Of course, as Om and others have already mentioned, there’s no guarantee this deal will actually be consummated: it could fall apart on valuation, as so many deals do — or Facebook could swoop in with a much higher offer and snatch Tumblr out of Yahoo’s clutches, the same way it did when it stole Instagram away from Twitter last year for close to $1 billion.

It makes Yahoo look desperate — because it is

Even if the deal does get done, one of the risks for Mayer and Yahoo is that the company could look desperate by paying more than $1 billion for a site that had revenues of less than $15 million last year (although CEO David Karp has said that figure should hit $100 million this year). That’s an almost bubble-like multiple for a company, and there will likely be plenty of criticism from investors who believe that $1 billion could be better spent elsewhere — in other words, on businesses that would make Yahoo a better return.

But the painful fact is that Yahoo doesn’t just look desperate — in many ways it is desperate. Mayer has made some changes since she took over the ailing former web portal, including the acquisition of Summly and a number of other mobile-focused startups and services, but the company still needs to make some aggressive moves if it is going to jump-start any growth at all. And since Yahoo has about $4 billion in cash on hand, it can arguably afford to make a big bet.

Yahoo buying Tumblr makes sense. Tumblr is only big, cool, newish social platform that Yahoo can afford.—
Henry Blodget (@hblodget) May 17, 2013

For Yahoo, the addition of Tumblr would do a number of things: because of the size and profile of the deal, it would make a major statement about Mayer’s intention to do whatever it takes to revitalize the company, and it would also send a signal to Facebook and Google — and even Apple — that Yahoo is a potential force to be reckoned with when it comes to potential acquisitions. Is doing that worth $1 billion? That’s for Yahoo’s investors and board of directors to decide.

Just as important, it would inject some much-needed life and energy into the somewhat stale lineup of content that the company currently relies on, which caters more to the over-50 set than it does to anyone in the much-desired 18 to 25 demographic. More than any other network, Tumblr is the platform of choice for media-obsessed teens and 20-somethings, who spend massive amounts of time sharing photos and videos and animated GIFs on the site — an engine of potential value that Yahoo desperately needs.

Tumblr gets a massive exit

This doesn’t come without its own risks, of course: As a number of observers have noted, Tumblr’s content contains a large quantity of not only mature or arguably offensive content but outright pornography, which many argue is the source of its massive traffic numbers. How Yahoo (or Facebook for that matter) would deal with this kind of content remains to be seen.

3 q's for Yahoo: 1) Can you convert Tumblr users to Yahoo products? 2) Can you monetize Tumblr PVs? 3) What to do w/ all that Tumblr porn?—
Mark Zohar (@markzohar) May 18, 2013

For Tumblr, meanwhile, being acquired would solve a number of problems — the main one being that the company has gone well beyond the “we’re a startup so we don’t really have to make money” stage, and is facing increasing pressure from the investors who have given CEO David Karp more than $125 million in venture financing, an investment that values the company at about $800 million. Accepting a giant check from Yahoo would take care of that problem in one fell swoop, especially if it was all in cash.

With a major company like Yahoo as a partner, Tumblr could connect its massive audience of users to the firehose of ads and other monetization methods the giant web portal has, and potentially generate much more revenue than it could have by itself. The only lingering question at that point is whether Tumblr fans decide that Yahoo is poisoning the well of social content and community on the site, and decide to flee for greener pastures. In other words, does Yahoo make Tumblr into YouTube — a successful standalone network that can grow and prosper on its own — or does it become MySpace?

The only scenario where a Yahoo-Tumblr combo works is if Yahoo keeps Tumblr separate in the same way Google managed YouTube.—
Mark Birch (@marksbirch) May 18, 2013

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Shutterstock / ollyy and Albert Chau

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Google announced that in June, customers can order the handset through the Google Play store. Instead of the phone running Samsung’s customized TouchWiz software, it will instead run on pure Android, just like the Nexus 4. That means it will get future software updates directly through Google and not Samsung or a network provider.

