Google Home
Amazon, Apple, And Ambience
Part 1: Ambient Computing – Buzzwords That Are Changing Your World
Part 2: Google Wants To Surround You With Invisible Assistants
Google, Amazon, and Apple are the only companies capable of surrounding us with connected networks of devices and services. Google hopes to become ubiquitous by extending Google Assistant everywhere. […] continued
Read moreGoogle Wants To Surround You With Invisible Assistants
Part 1: Ambient Computing – Buzzwords That Are Changing Your World
You don’t notice an automatic door when it opens.
Google, Amazon, and Apple want to make it so natural to interact with their devices that you don’t even notice that you’re doing it. We’ll be surrounded by devices. The more there are, the less we’ll notice them. […] continued
Read moreAmbient Computing: Buzzwords That Are Changing Your World
(Sonoma County fires: we have evacuated to a safe place and our house is not threatened. All of our thoughts and best wishes go out to those in danger or suffering losses.)
Hey Google . . .
- What time is my flight today?
- How long will it take to drive to Oakland Airport?
Google, Antitrust, And Zero-Click Searches
When you search for the phone number for Bruceb Consulting, Google shows the phone number.
Does that seem obvious? It’s a relatively recent change. Google only began serious efforts to provide One True Answer to search queries a few years ago. It completely changes Google’s role in the relationship between users and advertisers. […] continued
Read moreBreaking News: Special Google Edition, May 13, 2019
Google, Microsoft, and Facebook held developer conferences last week to showcase new products and services. Google had some exciting announcements. Microsoft and Facebook, not so much.
MICROSOFT Microsoft is an enterprise company. At its Build Conference, it showed off new cloud services for developers and enterprises. That’s it. That’s what it does now. […] continued
Read moreBreaking News: February 18, 2019
I’m trying to get my thoughts in order for a couple of long articles about how to think about privacy in our world of surveillance by giant tech companies. That’s not quite ready yet. Now, now, don’t be disappointed, get a grip on yourself – it won’t be long before you have a chance to read four or five thousand words about things that I’m poorly qualified to talk about, and won’t that be fun? […] continued
Read moreThe 2018 Bruceb News Year In Review
Remember when I wrote an article a year ago predicting that always-connected computers would be heavily promoted in 2018?
Yeah, about that: not even close. Nada. All the buzz died away when the first PCs in that category turned out to be underpowered and, well, pretty awful.
Okay, that prediction didn’t pan out. […] continued
Read morePut A Google Home Hub On Your Xmas List
The Google Home Hub is my favorite home assistant. Put it on your Xmas list, or sneak one under the tree for yourself. If your pictures are stored in Google Photos, then the Google Home Hub is worth the investment just because it is the best photo frame ever. But Google Home Hub stands out for everything else it does, too, so it’s highly recommended unless you are already so deep in the Amazon Echo ecosystem that it doesn’t make sense to switch. […] continued
Read moreThe Samsung Ecosystem: When Technology Is Driven By Jealousy
Samsung is a global electronics company with hundreds of thousands of employees. It is the world’s largest information technology company, consumer electronics maker and chipmaker by revenue. Samsung sells more smartphones than any other manufacturer by a large margin.
(You think Apple is number two in smartphone sales, and you’re a bit surprised it’s not number one, right? […] continued
Read moreThe Google Ecosystem: You Will Be Assimilated
Google is an advertising company. Its incentives are all tied to maximizing engagement with places where you will see ads served up by Google’s ad network. But that has more depth than you realize, driven by Google’s desire to have those ads be more effective and tailored to you than anyone else’s ads, combined with a strong ethical culture and the sheer joy of technology. […] continued
Read moreThe Amazon Ecosystem: The Company That Wants To Sell Everything To Everyone
Amazon seeks to be the middleman in every financial transaction on the planet. Its incentives are all tied to making customers happy in every context where Amazon can take a small fee as money moves from one place to another.
Since the beginning, Amazon’s mission statement has been: “Our vision is to be Earth’s most customer-centric company; to build a place where people can come to find and discover anything they might want to buy online.” In the most recent SEC filings, however, that is shortened; now it refers only to “Earth’s most customer-centric company,” without restricting it to sales from the Amazon website. […] continued
Read moreAll Your Loyalties Are Belong To Us: How Technology Companies Lure Us Into Walled Gardens
Five giant technology companies have set up walled gardens full of shiny devices and enticing services. All of us live in their gardens. We’re not completely locked in. We move from one walled garden to another, but each company hopes to keep you within its garden by making its services and devices work better if you stay in its embrace. […] continued
Read moreThe Definitive Answer To Which Is Better: An Amazon Echo Or A Google Home
The definitive answer to which is better, Amazon Echo or Google Home? Yeah, that’s not going to happen. Forget about it. Just a stupid clickbait headline so this article goes viral and I get a gazillion tweets and Facebook likes and LinkedIn bites or whatever they do over at LinkedIn.
After a couple of years of blanket advertising, you know about Amazon Echo and Google Home devices, right? […] continued
Read moreLooking Forward: Google Home, Amazon Echo & Home Assistants
The battle between Amazon and Google in the market for home assistants will be the source of the most interesting technology advances in 2018.
You probably know the basics. Perhaps you have an Amazon Echo or Google Home in your kitchen already. You may not be aware, though, of how broad the vision is for these devices and how far Amazon and Google are prepared to take them. […] continued
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