[nfais-l] NFAIS Enotes, August 2014

[mgranahan at nfais.org]

NFAIS Enotes, August 2014
Written and Compiled by Jill O’Neill
 
The Environment That Google Sees; The Environment Users Are Trained For
 
What do you do with the extra 48 billion dollars that you have sitting in the bank? If you’re Google, you spend six months buying a broad range of existing companies and emerging start-ups.  Since January of this year, it has been an interesting set of more than a dozen purchases.  Google has acquired DeepMind, Emu, Directr, Nest Labs, Titan Aerospace, Skybox, Alpental Technologies, Divide, Songza, drawElements and Twitch.  Note that this isn’t even a complete list.
 
Quiz time:  How many of those company names were familiar to you? When the acquisition was announced, could you identify the core activity of each entity that made it attractive to Google? 
 
You might have recognized Nest Labs because that company had already received some degree of national media attention prior to Google’s acquisition. The smart thermostat, which was Nest’s flagship product, programs itself to appropriate temperature settings depending upon the preferences and physical presence of a home’s inhabitants.  (See the New York Times write-up, [ http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/01/technology/personaltech/nest-learning-thermostat-sets-a-standard-david-pogue.html ]( http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/01/technology/personaltech/nest-learning-thermostat-sets-a-standard-david-pogue.html )) If you have an iPhone, you might also have recognized Emuou as a messaging app that promised to enhance daily productivity.  An article from MIT Technology Review describes the ways in which Emu learns your requirements for reminders and notifications:

“It conducts three types of analysis to figure out how and when to augment your conversation. It determines whether words refer to a business, a city, or something else. It also looks at the whole message to get a better sense of each word’s context, and at the different messages that make up the conversation. Additionally, it takes into account data gathered from your smartphone’s sensors, such as your location and movements, when figuring out what kinds of information to show you, such as movie times.”
 
[ READ MORE... ]( https://nfais.memberclicks.net/?option=com_lyftenbloggie&view=entry&category=enotes&id=19:20142 )
 
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