By Shubhi TandonHow often does it happen that you want to watch just that one video on YouTube, but the ones in the related videos tab are just too enticing to pull away? Well, this is what YouTube won an Emmy for in 2013 - for having a recommendation system that makes people want to spend more time on it. In a one-on-one with Businessworld, Cristos Goodrow, Engineering Director at YouTube, explains the origins of the recommendation system and how YouTube plans to be the hub for content discovery.About 80 per cent of views on YouTube come from outside of US. Asians are watching more hours of online video now than ever before. The number of hours Singaporeans spend on YouTube has doubled (110 per cent) in a year.Surfacing the right content for the users is a key task for YouTube as a content discovery platform. When Mr Goodrow joined YouTube in 2011, the company had launched a machine learning system to improve the recommendations system. "The objective of this system was to maximise the number of video views. So it took more views as a part of deciding recommendations," he explained.Why Focussing On Views Is WrongHowever, there was a catch in the system which focussed on views, that the team realised after the launch. "When we launched this in 2011, it was great as the views went up a lot and we were very happy about that as views were the metric that we had focussed on then. But as we started to look at the sessions, we noticed that some sessions would have more views, but actually, seemed to be the worst experiences for the viewers," Mr Goodrow explains.Many people would remember the days of related video suggestions on YouTube which looked very enticing, but were not the videos they expected them to be - as the headline and the image would be very misleading. Giving an example, Mr Goodrow explains, "We were looking at a session in which a user would have searched for a boxing match. At the top of the search results, they found what looked like a video of the boxing match. The thumbnail was very compelling - but when you click it what you saw was not the actual video of the fight, but someone talking about the fight. The user would watch the video for a minute or 30 seconds, and realise that this video would not have any footage of the actual fight."These videos found their way to the top of the related videos list because of the system relying on the number of views as the metric. "The user clicked on four videos before he finally got to the actual video about the fight," he adds.This got the team re-evaluating the recommendation system as they realised the system actually caused this as it put more such obstacles between the viewers and what they were looking for - because each one of them got counted as a view and thus led to maximising the views."We were so focussed on the views. This system was like catching a rocket booster for your product and whatever direction you point it in, it was going to go much faster in that direction. So if you have not pointed it in the right direction, you are going to be way off very quickly and that is where we were headed," Mr Goodrow opines.If Not Views, Then What?While rethinking the metric for the recommendation system, the team landed on the notion of 'time spent' by users on watching a video. "People's time is precious to them and if they are spending more of their time on YouTube, it is an indication that YouTube is more important to them and is providing more value to them," Mr Goodrow asserts.In March 2012, YouTube took the gamble of moving its metric from views to time spent - which Mr Goodrow remembers was a scary moment. "The whole company had applied its focus on this metric earlier and how we got them to go up. Now we were going to purposely drop them by a very significant amount in one day because we now wanted to focus on something else," he adds. The views fell by almost 20 per cent in a day (as the graph below shows).But ultimately the gamble paid off as YouTube witnessed the second largest increase in watchtime (the first one was when the company changed the Search system to Google). Most of the videos that had misleading thumbnails and titles also started to disappear.On Competition & Rise In ViewershipWhile YouTube has changed its focus on views as a metric, there has been a lot of talk in the past one year about Facebook's video platform increasingly catching up. Interestingly though, Facebook's statistics are focussed on the number of views it has - which stand at four billion daily video views.YouTube, however, has not released the number of daily views since 2012, but its official figures do highlight a growth in watch time."The competition is surely growing, but remarkably this growing competition in the video space has led to a growth for YouTube. It has been a great thing for us - but we can't relax, we must work as hard as we can," said Mr Goodrow.The number of hours people spend watching videos on YouTube is up 60 per cent year-over-year, the fastest growth for the company in two years. The number of people watching YouTube per day is up 40 per cent year-over-year since March 2014. The number of users coming to YouTube who start at the YouTube homepage is up more than three times year-over-year.Once users are on YouTube, they are spending more time per session watching videos. On mobile, the average viewing session is now more than 40 minutes, up more than 50 per cent year-over-year. The number of hours people spent watching videos on mobile is up 100 per cent year-over-year."In the past year, the overall viewership on YouTube has not only increased, but it has accelerated. We are in a very competitive market and the competition has increased and so has the growth of our viewership," he added.Mr Goodrow attributes the growth to the recommendation system and also the revamping of the YouTube homepage to make it more compelling. "In the past year, the number of people who came to YouTube, had just opened it up or turned it on and without having to search clicked on a video on the homepage itself - that has increased almost three times. So I think that also plays a role in increasing the amount of viewership as we know that users who come to YouTube directly tend to watch a lot more," he said.YouTube Of The FutureThe video platform works on the premise that the platform has a 100 hours of content for every person, and Mr Goodrow feels it's the job of his team to make sure that people find it. "Our aspiration is to be the Holy Grail of recommendation systems," he says.Mr Goodrow's team is now looking to have YouTube suggest videos, that users have not shown an interest in before, but would like to watch. "The thing that keeps people from watching more YouTube is that they can't imagine all the great videos that are there on YouTube - it does not occur to them that YouTube would also have videos on other things they are interested in," he says.He concludes, "Somehow we have to figure out a way to help viewers find videos that they didn't even know would be on YouTube. We don't know how to do that very well yet - but that is where our aspiration is - how can we make the platform so that the user does not have to put in any energy and yet somehow we show them some suggestions that they actually love."
