Company / division: Google
Google is Reportedly Working on an Echo Show Competitor (Sep 29, 2017)
This report from TechCrunch appears to be based to some extent on the same tip I mentioned both in yesterday’s item and on the podcast last night: it suggests that Google is working on a competitor to the Amazon Echo Show. It sounds like it would run key Google apps and serve as a smart home hub, and might also run Netflix, while the screen is expected to be similar in size to the Echo Show’s, at 7 inches. This is still a small slice of the overall voice speaker market, one which needs to prove itself more as a strange hybrid of stationary tablet and voice speaker with a display. Videoconferencing is one of the features Amazon’s promoted most with regard to the Echo Show, and it sounds like Google’s device will support that too, but of course we all have many devices capable of that function already, and the additional utility of having that device always in the same place is limited. Google’s leaked Home Mini and rumored Home Max seem much more promising in the near term.
via TechCrunch
Google Announces Assistant is Coming to Android TV Starting with Nvidia Shield (Sep 28, 2017)
If there are two big recent trends in voice assistants, they’re control of music and control of TVs. Every major company in this space is making announcements about these two areas, with Amazon adding voice control to its music apps and then Alexa to its new Fire TV box, Apple preparing the music-centric HomePod for launch, and Sonos prepping an event next week which is also likely to be music-oriented. In that context, then, it’s no surprise that the latest set of devices to get Google Assistant support are those running Android TV, of which there are currently very few, notably the gaming-centric Nvidia Shield and Sony’s Bravia TV sets. The Nvidia Shield support was actually announced way back at CES in January if I recall correctly, but support is only rolling out now. More broadly, Apple TV and Amazon’s Fire TV already support voice control, while there’s also an Alexa integration with DISH’s satellite service, and Comcast offers its own native voice control through its remotes, so this is becoming table stakes for a TV interface. The specific voice functions Android TV supports seem roughly on par with those offered on other platforms, though perhaps a bit more limited.
via Google
Google is Reportedly Working on a Premium Google Home Max (Sep 28, 2017)
9to5Google reports that Google is working on a premium speaker for its Google Home range, tentatively named the “Max”, which could either appear alongside the recently leaked Google home Mini at next week’s hardware event or show up sometime later. Such a device would be the first sign that either of the two major players in the voice speaker market today is interested in participating in the premium audio space directly – Amazon beefed up the audio capabilities in its own devices at yesterday’s event, but they’re still not aiming to compete with high-end speakers. Given the recent announcements from partners using Google Assistant and Alexa in the premium segment, I had assumed both companies would cede that market to others, but it appears that Google at least is somewhat serious about participating directly. That’s in keeping with the premium positioning of its other hardware products, with the Pixel and Pixelbook both targeting the pricier end of their respective categories. And it makes sense if Google wants to avoid merely attracting the lower end of the market as it has largely done with Android, though it will make life even harder for Sonos if both Apple and Google get into the premium segment. (If all this is of interest to you, you might be interested in my column today for Techpinions, which dives rather more deeply into yesterday’s Amazon announcements). Lastly, I heard from a tipster today who suggested Google is also working on a couple of Home devices with screens, and that this was part of the reason it pulled YouTube from the Echo Show – I haven’t been able to confirm that yet, but it’s an interesting thought.
via 9to5Google
Google Officially Begins Rolling Out European Shopping Search Changes (Sep 27, 2017)
This is just a quick follow-up on yesterday’s item on Google’s second proposed remedy to the finding that its Shopping search feature violates the EU’s competition laws. Google has now begun rolling out the changes that were reported but not officially confirmed by the company, and the EU’s stance is still that it will have to wait and see how the changes pan out before it rules on whether the fix is acceptable. The separation and opening up of bidding to other companies certainly leaves the door open to similar remedies in the other cases pending at the European Commission as well as other areas it may choose to investigate, including Maps, News, and so on, which would create much more far-reaching effects for Google than this change alone. It’s going to be a tough few years for Google in Europe.
