Searching
for Google’s future (Part 2)
Nudge, nudge
Android is a classic
Google play: if the world isn’t moving quickly enough in Google’s direction,
Google will give the world a nudge. The Chrome web browser came from a similar
perspective: Google felt that browser manufacturers could do a better job of
supporting web applications and HTML5, so it built a browser to spur them into
action. Chrome OS is designed to encourage adoption of cloud computing, where
Google is a significant player, and the new Google Wallet, which uses near field
communication (NFC) technoIogy to deliver wireless mobile payments in the US,
is an attempt by Google to kick-start a market from which it hopes to make a
lot of money.
From left: Larry Page, Eric Schmidt, and Sergey Brin
As Google’s executive
chairman Eric Schmidt told delegates at this year’s Mobile World Congress,
payments could be an enormous opportunity for the firm. “I’m walking down the
street and I need pants. My phone has an NFC chip. It knows where I am. It
tells me about two stores, one to the left with a 20 per cent discount and one
to the right with a 30 per cent discount. It’s programmed to know that I’m a cheapskate,
so it points me to the right and the store knows what pants [trousers] I want.
You don’t think this is going to work? Trust me, this is consumerism.” It’s
also something that ties in nicely with another Google product, Google Offers,
which is being beefed up with the acquisition of Groupon-style special offers
websites. At the time of writing, Google had just acquired the German deals
site Daily Deal.
Google isn’t the only firm
interested in smartphone-assisted shopping. As Windsor Holden recalls, “this is
pretty much the line that Paul Jacobs was spinning at the recent Qualcomm EMEA
event. The phrase he used was the handset as a ‘digital sixth sense’ - that the
handset will essentially be facilitating the flow of contextualised, localised
information.”
Could this really work?
“Considering Google’s presence across the value chain, it is — in theory at
least — a credible scenario, Holden says. “In terms of actually effecting that
scenario, the primary harriers are (a) ensuring that the various retailers are
on hoard and therefore ready to ping trouser-related information, and (b)
overcoming any residual customer concerns about intrusion and payment.”
Playing a long game
Rather than insist everyone
uses its own Google Checkout payment processing service, Google is happy to
team up with existing payment systems. So while it doesn’t get a percentage of
every transaction, it gets something that may be even more valuable: data.
With Google Wallet, Google
gets to know not just what you’re interested in, hut what you actually spend money
on. While Google Wallet doesn’t get your actual transaction details, it still
knows where you were and how much you spent. By combining that data with deals,
social networking, geolocation, Nectar-style loyalty programmes and specialised
services like the Zagat restaurant guides, which Google acquired in September,
Google has a very powerful platform for location -based, personalised
advertising.
The Google+ plus-one icon
already appears on display adverts so you can share them with the people in
your Google+ circles, and the same feature is coming to AdSense for mobile
devices too. But Google+ is about more than just letting your contacts know you
like the odd banner ad. It’s also about social TV, which many pundits predict
could he the next big thing in streaming media, and, inevitably, it’s about
advertising. If you’ve ever joined in live twitter conversations during
football matches, Question Time or Britain’s Got Talent, you’ll know how much
fun simultaneous viewing and posting with your friends can be. With Google+
Hangouts, Google is hoping to deliver something even better.
Hangouts are one of the
core Google+ features, delivering group video chat both on desktop PCs and on
Android devices. The new Hangouts API, which was added in September, makes it
possible for developers to create social TV applications that pith and share
content from sites like YouTube and Vimeo with groups of people. If you pause
the video, it pauses for everyone; if you rewind it or skip to a different
clip, then everyone else’s video rewinds or moves to the next clip. If Hangouts
prove popular, it will mean yet more data for Google to crunch and even more
opportunities to deliver targeted advertising.
Mobile money
As Eric Schmidt wrote in
the Harvard Business Review earlier this year, Google’s strategy is uall about
mobile”. In 2009, half a billion people used mobile devices to access the
internet; within five years, that figure is expected to double as the
smartphone overtakes the PC as the primary device people use to get online.
That opens up enormous
opportunities for Google. As Eric Schmidt explains, the smartphone makes it
possible to deliver personalised information about where you are, what you
could do there right now, and so forth - and to deliver such a service at
scale.” To make that happen, Schmidt says, Google needs to do “some serious
spadework on three fronts”. Those are improving the mobile networks we use to
connect to the internet, with 8-10mb connections being the norm, developing
mobile money, which we’re already seeing in the form of Google Wallet, and
getting smartphones into the developing world.
“We envision literally a
billion people getting inexpensive, browser-based touchscreen phones over the
next few years,” Schmidt says. “Can you imagine how this will change their
awareness of local and global information and their notion of education?” Can
you imagine how many ads Google will show them?
