Mike Maney

Tag: Google

  • 9 strategies feeding the Google mothership

    Yesterday, Google announced its intention to buy smart thermostat maker Nest for just north of $3 billion. The intersocialwebs went ballistic on the potential evil that lurks behind the drywall of a Google/Nest thermostat.

    Amidst the privacy panic were some who focused on the potential boon the Google/Nest connection could mean for the Internet of Things.  I tend to fall into this pint half full group (because, let’s be honest, even a half full pint is better than an empty pint…unless there’s another pint on the way).

    But I also think the Nest purchase signals something bigger and deeper in Google’s long term business world domination strategy.

    Pretend you’re Google for minute. Now imagine setting up what is arguably one of the most important and powerful companies in the world for the future. I’m talking about a future where code and connections are embedded in everything. A future where a company like Google has the power to turn all of those ones and zeros — however microscopic they may be — into information. What are the touchpoints you’d want to control? If you’re Google, you’re already telegraphing what those points are:

    • Design. The creme de la creme of design in tech is Apple. Know where Nest’s DNA comes from? Apple. The acquisition infuses ~100 Apple-level designers into Google’s less-than-Apple-like UI efforts.
    • Transportation. Driverless cars anyone? They aren’t just for mapping.
    • Energy. Nest becomes a pilot for larger industrial-level products.
    • Health. See Calico.
    • Communications. Not just phone, but lots of other devices powered by Android. And blimps.
    • Entertainment. Imagine YouTube with an iOS simple interface (no, not the abomination that is iTunes).
    • Commerce. Google Wallet. Will Square be next on the market? Coin?
    • Identity. Say what we will about Google+, there’s no underestimating the thundering momentum someone in Google’s position can create to drive adoption.
    • Knowledge. Each of these markets funnels data into what has effectively become the Internet’s brain. Watch for smarter search, and more widespread translation.
    What do you think? An accurate model of Google’s strategic structure moving forward?

  • A Future of wires, rotors and data

    While everyone was busy installing derivative messaging apps on their phones, some companies were busy messing around with wires and rotor blades. And by messing around, I mean doing some really interesting things.

    Amazon recently teased its drone delivery strategy and, as reported by VentureBeat, Google has been quietly acquiring its own robotic army.

    What I want to see is a live TV news shot of the first Amazon octocopter drone taking off on the first ever delivery. It passes over a Google car … which transforms into a bipedal robot and knocks the drone out of the sky. Your move, Bezos! – Ray Pawulich via Facebook

    Google and Amazon are just two of the big names in this next wave of technological innovation. Others, such as OpenROV, OnTheGo and Orbotix are also building pieces of this combined computing and manufacturing future that began with the dawn of the industrial age.

  • We’re Getting Closer to Jetson

    The Jetson'sCall me a nerd, but this is why I love doing what I do and why I’m excited about the future. For all the fun of Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare (not to mention all the supposedly non-social technologies used by the search giant Google), the collective data our generation is creating has the potential to – finally – build the Jetson’s-like future we’ve been promised for so many years:

    To understand where the combination of mobile sensors, cloud databases and computer algorithms augmented by human action is leading us, consider the self-driving car. Stanley, a driverless vehicle, won the US Darpa (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) grand challenge in 2005 by navigating a course of slightly over seven miles in a little under seven hours. Last year, Google demonstrated an autonomous vehicle that has driven over 100,000 miles in ordinary traffic. The difference: Stanley used traditional artificial intelligence algorithms and techniques; the Google autonomous vehicle is augmented with the memory of millions of road miles put in by human drivers building the Google Street View database. Those cars recorded countless details – the location of stop signs, obstacles, even the road surface.This is man-computer symbiosis at its best, where the computer program learns from the activity of human teachers, and its sensors notice and remember things the humans themselves would not. This is the future: massive amounts of data created by people, stored in cloud applications that use smart algorithms to extract meaning from it, feeding back results to those people on mobile devices, gradually giving way to applications that emulate what they have learned from the feedback loops between those people and their devices.

    I encourage you to read the entire Financial Times Article (“Birth of the Global Mind”) written by one of tech’s smartest, Tim O’Reilly.

  • If I Ran Google+…

     

    I’ve been pretty vocal about my views on how Google is blowing a huge, industry-shifting opportunity with Google+. Most of those views are centered around the company’s inability to know when to let professional marketers take the handoff from the engineers (and accept that it’s ok).

    This morning, my friend and fellow corporate misfit, Greg Lowe, posted his views on why he’s abandoning the Google+ party until it figures out how to make its various systems work together. Greg’s not alone. And that’s when it hit me: What would I do if I was running Google+’s marketing today?

    Would I allocate gobs of cash from my search business to promote this new product that — according to former Google CEO Eric Schmidt — has the potential to replace search as the backbone of the company? I could. It’s not like Google doesn’t have the money to make Google+ a household name like Facebook or Twitter.

    Would I pay a bunch of celebrities and brands bucketloads of moolah to make my new product look cool to people not immediately related to Robert Scoble? I could. Twitter has shown that tactic works pretty well.