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A venture capital fund backed by Reliance Industries Limited and a US-based technology firm have signed an agreement to bring into India cutting-edge software technologies that analyse complex, dynamic systems through physics-based pattern recognition. Reliance-backed GenNext Ventures and Ecorithm's partnership was announced on the sidelines of the inaugural India-US Strategic and Commercial Dialogue. Ecorithm's powerful suite of technologies can be applied to build systems and various other enterprise solutions to improve operations, optimise systems and minimise energy use, a media release said. With 400 million sq ft of Class A Buildings in India and over 100 million sq ft under construction (Cushman & Wakefield, Marketbeat Office Snapshot Reports, 2015), India presents a significant opportunity to scale Ecorithm's technologies, it said. "We have evaluated multiple energy management technologies from across the globe, and Ecorithm is clearly the next generation in building energy management," said Vivek Rai Gupta, Managing Director, GenNext Ventures. "As we bring Ecorithm into India, we are keen to deploy the technology to optimise the energy efficiency of our buildings and raise the standard of environmental design and operation for buildings and enterprises to global levels," he said. The global research and consulting firm Frost & Sullivan recently awarded Ecorithm with their 2015 Visionary Innovation Leadership Award.
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VSN International, a silver partner of Microsoft, is on track to grow its business by more than 200 per cent over the next 12 months. This growth will be powered by adoption of Microsoft Office 365 by its customers. Office 365 offers SMBs productivity tools that help customers to increase collaboration amongst employees without the hassle of managing expensive IT infrastructure. Some of the applications available under Office 365 include Exchange Online for email; One Drive for data storage and Skype for Business for video conferencing, in addition to office applications like Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook.VSN International has been building on its cloud capability with Microsoft, offering enterprise-grade, highly secure and scalable Office 365 services to SMBs that can enhance business efficiencies and collaboration. As per a recent research commissioned by Microsoft and conducted independently by the Boston Consulting Group (BCG), a global management consulting firm and a leading advisor on business strategy- SMBs that decided to take the IT plunge created more new jobs and more revenue growth over the past three years compared to SMBs that trailed in this regard. The BCG study, ‘Ahead of the Curve: Lessons on Technology and Growth from Small Business Leaders’ found that if more SMBs in India adopt the latest IT tools, there is potential for this sector to grow revenues by $56 billion and create as many as 1.1 million new jobs.“Technology provides significant opportunities for SMBs to achieve their business goals and make use of self-provisioned cloud solutions to meet their IT needs. Our pay-as-you-go model of cloud availability benefits SMBs from a scalability and affordability perspective” said Manohar Hotchandani, Director, Business Development, Microsoft India. “We are committed to work closely with our partners to enable customers be more productive, and will continue to enhance the capacity and capability of our partners to help them deliver superior value to customers”, he added.As per a report by the Ministry of Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs), Government of India, Madhya Pradesh is one of the ten leading states in terms of enterprises, with 19.33 lakh registered MSMEs. Supported by the right technology, these enterprises have immense growth potential in the country as well as globally. Recognizing this potential, Microsoft is enabling its partners to help them embrace the latest in technology. It is also training and up-skilling its partners like VSN International to help them in their business journey.Amit Bidasaria, Managing Director, VSN International, said, “Organisations recognize the need for a robust IT infrastructure to scale up their business to gain competitive advantage. With Microsoft Office 365, we have been able to address the IT needs of diverse verticals over the last year and we see tremendous potential for businesses in the upcoming year as they take their first step in the cloud.”Microsoft partners have the most complete cloud portfolio and are in a position to offer a holistic cloud solution addressing all the business needs of their customers. This offers significant value to customers as it provides them the flexibility to plan, purchase, deploy and manage their entire IT roadmap with the help of their trusted local partner. Partners are enabled to ‘do more’ for their SMB customers by exploring the potential of bringing in enterprise grade Microsoft cloud services to them at an affordable cost.
