Technology

Google complex lineup of ad products is getting rebranded.

Sridhar Ramaswamy, the senior vice president who leads Googlead efforts, explained the rebrand at a press event this morning, where he said the company has been getting &consistent feedback& over the past few years that the plethora of ad products and brands — assembled largely through acquisitions — could make it be confusing for advertisers.

&This is a primarily a name change, but it is indicative of where we have been directing the product& for the past few years, Ramaswamy said. He also said the rebrand points to &where we want the product to go.&

Moving forward, Googlead products will be divided up into three major brands. First, whatnow known as AdWords will become Google Ads, which Ramaswamy said will serve as &the front door for advertisers to buy on all Google surfaces,& whether thatsearch, display ads, YouTube videos, app ads in Google Play, location listings in Google Maps or elsewhere.

In this case, itnot just a name change. Google is also launching something it calls Smart Campaigns, which will become the default mode for advertisers. It allows those advertisers to identify the actions (whether itphone calls, store visits or purchases) that they&re prioritizing, then Google Ads will use machine learning to optimize the images, text and targeting to drive more of those actions.

The second brand is the Google Marketing Platform, which combines DoubleClick Digital Marketing and Google Analytics 360, the companyanalytics tools for marketers. Under that umbrella, Google is also announcing a new product called Display - Video 360, which combines features from DoubleClick Bid Manager, Campaign Manager, Studio and Audience Center.

Managing Director for Platforms Dan Taylor said the Google Marketing Platform is responding to a growing need for collaboration — for example, he said Adidas used the platform to bring its brand and performance marketing teams together with the measurement team.

The Marketing Platform includes a new Integrations Center where marketers can view all the ways they can different ways they can connect their Google tools. (And while the focus here is on integration within Googleplatform, Taylor said the company remains committed to interoperability with outside ad exchanges and measurement providers.)

The third brand is Google Ad Manager, a platform that combines Googlemonetization tools for publishers, namely DoubleClick Ad Exchange and DoubleClick for Publishers. In this case, Jonathan Bellack, director of product management for publisher platforms, said therealready been a &three-year journey& of merging the two products as the programmatic ad-buying becomes used across more types of advertising.

&These categories have just been breaking down for a while — all of our publishers already log into one user interface,& Bellack said. So the only thing thatreally changing is &the logo.&

One result of all this consolidation, and one that Ramaswamy described as &bittersweet,& is that the DoubleClick brand is going away. On the other hand, while they weren&t the focus of todayannouncement, the AdSense and Admob brands will continue.

The rebrand is expected to start rolling out in July. Ramaswamy and Taylor both emphasized that no product migration or training will be required.

&The look and feel is going to change a little bit, but the core functionality is not changing,& Taylor said.

Pet services can be serious startup business. Witness the likes of dog walking startupsRover and Wag, for example. At the same time digital health is a major area of interest for entrepreneurs, thanks to reliable demand meeting techdisruptive potential.

Well, SwedenFirstVet is dabbling in both — offering remote video consultations and advice for pet owners wondering if they should worry about their furry friendlatest bout of coughing/sneezing/vomiting, or whether that chocolate bar the dog snarfed when you weren&t looking is a cause for real concern.

As the name suggests, the niche FirstVet is looking to carve out is a pretty specific one — focused on first layer pet owner concerns which essential boil down to asking a qualified professional whether you really need to take Fido to the vet or not. So itmain competitor is probably Google search.

&We are a supplement to physical clinics rather than a substitute to them,& says CEO and co-founder David Prien. &The most common problems we help pet owners with are gastrointestinal questions, wounds, skin/fur/ears. Our main objective is to be the natural first point of contact for pet owners.&

True to his word, a note on FirstVetwebsite warns prospective customers: &If your pet is acutely ill or severely wounded you should always seek veterinary care immediately.&

&We really don&t want to be the party that pet owners turn to in real emergency cases and always refer them directly to physical vet clinics, we always make the medical journals available for both the clinic receiving the referral and pet owner directly after each consultation,& adds Prien.

The startup launched in 2016, and now claims around 60,000 registered users in its home market of Sweden — saying itanswered close to 4,500 calls in the month of June after slightly over a year on the market. Business has been growing 25 per cent month over month, it adds.

Prien says the price point for the service is set at about 30-40% of the starting fee for a physical vet visit in the market.

Which is still 30-40% more expensing than Googling symptoms — i.e. assuming you&re happy to ignore the risk of the free info you found online being entirely bogus.

While FirstVet intended to offer a b2c service, its route to market has been via partnerships with insurance companies who offer the service to their customers as a way to potentially reduce the risk of more major pet insurance payouts, or as a touchpoint for reaching pet owners who don&t have insurance cover and thus could be persuaded to sign up.

&What happened was that we quickly found that it made sense to collaborate with the insurance companies since it saves money for both them and the end customer,& says Prien. &The service is very popular amongst un-insured pet owners as well, and the share of uninsured pets using the service corresponds with the insurance penetration for each market so far.&

&We have collaborations in place with all eight active insurance companies in Sweden (where the insurance penetration is about 80%),& he adds.&And are currently launching new collaborations with three Finnish insurance companies as we speak.&

FirstVet is announcing a €5.1 million (~6M) Series A today, led by Creandum with participation from existing angel investors — which is says include experts in the telemedicine space.