Of course, some of the newest Samsung features won’t be present on the phone: I wouldn’t expect Samsung’s new camera modes to be there, nor would I expect gestures to work for hands-free scrolling or swiping. Still, in light of no new Nexus hardware, the unlocked handset could appeal to hardcore Android enthusiasts.

So without the release of Android 4.3 at Google I/O, does that mean Android hasn’t improved? Not at all; in fact, Google essentially boosted Android’s software without needing to wait for carriers and handset makers to upgrade the software. How did this happen? A large part of the 3.5 hour Google I/O keynote was dedicated to new Android services and APIs, plus a new application called Hangouts.

The new Hangouts app replaces Google Talk and is Google’s effort to unify its messaging platform. The app supports video calls with up to 10 participants, SMS notifications of incoming chat requests when offline, text chat and works across platforms: You can communication with other users on the web or on iOS devices. Hangouts also highlights a great new feature in Android: Support for synchronized notifications. If you get a notification on one device and take action, the notification won’t appear on other devices or in the Chrome browser.

Google also introduced its music subscription and discovery service called Google Play Music All Access. For a $9.99 monthly fee — $7.99 if you start a 30-day trial by June 30 — you get unlimited access to stream tracks thought the Play Music app and on the web. Human curators surface top songs and albums while music recommendations come from Google’s Knowledge Graph and your Google+ circles.

Gaming got a supercharge in Android as well. Developers can use the new Google Play Games services that allow cross-platform gaming complete with achievements and leaderboards. Game progress can also be saved to the cloud, allowing gamers to pick up where the left off, even from another device.

Android also saw one other big announcement this week, but it didn’t happen at Google I/O. The Bluetooth SIG announced that Android will gain support for Bluetooth Smart and Smart Ready devices in the coming months. That’s likely to be included in an actual Android release as some developers told me that Google will be completely changing the Bluetooth software stack in Android. Regardless, this means widespread support for Bluetooth 4.0 Smart and Smart Ready accessories such as watches, heart rate monitors and other low-powered companion devices.

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WebRTC is going to reach that milestone thanks in part to Firefox 22, which was just released this week. The new version of Firefox comes with WebRTC enabled in its beta version, which should add a large number of users to the addressable market for WebRTC developers.

Uberti also said that WebRTC is going to come to iOS devices soon: Apple hasn’t joined the efforts to implement and standardize WebRTC yet, but Google wants to nonetheless give developers a way to address users on iPads and iPhones through the release of a native toolkit.

Of course, there is another holdout: Microsoft has been pushing forward with its own version of WebRTC, which some have seen as an effort to torpedo the standard. Uberti had a much more optimistic take on the differences Friday, saying that Microsoft has been “a great participant in the standards.” He added: “I’m very optimistic that we are going to see a version of (Internet Explorer) that supports this technology in the not-too distant future.”

Image courtesy of Flickr user  Tsahi Levent-Levi.

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Without a doubt, the panel, at Google I/O, was an apt forum for that question. If any company is innovating in a big way, it’s Google, with recent advancements in voice recognition, wearable technology, quantum computing and other realms. So it wouldn’t be surprising to see some of the Google luminaries’ ideas actually come into being. Here’s what they had to say:

“Speech recognition and vision are showing dramatic improvements over the last few years. We just need to scale them up and make them work better. … They’re (mobile devices) going to vanish into much smaller devices that you carry around and aren’t full-size laptops.” — Jeff Dean

“We’re getting more contextualized. The computer is not what you go to to use. It’s something that’s around you all the time and sort of more integrated into your life, rather than a separate thing.” — Peter Norvig

“I would argue that we’re currently living the singularity, where the tool stops and the mind begins will start becoming blurry.” — Thad Starner

So there you have it, folks — the computer as a smaller and more natural extension of the human brain. Now, let’s set the kitchen timer for 10 years and see what actually happens.

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At a talk at the Google I/O conference on Thursday, Googlers Colt McAnlis (pictured), a developer advocate working on Chrome games and performance, and Grace Kloba, the technical lead on Chrome for Android, gave developers some tips for making better use of the GPU. Doing some of these things can help websites display their graphics as soon as possible and become optimized for “touch events” such as scrolling without sacrificing performance.

