3 Indians among key people who run Google

NEW DELHI: NikeshArora — till recently Google's chief business officer, and also its highest paid executive — is moving on, but an influential tech troika of Indian engineers will continue to shape the future of the $60 billion global search giant. 

Amit Singhal, Sundar Pichai and Sridhar Ramaswamy are responsible for the nuts and bolts that power Google. The trio reports directly to Google co-founder & CEO Larry Page. They are part of what is popularly called the L-Team at Google — 'Larry's team', not leadership team. They drive innovation, are responsible for new products and most of Google's 40,000 employees report to them. 

All three are senior vice-presidents, as was Arora. They are among the top eight executives at Google. 

Ramaswamy, who is responsible for all the engineering behind Google's ad products, has the largest team of engineers under him. Advertising is basically how Google makes all its money. 

Singhal, who runs search, is also a 'Google Fellow', a much revered designation within Google given only to its top scientists. He is building intelligence into the search algorithm to ensure that results are as accurate as possible. 

Pichai runs the current hot businesses: Chrome, Android and Apps and is responsible for their development and building global partnerships to market them. 

Pichai — who was once considered as a contender for Microsoft's top job, which went to insider Satya Nadella in February this year — was put in charge of Android in 2013, making him one of the most powerful technology executives in the world. 

Android, the mobile operating system is used by more than 70% of world smartphones. 

"Pichai has deep technical expertise, a great product eye, and tremendous entrepreneurial flair.This is a rare combination, which is what makes him a great leader," Google founder Larry Page said in a recent interview to Bloomberg Businessweek. 

Google does not disclose the compensation of the trio nor does it reveal the value of stock options held by them. 

Could one of the three become CEO someday? Some feel the trio may have a better chance than Arora. 

"A product company banking on innovation to succeed will look at technology as a primary skill," says Ravi Venkatesan, former chairman, Microsoft India. 

Adds K Sudarshan, managing partner, EMA Partners International: "In Google kind of companies, technology is the backbone. Technology has to run in your veins." This troika has that advantage. Arora didn't. 

"Arora wouldn't have made it as CEO at a products company like Google; you need to be a top-notch engineer first," says a person familiar with the inner workings of Google. "It's possible that Arora hit a wall and decided to move on even though he did astoundingly well at Google," the person adds. 

Page is also young, only 41. Arora, an engineer, MBA and CFA spearheaded Google's growth globally and also headed the European operations. He was instrumental in building Google's ad service into the largest online ad business in the world. 

However, he didn't do coding or product development, the core of Google, and the skills that the three Indians possess. Vineet Nayar, former CEO, HCL Technologies believes the choice of a CEO is determined by two factors. 

First, what is the source of biggest competitive advantage for the firm? Second, which leader is best positioned to leverage that value proposition to drive the company's growth?

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Flipkart crashes after Xiaomi Mi 3 goes on sale

NEW DELHI: Indian shopping site Flipkart crashed temporarily on Tuesday, minutes after Xiaomi's Mi 3 went on sale, as customers rushed to order the Chinese vendor's much-awaited Rs13,999 smartphone. The phone, which is only being offered through the site, was sold out in under 40 minutes, according to Xiaomi.

At around noon, when sales began, Flipkart site showed a 404 error, meaning the webpage wasn't found. An hour later it showed an out-ofstock message on the page promoting the device.

The price offered by the online retailer is about Rs1,000 lower than the Rs14,999 Xiaomi had announced at the launch earlier in the month. According to Xiaomi's Facebook page Mi India, the company got more than 100,000 registrations until July 21 from people seeking to purchase the Mi 3.

The Flipkart site said registrations for the phone will restart on July 28 and sales at noon on July 29. "The demand is much higher than anticipated. We have already started work on ramping up the supply chain to meet the demand for the Mi 3 and for other devices. We are still figuring out ways to handle the future demand," Manu Kumar Jain, head of Indian operations at Xiaomi told ET.

"We will ensure that customers who missed out on today's sale are automatically registered to buy a Mi 3 on 29th," Jain added.

