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Google’s growing problem on Mobile
Google losing out, even though Google search is front and centre on every Android phone (as per Google’s instructions as part of its Mobile Application Device Agreement, MADA). People don’t, on average, search very much on mobile. The miracle of Google, in retrospect, is building a multi-billion dollar business by accreting millions of rare actions – people doing searches and then clicking on ads.
So there is the problem for Google: the PC base is static or even falling, while the number of people holding smartphones is growing. But the latter group tends not to use search, and so doesn’t see its most profitable ads. (There are in-app ads, but it’s never been very clear how much revenue they generate compared to other search ads. One suspects if they were very lucrative for Google it would be touting its “run rate” from them.)
Hence Google pushes people to use the mobile web more; and also, notably, to expand beyond simple search into services such as Google Now, Now On Tap, and pretty much anything. Seen through that lens, the reorganisation of Google into Alphabet makes sense: it’s seeking to get as many potentially moneymaking new ideas fired off as soon as possible, while search and search revenues are still growing, and before the growth of mobile really pulls the averages down.
Mobile search is a real problem for Google: people don’t do it nearly as much as you suspect it would like. But there’s no obvious way of changing that behaviour while users are so addicted to apps on their phones – and there’s no sign of that changing any time soon.
This is a structural reality of how mobile is now. Buying Android and make it freely available was a defensive move to stop Microsoft being the gatekeeper to the mobile web. But it turns out that search wasn’t actually the gatekeeper to mobile; having a well-stocked app store is. That’s where the searching really happens.
In the second stage of the mobile web, what will Google’s answer be?
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Google re-designing Adwords
Google made $74 billion last year. A vast majority of Google’s revenue is from advertisements slipped into its free services like Search and YouTube. That’s why AdWords is really Google’s most important product, as it allows a million different businesses, big and small, to manage keyword-driven ad campaigns across Google.
Currently in the middle of a carefully paced, year-long makeover of the platform to conclude in 2017...
Updating AdWords will not only cement Google’s design makeover across its most important services; it will also make its platform a whole lot more usable in a time when advertising campaigns have grown more complicated than ever.
Adwords was built for a desktop search world," says Greg Rosenberg, head of UX, advertiser platform at Google. "Today, we’re in the middle of the biggest shift the ad industry has seen since AdWords launched—mobile."
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Could blockchain technology help the world's poor?
The independent computers that run Bitcoin’s decentralized network busily update and maintain an ever-growing public ledger of transactions. They repeatedly reach a consensus on changes and thus are constantly vouching for the ledger’s integrity. Information on new transactions is built on top of all preceding records in a precise, time-stamped, interlinked manner, which means anyone who tampers with past data will distort all other latter records and so expose their fraud. It is this permanance and incorruptability, combined with the fact that it is completely open and uncontrolled, that makes this new recordkeeping methodology so seductive. And the distributed nature of the blockchain ledger, which resides simultaneously on multiple computers, makes it far more secure than a centralized database. All these features make it possible for individuals to confidently and securely use the blockchain to make direct asset exchanges without relying on third-party intermediaries such as banks, lawyers, or notaries.
While the technology was first developed for peer-to-peer currency transactions, innovators are now seeking to use the blockchain–either the Bitcoin blockchain or competing versions of it–for many other applications, including on claims to property title. Inserting metadata (data about the data) into blockchain-based transactions can create a robust, reliable record of all sorts of changing information. At the MIT Media Lab’s Digital Currency Initiative, where I work, we are exploring some of these uses for projects with social impact like the one championed by de Soto. And this exact application is being actively explored by the government of Honduras. It is working with Austin, Texas-based startup Factom to understand how it might use blockchain technology for land registration.
The blockchain isn’t a magic bullet for the developing world. The technology is unproven and Bitcoin’s version of it faces scalability limits, among other challenges. Meanwhile, citizens still need government authorities to authenticate the input data on their claims to houses, cars, or personal identities. In slums, where criminal gangs often dictate who has rights to each piece of property, getting accurate and fair information poses an additional challenge. Still, once it’s created, the presence of an immutable blockchain ledger could help boost people’s confidence in public records.
Financial institutions will be more willing to provide services if they can trust the data, de Soto says. Just as important, ordinary people might overcome their reluctance to cooperate with data-collecting authorities.