Chrome developers can split up many website components into GPU layers, each of which can be subdivided into a bunch of tiles for an entire page — think of a grid overlaid on top of the page. Instead of asking the CPU to upload the pixels to the whole screen area, the GPU caches those tiles inside its memory when a page is accessed and then serves up select tiles in response to user behavior, such as scrolling. This approach “allows the CPU to drink margaritas and essentially chill out while the GPU does all the heavy lifting,” McAnlis said.

But there’s a tradeoff to this layering approach. Making many layers can result in entirely too many tiles, and the GPU “has a static, non-growable memory resource in its texture cache,” McAnlis said. “If the cache is full, you have to push old tiles out of the cache before you put new tiles in.” And that can result in a decrease in performance.

In short, developers have to figure out the right number of layers for each page. For example, if a user ends up not using a tile that is loaded and cached on the GPU, it’s a waste of a GPU compute cycle. Developers can learn more about the use of GPU inside Chrome in the Chromium Project’s design documents and get insight into GPU use with the Trace Event Profiling Tool. Developers can also run experiments through Chrome, McAnlis said.

To demonstrate good use of layers, McAnlis pointed, perhaps unsurprisingly, to a Google site, the mobile version of the Google I/O conference site. “Look at the source code,” he said. “It’s a great example.” The header is its own layer, he said, and it expands and contracts and adjusts the times of conference sessions as the user scrolls up and down the page.

The winners on the web over the next few years will be the sites that can serve rich, compelling content as fast as possible. It looks like Google believes taking full advantage of the GPU might be the best way to accomplish that goal.

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Photo courtesy: Leffot

I don’t know James, but my sense from reading his post is that he approaches design through a visual lens. Unlike him, I am not a designer and so my way of thinking about design is influenced by not mere visual aspects, but also how things are constructed. I don’t just love the shoes because of how they look — though that matters — but I also look at where the leather comes from, how it is stitched together and what kind of craftsmanship has gone into it. From shoe trees to little patterns on the toe to the packaging to the font on the label, all of those little things add up to the design aesthetic.

And that way of thinking about the design aesthetic extends to other things, including website design. Yes, fonts matter, and the layouts matter, but so does the relative relationship to the kind of content, the speed of the web service and even the screen size and how it all correlates to me.

So, using that lens, when I looked at Google+ and its new design, what I saw was that it was less social in the “Facebook sort of a way.” And by that I mean: it’s less about people, likes and shares being the primary action drivers on the page. Instead, I saw a design aesthetic defined by data and machines inferring relationships, the importance of content and the relative weight of all the elements on the page. The new super hashtag is a good example of what I am talking about — it surfaces a lot more information on those specific topics — with very little to do with social relationships.

As I pointed out in my post (and also on my post about Google Maps’ redesign,) we have moved into the world of data-informed applications and design too has to adapt to this reality. So, while there might be elements on the page might overlap on few occasions, the departure in the core philosophies that is reflected in the overall aesthetic is pretty clear to my eye. And as far as I can tell, that aesthetic is all about a philosophy and how it relates to senses.

Google has always been about inferring and serving up information. Facebook is about implicit actions. The new Google+ design is an extension of that thinking. And as Vic Gundotra, Google’s Senior Vice President of Google+ said: “We have put Google in Google+.”

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On Thursday solar installer SolarCity announced that it has signed up Goldman Sachs, and other investors, to create a $500 million fund to support leases for solar panels for home and business owners. With that much money, SolarCity can install some 110 MW worth of solar panels.

Solar leases are a contract between the building owner and SolarCity, whereby SolarCity pays the upfront cost of installing the system, owns and maintains the panels, and the building owner pays for the monthly electricity for the power from the panels over around 20 years. As Ucilia noted on GigaOM Pro today, the residential solar leasing market alone is expected to grow from $1.3 billion in 2012 to $5.7 billion in 2016, according to GTM Research.

