Google CEO explains 'Area 120' division where employees build their own startups
JILLIAN D'ONFRO0MAY
Google has created an in-house startup incubator called Area 120 to formalize its approach to letting employees tackle new ideas.
"We've always had a strong interest from within Google for people to go work on new things and have developed many of our products internally that way," CEO Sundar Pichai told Forbes' Miguel Helft. "At our scale, we want to make sure that there is a thoughtful way by which you give an avenue for those projects to be ambitious."
Pichai confirmed that the incubator, which was first reported by The Information last month, is a play on its famous 20% time, which gave employees freedom to work on things outside of their regular work that they were passionate about.
Teams within Google can submit a business plan to the incubator, run by executives Don Harrison and Bradley Horowitz, and if they're selectedPichai said they'll be able to stay in the program even as long as six months.Here's a description of the original 20% time that founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin included in their 2004 IPO letter:
"We encourage our employees, in addition to their regular projects, to spend 20% of their time working on what they think will most benefit Google," they wrote. "This empowers them to be more creative and innovative.Many of our significant advances have happened in this manner."
Why Google's smart assistant doesn't have a name like Siri, Alexa, or Cortana
JILLIAN D'ONFRO0MAY
A protester wearing a Guy Fawkes mask, symbolic of the hacktivist group Anonymous, takes part in a protest in central Brussels.When Google unveiled its new smart assistant earlier this week, it revealed the most basic name possible: Assistant.
Unlike Apple's Siri, Microsoft's Cortana, or Amazon's Alexa, "Assistant" isn't catchy. It has no identity.
You don't even really call it that - to summon it from Google's new smart speaker, you'd address it with a simple "Hey, Google" or the same "OK, Google" that you'd use to activate its voice search and predictive service, Google Now.
But Assistant's lack of personality was quite intentional, according to Jonathan Jarvis, a former creative director on Google's Labs team. While at the company, he led a team doing concept, strategy, and design on products like the Search app and even Alphabet's logo rebrand.
Jarvis worked on Assistant only up until February, so he wasn't there for the final decision to use "Assistant" as the platform's name. But he says that Google had spent a long time talking about whether or not it should personify its digital assistant.
Human Ventures
Jonathan Jarvis.
"We always wanted to make it feel like you were the agent, and it was more like a superpower that you had and a tool that you used," he tells Business Insider. "If you create this personified assistant, that feels like a different relationship."
For that reason, Assistant likely won't be telling you jokes or serving up sassy responses, either.
We also heard while at I/O that Google didn't want to give its assistant a gender or make it seem too American.
While the team didn't want to give it a personality, they had to call it something, or else it would be hard to distinguish it from regular Google, even though that's essentially what it is - all of Google's services mashed together with extra machine learning and artificial intelligence.
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Jarvis left Google earlier this year to join the startup studio Human Ventures, where he's working on a stealth new company that he plans to launch in the fall. He says that he's known for a while that he wanted to start his own company, but that the community and team-building offered by Human helped convince him to finally make the leap.
For the first time, Google beat Apple in PC sales - and that's really bad news for Microsoft
MATT WEINBERGERMAY 20, 2016, 04.53 AM
Google CEO Sundar Pichai
Today, two very important things happened for the future of the PC as we know it.
First: For the first time ever, low-cost Google Chromebook laptops outsold Apple's Macs during the most recent quarter, analyst firm IDC tells The Verge.
Manufacturers including Dell, Lenovo, and HP sold over 2 million Google-powered Chromebooks combined, versus around 1.76 million Macs, IDC estimates.
Second: those same Google Chromebooks are getting full access to Android's Google Play store, opening the door for those laptops to run a significant portion of the 1.5 million Android apps out in the wild.
For Apple, it's not necessarily great news, but it's not the end of the world, either. Quarter after quarter, Macs have shown sales growth,bucking the overall shrinkage of the PC industry. And Apple has always been a company that's content to completely and profitably own a small piece of a much larger pie.
But for Microsoft, it means that the pressure is on - Google's slow-but-steady attack is bearing some real results, and it's not great news for Windows 10.
Why people like Chrome
The key concept of the Chromebook is simplicity and portability. These devices run Google's mega-lightweight Chrome OS, which is little more than a web browser. That works fine, given that the vast majority of stuff that most people do on computers is based around the browser, anyhow.
That limitation becomes a strength, too: Because so little data is stored locally, it means that nothing is lost if you break or lose a Chromebook. It's all in the cloud, no matter what. And because the technical requirements for running a browser are so low, you still get reasonable performance, even from a sub-$200 laptop.
The Asus Chromebook C201 is a sub-$200 laptop that runs Google's Chrome OS.
That combination of low cost and resiliency is an offer that lots of schools, especially, can't refuse. Chromebooks continue to see their strongest growth in the educational space.
