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Comment by nicklo | Hacker News Reader

I wonder what this means for computer vision startups like http://clarifai.com?

Its hard to compete with Google on a task like image classification when Google has immense computational resources, tons of data, and hoards of top researchers.

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Google has a long history of failing to productize otherwise brilliant technology. Google Analytics is free and yet Mixpanel, Kissmetrics, Intercom, and a whole raft of analytics startups appear to be thriving by solving specific problems. AI and Computer Vision is a big space.

I think you're forgetting the reason why Google Analytics is free. It's not to generate profit, it's to collect data.

His point still stands. With data as the focus, GA should be built in such a way that users don't see the need tyo use Mixpanel & others.

But that is not the case. Which suggest Google isn't that good at productivizing stuff.

They can pivot to selling their technology to company that doesn't want to the expose their data to public cloud providers, or become more like a consulting company for customized vision technology though.

Hi Nick! I think every startup considers "what if Google launches into direct competition with me" at some point. We've definitely been preparing for this day (oh, I work at Clarifai). From a sheer technology standpoint, Google is the big gorilla in the room. But, computational resources and data are basically commodities. What matters is what you do with the data - how you train the models (just like different media companies, each machine learning company has its own editorial voice when it comes to tagging), custom training and domain models, the level of service you provide to developers, the integrations you have with other services, etc. These are all things we feel like we do better, and we'll continue to make our API the most developer-friendly one out there. In the immortal words of Coach Taylor, "Clear eyes, full hearts, can't lose." :D

Oh and shameless plug here, if you want to try video recognition, the Clarifai API already does it: http://clarifai.com/

Forget new services, even a small change in their existing products by Google can destroy lot of companies. Everyone remembers how they ruined email marketing by caching gmail images.

While this is a great example of monopoly done right and I'm very happy they did so, it is also a lesson about being too dependent on third party solutions.

It was arguably a net-win for user privacy. Admittedly - it doesn't hurt Google to weaken other marketing channels but it's disingenuous to frame it this way without also pointing out that it's a lot more user-friendly than 'images in this email are blocked. click to enable'.

Similarly to https://xkcd.com/1172/, every change breaks someone's business model.

caching images prevents knowing the open rate; it doesn't prevent knowing the response rate on click actions. If people are reading your emails but not clicking, how is that valuable?

It's also valuable to know the open rate. If people aren't opening your email, maybe it means your email subject line isn't "zingy" enough. At least you could A/B test with different subject lines and see if it changed the open rate.

one annoying as crap thing is that it prevents images from working against my dev vpn

There are still plenty of successful email marketing companies.

From what I know, it's still possible to track Gmail opens and the change Google made in fact made it easier by making image loading default to on.

When you open an email with images, Google will proxy the request for the tracking image and then cache it. If each user has a unique tracking image, you know when it was opened. Google is not caching the images before the open so you do know that it was opened.

What you possibly lose is repeat opens which might end up with the cached image.

That seems like a loss, but with this change, Google turned on images by default. So you get loads of Gmail users loading images by default rather than the old way where many more people would be loading your message with images off.

MailChimp has a little write-up about it: https://blog.mailchimp.com/how-gmails-image-caching-affects-...

tl;dr: Google's change didn't stop marketers from knowing you opened the email, but did potentially block cookie sending, IP address information, referrer information, etc.

Even a change in the pricing of say, the Google Places API (previously part of Maps, now billed differently) can cause drastic effects. I wonder if anyone at Google realise how much power they wield.

They won't be the only ones with this tech forever. In so much as a solution depends on "cleverness" rather than raw computing power, it'll have room for competition. They put a lot of effort figuring out what works and what doesn't but now that they have a product, the lesson is out and will be recreated by others. Google is leading, but they have also shown the direction to go and provided something to benchmark against.

> In so much as a solution depends on "cleverness" rather than raw computing power, it'll have room for competition.

Unfortunately, it's looking more and more like it's going to be a competition on training data and raw computational power, and it's hard to compete with Google's corpora from the web, gmail, captchas, maps, etc. -- not to mention Google's tremendous number crunching resources.

What other data sets exist that would be on par with Google's web/gmail/maps/etc. data sets for training models? Is there a chance Google would every make a version of their data sets available to the public?

At least right now there aren't many other places that have as much data flowing through them, or at least as much almost unrestricted access to data (for example, Amazon has plenty of data but very little legal access).

And possibly, though for privacy reasons in a much more filtered down form (see the word2vec Google News dataset). I find it unlikely for private data though.

The solution for those startups may be to target more specific solutions and smaller niches instead of aiming for "general" classification and image tagging solutions.

Could be any kind of niche, from specific industries (utilities, media, transport...) to specific use cases (I don't have many in mind, one could be https://sightengine.com). Ideas welcome :)

They can focus on selling their product to EU companies, with the guarantee that the data never gets into the hands of NSA, GCHQ, etc?

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