via WSJ
Google Pulls YouTube from Amazon’s Echo Show Device (Sep 27, 2017)
Amazon announced last night that Google had pulled its YouTube app from the former’s Echo Show device, the company’s first screen-based voice speaker. YouTube was one of very few video options available on the Echo Show, with Amazon’s own Prime Video being the main alternative. YouTube videos would show up in response to certain searches, especially ones relating to video, and although I doubt anyone bought an Echo Show solely to use YouTube, losing it is a blow to the company. There’s a certain irony that this breach in the relationship between Amazon and Google has occurred in a week when we’ve seen signs of detente between each of these two companies and Apple, with Amazon again selling Apple TV hardware and Apple replacing Bing with Google as the search engine in Siri and OS-level search in its devices. I joked on Twitter that it’s almost as if there’s some universal equilibrium of big tech companies not playing nicely with each other that has to be maintained.
Of course, this is all part of the broader ongoing competitive dynamic between these various companies, which all need each other to varying degrees but often place limits on their interactions in areas where they can afford to do so. Though Amazon says the decision was unilateral and unexplained, Google said the implementation of YouTube on the Echo Show violated its terms of service, which makes you wonder whether the companies launched in a hurry and agreed to settle terms later, or whether Amazon simply built the YouTube app without Google’s input and hoped it wouldn’t mind. My guess is that the ToS violation in question here revolves around the lack of options for managing a YouTube account – I sent my Echo Show back after testing it for a review, but if I recall correctly, many of the standard YouTube features on other platforms were not available there, which was reflective of the Echo Show’s broad limitations on interactivity and functionality, something I pointed out in my review. YouTube was in some ways very much behind a platform wall which Amazon erected in front of it, and it seems Google finally decided it had had enough.
It’s worth remembering that Google and Amazon compete directly across several areas and have limited their cooperation in several others as a result: they compete in voice assistants and devices, for starters, but also in cloud services, in product search, in tablets (albeit indirectly), in grocery deliveries, in TV boxes, and so on. And as a result there have been limits to their cooperation – Amazon stopped selling Chromecast devices a while back and generally doesn’t participate in the Google Shopping feature alongside other major retailers, and appears to have resisted adding Chromecast features to its video apps. It’s possible that Google pulling YouTube was a way to exert pressure to get Amazon to sell Chromecast devices again as it has Apple TV devices – the timing likely isn’t coincidental. And Google certainly has far more leverage in this spat than Amazon – the Echo Show is a meaningless contributor to YouTube’s overall success, but the presence or absence of YouTube on the Echo Show is a much bigger deal for that device and its appeal. I don’t think Google will be in any hurry to settle the dispute unless it’s able to extract some concessions, and I wouldn’t be surprised if that includes Amazon selling Chromecasts again.
via The Verge
Google Will Separate its Shopping Unit from Search to Satisfy EU Regulators (Sep 26, 2017)
After its initial proposal to address the European Commission’s concerns over its Shopping search feature apparently failed to pass muster, it appears Google is now offering to separate its Shopping search business from its core search business in the EU, and force it to bid for ten slots above the regular search results alongside other comparison shopping services. The reporting here from Bloomberg makes it sound like Google might still get more formal approval of its proposal, despite the EU Competition Commissioner’s remarks to Bloomberg last week which suggested that it would have to play things by ear. This solution will certainly seem less fishy than the first proposal, which I said had significant issues, but it’s still not clear whether it will meet the approval of either the EU or Google’s competitors. Certainly, Google is now going to have to bid for slots it previously received for free, which will dramatically change the economics of the Shopping search in the EU. But as long as Google has exclusive rights to its past data about the results from those links in the past, it will continue to have something of an unfair advantage over competitors in knowing what to bid for them in future.
via Bloomberg
★ Apple Switches Search Back-End for Safari and Siri to Google from Bing (Sep 25, 2017)
Apple has quietly switched the search back end for its Siri voice assistant and what used to be called Spotlight search to Google, after relying on Bing for several years. Bing will continue to provide the image search results in Siri, but is otherwise being replaced by Google. That’s a fascinating turn of events after several years of Apple removing Google from various elements of its built-in systems, from switching to its own maps to elimination the YouTube app to offering a variety of alternative default search providers in Safari, to this use of Bing behind the scenes. Although there’s obviously been some speculation that money was a factor here, and it may well have been, I suspect this ultimately comes down to wanting to provide the best possible experience in these various settings, and that means using Google. That’s ultimately the same reason that Apple hasn’t switched away from Google as the default search engine within Safari in Western markets – Google is the gold standard, and everything else still comes up short. I do wonder if this is part of a quiet renewal of the longstanding relationship between the two companies, which always prompts speculation about Apple replacing Google as the default. That certainly seems less likely now, as Apple in its brief public statement on this news has emphasized the need for consistency across experiences within iOS and macOS, suggesting that Google is here to stay as the default search option in Safari. That’s a big win for Google and a big loss for Microsoft, for which Apple’s partnership was a rare bright spot on mobile, while it continues to take decent share on the desktop by virtue of Windows’ dominance there.
