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Google starts rolling out better AMP URLs
Publishers don’t always love Google’s AMP pages, but readers surely appreciate their speed, and while publishers are loath to give Google more power, virtually every major site now supports this format. One AMP quirk that publisher’s definitely never liked is about to go away, though. Starting today, when you use Google Search and click on an AMP link, the browser will display the publisher’s real URLs instead of an “http//google.com/amp” link.
This move has been in the making for well over a year. Last January, the company announced that it was embarking on a multi-month effort to load AMP pages from the Google AMP cache without displaying the Google URL.
At the core of this effort was the new Web Packaging standard, which uses signed exchanges with digital signatures to let the browser trust a document as if it belongs to a publisher’s origin. By default, a browser should reject scripts in a web page that try to access data that doesn’t come from the same origin. Publishers will have to do a bit of extra work, and publish both signed and un-signed versions of their stories.
Quite a few publishers already do this, given that Google started alerting publishers of this change in November 2018. For now, though, only Chrome supports the core features behind this service, but other browsers will likely add support soon, too.
For publishers, this is a pretty big deal, given that their domain name is a core part of their brand identity. Using their own URL also makes it easier to get analytics, and the standard grey bar that sits on top of AMP pages and shows the site you are on now isn’t necessary anymore because the name will be in the URL bar.
To launch this new feature, Google also partnered with Cloudflare, which launched its AMP Real URL feature today. It’ll take a bit before it will roll out to all users, who can then enable it with a single click. With this, the company will automatically sign every AMP page it sends to the Google AMP cache. For the time being, that makes Cloudflare the only CDN that supports this feature, though others will surely follow.
“AMP has been a great solution to improve the performance of the internet and we were eager to work with the AMP Project to help eliminate one of AMP’s biggest issues — that it wasn’t served from a publisher’s perspective,” said Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare. “As the only provider currently enabling this new solution, our global scale will allow publishers everywhere to benefit from a faster and more brand-aware mobile experience for their content.”
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Google acquires cloud migration platform Alooma
Google today announced its intention to acquire Alooma, a company that allows enterprises to combine all of their data sources into services like Google’s BigQuery, Amazon’s Redshift, Snowflake and Azure. The promise of Alooma is that it handles the data pipelines and manages them for its users. In addition to this data integration service, though, Alooma also helps with migrating to the cloud, cleaning up this data and then using it for AI and machine learning use cases.
“Here at Google Cloud, we’re committed to helping enterprise customers easily and securely migrate their data to our platform,” Google VP of engineering Amit Ganesh and Google Cloud Platform director of product management Dominic Preuss write today. “The addition of Alooma, subject to closing conditions, is a natural fit that allows us to offer customers a streamlined, automated migration experience to Google Cloud, and give them access to our full range of database services, from managed open source database offerings to solutions like Cloud Spanner and Cloud Bigtable.”
Before the acquisition, Alooma had raised about $15 million, including an $11.2 million Series A round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and Sequoia Capital in early 2016. The two companies did not disclose the price of the acquisition, but chances are we are talking about a modest price, given how much Alooma had previously raised.
Neither Google nor Alooma said much about what will happen to the existing products and customers — and whether it will continue to support migrations to Google’s competitors. We’ve reached out to Google and will update this post once we hear more.
Update. Here is Google’s statement about the future of the platform:
For now, it’s business as usual for Alooma and Google Cloud as we await regulatory approvals and complete the deal. After close, the team will be joining us in our Tel Aviv and Sunnyvale offices, and we will be leveraging the Alooma technology and team to provide our Google Cloud customers with a great data migration service in the future.
Regarding supporting competitors, yes, the existing Alooma product will continue to support other cloud providers. We will only be accepting new customers that are migrating data to Google Cloud Platform, but existing customers will continue to have access to other cloud providers.
So going forward, Alooma will not accept any new customers who want to migrate data to any competitors. That’s not necessarily unsurprising and it’s good to see that Google will continue to support Alooma’s existing users. Those who use Alooma in combination with AWS, Azure and other non-Google services will likely start looking for other solutions soon, though, as this also means that Google isn’t likely to develop the service for them beyond its current state.
