-invasive – it kept prompting or reminding me that everything I was doing would be shared with friends and/or publicly available.
via The Verge
Alphabet Swaps Project Loon Leaders After Six-Month Stint for Latest CEO – Bloomberg (Mar 11, 2017)
Given the brevity of Moore’s tenure at Loon, it looks like things didn’t turn out so well, which is a bit surprising given he was thought to be the kind of business brain who would align well with Alphabet’s new, more focused strategy. It’s also a bit surprising because Loon had recently announced that it was making progress in streamlining its technology and therefore getting closer to the point where it might make money. In the end, Moore seems to be either another executive who didn’t jive with the way Alphabet is being run now, or perhaps merely had conflicts with other managers around him.
via Bloomberg
CIA Leak Reveals Gaps in Patchwork of Android Software – WSJ (Mar 11, 2017)
The CIA leak taught us nothing new about the slow rate of Android adoption, but it did perhaps serve as a reminder of its consequences for security. Android adoption is notoriously slow, and it’s something I’ve written about quite bit (see here for my most recent deep dive into the numbers). It takes roughly two years on average for a new version of Android to reach 50% adoption among the base, and no version ever gets above about 40% adoption before a new version begins eating into its share. Compare that to iOS, which typically gets to about 70% adoption within a few months of release, and whose two most recent versions usually account for over 90% of the total base. In the past, this was very problematic, because it meant security vulnerabilities weren’t patched and users were left open to hacks and malware. However, more recently Google and its partners have separated some of the security patches from major OS updates and fast tracked these through a separate update process with the carriers. It’s not a universal solution, but it has helped mitigate some of the security impacts that result from slow OS updates. However, Android in general continues to be far more vulnerable to malware than iOS both because of the slow update issue and because of its overall architecture.
via WSJ
California DMV: Humans soon no longer required in self-driving cars – San Francisco Chronicle (Mar 10, 2017)
Michigan’s autonomous driving laws already allow testing of cars without drivers, and given that these two states are home to much of the testing going on, California clearly feels it needs to keep up. Those Michigan laws assume that carmakers are going to comply with all applicable regulations, and therefore require that any testing is done by or in partnership with those carmakers, while the proposed California law has no such restrictions (logical given the biggest local testers are tech companies and now legacy automakers). In both cases, the states are deferring somewhat to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to set the overall rules and to some extent approve cars for autonomous driving without a driver. This Chronicle piece quotes a spokesperson from Consumer Watchdog, which has been particularly harsh (perhaps deservedly so) on Uber/Otto, but also seems to be one of the main organizations demanding tougher regulation of autonomous driving in general in California. What’s interesting is that there are so few voices on the other side of this rapid push towards autonomous driving.
Alphabet’s Waymo filed an injunction against Uber for allegedly stealing intellectual property – Recode (Mar 10, 2017)
The fact that Waymo is suing Uber isn’t new, but this new step of filing for an injunction is, and that’s important because it could speed things up considerably. Judging the case in full could have taken months if not years, but a request for an injunction will involve convincing a judge in a much shorter space of time that there’s enough merit to the case for him or her to intervene in the near term. So we’ll know rather sooner how solid Waymo’s case here is, and will likely also get additional details from both sides about exactly what’s been going on. Importantly, we’ll get more from Uber than its brief initial statement about the accusations being baseless, which will be intriguing because from where I sit the forensic evidence looks fairly compelling. As I’ve said before, though, the toughest aspect of this for Waymo and its lawyers is proving that Levandowski actually used the files he downloaded rather than simply his memories of work he’d previously done.
via Recode
Google goes after Slack and splits Hangouts into Chat and Meet – TechCrunch (Mar 9, 2017)
More announcements today from Google’s big Cloud event, with today’s focus being more on the end user tools rather than the infrastructure ones covered yesterday. The big news is that Hangouts is getting a bit more sophisticated, with a more fleshed out version of the meetings app now called Hangouts Meet and becoming a bit more like WebEx, and a second feature set which basically mimics Slack under the Hangouts Chat banner. Google is definitely getting stronger in some of these areas on the enterprise, although it’s surprising to me that we haven’t seen some of this stuff much sooner – Google has been using a version of Hangouts internally for years for its meetings, and I would have thought we’d have seen these more optimized tools long before now. But it’s getting there, and it’s starting to feel like the enterprise side is a lot more logical in its structure and feature set than Google’s consumer messaging and communication apps.
via TechCrunch
Self-driving car numbers double on California roads – Financial Times (Mar 9, 2017)
California and Michigan have to be the two states where the most testing of autonomous vehicle technology is being done, with the former home to most of the tech companies in the space and the latter the home of several legacy automakers. The FT is here citing data from the California DMV, which you can see in its raw form here. What’s fascinating is the mix of companies here, as I’ve said before – there are several traditional carmakers (VW, Mercedes, Nissan, BMW, Honda, Ford, and Subaru), several big names from the tech world (Waymo, Tesla, Uber, Baidu, Faraday Future, and Cruise [now part of GM]), and a variety of other smaller companies. But Waymo has by far the largest number of cars and miles driven (and most accidents). But the California DMV is certainly the source of some of the most interesting data on self-driving testing anywhere in the world right now.