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International Data Corporation (IDC) identifies the top 30 IT services providers in the Asia/Pacific (excluding Japan) (APEJ) region in revenue terms for CY 2014 in its new report, “Asia/Pacific Leading IT Services Providers 2015 Competitive Profiles and Analysis (AP257546)."The study covers an overview of the IT services market, go-to-market strategy, detailed revenue breakdown and IDC’s view on strength, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of the top 10 IT services providers in the region. The IT services revenue is based on the latest "IDC Asia/Pacific Semiannual IT Services Tracker, 2H 2014 (IDC_P10614)."IDC research indicates that half of the top 10 IT services providers’ revenue declined in 2014 including the top 3 IT services providers, IBM, HP and Samsung SDS — reflecting a structural change in the market. The emergence of 3rd Platform technologies (i.e. cloud, social, analytics and mobility), and particularly cloud services, has increased price pressures on traditional asset intensive markets such as IS outsourcing or hardware support and deployment services market.The study also identified Huawei, Telstra, and Atos as the three fastest growing companies in the top 30 list. In addition, it highlighted the emergence of strong India and China players like TCS, Pactera, and 21Vianet that are looking to expand their reach in the region.“With the emergence of 3rd Platform technologies, it disrupts the way IT services are delivered and consumed. We are seeing a number of top IT services providers experiencing revenue decline over the past two years”, said Cathy Huang, IT Services CIS Program Lead, IDC Asia/ Pacific.Another author of this report, Sherrel Roche, IT Services Senior Market Analyst said,"The APEJ IT services market is at an interesting juncture and is seeing the rise of resilient India and China players looking to build their presence in the region. The challenge hence for global IT services vendors is twofold — one from the emergence of these Asian players but more importantly the need to innovate to keep up with 3rd Platform technologies such as cloud."“Citing from Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution — it's not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one that is most adaptable to change. We believe that only the services providers that acknowledge the changing market dynamics and take actions in responding to those changes will survive and thrive,” Cathy Huang continued.IDC recommends that IT services providers must transform their businesses to enable their customers as they embark on digital transformation journeys of their own. Services providers will need to be equally focused on optimizing the business they can generate in their traditional areas of strengths through aggressive cost management, greater optimization, and increased automation.(BW Online Bureau)
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Google on Monday (21 September) announced the launch of a programme to offer Android Nanodegrees in India in partnership with Udacity.The Android Nanodegree is an education credential that is designed to help developers learn new skills and advance their careers in a few months from anywhere on any device at their own pace. As a part of the programme Google and Tata Trusts will offer 1,000 scholarships for the Android Nanodegree to deserving students across the country.With India being the second largest developer population in the world with 3 million software developers, India has the potential to become the #1 developer population by 2018, with 4 million developers. By providing easy and affordable access to a world-class skill and educational program to Indian developers, Google aims to help India become a global leader in mobile app development.The Udacity Android Nanodegree programme comprises of courses developed and taught by expert Google instructors from the Google Developer Relations team and will include project reviews, mentorship and career services from Udacity. The curriculum will be updated regularly with new releases and will provide developers with a certificate that will help them to become a more marketable Android developer.Rajan Anandan, VP & Managing Director, Google South East Asia & India said, “While India has millions of software developers, we still lag behind in creating world-class apps. With the launch of this program we want to bridge the gap by providing India’s developer community an easy access to learn and build high quality apps for the world. Today, only 1% of apps built in India feature in the top 1000 apps globally and our goal is to raise this to 10% in next three years. We’re pleased to announce, that Google along with Tata Trusts will offer 500 free scholarships each to developers for Android Developer Nanodegree programme.”The Udacity Android Nanodegree programme is open for enrollment right now. It takes an average of 6-9 months and costs Rs 9,800 per month with Udacity returning 50 per cent of the tuition upon completion.(BW Online Bureau)
