At one level this [...]]]> The world is a-buzz this morning with discussion of Google’s new product “Search, plus Your World” which integrates personal content from Google+, Picasa and other places in with search results from the open web from Google’s main search service (only available on Google.com so far, official press release here).

At one level this is already pretty cool – e.g. a search on my name throws up photos I’ve taken on my phone recently (e.g. this picture of Stanley with his newly built Christmas lego that I took on Saturday), and more usefully the intent is that content my friends have shared will also turn up – e.g. restaurant reviews. Note that my personal content will only be visible to me – i.e. nobody else will get the picture of Stanley in their search results (unless I shared it with them).

However, the content being surfaced is all Google related. I took this photo of Stanley with my Android phone and I think I uploaded it to Picasa. If I’d taken it on an iPhone and uploaded it to Facebook it wouldn’t show up. Ergo Google is using its power in search to promote its own services in areas where it is less strong – like social networking.

Unsurprisingly a lot of the comment about Search, plus Your World has been negative, and rightly so. MG Siegler thinks they are inviting an anti-trust inquiry, and Twitter General Counsel Alex Macgillivray responded by calling yesterday a “bad day for the internet” – more details of the negative response here.

Google has responded by saying that they are open to striking deals so they can feature content from Twitter, Facebook, and elsewhere, but that rings a little hollow to me. I’m reminded of Microsoft’s denials of circa ten years ago that bundling Media Player and Internet Explorer with Windows was anti-competitive.

However, it is not so much the rights and wrongs of this that interests me as the likely outcomes and impact on the startup ecosystem. Microsoft won the media player battle but is losing/has lost the more important browser battle, but both battles got mired in the courts and dragged on for years. Innovation became more difficult and with it life at startups suffered a little.

I suspect we will see something similar unfold here. Google’s search results will become more clogged up with their own properties making it harder for new services to get customers via organic search. Unless, of course, they cut a deal with Google…. That will be bad news for startups.

Moving to the bigger picture, this is another small piece of evidence that we are moving away from the first phase of the web which was characterised by free and open access, and the hope of an enduring new order, toward a mature phase where the web is controlled by a small number of companies and regulation becomes increasingly important. (On Monday I blogged about the potential for similar developments in mobile.)

The history is one of promises unfulfilled.  Khosla quotes Google research chief Peter Norvig to sum it up:

[Khosla] [...]]]> Legendary VC Vinod Khosla has a guest post about the ‘Surprising Path of Artficial Intelligence’ up on Techcrunch today.  It is a reminder of both the chequered history of computer smarts and the unrealised potential.

The history is one of promises unfulfilled.  Khosla quotes Google research chief Peter Norvig to sum it up:

[Khosla] I read the following in a NY Post article last year by Google’s research chief Peter Norvig:

[Norvig] Forty years ago this December, President Nixon declared a war on cancer, pledging a “total national commitment” to conquering the disease. Fifty years ago this spring, President Kennedy declared a space race, promising to land a man safely on the moon before the end of the decade. And 54 years ago, Artificial Intelligence pioneer Herbert Simon declared “there are now in the world machines that think” and predicted that a computer would be world chess champion within 10 years.

[Khosla] Though we made it to the moon the efforts in cancer and artificial intelligence have failed in their larger ambitions but have made progress. In cancer:

[Norvig] Those hoping for a single “cure” were disappointed because cancer turned out to be not a single problem but a complex arrangement of inter-related problems on which we continue to make incremental progress.

Artificial intelligence turned out to be more like cancer research than a moon shot. We don’t have HAL 9000, C-3PO, Commander Data, or the other androids imagined in the movies, but A.I. technology touches our lives many times every day…

Those every day touch points are everywhere and most of them go by un-noticed – artificial intelligence (AI) systems are built into photocopiers, building control systems, word processor software, computer games, cars, and mobile phones (I could go on).  On top of that there are the headline grabbing high profile AI success stories, including an IBM computer (Deep Blue) beating the world chess champion for the first time (1997), another IBM computer (Watson) beating human contestants to win the quiz show Jeopardy (2011), and Google’s self driving cars.

The interesting question (of course) is ‘where does it go next?’

The underlying driver here is improvement in computing power – particularly data processing and storage. Artificial intelligence systems work by looking for patterns in huge datasets and it is only now that is becoming cost effective. Apple’s Siri was the first attempt at a mass market wide ranging AI, and that became possible only in the iPhone4S. As the cost of processing and memory continue to fall systems like Siri (in the broadest terms) will start to become so useful that we get dependant upon them. Probably utterly dependant. If that seems incomprehensible now think about how reliant you are on your smartphone and whether that would have seemed likely ten years ago.

As a reminder of how fast computers are evolving consider the recent assessment by Forrester that in 1993 the iPad 2 would have ranked among the top 30 computers in the world. Imagine what you will hold in your hand in five years time.

Remember also Ray Kurzweil’s prediction that by 2029 we will be manufacturing computers that are comprehensively as intelligent as humans.

