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Comment by verandaguy | Hacker News Reader

Is it completely naïve to believe that Google perhaps intends to use these acquisitions for genuine R&D rather than for analytics and data mining?

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I think there is an honest interest in expanding the telecommunications side of the company. This chart from Ben Evans really puts the market size in to perspective: http://static.squarespace.com/static/50363cf324ac8e905e7df86...

Google could probably double or triple their revenue from moving in to this space (margins won't follow, but that is a different issue.)

Definitely this. I think they want to replace Verizon/ATT with wifi to make Android phones even less expensive to get more eyes for advertising.

That's just stupid. If Google wants to replace Verizon/ATT it will have fuck all to do with advertising. It will be for the revenue from users handing them a handful of cash every month.

Companies typically want to diversify how they make money, and this is very obviously something Google desperately wants given that pretty much all their new businesses are around NEW revenue streams and not advertising.

For someone who's an expert about how companies work your grasp of profit margins and competition isn't the greatest ;)

In an average month I click approximately zero ads and I pay my mobile network operator $14 in cold, hard cash.

Perhaps Google want to diversify from advertising. Mobile communications would be one way of doing that.

I see your point and would like to agree to it, but no. Really, I wish Google was really interested in actually doing good. But their track record with this 'no-hire-from Apple' thing alone says otherwise. Yeah, the X guys may mean well, and yeah it might be really cool stuff, but I am super hesitant to think it's not just to track people better.

For example, look at glass. Yeah, it's got a marketing problem now, but the tech is right out of 'Snow Crash'. Its amazing! But that damn camera on it. I have a real suspicion they are just tracking where you look to get abetter idea of what ads attract people in real life. Its only a matter of time before they have a feature that tracks your eye movement and focus to help take pictures or whatever. And then what? They know what you are looking at in real time. So what? Well, I just don't get the 'don't be evil' vibe from that kind of data.

The battery in glass is tiny. If the camera was used to do what you say, the battery life would be measured in minutes, not hours.

Now this is why I come to HN, for comments like this. Thank you for the info, I just assumed that the battery was comparable to a cell-phone's, hours of life. This does change my opinion for the time. Once the battery comes up to the hours and days mark, then I'll worry again.

In addition to the short battery life, glass also get very hot when recording. It gets to the point that it hurts to wear after only a couple of seconds.

Even if the battery were comparable to a phone, the battery life would be measured in minutes if you left the camera on and recording all the time. The camera is the single largest consumer of battery on your phone (when in use).

It's not too hard to imagine that people who make the cultural leap to wearing Google Glass would be averse to adding the geeky pager-sized battery pack that will give them days of operation. I reckon your relief will be short-lived.

If you don't want to believe the impracticality of it, than just look at the pointlessness of it. Why waste pointless amounts of battery, network bandwidth, and heat dissipation, when the data gathered won't actually help increase ad revenue over and above using GPS, search, email, and other activities as a proxy for your interests.

The idea that they need to know what you're looking at to serve ads just doesn't make much sense.

They didn't hire from Apple because Steve Jobs told them to. Is it theoretically impossible to "do good without hiring from Apple"?

Also, 'more data = evil'. I don't see that very justified. And of course, they are not sending all that you are looking at to their servers. That is practically impossible right now.

To the first: No, of course not. But it does imply that they are (surprise) more focused on the bottom line and willing to adjust moral values for an extended time.

To the second: Its not that more data=evil, it's that 'evil' has broader access to you, your habits and potentially your kids and their habits, etc. I do not trust google all that much (I say this with a gmail account I use for work). It's not that I don't trust them, its that the data is powerful and can easily be used for unsavory activities. Also, practically impossible was an iPhone in 2003, but a mere 4 years later there it was. That Moore's law is really something.

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