The funding will be used for business growth and additional market expansion in Europe, with Norway and Denmark slated as &coming soon&. It says its plan is to launch into all the Nordic countries — along with &key European markets& that have high rates of pet insurance.

&Our aim to launch in at least one central European market during 2018,& adds Prien.

Asked whether ittaking a cut of vet visit fees for any referrals, he says not in its home region. Though his response to this question leaves a bit of wiggle room in markets where veterinary services have not been so consolidated.

FirstVet could face a competitive squeeze from on-demand vet startups which are operating in some European markets — such as the likes of UK startupPawSquad— which can send a qualified veterinarian to check out your pet at home. And doesalso offer its own 24/7 remote vet consultation option, including via video or text chats.

But Prien suggests FirstVetmodel offers pet owners the advantage of impartial advice — since itnot incentivized to generate a physical vet visit in cases where this can be avoided. Whereas home visit services might want to encourage visits to to grab a bigger fee.

&To have a truly independent source to turn to, no matter the time or place/if you&re insured or not, really provides great value for pet owners,& he argues. &Given that the market is fully privatized, we strongly believe that it is important not to make this type of service ‘dependent on the incentive of actually generating a physical vet visit when it potentially could be avoided (as many pet owners perceive vet visits as quite stressful, time consuming and expensive).&

While itstill early days for FirstVet, and itfocusing on market expansion, Prien says it is also looking into ways to expand the services it can offer pet owners by creating DIY tests which they could carry out to help with remote diagnostics.

&We&re currently in the very beginning of developing self-tests for pet owners to conduct from home together with a partner as well, that indicate super interesting results,& he adds.

Facebook has announced that it will no longer pursue its dream of building a gigantic, solar-powered plane to blast internet to underserved communities via laser. Surprisingly, itjust not practical.

In a news post on the companycoding sub-site, FacebookYael Maguire announced that &we&ve decided not to design or build our own aircraft any longer, and to close our facility in Bridgewater.& Closing the facility comes with the loss of 16 jobs specific to the development and maintenance of the aircraft, the company confirmed to TechCrunch, though plenty relating to other aspects of the project were unaffected.

The company will continue its work with partners, such as Airbus, to help advance &high altitude platform stations& (HAPS) like the Aquila.

The program has been underway since 2014 (the acquisition of Ascenta seems to have been its real start) and public since 2015, and had its first test flight in 2016 — resulting in a &structural failure,& hard landing and subsequent NTSB investigation. The second test flight was better, but far from perfect.

The craft itself, an enormous flying V that stayed aloft at extremely low power draw replenished by solar cells, seems to have worked quite well, actually, despite a few hiccups. But Facebook isn&t the only company looking to get into low-power, high-altitude communications craft.

&As we&ve worked on these efforts, itbeen exciting to see leading companies in the aerospace industry start investing in this technology too — including the design and construction of new high-altitude aircraft,& wrote Maguire.

Considering the considerable scale of investment required to build a craft like this from scratch, and the vast gap in expertise and core competencies between a social network and a veteran aerospace company, itnot surprising that Facebook decided to cut its losses.

The decision was preceded by a report from Business Insider that the project had more or less stalled: its head and chief engineer left last month after, from reading between the lines, efforts to double down on the project with a redesign and private hangar were rejected.

The Aquila plan, like other ambitious connectivity ideas, some still in the offing, was conceived in a period one might call &peak Facebook,& when it was at the height of its growth, before it attracted nearly the level of criticism it faces today, and when its goals were lofty in several ways.

No doubt the company plans to pursue &the next billion& in a way that isn&t quite so costly or unprecedented. Maguire does indicate that work will continue, just not in such a direct way:

Going forward, we&ll continue to work with partners like Airbus on HAPS connectivity generally, and on the other technologies needed to make this system work, like flight control computers and high-density batteries. On the policy front, we&ll be working on a proposal for 2019 World Radio Conference to get more spectrum for HAPS, and we&ll be actively participating in a number of aviation advisory boards and rule-making committees in the US and internationally.

Ithard to fault Facebook for its ambition, though even at the time there were plenty who objected to this extremely techno-utopian idea of how internet could be delivered to isolated communities. Surely, they said, and will continue to say, that money would be better spent laying fiber or establishing basic infrastructure. We&ll see.

I asked Facebook for more information, such as what projects specifically it will be backing, and what will happen to the IP and hardware the Aquila program comprised.

Although a Facebook representative declined to answer my specific questions, they emphasized the fact that the Aquila project was both successful and wide-ranging; although an actual aircraft will no longer be part of it (that duty falls to actual aerospace companies), there were many other advances in transmission, propulsion and so on that are still very much in active development. What exactly the company plans to do with those is still unclear, but we can probably expect news on that front over the next few months as the program adjusts focus.