Add Android apps to that mix, and it gets even better. Android is the most popular operating system in the world. Any software today is likely going to be available on Android, the web, or both. It means that for Chromebooks, and indeed any Chrome OS device, there's basically nothing you won't be able to do.
Google is basically taking its wildly successful smartphone operating system and smashing it together with Chrome OS to make it a more useful desktop operating system.
Microsoft is taking the opposite tack with Windows.
Where Windows 10 is going
With its Universal Windows Platform iniative, Microsoft is trying to convince developers - mainly the new breed of smartphone app developers - to bring their services to Windows 10 and its Windows Store.
It's basically trying to take its existing lead in desktop operating systems, and extend it down to the things people usually do on their phones nowadays.
They've had some success at attracting big names like Uber, Facebook, and Hulu, but Windows 10 just doesn't have the same thriving ecosystem of, say, Google's Android. Thanks to Microsoft's lack of presence in the smartphone world, many developers would rather focus their efforts on iOS and Android.
Matt Weinberger/Business Insider
A slide from Microsoft's GDC 2016 talk.
For now, that's fine. Windows 10 still runs all of the old-school Windows software that consumers and business are used to, and you can still use your web apps. Increasingly, though, the next generation of great stuff is being written for the smartphone, or for the web, because that's where the customers are.
It's a future that Chromebooks will be uniquely well-positioned to take advantage of, with that all-important community of Android app developers, plus the mega-popular Chrome web browser.
And while Google doesn't make its own Chromebook laptops, with the exception of the super-high-end Chromebook Pixel line, the Chromebooks represent significant new territory for Google's Android business and overall reach.
Windows still has a clear lead now, but the PC market is shrinking, with little chance of a turnaround. If Chromebooks are growing amid those conditions, it's just another challenge for Microsoft to overcome.
Google is turning a harsh truth about Android into a strength
MATT WEINBERGER0MAY 20, 2016, 02.27 AM
Google cloud boss Diane Greene
It's a cold, hard fact: Apple iPhone owners spend a lot more money on apps than people with phones running Google Android.
The net result is that it's increasingly uncommon to find a developer who only works with Android.
The massive reach of Google's Android operating system is good, but it's almost always better to hedge your bets with a web browser or iPhone app, as well, if you actually want to make money.
That's why a cheer went up from the crowd at this week's Google I/O conference when the search giant announced a huge upgrade to its Firebase product - a popular free service, now with 450,000 users, that provides the crucial behind-the-scenes plumbing for iPhone, Android, and web apps.
That update brings lots of new features, many of which will make life easier (and more profitable) for developers. That includes a new Firebase Analytics product, the evolution of the popular Google Analytics, and a bunch more features that bring Firebase into parity with its soon-discontinued competitor Facebook Parse.
It's a smart move that turns a weakness - the difficulty making money from Android apps - into a potential strength for Google and its increasingly important cloud computing business.
Unification
"This has been a massive effort across the company to unify our efforts for app developers," Google analytics head Russ Ketchum tells Business Insider. "The result is that Firebase is now these full suite of integrated products designed to help developers build their apps, grow their user base, and earn more money."
Here's Google's video showing the new Firebase in action:
The Firebase sales pitch is simple: Developers may have a lot of skill at building slick, sweet, interactive apps for the smartphone and the web. But those skills don't necessarily translate into maintaining the server infrastructure that an app needs on the backend for stuff like storing user data or sending push notifications.
Facebook's popular Parse service used to do much of that, before the social network announced that they were shutting it down in 2017. With these upgrades, Firebase now does everything that Parse used to, plus its original killer feature of super-speedy database synchronization across devices.
"This has been a massive effort across the company to unify our efforts for app developers," Google analytics head Russ Ketchum tells Business Insider. "The result is that Firebase is now these full suite of integrated products designed to help developers build their apps, grow their user base, and earn more money."
Here's Google's video showing the new Firebase in action:
The Firebase sales pitch is simple: Developers may have a lot of skill at building slick, sweet, interactive apps for the smartphone and the web. But those skills don't necessarily translate into maintaining the server infrastructure that an app needs on the backend for stuff like storing user data or sending push notifications.
Facebook's popular Parse service used to do much of that, before the social network announced that they were shutting it down in 2017. With these upgrades, Firebase now does everything that Parse used to, plus its original killer feature of super-speedy database synchronization across devices.
Real genius
The real genius, though, is that Firebase can act as kind of a gateway to the Google Cloud Platform, where customers can rent supercomputing power and services from the search giant just by punching in a credit card.
After all, Firebase is simple and powerful, but it won't be enough for every app. At a certain point, some customers are going to need some extra juice and flexibility. When that threshold is passed, it's designed to be easy to go from Firebase to the more robust, but more technically-demanding, Google Cloud Platform.