via Financial Times
Wikileaks Could Still Release CIA Hacking Tool Code – USA Today (Mar 8, 2017)
Though the CIA leaks from Wikileaks earlier this week are worrisome in their scope and bad news for the vendors whose devices and platforms have been compromised, there’s at least some comfort in the knowledge that these tools have at least theoretically been subject to due process in the past. However, Wikileaks claims that it has the code for the hacking tools themselves and is debating releasing that code, which would make it available to any hacker who wanted to use it, dramatically increasing the potential for misuse for hacking regular individuals. Again, Apple has said (and Google also confirmed this evening finally) that most of the vulnerabilities have already been patched in recent versions of their respective software, so that should be some defense. But as I’ve said already this week, what a vindication of Apple’s refusal to cooperate with the FBI a year ago over hacking an iPhone.
via USA Today
Google, a Cloud Computing Upstart, Seeks Credibility – WSJ (Mar 8, 2017)
Google is having its big enterprise cloud event, Next, this week, and making lots of announcements of both new features and new customers. I got a briefing on the new features on Monday ahead of the announcements, and it looks like a decent set of mostly incremental improvements, many of which are about closing the gap competitively with Amazon and Microsoft and a few of which are more unique. But all the new features and customer wins Google announces won’t change a basic fact outlined well in this WSJ report: Google is way behind the two big players in this space in terms of scale. Even with rapid growth, Google is unlikely to close the gap because both AWS and Azure are growing fast too. Google claims that it’s winning a good share of the engagements it competes for, which then implies that it’s still not being considered for many engagements where Amazon and Microsoft are competing, something that’s also reinforced by a (somewhat self-serving) comment from Microsoft in this article. Its job at this point is, then, to ensure higher consideration when companies are looking for a cloud provider.
via WSJ (you might also be interested in last week’s Beyond Devices Podcast, in which we discussed AWS and its competitors in some depth)
Alphabet’s Nest Working on Cheaper Thermostat, Home Security System – Bloomberg (Mar 8, 2017)
There are several interesting elements here – a cheaper Nest thermostat, a thermostat with the power to control the temperature in individual rooms, and a home security system. Bringing the price down could certainly help drive adoption – $250 is a little steep for a single thermostat, but it really adds up when you have several (as we do in our home). Of course, one of the reasons why you might have several Nests installed is to control the temperature in different rooms more effectively – we have a number of different zones for just this reason, and no smart thermostat I’ve seen can manage more than one zone at once. Of course, this might also require a professional HVAC technician to create some new zones in your home – I can’t imagine how it would work without those changes. However, all that said, I think the security system is potentially the most interesting thing here, because it opens the door to the kind of service model I think is key to the future of the smart home (see the narrative attached to this post). When Nest’s new CEO was installed, I pointed out that he comes from a services background and would be an appropriate leader to drive a transition from a retail model to a services model – I’m very curious to see if we see a move in this direction when this hardware launches. That could drive much stronger growth in Nest’s business, but it would likely be heavily reliant on partnerships, which is the other important part of such a shift.
via Bloomberg
Twitter’s former head engineer Alex Roetter lands at Larry Page’s flying car startup Kitty Hawk – Business Insider (Mar 7, 2017)
The details of this story aren’t all that interesting unless flying cars are a particular obsession. What’s most interesting here is actually that Larry Page is now doing in separate (often secretive) entities things which in the past might well have been done by divisions of Google. I’ve often said that a lot of what now sits in the Other Bets segment at Alphabet began life as a twinkle in Larry or Sergey’s eye, or as a passion project of sorts, and that’s always struck me as a rather inappropriate use of shareholders’ money. So, it’s interesting to see that not only is Alphabet paring back the Other Bets and exercising greater financial discipline around them in general, but the Google founders are also starting to make those bets with their own money. Both feel like progress.
via Business Insider
No, WikiLeaks Didn’t Just Reveal That The Government Has Access To Your Secure Messaging Apps – BuzzFeed (Mar 7, 2017)
This is one of those stories where lots of publications are rushing to publish the most frightening headline without doing their reporting first, so kudos for BuzzFeed here for debunking right away one of the big tropes that’s doing the rounds. There’s nothing about secure messaging apps being compromised in the documents – rather, devices have allegedly been compromised, and of course once a device is compromised everything on it is too. However, even those claims of devices being broadly compromised are being disputed by some security experts – see here, for example. And Business Insider also argues that those on the latest version of iOS (79% on iOS 10 and another 16% on iOS 9) are safe from all the exploits listed. I suspect there will be lots more to come here, and as usual being on the latest version of Android is a lot harder than on iOS so the same protections don’t necessarily apply, but everyone should be trying to understand first, publish second when it comes to this data dump. And of course all this just reinforces arguments Apple and others have made about not trusting the government with back doors for encryption and the like.
via BuzzFeed
Why Amazon Echo And Google Home Can’t Tell Who’s Talking–Yet – Fast Company (Mar 7, 2017)
This is a good counterpart to the Time article from last week about Amazon working on voice identification in their respective home speakers. It points out the complications in providing such a feature, not least that heavy processing to make voices clearer will also tend to distort them and therefore make it harder to recognize and distinguish speakers. The article also makes clear, though, that these challenges are far from insurmountable, which leads me to believe that Amazon or Google or both will eventually figure this out. In fact, whichever does figure it out first could have a big advantage, because for a lot of the most useful features (calendar, emails, etc) individual profiles are critical. So much so that Google misleadingly included that exact use case in its I/O launch video last year.
via Fast Company