Some banks and even companies like Google have been willing to put hundreds of millions into these types of funds. SolarCity has been able to raise $1.7 billion in funding over its lifetime to finance installations from groups like U.S. Bancorp, Google, PG&E and Credit Suisse. Other solar financing companies — and the competition is now getting fierce — include Sungevity, OneRoof Energy, Sunrun and Clean Power Finance.

There’s such a demand for solar leases and financing that even some companies are falling behind on getting funding for these businesses. SunPower said earlier this month that demand for its residential solar leases is far greater than the money available to finance them. Power company NRG Energy also wants to retry getting into this space, after trying out this market awhile back.

It’s not just banks and corporate do-gooders that want the opportunity to make a decent return — some 10 to 12 percent in some cases. Crowd-funding is starting to appear as an interesting blip on the radar. Startup Solar Mosaic says that it’s now raised $1 million from its crowd-funders for its solar panel systems, which offer around a 4.5 percent annual yield. Bloomberg New Energy Finance estimates that commercial‐scale solar panel systems can reach returns of 8 percent to 14 percent in states like Hawaii, Texas, New Jersey, and Massachusetts.

As big power players, upstart solar financiers and even everyday crowd-funders grow these funds and receive the returns, this market will start to expand significantly. As a boom of solar panels continues to hit the U.S., various parties can make significant money off this transition. Bloomberg New Energy Finance expects that residential solar panels could be installed on 2.4 percent of U.S. houses by 2020.

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How can Google stand out from the crowd, and convince millions of consumers who haven’t warmed up to access models that they don’t need to own music to enjoy it? To find out, I’ve both tested the service since its launch Wednesday and met up with Paul Joyce, Lead Product Manager for Google Play Music on the sidelines of the Google I/O developers conference where the service was launched. Joyce politely declined to answer some of my questions, but the conversation gave me a good idea of what’s in store for the music service with the confusingly long name.

Right now, it’s more or less like all the others

Google’s premise for Play Music All Access is simple, and you’ve heard it before: Play millions of songs, on your desktop and on the go, for one low monthly fee. That’s what Spotify and all of its competitors have been offering for some time now, and Google doesn’t mess with the basic recipe. All Access costs $9.99 ($7.99 if you sign up before the end of June), and it offers streaming access to songs from all three majors and most significant indie labels.

However, there’s one big difference: Google’s subscription music catalog seamlessly integrates with the company’s music locker, with which users can store up to 20,000 songs for free. That’s an interesting combination, and it hasn’t been offered by any of the other major subscription players before. It makes it possible to have Google generate smart radio stations based on your own music collection, or mix subscription tracks and CDs you ripped in custom playlists, and then access these on the go without having to worry that some of the tracks won’t be available.

Joyce told me that the locker is especially good for tracks that aren’t available through the subscription offering, or even as MP3 sales – mashups, imports and other kinds of rarities.

In the future, All Access will be a lot more social

But All Access isn’t just about filling the gaps left by other services. It also wants to be better at engaging you – which has been one of the problems of existing services. “People sign up, and then they don’t know what to do afterwards,” Joyce said. Having millions of songs at your disposal doesn’t exactly make choice easy, and there is some evidence that a good chunk of users simply tune out.

How does Google want to address this issue? Joyce gave me one hint: “There is more we can do to innovate in social,” he said.

Play Music doesn’t offer much of a social integration today – but that could change soon.

And we are not talking here’s a list of the unfortunate music choices of all the people you didn’t really care about in high school social, which has been Spotify’s original model of social discovery. “If you treat all your recommendations of all your friends the same, then that is a problem,” Joyce argued. However, he wasn’t convinced that the Rdio model – which is very much like Twitter in that it offers you to follow tastemakers – is the right approach either. It’s simply too much work to find the people who can give you good recommendations, he argued.

So how is Google Music’s approach to social going to look? Joyce didn’t go into details, only telling me that the goal was to give you “the right music from the right people at the right time.” However, one has to assume that it would be powered by Google+, which gives us some idea of how it could work: You could get music recommendations from circles and communities, with the ability to share circles of influencers with others. Instead of just curating albums, Google Music’s editors could curate circles of influencers, and users could simply follow the 50 most influential indie rock bloggers with one click.

