Is Google Really, Really Killing the Ad Industry?
June 16, 2021
I read “Google Is Also Killing Ad Industry like Apple.” There’s a caveat after this somewhat bold headline:
[Google] promises to put an end to personalized ads starting with Android 12
The write states:
Close to 80% of its revenue comes from advertising. But with pressure from regulators and consumers, Google had no choice but to follow Apple’s lead to protect users’ privacy and data.
Okay, the Google is reacting to what seems like on going legal hassles. Is Google “like Apple”? Well, Apple has diversified its revenue stream. The hardware, the App Store, the subscription businesses, and the other bits and pieces of the company that turn a buck are more robust than Google’s model.
Yep, that’s 80 percent advertising, and it is smart. Well, sort of smart. Some of the ads we’ve have been monitoring on YouTube and our Google Web search results pages seem a bit off the mark for whoever Google thinks “I” am. We love seeing ads for discounted auto insurance, Grammarly to improve the entity’s writing, and blandishments to consume a vegan health drink. Not exactly a cohesive line up of messages, but Google thinks we watch yacht videos, hacker and stolen software videos, and search for weaponized drone manufacturers. Normal stuff for the smart Google system.
That’s the problem. The 80 percent is based on some pretty crazy real life, rules based, and human tuned systems and methods. By virtue of zero meaningful regulation, the Google has become the embodiment of online advertising. Banners, personalized, scammy, whatever Google is there.
What if users opt out of Google data collection?
What difference will that make? The Floc you crowd believes that privacy is Job 1 at the Google. The cheerleaders for the weird “rumble” or “bumble” bundle think that subscriptions are the way to go. Google believes that its solving death and smart auto technology will become big winners. Then there’s the licensing opportunity for DeepMind’s smart software. Those who aren’t keen on saying, “We’ve got the secret sauce for artificial general intelligence” are gone or heading out the door. The AI ethics negative Nellies are history as well.
The problem is the 80 percent thing.
The write up has an answer:
As predicted, Google gave in to pressure from regulators and its users to implement these changes. However, it will be interesting to see, how Google will sustain these changes let alone other third-party ad providers. But only the future will tell how will these changes affect independent and small business owners as Facebook fears. Google recently introduced FLOC (Federated Learning Of Cohorts) an alternative method to replace the third-party cookies on Chrome which makes it difficult for advertisers to track user’s web activities to serve targeted ads. This FLOC will enable interest-based advertising on the web without letting advertisers know your identity. Probably, Google’s alternate solution to the Android app’s future personalized ads will probably reminiscent of FLOC. Overall, this is a welcome change from Google.
Got it? But 80 percent of $196 billion is a lot of smart auto and smart software licensing deals. Therefore, Steve Ballmer’s one trick pony observation is proving to be accurate or at least more accurate than Mr. Ballmer’s basketball team’s free thrown shooting percentage.
Stephen E Arnold, June 16, 2021
Great Moments in PR: Google and France June 2021
June 14, 2021
I am not sure what percentage of Alphabet Google’s annual revenue $268 million represents. My old handheld calculator balks at lots of numbers. I am more of a 00 or 000 kind of old timer. France believes that this figure is fair and appropriate for alleged missteps by the mom and pop online ad company.
I found the article “Google to Improve Ad Practices after Being Slapped with $268 Million Fine” interesting. In fact, I circled in True Blue this passage:
Following the results of this investigation, Google has decided to reach a settlement with the French antitrust authority. As a part of this settlement, the tech giant will have to improve its ad services to offer better interoperability with other platforms, and will also pay a $268 million fine.
Yep, the do better assurance. What was the alleged saying bandied about when Messrs. Brin and Page were roller blading around the Mountain View offices? I think it was this one:
It’s easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission.
A slight edit yields:
It’s easier to pay the find than make specific commitments.
Stephen E Arnold, June 14, 2021
Western Union And Wise Boost Google Pay
June 11, 2021
Western Union and Wise are trusted money wiring services and the companies have teamed with Google Pay. Tech Moran explores the new business team up in the story, “Google Pay Partners With Western Union And Wise To Launch An International Money Transfer Service.”
Wise and Western Union are now integrated parts of Google Pay. Google Pay is only available in the US. Customers can now transfer money through the Google Pay app to Singapore and India. Using Wise’s international services, Google Pay will not be available to eighty countries and Western Union connects the app to two hundred countries by the end of 2021.
In order to send money to India or Singapore, the Google Pay app will give customers the option to send money via Western Union or Wise. Google Pay selected Singapore and India as test countries due to the amount of remittance payments sent there from the US senders.
COVID increased the amount of money sent through online payments, but demands for remittance services have decreased since 2019:
“The Covid 19 pandemic has led to an increase in online payments though generally there is a drop in overall remittances flows as the money migrants sent has declined up to 14 percent from 2019.This is occasioned by worsening economic conditions and employment levels in migrant-hosting countries as revealed by the World Bank.”
