Failed Google Products

In the tech world, failure is as much a feature of innovation as success. Google is known for its collection of wildly popular products, from Search to Maps to Android. But not everything the company touches turns to gold. Google Glass was supposed to change the world, but quickly became a punch line. The best innovations are the ones that everybody thinks are doomed to fail.

Orkut – It was a popular social networking service that grew out of a Googler's "20 per cent time" project. The site was more popular abroad than it was in the US. Google decided to kill it in September 2014. Google's Nexus Q, a streaming media player that was designed to connect all home devices, was unveiled with great fanfare at the company's 2012 developer conference. Google's virtual worlds only lasted a little over a year. Google said it created Lively because it wanted users to be able to interact with their friends and express themselves online in new ways," but it just didn't catch on. Lively was shut down in 2008.

iGoogle, a personalized homepage, was shut down in 2013. It allowed users to customize their homepage with widgets. Google said iGoogle wasn't needed as much anymore since apps could run on Chrome and Android. Originally intended to give people access to health and wellness information, Google Health was closed for good in January 2012 after Google observed the service was "not having the broad impact that we hoped it would".

The Google Play edition Android phone was introduced in the spring of 2014. But by January 2015, they were listed as "no longer available for sale" and a Galaxy S5 edition of the phone never materialized. Google first unveiled Glass in dramatic fashion in 2012, but the device never reached the masses. Glass came with a high price tag, software issues, and potential privacy problems and generally looked too nerdy. Google ended consumer sales of Glass in January 2015, but it is working on a new version now.

Google Buzz was a social networking service that was integrated into Gmail, but it was plagued with problematic privacy issues and never caught on. The company announced in October 2011 it would shut down the service to focus on Google+ instead. Google Answers was the first project Google worked on and started as an idea from Larry Page. Answers lasted for more than four years but stopped accepting questions in 2006.

Lessons Start-ups can learn from Corporate World

Many books and articles have been written on what corporates can learn from start-ups, how to build an agile culture, foster creativity in the team, and ship products quickly. However, the opposite is also true in many cases. There are areas that a start-up can learn from a well-run corporate. Implementing these lessons early on will help a start-up immensely along its journey to be a large well-managed company.

Team Management- The challenges of managing a team between a corporate and a start-up are not materially different. 

Performance Discipline- Performance spins the wheel whether in a billion dollar organization or a company with a few thousand dollars in revenue. Closing sales, managing leads, meeting customer demands, delivering a better experience — these are all part of an organization’s efforts to keep the lights on. 

Financial Discipline- Many start-up founders do not take the time to establish financial discipline and end up paying a high cost for this mistake. 

Board Governance- As start-ups continue to raise funds and have external investors, it needs to establish a proper governing board. A good board can be a powerful ally to the founder — board members can guide founders through difficult situations, make important introductions, and help raise next level of funds.

People Discipline- A founder spends a good portion of her time in recruiting and managing the people in her company. As the startup continues to accelerate, human resources become an important function for the success of the company.

Operations- Things change very quickly and the old way of managing operations do not work anymore. Founders of start-ups can borrow the processes and operational learning’s of the corporate world as they embark to scale.

Google Projects that could change the World

Google parent company Alphabet has so many projects cooking it can be difficult to keep track. But there are some that could truly change the world. Here are the mind-blowing projects.

The smart contact lenses project is run by Alphabet's Verily Company, which was originally named Google Life Sciences. The lenses could be solar-powered and collect biological data about the wearer. Sensors embedded in the contacts could collect information like body temperature and blood-alcohol content. The lenses could also have glucose sensors to measure sugar levels in your tears. 

Project Loon aims to provide internet access to rural areas and parts of the world where it's difficult to access the web. The balloons will fly 60,000 to 90,000 feet in the air, or two to three times higher than airplanes fly. They'll be powered by solar, allowing them to stay airborne for 100 days at a time. The balloons will beam LTE signals to the ground. 

Now run under Alphabet's Google X division, Makani Power makes an airborne device called an 'energy kite' to create renewable energy. An energy kite is equipped with rotors that help it lift off the ground. Once it's in flight, the wind forces the rotors to act like individual turbines. The system reportedly generates 50 per cent more energy than traditional turbines and uses 90 per cent less materials. 

The tech giant plans to beam the internet around the world using drones as part of its Project Titan. Dubbed the Titan Aerospace Solara 50, the drone can stay airborne for five years straight, thanks to the 3,000 solar cells on its wingspan.

About 1.24 million people worldwide die each year in collisions, with that number expected to rise to 2.2 million by 2030, according to the World Health Organization. But having driverless cars on the road can greatly reduce the number of accidents. Google's driverless cars are leading the industry, having driven over 1.7 million miles in autonomous mode since 2009. 

Google X The research team is developing tiny magnetic particles called nanoparticles that can attach to cells, proteins, or other molecules. Google X is also developing a wearable that would use a magnet to count the particles consistently. The system could provide an early warning system for cancer. 

Google's artificial intelligence could truly change the world as we know it. When Google's AI system AlphaGo beat a world champion at the complex game of Go, it garnered a lot of praise. If Google's AI continues to advance on the track it's on today, it could open a world of possibilities, like building conscious machines. 

Run by Calico, a company under Alphabet that stands for California Life Company, the project's researchers are looking at things like genes that correlate to longer lifespans in certain people. There's still very little information out there about what Calico is working on. 

Costs of Air Pollution

Air Pollution takes years off people’s lives. It causes substantial pain and suffering, among adults and children alike. And it damages food production, at a time when we need to feed more people than ever. This is not just an economic issue, it is a moral one.

Air Pollution can be produced both outdoors and indoors. For the poorest families, indoor smog from coal or dung fired cooking stoves is typically the more serious problem. As economies develop and start to electrify, motorize and urbanize, outdoor air pollution becomes the bigger issue. Cleaner technologies are available, with the potential to improve air quality considerably. But policymakers tend to focus myopically on the costs of action, rather than the costs of inaction.

The Economic Consequences of Outdoor Air Pollution estimates that outdoor Air Pollution will cause 6-9 Million premature deaths annually by 2060, compared to 3 Million in 2010. That is equivalent to a person dying every 4-5 seconds. Cumulatively, more than 200 Million people will die prematurely in the next 45 years as a result of air pollution. There will also be more pollution-related illness. New cases of bronchitis in children aged 6-12 are forecast to soar to 36 Million per year by 2060, from 12 Million today. For adults, they predict 10 Million new cases per year by 2060, up from 3.5 Million today. Children are also being increasingly affected by asthma.

These health problems will be concentrated in densely populated areas with high particulate matter (PM) concentrations, especially cities in China and India. In per capita terms, mortality is also set to reach high levels in Eastern Europe, the Caucasus region and other parts of Asia, such as South Korea, where ageing populations are highly vulnerable to air pollution.

The impact of air pollution is often discussed in dollar terms. By 2060, 3.75 billion working days per year could be lost due to the adverse health effects of dirty air. The direct market impact of this pollution in terms of lower worker productivity, higher health spending and lower crop yields could exceed 1% of gross domestic product, or $2.6 trillion, annually by 2060. On average, individuals would be prepared to pay around $30 to reduce their annual risk of dying prematurely by one in 100,000.

By that measure, the global cost of premature deaths caused by outdoor air pollution would reach a staggering $18-25 trillion a year by 2060. Arguably, this is not “real” money, as the costs are not related to any market transactions. But it does reflect the value people put on their very real lives. It is time for governments to stop fussing about the costs of efforts to limit air pollution and start worrying about the much larger costs of allowing it to continue unchecked. Their citizens’ lives are in their hands.