What else does Google have up its sleeve?

There have been ongoing reports that Google is going to launch a separate music subscription service on YouTube, which makes about as much sense as having four separate messaging apps from the same company (but that didn’t really stop Google, either). Joyce didn’t want to go into any specifics. “YouTube is a great asset for Google,” he told me, and then added: “We will find exciting things to do together.” Maybe it won’t be two separate services, after all?

Google also plans to bring Play Music All Access to other countries “soon,” said Joyce. Countries that already have Google’s music cloud locker will be first on the list for an international expansion, and currently include the UK, France, Germany and Spain.

And finally, there is iOS. Joyce’s lips were sealed when I asked him about the potential of bringing the service to the competing mobile platform, but it would make a lot of sense, and follow Google’s overall theme of unification across mobile and desktop platforms. Of course, this would be the first time that any Play service was available on iOS – but I predict that Google will have to take that step if it wants to seriously compete with Spotify and Co.

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Earlier this year Lockheed Martin shared details of its implementation of a D-Wave Systems quantum computer, which reportedly cost $10 million: The contractor is using the computer to develop new aircraft, radar and space systems.

Now Google is taking steps at incorporating more quantum computing into its operations with the Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab, which will be located at the NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif. Researchers from the Universities Space Research Association will be able to use the machine 20 percent of the time, Forbes reports. That could lead to lots of interdisciplinary thinking and collaboration.

For Google, though, the goal of the initiative is to make strides in machine learning, according to a Thursday Google Research blog post. The best results could trickle down to end users, perhaps in search results and speech-recognition applications.

Quantum computing could mean smarter smartphones

Google has already assembled machine-learning algorithms that involve quantum elements, Hartmut Neven, a Google director of engineering, explained in the post:

One produces very compact, efficient recognizers — very useful when you’re short on power, as on a mobile device. Another can handle highly polluted training data, where a high percentage of the examples are mislabeled, as they often are in the real world.

It’s not hard to imagine how quantum computing could inform machine learning on a smartphone with just a drop of battery life left. It could be that a smarter smartphone one day will take a minuscule amount of input and determine with a high probability who a user wants to talk to or what information it needs right away, rather than forcing the user to cycle through a string of commands and risking the death of the battery altogether.

The applications might have arisen after Google’s earlier partnership with D-Wave, which came to light in a different blog post from Neven in 2009.

Google has already used machine learning to recognize faces and other things in photos and videos. New technology Google executives talked about at the Google I/O developer conference in San Francisco on Wednesday also appears to use machine learning to stitch together photos and clean them up.

What Google has learned so far is the best results come from blending regular binary computing using ones and zeros with quantum style computing. Quantum computing accommodates the space between a one and a zero with quantum bits of information, or qubits. It can express likelihood as well as take shortcuts by approximating when handling certain kinds of workloads. Given what Google has observed thus far, it could decide to build hardware combining quantum and classical computing capabilities.

For now, though, Google is diving deeper into quantum computing with the D-Wave machine. The move could kick off a sort of arms race for webscale companies to buy quantum computers and come up with new notions by way of probabilistic logic. In this way, Google could help push the development of quantum computing much like its invention of MapReduce changed the way firms do distributed data processing.

In any case, quantum computing has a long way to go before reaching commercial viability. That could take decades (so far it has). But because the organization at the helm of the quantum research is Google and not IBM or Bell Labs, regular people could start seeing much more of the advantages in just a few years’ time, which in turn could drive commercialization.

Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user pixeldreams.eu.

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“It’s easy to make big money when you get to keep all the profits,” the Glass Balcony post points out, before complaining about the impact of these low-outlay ways on real people:

“Relying on automated support systems is no longer adequate. As the amount of online fraud grows over the years, automated systems are becoming less efficient. There is no accurate measure for that, however it’s anecdotally known that it’s more common nowadays for Google to shut down perfectly well-standing and long-standing AdSense accounts for invalid activity without providing the actual reasons for shutdown. Ditto for PayPal withholding the funds of customers.”