Remittance services have an advantage over online payments in that they do not require an online account to receive or send money. Are there implications for enforcement officials working in the cyber crime space? Oh, some.
Whitney Grace, June 11, 2021
What Is Cloud Computing? It May Be Timesharing REbranded
June 1, 2021
I have been around long enough to watch hot trends come and go. Then years or decades later the “old” new thing returns. “Nvidia Is Renting Out Its A.I. Superpod Platform for $90K a Month” states:
Nvidia is looking to make work and development in artificial intelligence more accessible, giving researchers an easy way to access its DGX 2 supercomputer. The company announced that it will launch a subscription service for its DGX Superpod as an affordable way to gain entry into the world of supercomputers.
Does this sound like timesharing to you? It does to me. And what about those automatic upticks in charges? It is too early to tell, but my hunch is that there will be “peak times,” data transfer thresholds, and a taxi meter method applied to some user actions. I hope I am wrong, but, hey, timesharing business models have been around since — what? — the 1950s. That is long enough for those thrilling moments after opening a timesharing invoice to become one of the benefits of this “new” but “old” approach to computing.
Will the Nvidia supercomputing deals include a white coat? One tip: If you tour the superpod data facility, take a sweater.
Stephen E Arnold, June 1, 2021
Palantir: Pay Us in Bitcoin
May 19, 2021
I spotted an interesting article called “Palantir Technologies Accepts Bitcoin Payments, Might Hold on Balance Sheet.” Bitcoin is the poster child for digital currency. In some circles, Bitcoin evokes thoughts of money laundering and cyber crime. The write up points out in response to a question about crypto currency on the balance sheet:
Palantir’s CFO, David Glazer said, ‘The short answer is yes. We’re thinking about it and we’ve even discussed it internally. If you take a look at our balance sheet there’s $2.3 billion in cash at quarter-end including $151 million in cash flow in Q1. So it’s definitely on the table from a treasury perspective as well as other investments as we look across our business and beyond. Glazer went on to note that “in terms of accepting bitcoin from our customers, we do accept it as a form of payment. We’re open for business there.”
Some of the early investors in Palantir are enthused about digital currency. Business Insider reported that:
Block.one announced on Tuesday that it would launch a crypto exchange called Bullish. It’s landed over $10 billion in backing from Peter Thiel, Mike Novogratz, Louis Bacon, and Nomura. Novogratz said that Bullish’s scale and Block.one’s experience would make it “a formidable player.
Significant moves indeed. However, in the back of my mind is the thought that Bitcoin facilitates certain types of illegal activity. But that’s just my speculation.
Stephen E Arnold, May 19, 2021
Clarivate Buys ProQuest
May 18, 2021
I don’t want to go into the history of commercial database producers. (Those readings about Oliver Cromwell in my British history class were orders of magnitude more exciting.)
“ProQuest Bought by Clarivate in $5.3bn Deal” reports:
London-based Clarivate said the acquisition would establish it as “a premier provider of end-to-end research intelligence solutions” and significantly expand its content and data offerings.
Clarivate describes itself this way:
Together, we can create a better tomorrow.
The firm uses these phrases to communicate its business:
Every drop of potential needs to be squeezed from your IP
Make critical decisions with speed and certainty
Innovation in focus
Human ingenuity can change the world and improve our future
Accelerating innovation with actionable information and insights
If you are still unsure what the firm does, you will need to check the About page on the company’s Web site. Oh, sorry. There is no “About” page for Clarivate. A profile of the firm, which is assumed to be a household work, is available at this link.
ProQuest warrants its own Wikipedia entry which explains that
ProQuest LLC is an Ann Arbor, Michigan-based global information-content and technology company, founded in 1938 as University Microfilms by Eugene B. Power. ProQuest provides applications and products for libraries. ProQuest started as a producer of microfilm products, then became an electronic publisher, and later grew through acquisitions. Today, the company provides tools for discovery and citation management,[example needed] and platforms that allow library users to search, manage, use, and share research.
Net net: For fee online information access appears to mesh with the increased interest in subscription services. Challenges exist; for example, individuals like Sci Hub’s founder Alexandra Elbakyan and university professionals who can go off the reservation and present content outside of the peer reviewed journals, Dark Web archives, and customers mindful of the cost associated with an online for fee search may look for relevant information on Medium or Substack type services. My view is that this is a sale by ProQuest’s owner Cambridge Scientific Abstract comparable to Bill Ziff’s legendary deals.