Alooma’s co-founders do stress, though, that “the journey is not over. Alooma has always aimed to provide the simplest and most efficient path toward standardizing enterprise data from every source and transforming it into actionable intelligence,” they write. “Joining Google Cloud will bring us one step closer to delivering a full self-service database migration experience bolstered by the power of their cloud technology, including analytics, security, AI, and machine learning.”
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Branch pairs up with TUNE to create a supersized marketing and measurement platform
Branch announced today that it has acquired TUNE‘s attribution analytics team and business, a part of the SaaS platform that focuses on optimizing and accurately attributing ad spend. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
TUNE, a Seattle-based startup founded in 2009, helps ad platforms tie marketing investments to measurable outcomes.
Backed by Android co-founder Andy Rubin’s Playground Ventures, Branch creates links between websites and mobile apps, called deep links. The deal will help the company, which supports 40,000 apps with roughly 3 billion monthly users, expand its portfolio of linking and attribution analytics tools to become the ultimate marketing and measurement platform for businesses.
“TUNE has always been a steward of Branch’s core values, especially when it comes to putting user experience and privacy first,” Branch CEO Alex Austin said in a statement. “Combining TUNE’s years of learning with Branch’s innovation, raw product execution, and key strategic partnerships is the beginning of a new era of mobile marketing. It’s going to be an incredible ride.”
Formerly known as HasOffers, TUNE was founded by twin brothers Lucas and Lee Brown. Peter Hamilton joined the startup in 2012 and has served as the CEO since.
The performance marketing company completed a $9.4 million Series A investment in 2013 led by Accel, followed by a $27 million Series B in 2015 led by ICON Ventures. For its part, Branch is in the process of raising a fresh round of venture capital funding at a unicorn valuation.
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Google launches its own AI Studio to foster machine intelligence startups
A new week brings a fresh Google initiative targeting AI startups. We started the month with the announcement of Gradient Ventures, Google’s on-balance sheet AI investment vehicle. Two days later we watched the finalists of Google Cloud’s machine learning competition pitch to a panel of top AI investors. And today, Google’s Launchpad is announcing a new hands-on Studio program… Read More
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Google’s Unique Reach tells marketers when you’ve seen the same ad a gazillion times
We have all suffered the pain of seeing the same ad for a BBQ grill we can’t fit in our apartment on our phone, tablet, laptop and work desktop. The duplication is not only annoying, it’s wasteful for advertisers.
At Google’s Marketing Next conference in San Francisco, the company announced Unique Reach, a new measurement tool that captures the number of times the same… Read More
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Google Attribution is a free and easy way to evaluate marketing efforts
At Google’s Marketing Next conference, the company is announcing a new beta for Google Attribution, a free tool for examining the role that different marketing strategies play in customer purchasing decisions.
Regardless of device or marketing channel, Google wants Attribution to be a home for evaluating marketing campaigns. By creating a tight loop between strategy, ad spend and… Read More
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Google is now using deep learning to measure store visits
Google is announcing a major update to its store visits measurement tool today at its Google Marketing Next conference. Google has used anonymized location and contextual data since 2014 to estimate brick and mortar store visits spurred by online ads. The company is augmenting its existing models with deep learning to bring insights to even more customers. Omnichannel marketing is as big of… Read More
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Ozlo releases a suite of APIs to power your next conversational AI
Building on its promise to give the entrenched a run for their money, conversational AI startup Ozlo is making its meticulously crafted knowledge layer available for purchase today. Ozlo’s new suite of APIs that includes tools for both expressing knowledge and understanding language will help to democratize the creation of conversational AI assistants. In the spirit of the expert systems… Read More
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Medium lays off 50 employees, shuts down New York and D.C. offices
It’s not the happiest new year at social publishing platform Medium, apparently.
According to a blog post from its CEO Ev Williams, also co-founder of Twitter, the well-funded startup is laying off 50 employees in non-engineering roles and shuttering its offices in New York and Washington, D.C.
Williams took the rosiest possible angle on changes happening at Medium, titling his… Read More
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The ad-blocking wars are stepping up a gear today as mobile network-level ad blocker startup Shine has announced it’s signed its first European carriers to roll out its tech.