We all marvel at how quickly these companies grow and at their bounteous financials, but we don’t often enough sit back and consider why it is these companies can perform so well.

A huge part of that is down to enabling technologies, from the web itself to cloud computing and, yes, natural language processing and other technologies that will make automated customer service more useful and reliable. But that’s only part of the picture.

At this stage in the game, these companies are playing by different rules to everyone else. In the context of the post I mentioned above, customers are not customers: instead, they are users. If the exchange of money isn’t central to the relationship, as it is with an e-commerce operation such as Amazon, then customer support becomes an afterthought – after all, most of the users aren’t paying with anything more than their personal data anyway, so what should they expect?

But that’s only one facet. Pull back, and this iconoclasm becomes even more concerning.

Taxing times

I’m not suggesting that Amazon, Google and Facebook are breaking any laws, but they certainly don’t pay much tax either, relative to their revenues. In Europe, this is becoming a big issue, which is unsurprising given our current age of austerity. After all, if small businesses are struggling in this economic and technological environment, is it really fair that the megacorps taking their business away (particularly in retail) are so big and international that they don’t have to play by the same rules?

Bear in mind that Amazon is supposedly operating at a loss. The company’s margins are so low that it can destroy most competition, yet it somehow continues to expand. If the company paid taxes at the rate that small businesses need to, this situation would be entirely unsustainable.

The economic benefits for anyone other than Amazon are sometimes hard to see. Small businesses that would have paid their taxes in full are going under, and those public revenues are not being replaced. Of course these web giants are based somewhere – usually the U.S. – but their money often goes through a dizzying series of countries before it finds some tax haven where it can rest quietly. And from the companies’ perspective, why not? They operate everywhere; they can pick and choose.

That can sometimes lead to a sense that the web giants don’t feel beholden to any particular society. Consider these extraordinary quotes from Larry Page at yesterday’s Google I/O Q&A session:

“The pace of change in the world is increasing… We haven’t adapted mechanisms to deal with that. Maybe some of our old institutions like the law and so on aren’t keeping up with the rate of change that we’ve caused through technology. The laws when we went public were 50 years old. The law can’t be right if it’s 50 years old, that’s before the internet…

“We also haven’t built mechanisms to allow experimentation. There’s many exciting things you can do that you just can’t do because they’re illegal or against regulation. That makes sense, we don’t want our world to change too fast, but maybe we should set aside a small part of the world. I like going to Burning Man, for example, that’s an environment where people can try different things.”

Some have mocked Page for “wanting to start his own country”, but that risks missing Page’s point. He just sees Google as a special case that should enjoy at least limited exemptions from the rules that apply to smaller, pre-internet-style concerns. “If your rules weren’t written for us,” he seemed to say, “they shouldn’t apply to us.”

Competition

I sympathize with this view to a very limited extent: the pace of technological change does mean that regulators and legislators need to speed up their own operations if they want to keep up. Where Page and I part company, though, is that he wants Google to be hassled less and I want to see, for example, new data privacy laws that put meaningful and practical limitations on what companies such as his can do.

The great benefits of the free market system are supposed to be its enabling of genuine, merit-based competition and the resulting benefits to society. What we’re seeing here is a reduction in competition and variety, the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few giants, and the rise of players so big as to feel untouchable. The lack of genuine customer service mentioned at the start of this article is both symptomatic of this situation and one of its many drivers.

That sense of invulnerability and entitlement will affect us all, not only in terms of public finances, but in other fields too, such as data protection. These companies are worth more than many countries, and you can tell they know it.

In short, I’m worried about where this industry is going. I’m all for progress – I’d have chosen a strange field of journalism if that wasn’t the case – but perhaps it’s time to aim for a wider evaluation of what’s going on here. It’s not about being positive or negative. It’s about making sure that the massive societal changes this industry is effecting work out for the benefit of society as a whole.

After all, that’s why many of us are in this game to start with.

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