Stephen E Arnold, May 18, 2021
Believe It or Not: The First AI to Surpass Humans
May 12, 2021
Say what you will about other aspects of Google, you have to hand it to the company’s research arm. Developers at Google Brain, DeepMind, and the University of Toronto have developed the reinforcement-learning AI DreamerV2. According to Analytics India Magazine, “Now DeepMind’s New AI Agent Outperforms Humans” as measured by the Atari benchmark. The tech evolved from last year’s Dreamer agent created by the same team. It uses a world model, an approach that is more adept at forming generalizations than traditional trial-and-error machine learning processes. World models have not been as accurate as many other algorithms, however. Until now. Reporter Ambika Choudhury writes:
“Dreamer learns a world model from the past experience and efficiently learns far-sighted behaviors in its latent space by backpropagating value estimates back through imagined trajectories. DreamerV2 is the successor of the Dreamer agent. … This new agent works by learning a world model and uses it to train actor-critic behaviors purely from predicted trajectories. It is built upon the Recurrent State-Space Model (RSSM) — a latent dynamics model with both deterministic and stochastic components — allowing to predict a variety of possible futures as needed for robust planning, while remembering information over many time steps. The RSSM uses a Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) to compute the deterministic recurrent states. DreamerV2 introduced two new techniques to RSSM. According to the researchers, these two techniques lead to a substantially more accurate world model for learning successful policies: [a] The first technique is to represent each image with multiple categorical variables instead of the Gaussian variables used by world models; [b] *The second new technique is KL balancing. This technique lets the predictions move faster toward the representations than vice versa.”
See the write-up for a chart of DreamerV2’s performance compared to previous world models. And all this on a single GPU. Curious readers can check out the team’s paper here. We believe.
Cynthia Murrell, May 12, 2021
Google Bets: Chump Change
April 30, 2021
In the midst of stakeholder ebullience about Alphabet Google’s money making prowess, I spotted one interesting comment. “Alphabet Reports Q1 2021 Revenue of $55.3 Billion” included this statement:
The closely-watched “Other Bets” continues to lose money. It reported $198 million revenue primarily generated by Verily and Fiber from $135 million in Q1 of 2020. However, it lost $1.15 billion compared to $1.12 billion in the same quarter of last year.
For a company of Alphabet Google YouTube’s scale this is a modest loss. However, it does beg a couple of questions:
- Is the data analysis used to decide upon what to wager flawed?
- Is there high value information about the firm’s management of certain projects contained in these increasing and continuing losses?
Alphabet does online advertising and data vending. Innovation may be more of a reach than some expected.
Stephen E Arnold, April 30, 2021
Smart Software: What YCombinator Has Been Doing
April 28, 2021
I read a very good overview of Y Combinator’s involvement in smart software. Artificial intelligence generates significant investor interest and spins out massive hyperbole. “What Over a Decade of Y Combinator Data Reveals About Artificial Intelligence” takes a factual approach to characterizing Y Combinator’s activities in this active area of software and services.
The write up states:
The majority of AI funding in YC has been placed into what can be defined as Next Gen AI Infrastructure. The backbone of AI is Infrastructure which consists of numerous subcategories such as AI model development, computer vision, development operations, and natural language generation/natural language processing.
I was surprised to learn that YCombinator has placed emphasis on blocking and tackling, not spray painting the gym walls with slogans.
I circled the conclusion with a red marker.
Y Combinator’s 15 years’ worth of information suggests AI is rapidly heading towards mainstream adoption as companies are utilizing data to automate their activities. The data also suggests certain industries are getting more AI dollar investment than others (e.g., Business Operations, E-Commerce, Sales & CRM). Nonetheless, founders of startups specializing in Next Gen AI Infrastructure, Healthcare, and other mainstream industries should be encouraged that capital allocation will continue to grow in their respective sectors.
Well done. Worth reading.
Stephen E Arnold, April 28, 2021
Financial Warfare: Another View of FinTech
April 21, 2021
I usually ignore articles about big finance and international wheeling and dealing. I did read “China’s Digital Yuan Displaces the Dollar.” The headline struck me as misleading and somewhat deceptive. You will have to read the original write up and make your own decision.
I am not going to walk through the argument and the facts supporting the point of view in the essay. I will cite one interesting passage:
The $16 trillion of offshore dollar deposits at international banks won’t turn into the equivalent amount of Chinese Yuan. Instead, that $16 trillion will shrink to a small fraction of its present volume, because the Big Tech/fintech revolution will make them redundant. Instead, as Morgan Stanley analysts explained this week, “banks will lose their deposit base” as digital currencies replace their most basic functions.
Let’s assume that this assertion is correct.
From an intelligence perspective, consider these questions:
- What’s the impact of the US printing dollars to cover Covid et al?
- What happens if China takes direct action to add Taiwan to its collection of entities?
- What happens if Russia annexes Ukraine?
- What happens if these events occur at the same time?
I try to stick to online information in this blog. Therefore, one final question:
What happens if the cyber attacks based on SolarWinds, Exchange Server, Pulse Secure, and similar entities move into a new phase of active aggression?
Maybe Texas power problems on steroids? Thumbtyping and sucking down YouTube and TikTok content might become problematic. ATMs are online devices and possibly vulnerable.
Stephen E Arnold, April 21, 2021
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