Google
The official chart of Google Firebase features.
Maybe not every Firebase customer will upgrade to Google Cloud Platform. But to go back to Android apps, the situation is kind of like Clash of Clans on Android: Not every player needs to spend money to make it a smash hit; only a relatively few spending a lot of money make the whole enterprise worthwhile.
And so, it gives Google a path to cloud revenue growth, whether developers are writing their apps for Android, iOS, or just the web browser. No matter where they are, or whether or not they're making money from the Android app store, Google will help developers now, in the hopes that they pay up later.
Google has a new plan to cripple the iPhone app store model and rule the mobile world
JULIE BORT0MAY 20, 2016, 12.36 AM
Apple CEO Tim Cook
At Google's annual developer's conference on Wednesday the company previewed a lot of new tech.
One thing it showed off was something called Android Instant Apps.
It's basically Google's way of taking on Apple iOS and "upending the app store model that's been so profitable to Apple," a developer who has been talking to Google officials at the I/O conference tells Business Insider.
The ultimate end game is to kill the traditional app store model altogether.
"They are trying to replace it and go back to the web model where they've had so much success. Google wants to break the notion of the App Store," this person told us.
The real genius, though, is that Firebase can act as kind of a gateway to the Google Cloud Platform, where customers can rent supercomputing power and services from the search giant just by punching in a credit card.
After all, Firebase is simple and powerful, but it won't be enough for every app. At a certain point, some customers are going to need some extra juice and flexibility. When that threshold is passed, it's designed to be easy to go from Firebase to the more robust, but more technically-demanding, Google Cloud Platform.
Google
The official chart of Google Firebase features.
Maybe not every Firebase customer will upgrade to Google Cloud Platform. But to go back to Android apps, the situation is kind of like Clash of Clans on Android: Not every player needs to spend money to make it a smash hit; only a relatively few spending a lot of money make the whole enterprise worthwhile.
And so, it gives Google a path to cloud revenue growth, whether developers are writing their apps for Android, iOS, or just the web browser. No matter where they are, or whether or not they're making money from the Android app store, Google will help developers now, in the hopes that they pay up later.
Google has a new plan to cripple the iPhone app store model and rule the mobile world
JULIE BORT0MAY 20, 2016, 12.36 AM
Apple CEO Tim Cook
At Google's annual developer's conference on Wednesday the company previewed a lot of new tech.
One thing it showed off was something called Android Instant Apps.
It's basically Google's way of taking on Apple iOS and "upending the app store model that's been so profitable to Apple," a developer who has been talking to Google officials at the I/O conference tells Business Insider.
The ultimate end game is to kill the traditional app store model altogether.
"They are trying to replace it and go back to the web model where they've had so much success. Google wants to break the notion of the App Store," this person told us.
Today's mobile is not Google's world
Android Instant gives Android users the ability to access an Android app (or even just part of it) even though they do not have the actual app installed on their phone.
Android Instant
For instance, a friend texts you a link to a recipe video but you don't have the video app installed. Click on the link and the app will run the video anyway, no install required.
As Google explains in its video about Android Instant, this makes mobile apps work like the web. On the internet today, if you click on a link, you are taken to a web page. You are not asked to install an app. You are not taken to the home page, but to the actual thing you want to see.
Thanks to Apple's App store model, mobile apps don't work that way. Apple makes money by selling apps. So the mobile world has evolved to encourage you to download an app. Consequently, developers with ad-supported apps focus on downloads, monthly active users, daily active users and so on.
This is not Google's world. Google rose to dominance on the web by studying what people are doing, so that advertisers could target potential customers. Consequently, Google still makes more money from web search ads than from mobile services.
Android Instant gives Android users the ability to access an Android app (or even just part of it) even though they do not have the actual app installed on their phone.
Android Instant
For instance, a friend texts you a link to a recipe video but you don't have the video app installed. Click on the link and the app will run the video anyway, no install required.
As Google explains in its video about Android Instant, this makes mobile apps work like the web. On the internet today, if you click on a link, you are taken to a web page. You are not asked to install an app. You are not taken to the home page, but to the actual thing you want to see.
Thanks to Apple's App store model, mobile apps don't work that way. Apple makes money by selling apps. So the mobile world has evolved to encourage you to download an app. Consequently, developers with ad-supported apps focus on downloads, monthly active users, daily active users and so on.
This is not Google's world. Google rose to dominance on the web by studying what people are doing, so that advertisers could target potential customers. Consequently, Google still makes more money from web search ads than from mobile services.
And this is a problem since the world is shifting to mobile
A mobile technology called deep linking is supposed to provide this same kind linking function. Troubled startup Quixey offers deep linking tech, as does DeepLink and URX (bought by Pinterest).