Khosla highlights healthcare and education as two areas where we will feel the benefits of AI. I can see his thinking there, and I look forward to his posts on those topics, but I suspect that in ten years time artificial intelligence will be as ubiquitous as electricity is today. To finish with a small example, learning is a key part of AI and systems that don’t personalise by learning will increasingly lose out to those that do. I can see that being true for both consumer and enterprise.

It is easy today to think of Google as slightly old hat.  The startup that [...]]]> I was going to write about how I’m getting on with the new Google Samsung Galaxy Nexus phone today, but I was so gob smacked when I saw this table on AllThingsD that I had to re-blog it.

It is easy today to think of Google as slightly old hat.  The startup that everyone used to love turned monopolist that is now struggling to innovate and getting outdone by Facebook.  Whilst there is some truth in that characterisation these market share stats are a stark reminder that Google dwarfs its competitors.  In market share terms it is an order of magnitude bigger than all of its competitors bar Yahoo.

Size matters and the worlds biggest online advertising company is not just the biggest, it is continuing to grow share faster than anyone else, at least in terms of market share gross percentage points.

Beyond the growth of Facebook, which probably isn’t a surprise to anyone with a computer, the other thing that leaps out from this chart is the speed with which AOL and Yahoo are declining.  Ten years ago they were the Google’s of their day, and look at them now.

I would hazard a guess that ten years from now two or three of these players will no longer be in the top five, but given the size of the market today and the scale of market share difference it is hard to see Facebook or anyone else managing to knock Google off the top spot.

Matias is [...]]]> Matias Duarte of Google wrote a long post yesterday about the new Roboto typeface they are using in Ice Cream Sandwich (aka Android 4.0).  It is interesting more for what it says about how Google is trying to portray itself as for the details of how they went about making Roboto. 

Matias is at pains to show how much effort they have put into delighting the consumer, e.g.:

Emotionally we wanted Ice Cream Sandwich to enchant you, to be attractive and eye-catching. Our new typeface had to be modern, crisp, and structured to match our new emphasis on open layouts and rigid grid alignments, but also friendly and approachable to make Android appealing, and a little bit more human.

And to show their obsession with detail:

One of the potential drawbacks of a grotesk font is that the structured evenness of the type can make it more difficult to read. We started by softening up the lower case letters, and then experimented with opening up some of the glyphs to get a more diverse rhythm. We found that by adding a little more diversity to the lower case the font become more readable. In particular, we opened up the ‘e’ and ‘g’ while keeping the ‘a’, ‘c’ and ‘s’ characters closed. The rhythm starts to compare more to book types and makes for really nice reading over longer spans of text.

Up to this point Apple has had the reputation for building beautiful products whilst Google has been seen as more utilitarian and efficient – brilliant maybe, but not exciting.

Clearly they are trying to change that perception – both by creating beautiful products and by talking about how they go about it.  Just like Apple.

This is, I think, just one example of the way in which three of the leading tech companies of our time Apple, Google, and Amazon are becoming more and more like each other.  Put differently – their strategies are increasingly to compete on all fronts.  Google and Amazon have become hardware companies, Apple is focusing more on cloud services, all three are beefing up their content businesses, and hot off the press today, Amazon has bought a speech recognition company.

The [...]]]> Despite recent commentary to the contrary it seems very clear to me that both Google+ and Facebook are making great progress.  (For negative commentary see Google+ … ‘Worse than a ghost town’ on MediaShift and At last, we’re logging back on to the real world from our old friends at the Daily Mail.)

The case for Facebook is made crystal clear by the chart below.  Even in their most mature market, the US, they are still showing great growth as measured by market share of time spent online.  Note this is a different (and better) measure than number of subscribers or active users as it also takes time on site into account.  In countries like the US Facebook must be pretty close to saturation in terms of user numbers, so their growth going forward will come from increasing the utility of the service to drive up frequency of logins and length of session.  Most (if not all) of the features announced at f8 last week will improve both these metrics.  Personally, I’m using Facebook much more to now that I have curated lists of people to follow, and I’m checking the top right hand box in my profile to see what people are listening to on Spotify so often that I’m thinking about turning it off

Google+ is earlier in it’s evolution, and the jury is still out on the long term viability of the service, but I bet they are pleased with the progress so far.  Growth has been staggering in the last couple of weeks, with traffic up 1,269% in the last seven days, and 50m users now on the service.  To put that in context Google+ has been live for 88 days, whilst it took Facebook and Twitter over three years to reach that milestone.  Moreover, Google will increasingly use Google+ profiles in its search engine results page, encouraging people to populate their profiles and post their content to Google+.  I updated my Google+ profile this morning after discovering it is the fourth result if you search on ‘brisbourne’, and I’m still thinking about whether I should syndicate my blog there.

For me though Facebook is still far the better service, both for reading and publishing content.

Big picture, it is great that these two companies are fighting each other on the basis of innovation, but the way these juggernauts use their existing reach to drive new features means that new startups need to find ways to partner with them and live within their ecosystems.  All out competition to Facebook and Google from socially oriented startups is getting harder and harder.  The speed with which Google got to 50m users and the fact they got there via home page promotion is evidence of this point in spades.