In a separate statement, Flipkart said the company had anticipated a traffic spike and scaled up its services, but the number of customers who logged in immediately after the sale went live caused the process to slow down for a while. "We are expanding our capacity in order to provide a smoother shopping experience the next time."

The Flipkart website had previously experienced similar issues when it offered Motorola's Moto E smartphone for sale. That and the Moto G were launched in India solely through Flipkart.

Jain said the company is working with Flipkart to ensure the technical issues are resolved. "We underestimated the demand we would receive and we are taking steps to ramp up the supply as soon as possible."

Flipkart and Jain didn't comment on the number of units sold in India, but a person familiar with the matter said that Xiaomi has brought very low numbers under 10,000 of the smartphone to India. Jayanth Kolla, analyst founder at Convergence Catalyst, believes that bringing a small stock could be a part of Xiaomi's strategy to get the initial response.

"We have seen in China Xiaomi bringing in very low numbers of devices for the first three days just to get the feedback... It seems that the company's strategy is working for them," he said, adding that Xiaomi is targeting the urban audience.

The price of Rs13,999 pits Mi 3 against mid-segment devices such as the Moto G and BlackBerry's new Z3 device. The Moto G and the Moto E were big hits in India while Z3 is also having a decent run. Flipkart has sold close to one million Moto G smartphones in the country, an insider said.

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Infosys, Wipro look to build ‘next-generation’ boards with tech visionaries and corporate leaders

The hunt is on at two of India’s biggest software companies — Infosys and Wipro — for tech visionaries and corporate leaders who can join their boards and reinvigorate them after the exit of several old-timers and co-founders later this year.

While the board of Bangalore-based Infosys will be made up of non-founders for the first time in history, cross-town rival Wipro too is looking to replace at least three of its directors who are set to retire in a few months.

According to several people briefed on the profiles of potential candidates who could be inducted in these boards, technology vision, strong corporate representation from Europe and deep financial and audit skills are among the qualities being sought by the chairmen and nominations committees of Wipro and Infosys.

“The idea really is to build the next generation board that brings the kind of thought leadership and bold insights needed to remain competitive,” said a person familiar with the search for board members at Wipro. He said with a former SAP board member retiring, there’s strong interest in getting a global technology leader on the board. “When you are in the fast-changing technology business where Silicon Valley speed is the benchmark, you need people on the board who can vet newer plans and even identify the next big bets,” he added.

Last month, three of Wipro’s independent directors, Henning Kaggermann, BC Prabhakar and Shyam Saran, resigned. By next year, Wipro veteran Suresh C Senapaty too is expected to retire, leaving scope for a generational change at the company’s highest decision making body.

At Infosys, with the founders gone, only one of its independent directors — former Microsoft India chairman Ravi Venkatesan — has any tech industry background. “In the business Infosys is, you need a far higher proportion of leaders who understand the world of tech,” said the person familiar with the discussions.

Another key priority for Infosys would be to get somebody senior from Europe, and that’s despite the company’s new CEO Vishal Sikka coming from SAP, among the biggest and most influential companies from the region.

“With somebody of Sikka’s stature on board, especially given his strong European background, you actually need somebody capable of even questioning his strategies, somebody who can bring expertise from Europe,” the person added.

Experts such as Partha Iyengar, principal analyst at Gartner, said the boards of Infosys and Wipro have far greater role to play going forward. “If they don’t act fast, the growth will be stymied and we could see them going downhill in 5-7 years,” Iyengar said. “They need leaders with expertise in finance, a nutsand-bolts person who knows the business inside out and a visionary who can challenge the comfort zones.”

Over years, the founders of these companies brought leaders who they knew well enough and who brought strong governance skills. But now, these companies need business inputs and course corrections from visionaries in the industry.

“Earlier, the assumption was that no business inputs were needed, and the role of the board was mainly governance, but with the core business itself looking less predictable, this may be a time to get people who can give good business inputs,” said Rishikesha Krishnan, a professor of corporate strategy at IIM Bangalore.

Both Infosys and Wipro have been losing revenue growth to aggressive rivals TCS and Cognizant Technology Solutions over past few years. Experts have pointed out management stability as the single biggest reason for this polarisation between leaders and laggards in India’s over $100-billion IT industry.

