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The Nexus 7 and The Cloud Commit Conundrum: Google Wins (For Now)

Google was kind enough to send me a Nexus 7 tablet to play with last month, and over the past week or so I’ve had the chance to actually put it to use. Even though I own an iPad, I have serious reservations about the constraints of Apple’s iOS ecosystem (more on that below), so I was eager to see how Google’s alternative performed.

Now, before I get into details, I want to state what I think really matters here: The Nexus device – and others like it – represent a play for something extremely valuable: a hard-wired digital portal to our hearts, minds, and wallets. As I’ve written elsewhere, there are five major companies deeply engaged in this play – Amazon, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Apple. All of these companies want us to commit to their services as the basis of our digital lives – how we consume media and entertainment, how we manage our work and personal lives, where we store our most important information (including our money), and of course, how we declare who we are and what we believe (our identity). The more these companies can get us to upload our music, videos, photos, identities, purchases, browsing behaviors, etc. etc. etc. into their nebulae, the more they’ve locked us into a lifetime relationship of revenue and profit.

Put in that frame, your choice of tablet or phone is about much more than feeds and speeds or features and prices (for all that, see this Engadget review). It becomes a choice about what kind of a company you want as a partner in your digital life. Will the company let you export your data easily to other services? Will it be transparent about how your data is used? Will it have the guts to stand up to bad actors, whether they be governments or other corporations? Will the company create dashboards where you can see, edit, delete, and contest how your data is displayed?

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Halfway Through The Year: How’re The Predictions Doing?

It’s time to review how my Predictions 2012 are faring, now that half the year has slipped by (that was fast, no?).

One thing that stands out is the timing wrt Twitter – my first two predictions were about the company, and now that I think about it, given the news just this week (and the attendant debate), I should have realized how the two could be in direct conflict with each other. It all makes for some interesting chin stroking, which I’m busy doing while on vacation – fishing the Rio Blanco up above Meeker in Colorado. Yes, you may now give me shit for writing that.

But to the review: I’ll take them one at a time:

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Google’s “Mute” Button: Why Didn’t I Think Of That? Oh, Wait…

One of my pet peeves about our industry is how slowly we change – I understand it takes a long time to gather consensus (it took three years to get AdChoices rolled out, for example) – but man, why don’t the big players, like Google, innovate a bit more when it comes to display advertising?

Well, yesterday Google did just that, announcing a “mute this ad” feature that it will roll out across its network over the next few months. The feature does what you might expect it to do – it stops a particular ad from “following” you around the web. It will look like this:

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Google’s Transparency Report: A Good And Troubling Thing

A couple of days ago Google released its latest “Transparency Report,” part of the company’s ongoing commitment to disclose requests by individuals, corporations, and governments to change what users see in search results and other Google properties such as YouTube.

The press coverage of Google’s report was copious – far more than the prior two years, and for good reason. This week’s disclosure included Google’s bi-annual report of government takedown requests (corporate and individual requests are updated in near real time). The news was not comforting.

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The Internet Big Five: Up $272 Billion in Six Months

Last December I posted on “The Internet Big Five,” noting their relative strengths and the market cap of each. Since that time, the Five have only gotten stronger, adding a cumulative $272 billion in market cap (much of that is Apple, but Amazon and Facebook – assuming the offering does as expected on Friday – have also increased quite a bit). All in all, nearly 30% increase in value for these five companies – sort of makes me wish I was an investor, rather than a writer and entrepreneur.

I’ll also check the number of engaged users for each platform, to see if there are any significant shifts, though I don’t recall seeing any in the news recently (save Facebook crossing 900 million users). It is interesting to note that Facebook, should it hold its supposed valuation, will be more highly valued than Amazon.

A reminder as to why I’ve made a point of watching the Big Five, from my original and secondary posts:

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On Thneeds and the “Death of Display”

It’s all over the news these days: Display advertising is dead. Or put more accurately, the world of “boxes and rectangles” is dead. No one pays attention to banner ads, the reasoning goes, and the model never really worked in the first place (except for direct response). Brand marketers are demanding more for their money, and “standard display” is simply not delivering. After nearly 20 years*, it’s time to bury the banner, and move on to….