via TechCrunch
YouTube Announces More Sophisticated Targeting, Customization for Ads (Sep 25, 2017)
Google has announced several new tools for advertisers using its platform to reach users with video ads, and they highlight just how sophisticated the YouTube ad platform is becoming, at a time when Facebook is still struggling with basic formats and helping creators tweak their video formats to work with its ad limitations. There are four parts to the YouTube announcement: custom affinity audiences, which allow advertisers to reach users based on profile-based interests including recent Google searches; customizing video ads by context on the fly using automation; stringing together multiple ads to tell a story or react to user responses; better online-to-offline attribution. To my mind, the custom video ads are the most interesting thing here – they allow advertisers to upload a set of assets and have the system automatically mix and match them to create ads that feel like they’re customized based on the video the user is watching. As this TechCrunch article points out, that’s likely to make the videos more memorable, but it may also cross the “creepy” line for some viewers, and that’s the risk all highly-targeted advertising takes. Various elements of what Google is announcing take advantage of its increasingly strong AI and machine learning techniques as well as the breadth of its tracking of users (for better or worse) across the various properties it owns, and the latter may in future be hampered by increasing limits on this kind of targeting which will come into effect in Europe soon.
via Google
Google Confirms Both it and Partners Will Issue Refunds for Fraudulent Traffic (Sep 22, 2017)
Last month, the Wall Street Journal reported that Google was preparing to offer refunds to advertisers whose ads had appeared on sites with no legitimate traffic but who were nonetheless charged as if there had been traffic. The problem with the refunds was that Google itself could only refund a small portion of the total because much of the money from the advertisers went to ad exchanges also involved in the transactions. Google has now announced the refund program publicly, and said that several major exchanges will also join in offering refunds, which should return a much more substantial part of the total payment. As also reported earlier by the Journal, Google is also going to be participating in a program called ads.txt, which makes it much easier to validate sites claiming to have large amounts of traffic and therefore cuts down on ad fraud, which should be a big help in this specific type of fraud, even as others persist.
via WSJ
EU Competition Chief Says Google’s Shopping Remedy to be Approved by Competitors (Sep 22, 2017)
This seems like a totally bizarre stance from the EU’s Competition Commissioner in response to Google’s proposed remedy to its alleged abuse of its dominant market position. Google is reported to have offered an auction to fill the Shopping slot it previously occupied exclusively, and Margrethe Vestager says her office won’t approve the remedy as such, but will wait to see whether it works in the market. That’s enormously unfair as an approach because it means Google could act in good faith, believing it’s proposed an adequate remedy, only to find out much later than it hasn’t and is subject to back-dated fines. Given that the European Commission found that Google violated its rules, it should surely also be the arbiter of whether the proposed remedy fixed things or not. And allowing the comparison shopping services that prompted the investigation in the first place to be the judges instead seems particularly unreasonable given that they have a vested interest in continuing to extract concessions from Google. I said when the proposed remedy was reported last week that I thought it unlikely to be sufficient, but to leave Google in legal limbo on this point just isn’t reasonable. It gives the impression that the EU has an axe to grind with Google and wants it to suffer rather than simply providing the legal clarity it should be entitled to.