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Crown-it, a restaurant retail cashback app, has raised Rs 34.5 crore in May this year from venture capitalists Accel Partners and Helion Venture Partners. The company, which is a marketplace for local businesses, helps consumers discover local merchants and drives business to those merchants.According to FICCI Grant Thornton survey, the Indian food and beverage sector, which is currently growing at 23 to 24 per cent annually, is likely to touch Rs 3.80 lakh crore by 2017. In an interview with BW | Businessworld's Haider Ali Khan, Crown-it founder and CEO Sameer Grover talks about the company's future plans and many more things. Edited excerpts: The market has changed a lot since your inception in 2014, where do you stand now?We have grown exponentially since our inception in March 2014. Over the period of one year, we now have a presence in 7 cities with over 10,000 listed local merchants, a strong user base of over 300,000 on Android, iPhone and Windows. We are one of the largest curated deals offering company in the market today. What is the size of your company in terms of capital?We had started with angel investments of around half a million dollars. Crown-it then raised series-A funding of $ 5.5 million from Accel Partners and Helion Ventures in May 2015. What is the response of consumers? How many active users you have?The response of the consumers is overwhelming. Customers are having fun collecting and sharing crowns. We have been able to create a habitual set of consumers. We have over 3 lakhs users in Delhi-NCR. Our consumer app metrics are one of the best in the industry today. We have 3 monthly transactions per active user and 9 weekly app opens per active user. Are you going to increase your chain, with more stores and outlets?We have over 10 thousand plus merchants across India and we are definitely going to increase as we enter into new cities and new categories. There are other players like Payback, Foodpanda etc. Why should a customer prefer Crown-it?We provide a curated deal offering to the consumers based on their spending and eating out habits, interests and other social data. The personalized offering is something coupons will never be able to provide. We have a very strong and innovative referral program that is exciting and fun for the consumers. We also provide an avenue for the consumer to spend this saving which is credited to a closed wallet to get mobile talk-time, bill payments, online shopping, movie tickets and charity etc. Any plan to shift outside F&B sector? And your future expansion plan?We have already expanded into the beauty and health segment. We are planning to enter into 7 categories, including weekend getaways, apparels and airlines by the end of 2015. How is your monthly business right now?We are driving a monthly Gross Merchandise Volume (GMV) of $ 3 million at present. We have a target to achieve a couple of million users and monthly $ 25 million GMV by March 2016 ($300 million annual run rate GMV). The company is on its path to have 20 million users and drive $1.2 billion of annual GMV across 25 cities in India by 2018.
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By Steve BlakemanAfter a decade of use, Google ditched its old logo this week in favour of an ‘all new and improved’ version. Some of the reactions have been pretty extreme including a few that are not quite so complimentary...Firstly, what exactly has it done? Well just a month after a major restructuring of the company, Google is putting on a fresh face to the world. The new product sans typeface is designed to make it appear a little more modern and playful. Some say it’s more like fridge magnets. Or that is shows us the way to Sesame Street...Apparently, the colours are much softer hues than previously. It’s indiscernible to my dodgy eyes though. I even put my glasses on, but I still can’t make out the difference.There is also a more than a passing resemblance to Alphabet’s (Google’s new parent company) logo. And of course it isn’t a coincidence that their design language is remarkably similar as they are clearly seeking to maximise the synergies between the two.Secondly, why did Google change it? Google says the main reason is because technology has changed how we interact with its products and with the Internet at large. Fair enough, that’s a point I get. However, what I don’t understand is why it needed to redesign the logo as a consequence. It goes on to say that the new logo will better reflect the reality that Google is no longer a desktop destination, it’s a humongous array of websites, mobile apps and other services that you visit on a multitude of devices. According to Google, it believes that its new logo reflects this reality and it seemingly demonstrates:“when the Google magic is working for you, even on the tiniest screens”.Hmm. All that said the question remains — why does it need a new logo to convey ‘the Google magic’ on small screens. Frankly I didn’t detect any issues with the old one.Some designers have argued that it’s too simplistic to talk about it as a change of logo stating that this is more about a change in ‘identity’. The logo only represents one facet of that identity and as such is merely a symbol of some of the aspects that define the Google brand: simplicity, creativity and playfulness. And I don’t doubt the wisdom of the design experts. After all, it is their craft. But we humans are fickle beings and are all too quick to proffer our opinions on absolutely anything, particularly on those things that are so familiar to us in every day life.And finally, what about the reaction from consumers? Well for such an inoffensive, quirky, colourful and cute logo it has caused some interesting reactions on Twitter; some are amusing and some a little odd.So come on what do you think? Do you love it or loathe it? Either way, let’s face it, you are still going to use it rather than Bing.The author is managing director of Global Accounts at OMD(This story was published in BW | Businessworld Issue Dated 05-10-2015)
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