“Both these companies already have adequate governance expertise on their boards, what they need now are specific and long ignored skills of sales, marketing, technology and connect with the next generation,” said a board member at one of the biggest Indian IT firms. 

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Google Play Game Services: The bad, the good, and the great

Android developer William J. Francis provides first-hand tips for using Google Play Game Services. 

For those of you who have teenagers, you probably know that sometimes it can be hard to relate to each other. My son is sixteen, and there aren't a lot of things that I'm interested in that he is also keen on and vice versa. An exception is a few years ago we discovered we both have a love for building video games. It is how we find some common ground, usually at the coffee shop on a Sunday afternoon.

Last week we released a brand new game for Android called Melodious (and I'm not ashamed to say he did most of the heavy lifting). I've previously written about the merits of gamifying an app and some of the features of Google Play Game Services (GPGS). This most recent project gave me an ideal opportunity to do a deep dive into GPGS. While it was still fresh in my mind, I decided to share some observations with my fellow Android developers.

The bad

It's not cross-platform in practice.

What's this? Doesn't it say right on the GPGS home page "build games for Android and iOS"? It does. From a technical perspective, GPGS is cross-platform -- but it hinges entirely on a user's Google+ account, which is why the iOS version of Melodious uses Apple Game Center (AGC). Let's face it, you're not going to get an iPhone owner to install Google+ on her device just so she can compete on a leaderboard -- not when all her other games and friends are on AGC.

The most difficult part of setting up GPGS is linking your app and creating the IDs for it.

I'm not sure why, but this seems to be common with Google APIs, particularly when it comes to application IDs and SHAs. There is a long-winded tutorial that will guide you through the process. Just be aware you'll have to follow it from start to finish with an attention to detail, and even then you may find yourself starting over a couple of times.

Almost everything you create in the GPGS console will live forever.

This was one of the most frustrating parts of the process in my opinion. There seems to be no way of resetting scores, achievements, etc. after you do your testing besides creating entirely new leaderboards and achievements -- at least through the web console. This is a feature officially requested nearly a year ago, but I was unable to find any evidence of progress by the GPGS team.

The good

Once everything was set up on the console, integrating GPGS into the app went really fast.

With both a rest API and a native Android SDK, adding achievements and leaderboards into the app was fairly painless. I was quickly able to set and get high scores, as well as unlock player achievements.

GPGS takes care of a lot of state management for you.

The GPGS backend is pretty smart about ignoring extraneous calls. If, for instance, you send a user's score to a leaderboard that is lower than that player's current high score, it will simply get ignored. The same is true when unlocking achievements that have been flagged as only unlockable one time in the console.

In some cases, GPGS means you won't need a backend server.

I'm using GPGS as a means to sync player data across multiple devices. With free features like Cloud Save, in many cases, you'll find with GPGS that you don't need any server backing your app. I consider this a huge benefit for indy developers.

The great

The built-in UIs are pretty usable right out of the box.

You can create your own custom user interface (UI) to display leaderboards and to alert the user when he unlocks an achievement. The interface components the library can display without any customization are pretty decent looking. And unlike some of the previous Google components I've used, the designers have done a nice job of choosing neutral colors and semi-translucent backgrounds so that things tend to blend quite nicely.

If you use the built-in UI components, be sure you're calling the methods that present them (for instance when unlocking an achievement) on the UI thread; otherwise, they may not show up for your user.

Final thoughts

GPGS has some room for improvement. However, having used both GPGS and AGC recently, I definitely found it easier to work with Google's implementation; in particular, I was impressed with some of the UI components I got for free from the library.

It's too early to tell how much of a difference including GPGS in my new app will make in terms of overall usage and retention, but in my initial beta testing, leaderboards and achievements proved to be two of the most liked features.

Figure A

GPGS leaderboard overlaid on my app.

Figure B

GPGS achievements overlaid on my app.

Figure C

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An Investment Banker Made This Epic Presentation On The Future Of TV

Investment banker Terence Kawaja, founder and CEO of LUMA Partners, has a new, epic presentation on the future of the television industry.

He built this presentation after talking to people in the digital media business as well as people in the traditional "linear" television industry.