YouTube
Google CEO Sundar Pichai
Google has deep linking tech in Android, too, called App Link. And Android Instant takes all of that the step further, by eliminating the problem of making someone install the app.
Google has basically required developers to use App Link.
Google changed its search algorithms so that apps that use App Link scored higher in search. Apps that didn't, were not ranked as high and weren't as likely to be featured in the app store, the developer tells us.
On top of that, the developers website search ranking might also be impacted, as apps (both iOS and Android) that use deep linking to link to websites score higher in Google's search algorithm too, Google has said.
In other words: use the tech in your app or your app, and your website, will be harder to find via Google.
The developer we talked to believes Google will use the same incentive for Android Instant.
A mobile technology called deep linking is supposed to provide this same kind linking function. Troubled startup Quixey offers deep linking tech, as does DeepLink and URX (bought by Pinterest).
YouTube
Google CEO Sundar Pichai
Google has deep linking tech in Android, too, called App Link. And Android Instant takes all of that the step further, by eliminating the problem of making someone install the app.
Google has basically required developers to use App Link.
Google changed its search algorithms so that apps that use App Link scored higher in search. Apps that didn't, were not ranked as high and weren't as likely to be featured in the app store, the developer tells us.
On top of that, the developers website search ranking might also be impacted, as apps (both iOS and Android) that use deep linking to link to websites score higher in Google's search algorithm too, Google has said.
In other words: use the tech in your app or your app, and your website, will be harder to find via Google.
The developer we talked to believes Google will use the same incentive for Android Instant.
Developers like it
But developers won't need a lot of encouragement. Many developers love the idea of Android Instant. Those who make apps for developing worlds for low-end phones with less memory, really love it.
Others hope it's going to make their apps easier to find the old search-the-App-Store method, this developer says.
Ultimately, Google hopes that instant apps become so popular on Android, that iOS users demand the same from Apple, thus ending the App Store model for good.
Google could not immediately be reached for comment.
Google is finally smashing Android and Chrome together and it's awesome
JILLIAN D'ONFRO0MAY 19, 2016, 11.53 PM
Google just took a big step to unite its two operating systems, Chrome and Android, and it's great news for users.
The company is bringing its mobile OS Android app store, Play, to Chrome OS, the software that runs on its Chromebook laptops, it announced at its IO developers' conference on Thursday.
That means that Chromebooks will soon be able to run all 1.5 million Android apps.
The functionality will launch with three new Chromebooks this summer, with additional devices getting the functionality in the fall.
This move brings a lot more functionality to Chromebooks. Users who crave a more seamless experience across their laptop and Android smartphone will now have it. It's also a long time coming: Google promised that Android apps would be coming to Chromebooks way back in 2014.
"You can write your term paper and get your Snapchats all on the same device without ever having to take your phone out of your pocket," a Chrome product manager said on stage.
Jillian D'Onfro
It's also potentially good news for app developers who will be able to reach more users. It won't be without some effort though: most smartphone apps will look pretty lousy on the big screen of a Chromebook device, so developers will have to make some tweaks to their design.
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If you find this post interesting, do share it on Facebook & Google plus.
But developers won't need a lot of encouragement. Many developers love the idea of Android Instant. Those who make apps for developing worlds for low-end phones with less memory, really love it.
Others hope it's going to make their apps easier to find the old search-the-App-Store method, this developer says.
Ultimately, Google hopes that instant apps become so popular on Android, that iOS users demand the same from Apple, thus ending the App Store model for good.
Google could not immediately be reached for comment.
Google is finally smashing Android and Chrome together and it's awesome
JILLIAN D'ONFRO0MAY 19, 2016, 11.53 PM
Google just took a big step to unite its two operating systems, Chrome and Android, and it's great news for users.
The company is bringing its mobile OS Android app store, Play, to Chrome OS, the software that runs on its Chromebook laptops, it announced at its IO developers' conference on Thursday.
That means that Chromebooks will soon be able to run all 1.5 million Android apps.
The functionality will launch with three new Chromebooks this summer, with additional devices getting the functionality in the fall.
This move brings a lot more functionality to Chromebooks. Users who crave a more seamless experience across their laptop and Android smartphone will now have it. It's also a long time coming: Google promised that Android apps would be coming to Chromebooks way back in 2014.
"You can write your term paper and get your Snapchats all on the same device without ever having to take your phone out of your pocket," a Chrome product manager said on stage.
Jillian D'Onfro
It's also potentially good news for app developers who will be able to reach more users. It won't be without some effort though: most smartphone apps will look pretty lousy on the big screen of a Chromebook device, so developers will have to make some tweaks to their design.
- digg
If you find this post interesting, do share it on Facebook & Google plus.
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