…well, to something else. Mostly, if you believe the valuations these days, to big platforms that have their own proprietary ad systems.

All over the industry, you’ll find celebration of new advertising-driven platforms that have eschewed the “boxes and rectangles” model. Twitter makes money off its native “promoted” suite of marketing tools. Tumblr just this week rolled out a similar offering. Pinterest recently hired Facebook’s original monetization wizard to create its own advertising model, separate from standard display. And of course there’s Facebook, which has gone so far as to call its new products “Featured Stories” (as opposed to “Ads” – which is what they are.) Lastly, we mustn’t forget the grandaddy of native advertising platforms, Google, whose search ads redefined the playing field more than a decade ago (although AdSense, it must be said, is very much in the “standard display” business).

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What Doesn’t the Valley Understand About Washington?

A few weeks ago I ventured to our nation’s capital to steep in its culture a bit, and get some first hand reporting done for the book. I met with about a dozen or so folks, including several scholars, the heads of the FCC and FTC, and senior folks in the Departments of Commerce and State. I also spoke to a lobbyist from the Internet industry, as well as people from various “think tanks” that populate the city. It was my first such trip, but it certainly won’t be my last.

Each of the conversations was specific to the person I was interviewing, but I did employ one device to tie them together – I asked each person the same set of questions toward the end of the conversation. And as I was on the plane home, I wrote myself a little reminder to post about the most interesting set of answers I got, which was to this simple question: What doesn’t the Valley understand about Washington?

It’s not a secret that the Valley, as a whole, has an ambivalent attitude toward DC. Until recently, the prevailing philosophy has trended libertarian – just stay out of the way, please, and let us do what we do best. Just about every startup CEO I’ve ever known – including myself – ignores Washington in the early years of a company’s lifecycle. Government is treated like plumbing – it’s dirty, it costs too much, it’s preferably someone else’s job, and it’s ignored until it stops working the way we want it to.

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On Larry Page’s Letter: Super Amazing Great Tremendous!

(I promised a bit more color commentary on Larry Page’s 3500-word missive posted last week, and after reading it over a few more times, it seems worth the time to keep that promise. I wrote this last weekend, but am on vacation, so just posting it now…)

It’s not often you get a document such as this to analyze – the last time I can recall is Google’s feisty 2004 letter to shareholders written on the eve of its IPO.

Well, eight years in, the feisty has taken a back seat to the practical, the explicative, and the … nice! The first thing I noticed were the exclamation points – Larry uses one in the second sentence, then keeps on exclaiming – 11 times, in fact. Now, I don’t know Larry Page very well, but he just doesn’t seem the type to use exclamation points. Seeing so many of them felt….off. Also, the letter had a very “softer side of Sears” feel to it, the language itself was rounded, not quite defensive (as it might have been given the news lately), but also not pointed.

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Who Controls Our Data? A Puzzle.

(image) Facebook claims the data we create inside Facebook is ours – that we own it. In fact, I confirmed this last week in an interview with Facebook VP David Fischer on stage at FM’s Signal P&G conference in Cincinnati. In the conversation, I asked Fischer if we owned our own data. He said yes.

Perhaps unfairly (I’m pretty sure Fischer is not in charge of data policy), I followed up my question with another: If we own our own data, can we therefore take it out of Facebook and give it to, say, Google, so Google can use it to personalize our search results?

Fischer pondered that question, realized its implications, and backtracked. He wasn’t sure about that, and it turns out, it’s more complicated to answer that question – as recent stories about European data requests have revealed.*

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Halfway Through The Year: How’re The Predictions Doing?

Google’s “Mute” Button: Why Didn’t I Think Of That? Oh, Wait…

The Internet Big Five: Up $272 Billion in Six Months

On Larry Page’s Letter: Super Amazing Great Tremendous!