“The reason people don’t go around recording themselves, besides the fact that record-keeping systems in former Soviet and developing world countries are shabby, is because when they give over that information, they don’t trust who they are giving it to,” de Soto said during a recent visit to New York. “They don’t want to be vulnerable to something that can be used against them. And that’s what’s interesting about the tamper-proof blockchain – if you can get the right message about it out there, [people will see] that it’s worthwhile recording yourself.”
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What if property rights is the final impact frontier?
Hernando de Soto on the importance of property rights
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Unitization + Fracking (Nick Axel)
Unitization → contractually joins individual lands and their owners to control the process + quantity of petroleum extraction. “As both a political and economic process of many individuals coming together to become one, the ‘unit’ is a petri dish of democratic principles. A supermajority, typically 3/5, is required to drill a well at all, a leader is decided upon to head up the operations and the well’s costs and revenues are distributed amongst all members.”
“As a law, unitization is where rights become tangible.”
Unitization is a policy that by necessity discriminates between who has political rights and who doesn’t. While on paper unitization seems estimable, its image becomes corrupted when we recognize that property rights constitute the unit’s political rights. “This fact should not be criticized in and of itself, but within today’s expanding scale of domestic oil and gas production, the social implications of this political framework become monstrous.”
“Who owns the surface, what we typically think of as land, is not necessarily the owner of what minerals lie beneath it. It was discovered early in the United States’ history that profits could be maximized if the surface was severed from its minerals.”
“The unit is comprised solely of subsurface mineral rights owners. Mineral estate dominance is the name of this (nearly 450 year-old) legal doctrine that makes the consent of the surface owner simply unnecessary. This means that whoever owns the land (i.e. those most immediately exposed to its spatial / environmental risks) increasingly has no right or say regarding whether wells are drilled on it or not.”
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Revital Cohen and Tuur Van Balen’s work is occupied with broad meanings of material and production. They work with objects, installation, film and photography to explore manufacturing processes as cultural, ethical and political practices.
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There are three methods generally used for computing and establishing the royalty payment and how it is valued:
Market price and value of the oil or gas. Sometimes the market price at the well in the field is used as the prevailing price. Landowners usually have been taking the field price at the well because it allows the price to rise as the price of crude oil and gas rises
Ties the royalty to actual revenue received from the. In this case, the royalty received may or may not be equal to the actual market price of the oil or gas. The production company can and has committed to long-term contracts and the royalty, in that case, is more dependable.
The "in-kind" method: the landowner takes possession of the oil or gas produced for the landowner's share of the oil or gas production before the oil or gas is marketed by the production company. The landowner can insert a clause in the lease to take royalty either "in kind" or "in proceeds." This clause allows the landowner more flexibility and a higher royalty based on decisions of the market.
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Government Licenses
The great many activities that require a license issued by a government authority include fishing; hunting; marrying; driving a motor vehicle; providing health care services; practicing law; manufacturing; engaging in retail and wholesale commerce; operating a private business, trade, or technical school; providing commercial services such as those offered by whitewater rafting outfitters and travel agencies; providing public services such as food and environmental inspection; and operating public pinball machines.
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A royalty interest (in Oil/Gas business):
Ownership of a percentage of production or production revenues, produced from leased acreage. The owner of this share of production does not bear any of the cost of exploration, drilling, producing, operating, marketing or any other expense associated with drilling and producing an oil and gas well.
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Royalties
A royalty : a payment made by one party (licenseeor) to another that owns a particular asset (licensor) for the right to ongoing use of that asset. Royalties are typically agreed upon as a percentage of gross or net revenues derived from the use of an asset or a fixed price per unit sold of an item of such, but there are also other modes and metrics of compensation.
A license agreement defines the terms under which a resource or property are licensed by one party to another, either without restriction or subject to a limitation on term, business or geographic territory, type of product, etc. License agreements can be regulated, particularly where a government is the resource owner.
A royalty interest is the right to collect a stream of future royalty payments:
Royalty interest allows the owner to share in the success of natural resource production without incurring the associated costs (for oil and gas companies, royalty interest payments can significantly reduce total revenue gained while risk and liability remains unchanged)
Landowner’s royalty: Belonging to the lessor, landowner’s royalty is the percentage paid to the landowner based on total revenue from natural resource production
Royalty interest owners: benefits from perpetual payments and no cost for production
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