via Bloomberg
eMarketer Data Shows Google and Facebook Share of US Online Ads at 63% (Sep 21, 2017)
A key part of the Advertising Sustainability narrative on the site is the issue of two companies’ dominance of online advertising in the US and to a lesser extent other western markets. New data from eMarketer is a useful checkpoint in measuring that dominance – it says that the two companies will suck up 63% of US online ad spend in 2017, an increase from its earlier forecast of 60%. Microsoft comes in third place way behind the top two, with Verizon in fourth for now and Amazon projected to take its place over the next couple of years. Google and Facebook’s dominance is neither surprise nor mystery at this point – the former has the unique combination of timeliness and relevance that search offers, while the latter has created the most powerful combination of audience and native advertising, dominating their respective categories and leaving the dregs for smaller competitors and less effective forms of advertising. Importantly, though, eMarketer doesn’t see the two companies’ share rising dramatically over the next couple of years – it projects just 68% share in 2019, meaning that other companies will still capture nearly a third of the market, and their dollar share of the total will actually rise since the market is still growing rapidly. eMarketer’s blog post with all the numbers is here.
via Mashable
Google is Reportedly Working on AI-Based Subscription Help for Publishers (Sep 21, 2017)
The Financial Times reports that Google is working on an AI-based tool that will help publishers identify possible subscribers for their newspapers. This is a somewhat fleshed-out version of a report from a month ago on Bloomberg, which had fewer details but said Google was testing a number of different approaches. As a reminder, the context here is the tension between news organizations and both Google and Facebook over business models, the increasing power of the internet companies, and the challenges of selling online subscriptions and building brands when search and social serve as channels for so much news consumption. As I’ve said before, Facebook began taking this tension seriously some time ago and pouring oil on troubled waters, but it seems to have taken Google longer to come around, and it’s still mostly at the testing stage in its efforts. Putting AI to work in the service of solving the problem is a classic Google move, but it remains to be seen how effective that will actually be. Certainly, the publishers quoted by the FT seem heartened but not yet won over by Google’s new approach.
via Financial Times
★ Google and HTC Announce $1.1 Billion Acquihire and Patent Licensing Deal (Sep 21, 2017)
Google and HTC finally announced the deal that’s been rumored for a while and for which many details leaked yesterday. Google is in the end only acquiring 2000 employees and some non-exclusive intellectual property, for $1.1 billion, an amount over half of HTC’s market cap before the deal was announced. The 2000 are around half the research and design team at HTC (and a fifth of the total workforce), while the other half will remain and work on a streamlined portfolio of first-party HTC hardware including a new flagship already in the works. Google’s blog post about the deal is remarkably vague and unhelpful, and it’s equally remarkable that there’s no SEC filing or press release on Alphabet’s investor relations site about the deal given its magnitude. It’s almost as if Google doesn’t want to talk about the deal or its details, but HTC very much wants to, emphasizing both the financial boon – the money to be paid in cash once the deal closes in early 2018 – and its ongoing commitment to making smartphones and VR devices.
The deal has echoes of Microsoft’s bailout acquisition of Nokia a few years back – HTC is a far less important strategic partner to Google, but this very much feels like Google offering a financial lifeline to the very unprofitable and shrinking HTC in return for some assets it needs. Those assets are IP necessary to make Pixel phones without being sued by HTC or anyone else but also the research and design skills necessary to build those phones exactly to Google’s specifications and needs rather than having to work off HTC’s foundation and platform, originally built for other devices. That optimization and the integration with Android it should enable are going to be critical for Google to squeeze the most out of its hardware efforts, though it also needs to go deeper on the chips side, something it’s been reported to be doing separately.
One of the things I’ve been asked about by reporters over the last 24 hours or so is what effect this will have on other Android OEMs. The simple answer is that it clearly strengthens Google’s first party hardware capabilities, which for now aren’t much of a threat. But it’s not as if those OEMs can do anything about it – Android is the only viable open smartphone platform out there today, and if OEMs aren’t producing top-notch, differentiated hardware, Google’s efforts in the space are far from their only problem. One thing is notable: Android engineering head Dave Burke is apparently in Taipei – which is interesting because Google hardware has been said to run at arm’s length from Android team, like any other OEM, so there’s no real reason why Dave Burke would need to be involved in this transaction, and yet there he is in HTC’s home city as this deal is announced.