Kawaja's investment banking work focuses on digital media, with expertise is in the ad tech industry. (To get a sense of how connected he is in the ad world, check out his industry executive studded video from the Cannes ad festival.)

Unlike most digital people, though, Kawaja doesn't think traditional TV is dying, or about to be killed by digital media.

In the presentation, he says, "TV spend shows no sign of slowing down. Linear television, the one everyone says is going to die, is a growth industry. In fact, television is growing more in absolute dollars than the size of the entire digital video industry. "

However, he also says that if you were to slice off the last 7% of TV ad spending, which is arguably the least efficient, you would have enough money to support the entire digital video ecosystem.

He believes that digital and linear are on a crash course to converge. And, (naturally, as a banker) he believes there will be a lot of mergers and acquisitions that will bring the two together.

The presentation has Kawaja's captions/explanations under the slides. So, you can see what he thinks is going to happen.

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In Just Three Months, Facebook App Links Top 1 Billion Links Used

Last week, Facebook announced in a blog post that more than 1 billion App Links have been used by developers since the program's launch three months ago. App Links allow developers to introduce links on third-party mobile properties that, when clicked, open up the associated app on the phone, rather than opening the mobile browser site.

App linking - also called deep linking - has become an extremely important mobile trend recently. That's becauseuntil now there hasn't been a great way of communicating between different apps, even though apps are how mobile users overwhelmingly prefer to spend time on their devices.

BI Intelligence finds that of the 2 hours and 42 minutes per day that the average U.S. consumer spent on smartphone and tablet iOS and Android devices during the first quarter of 2014, 86% of that time was spent within apps.

Consider:

• That share of time-spend is up from an 80% share in the same period last year. In terms of average total time spent in apps, it grew from 2 hours and 7 minutes to almost 2 hours and 19 minutes.
• Growing app usage means users are spending less time on the mobile web. The mobile web's share of time spent fell from 20% to 14% year-over-year, and users now only spend about 22 minutes per day in mobile browsers.
• App usage growth outpaced total mobile time spent growth. Time spent in apps is up 9.5% from last year while total time spent on mobile devices is only up 2.5%.
• Mobile users now spend more time in the Facebook app (17%) than they do on the mobile web.

With Facebook's App Links program, the company is becoming a leader in deep linking. Increasingly, companies are looking to improve the experience of going between apps on phones to help users complete multi-step tasks. This is part of a broader trend toward mobile personalization - the effort to serve users the apps they want when they want them and make the transition between apps that much easier. In a recent report, BI Intelligence found that mobile personalization is an important mobile battleground right now. On Android, personalization apps saw a 1,325% increase in user sessions between early 2013 and early 2014.

BI Intelligence is a tech research service that closely tracks the mobile industry, providing in-depth analysis, reporting, and downloadable charts for subscribers.

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Deleted smartphone data can be easily recovered

WASHINGTON: Selling your used smartphone? Deleting files may not be enough!

Researchers from Prague-based security software company Avast said they were easily able to retrieve personal data from used smartphones sold online, despite consumers deleting their data.

From the used devices, Avast was able to recover more than 40,000 personal photos, emails, text messages, and - in some cases - the identities of the sellers.

"We purchased a variety of Android devices from sellers across the US and used readily available recovery software to dig up personal information that was previously on the phones," said Jude McColgan, President of Mobile at Avast.

"The take-away is that even deleted data on your used phone can be recovered unless you completely overwrite it," he said.

AVAST analysed 20 used smartphones whose previous owners had performed a factory reset or a 'delete all' operation on their devices.

The researchers were able to recover more than 40,000 stored photos, more than 1,500 family photos of children, more than 1,000 Google searches, over 750 emails and text messages, more than 250 contact names and email addresses, four previous owners' identities and one completed loan application.

"More than 80,000 used smartphones are for sale daily on eBay in the US. Along with their phones, consumers may not realise they are selling their memories and their identities," McColgan said.

"Images, emails, and other documents deleted from phones can be exploited for identity theft, blackmail, or for even stalking purposes. Selling your used phone is a good way to make a little extra money, but it's potentially a bad way to protect your privacy," added McColgan.

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