Hexacta Blog » Google

Google acquired Motorola Wireless for 12,500 million dollars

Andrea Sanchez — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 19:53:44 +0000

The atmosphere in the current market is odd and unpredictable. Google´s Android mobile OS emerged and started growing to an unexpected extent, comfortably exceeding Apple. In the last quarter, 50% of smartphones sold worldwide use Android, compared to 20% of IOS, the system of the iPhone and iPad.
But, which are the main reasons that explain this move? Why Google decided to buy Motorola?
1-Patents: by buying Motorola, Google acquires around 17.000 patents. This will allow Google to defend against an avalanche of lawsuits to its Android software, used in more than 150 million mobile devices worldwide.
2-Hardware division: Google needs a hardware division. Its own business, software and advertising, is much more profitable, but it is also volatile. Motorola has the know-how, the procedures and the engineering to manufacture devices. Google is now in a much more robust position than before. They have a wide spectrum of possibilities: smartphones, tablets, televisions connected to the web, etc.
3- Knowledge of the mobile business: Google already tried to produce their own smartphones (Nexus) and the results were poor, not because of the quality of the phones but because of their lack of knowledge of the mobile business. Motorola will provide the expertise of 40 years in the business.
4-Position in the market: Google is now placed in a new position in a battle where it competes at the same time with Microsoft, Facebook and Apple. Its already proven ability to seduce with services will now be reinforced with a hardware division.
The future will only tell if Google will respect Motorola´s culture or if they will try to inject their own. If they go for the second option then they would have only bought a package of patents. But if, instead, they allow Motorola to keep making what they do best, telecommunications engineer, they could have done one of the best transactions.
Nevertheless this represents some risks for Google: leaving the familiar field of software manufacturing to venture in hardware, a business where competition is ruthless. Also this implies to manage manufacturing facilities, inventory, network operators and retailers.
In my opinion, one of the main risks Google faces is attempting against its own business if it alienates with those partners that helped Android to have the greater participation in the global market of OS for smartphones. “Google is in the business of providing software to hardware manufacturers and buying one of those manufacturers won´t be received by the others in the best way” said Charles Golvin, Analyst in Forrester Research. Companies such as HTC Corp and Samsung Electronics Co. that resorted to Android as a way of competing with Apple, probably will balance their bets by creating more devices using the operating system for mobile, Microsoft Corp.
Google announced that the point of the transaction is to boost Android for mobile devices. But only time will tell if this move brings successful results to Google and how the mobile map will be altered.

Hexacta at GoogleDevFest Argentina

Laura Lowenthal — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 20:13:38 +0000

For the past few years, Google has been hosting DevFest events in several cities all over the world. It’s a couple of days where developers, designers and other software professionals get together to hear the latest on google technologies and related topics, straight from the engineers who work on them.

On November 1st and 2nd, we had the second edition of the DevFest in Buenos Aires. Hexacta sent around five or six excited participants each day — I got to be there on day one.

Android and Internet computing caught the focus this year. The event featured a number of presentations on Android, Chrome and HTML5, Application Engine and GWT. Not all of them were purely technical: we also heard tips and guidelines on how to make the most of these products to build great applications (and hopefully sell them, too!). We will be writing all about it on our IT Blog.

I really enjoyed attending this event. The presentations offered well-chosen contents in a clear way. The speakers did an amazing job charming their non-English audience and keeping them interested, even when things got rather technical. Organization was spotless. And of course, as everything that comes from Google, the event was just plain cool.

However, I left with the feeling of wanting more from it. Experiences like these often have the problem of being “too unidirectional”. Even when there’s room of Q&A, which wasn’t the case for all presentations, it is not enough for the attendants to feel they are getting something valuable for their time. ‘I could have just watched this online’, was the most usual comment I got when I asked around for impressions.

I don’t exactly agree with that — there is still something different about the personal experience, plus, do you really take the time to watch a 45-minute talk online? — but I do get the point. Events such as this one need to become more participative. Ask people for their opinions, test their knowledge with exercises, make them stand, move around, or anything that will encourage them to stay active. Especially if you’re Google, one the most innovative companies in the world! I hope next year they’ll get creative not only in product, user experience or methodology, but also on how to make their DevFests truly unforgettable.

Google DevFest 09

admin — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 15:12:38 +0000

17th of November was a very cool day, i could enjoy the Google DevFest 2009 in Argentina and i will share you some exiting thinks from this event.

Some news about Google Apps

Google is working in a lot of new stuff, one of them is the improvement of the GEO API. The 3th version of Javascript API for Google Maps is growing up faster and its focused on speed browsing and will bring us some new cool feautres.

Android is hitting the 2.0 version and this week Motorola is bringing to the market a new cellphone with this operative system.

Others topics they talked about are Google App Engine, Google Wave, Open Social, Google Chrome Extensions and HTML 5.

DevFest09 documents