From HTC’s perspective, the cash infusion will give it breathing room to continue working on a strategy that can again provide sustainable profits in the long run, presumably with its Vive VR business at its core, given that even a shrunken smartphone team isn’t likely to be profitable at its current (or smaller, Pixel-less) scale. I do wonder why Google didn’t just buy the whole company – at under $2 billion market cap, Google could presumably have paid roughly double what it is and had the whole thing, taking what it needed, including manufacturing capability, VR hardware expertise, and other useful pieces, and shut the rest down. This deal is certainly simpler and less painful from an integration perspective, but I’m still not sure I see a viable future for HTC even with this investment and the attendant changes.
via HTC
Moto X4 Brings Android One to the US and Google’s Project Fi (Sep 20, 2017)
I noted a couple of weeks back with the launch of Xiaomi’s first Android One device that the project appeared to have morphed from a low-tier emerging markets play to one focused more on the mid market, and today’s news reinforces that perception. Motorola is launching its Moto X4 device into the US market as part of the Android One project, and this $400 phone will be available on Google’s own Project Fi service as an alternative to the Nexus and Pixel phones it’s offered until now. (The Nexus phones Google has offered are, by the way, currently showing as out of stock on the Project Fi site, suggesting they’re likely to get phased out with the launch of new Pixel devices in a couple of weeks.) The Android One version isn’t the only one Motorola offers – as I noted when it was announced, the main version actually comes with Alexa baked in, something the Google version certainly won’t do. All of this is indicative of Motorola’s falling leverage with carriers, and its need to do deals with other market players to parcel up its phones in different ways to find attractive niches.
via 9to5Google
★ Google Reportedly About to Announce Partial HTC Acquisition (Sep 20, 2017)
HTC has formally announced that its shares will halt trading for a material announcement tomorrow, and Bloomberg is reporting that it will be that Google is acquiring at least part of the company’s smartphone operations. Other sources – including Taiwanese site Apple Daily and as I understand it shortly also the Wall Street Journal – are saying that it’s the smartphone design operations specifically that Google will acquire, for a relatively small sum in the hundreds of millions of dollars. As I’ve said before, there’s a strong logic to this acquisition despite the history with Motorola. The biggest change since that earlier acquisition is that Google is now far more clearly serious about hardware, with a consolidated division about to announce a second generation of major products at an October 4th launch event. In addition, acquiring a very focused slice of HTC would be a very different proposition from buying what was at the time a much larger and more diverse Motorola business, which was subsequently run largely at arm’s length inside Google. I would expect Google to bring the HTC assets deeply into its own hardware division and to use the new capabilities to drive much more optimized and integrated hardware design relative to the ODM approach used for Pixel hardware, which likely relied heavily on existing designs and platforms from HTC.
All of this is, of course, further validation along with Microsoft’s Surface push of the approach Apple has long taken to tightly integrating hardware and software. It’s increasingly clear that the best results in hardware are achieved by those who can combine hardware and software in such a way, preferably with tight control of the whole process, and Google would get a lot closer to that goal through this acquisition. The big question still remains what happens to whatever’s left of HTC, which presumably will abandon making smartphones and focus on its Vive VR efforts, something that’s going to be a tough proposition in an increasingly competitive market. I’m still surprised that Google isn’t taking over the whole thing, because it could clearly benefit from the Vive assets as it seeks to deepen its own Daydream VR capabilities.
via Bloomberg
Details on Google’s Home Mini, Pixel 2 XL, and Pixelbook Leak Ahead of Event (Sep 19, 2017)
Droid Life appears to have obtained images and pricing for three of the hardware products Google is expected to unveil at its October 4th hardware event. It has four separate posts on the Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL, a Chromebook called the Pixelbook, and the Google Home Mini, which is exactly what it sounds like. The Pixel 2 models seem to lean heavily on the design of the first versions from a hardware design perspective, with some minor changes and some new color options, with the smaller one being made again by HTC and the larger one by LG, as reported earlier. It looks like Google will embrace this year’s super premium pricing for larger flagships, too, with an $849 starting price on the XL, although it’ll offer monthly financing (whether directly or through a partner is not clear) as well. The Pixelbook is the predicted successor to the original Pixel, a high-end Chromebook, though this time with a screen that folds over the keyboard to become a clunky tablet, and an optional pen, while it retains the premium pricing. So that’s more or less in the Surface ballpark and a more expensive and laptop-like alternative to Apple’s iPad Pro line. Lastly, the Google Home Mini is exactly what you’d expect, borrowing from the Google Home’s slightly softer design relative to Amazon’s fairly industrial looking speakers in a smaller and cheaper form factor.