    Would I initiate basic political and competitive campaign tactics to reshape how press, analysts and other influencers define the market? I could and would.

    No, what I’d do is much simpler.

    The biggest problem with Google+ right now isn’t that it’s UI is ugly or that people like Greg can’t log in from their different Google accounts. Google+’s biggest problem is that it’s marketing team isn’t harnessing the power of its most passionate customer base: those who take the time to complain about the product’s current shortcomings (early adopters who are core to the growth of the product).

    My fix? Have a strike team scour Google+, Twitter and the web for any and all complaints about the product. Capture them. Catalog them. Categorize them. Communicate them. And then turn the engineers lose fixing them. As each issue is addressed, check it off. Keep the list public. There’s a built-in, passionate product marketing department already built into Google: its customers.

    People want Google to be successful with Google+. The meteoric sign-ups show many are looking for something that builds on the early foundations laid by Facebook and Twitter. But unless Google gets some basic marketing religion — and gets it fast — their constant drumbeat of “It had potential…” flops will increasingly erode confidence in the company’s core geek foundation.

  • Theoretically Speaking: Google vs Microsoft

    I’ve got a hunch that this week’s Google+ news is the first volley in a tectonic shift for the tech industry. While conventional wisdom puts the battle between Google and Facebook for control of the so-called social graph, the real battle is fermenting between Google and Microsoft.

    In one corner:

    • GoogleApps (docs, video, email, cal)
    • Search
    • Google+

    In the other corner:

    Microsoft has been slow — if not outright absent — in the present day war among everyday consumers…outflanked by the speed, agility and popularity of Google and Facebook. Yet it still remains a force to be reckoned (arguments aside about how it obtained that force). It’s Office suite is still king and increasingly becoming more Google-like. It has done a nice job of staying alive, if not thriving in search. Hotmail still has, last I heard, a huge following. And the purchase of Skype was thought by many to be a shrewd move to enhance its enterprise business (although it looks like enterprise may not have been the primary or sole reason for the acquisition). Microsoft is slowly, if not stealthily, encroaching on Google’s hallowed turf.

    Google, despite a slew of missteps (which happens when a company refuses to let a product make a transition from engineering to marketing), has used its apps products to encroach on Microsoft’s stranglehold. Not so much from functionality, but as a tool to cause people to question whether they need traditional software…Redmond’s bread and butter. And, now, with Google+, it has the ability to thwart Microsoft’s plans for Skype.

    Except Microsoft has that hidden and oft-forgotten ace up its sleeve: Its investment in Facebook (and Facebook’s hatred of all things G). Skype + Facebook — if the rumor pans out next week — puts Microsoft and Google on equal footing. In fact, I’d go so far to say that given the consumerization of IT and Microsoft’s embedded position in the enterprise, it could put Microsoft back into the tech driver’s seat.

    If my hunch plays out, we’ve got ourselves an unbelievable dogfight coming in the tech industry. And when it happens — when two behemoths push themselves to out do and out innovate each other — you and I win.

  • A Personalized Google TV Station

    Smokey and the Bandit

    A status update that included a link to a clip of the movie “Smokey and the Bandit” by my friend and Phi Tau fraternity brother, Sam Ceresi, sparked an idea this morning: create a television channel that does a 24×7 loop of the following movies:

    Maybe a play for Netflix or Comcast or DirecTV? I don’t know the technical limitations, but it seems to me they already have quite an inventory of spectacularly useless channels already in their lineup. What’s one or a couple million more?  Would it be possible to give everyone their own personal channel — like Google does with email. Hmmm, doesn’t Google already own YouTube? If they could figure out a way to compensate the studios — and either create their own or buy their way into an existing network — this could be an interesting play for them.

    Think it would could fly? Would there be enough demand? What would you pay? And, most important, what five movies would you loop on your personal Google TV channel?

  • The 2008 Cloud Computing All-Stars


    One of the most talked about technologies of 2008 was unquestionably cloud computing (okay, maybe not unquestionably…this is the tech industry, afterall). Cloud computing — from consumer-level apps such as Facebook to big company entries such as Microsoft’s Azure — dominated a good part of the tech conversation over the past year.

    And, like most hot technologies, a number of key players emerged. While my role in cloud computing flirts primarily around the periphery (i.e., I don’t write code), I am close enough to the conversation to notice which players seem to sit at the epicenter of the discussion.

    Among the creme of the crop are five who I believe make up The 2008 Cloud Computing All-Star Team:

    1. Jeff Barr (Amazon’s web services god)
    2. Michael Sheehan (GoGrid evangelist extraordinaire)
    3. Reuven Cohen (Enomaly founder and Cloud Camp instigator using open source to make the cloud elastic)
    4. Sam Charrington (Appistry VP using cloud application platform to put a hurt on the legacy app server market)
    5. Chris Gladwin (CEO of Cleversafe and the guy behind one of the hottest cloud storage technologies of ’08)

    Which cloud computing players would you recruit for your all-star team? Let me know in the comments.

    [Disclosure: Appistry is a client.]

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