We’ll have to wait for the event itself to see all the software and feature details – these leaks are pretty much exclusively about external features and pricing – but I half wonder whether Google has allowed some of these details to leak out ahead of Friday’s iPhone 8 launch to give at least some potential buyers pause before jumping into a new iPhone. Given the breadth of the leaks, though, I suspect it’s more likely a rogue employee looking for some attention and/or notoriety. As with the iPhone leaks, I think this kind of thing benefits all of us very little while trampling on the hard work of many who’ve been prepping these devices for launch.
via Droid Life: Pixel 2 XL, Pixel 2, Pixelbook, Google Home Mini
Google Officially Launches Tez Mobile Payments App in India (Sep 18, 2017)
I debated whether to make this its own item today given that I covered the leak of most of the details last week, but I feel like it’s worth it to cover a couple of details that I didn’t cover the first time around, when I largely focused on the broader issue of localization in markets like India. One of the most important aspects is integration with UPI, which is the Indian government’s mobile payments technology and is unique to the country. Almost any mobile payments service in India that didn’t feature integration with it would likely be dead in the water, while UPI itself has significantly boosted interest and uptake around mobile wallets in the country (and banking in general). Secondly, Google is using Tez to test some new ideas around payments including one based on sound called Audio QR, which borrows a little from the QR-based payments that are common in China but requires less specialized software and hardware. I wouldn’t be surprised if that technology in particular made its way into Google’s existing mature-market payment services too eventually.
via TechCrunch
Google Reportedly Offers to Auction Shopping Slots to Competitors to Placate EU (Sep 18, 2017)
A few weeks back, when Google filed its proposed response to the European Commission’s investigation into its Shopping feature, I suggested that there were only a few ways in which it might comply with the Commission’s requirements: “kill its Shopping product entirely in the EU; relegate it to either the organic or paid slots on a page rather than giving it the current prominent placement it enjoys; or create a broader “comparison shopping” section above the regular search results featuring both its own and competing services.” In the end, it sounds like what Google has proposed is a combination of those things – allowing other comparison shopping sites to bid to appear in the Shopping section where its own results currently appear exclusively, while placing an artificial cap on its own maximum bids to avoid dominating the results after the change.
The latter highlights the unlikelihood that the solution will be palatable to Google’s competitors or the EU – either it forces itself to sit out entirely from the bidding process, or it will regularly beat out competitors. Google knows better than anyone else what placement in that slot is currently worth, because it’s the only company that’s ever occupied it, and it therefore enjoys an unfair advantage. It could therefore set arbitrary caps in line with what it thinks those slots are worth, allowing competing companies to take the slots it doesn’t want to and reserving the best for itself. Either this has to be an open marketplace, in which case Google’s massive scale will likely allow it to beat out competitors for every slot it actually wants (as the WSJ points out it already does in many cases), or Google has to be excluded. This is where I go back to the solutions I proposed – either open up the Shopping slot in a similar fashion to Microsoft’s Windows browser choice options, or do away with the feature entirely. This proposed solution seems unlikely to pass muster with the EC.
via WSJ
Google Launches Google Earth VR with Street View Imagery From 85 Countries (Sep 15, 2017)
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Google, Like Apple, to Disable Autoplay Videos in its Browser (Sep 15, 2017)
Google has announced that its Chrome browser will begin either silencing or blocking autoplay videos with the version it currently expects to release in January 2018, echoing Apple’s decision to disable autoplay videos in the latest version of its Safari browser (which also limits retargeting using third party cookies, as I wrote yesterday). That so many websites still run autoplay videos – especially with sound – is egregious, so it’s great to see both of these major browser makers take steps to limit the impact. Both browsers will offer some fairly granular controls on both a general and site by site basis for disabling or silencing autoplay videos. As far as I can tell, Microsoft’s Edge browser doesn’t yet support blocking autoplay in general, while Firefox allows blocking but only through a fairly fiddly process of editing its config file.
via Google