Alphabet – Social Blog

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After having read the news article ‘Alphabet is leading a $1billion round in Lyft – despite being an investor in Uber’ (Balakrishnan, 2017), I believe it is time to blog about the two ‘kind of the same’ companies.

Both companies offer the same service: A ride when you need one. Uber, being worth $70billion, is still the largest of the two, since Lyft is ‘only’ worth $11billion. Alphabet, the mother company of Google, noticed the potential of Uber and its business model already in 2013. They invested $250mln in Uber at the time, and this got them a seat on the board.
However, yesterday the newspapers were full with the news that Alphabet now leads a $1billion investment round in Lyft.

So, what happened and what is the situation now?

In 2014, Alphabet gave its seat on the board of Uber, since they intended to compete in the ridesharing space with Uber in the future. This, of course, was inconvenient for Uber. After this, Uber has had to deal with several other incidents. Incidents about repeating sexual assault by drivers, but also with the incident of board member David Bonderman, who made sexist comments during a meeting (Maessen, 2017; Rawstorne, 2017). More recently, Uber had to deal with its CEO who resigned, hoping that the company would recover from the lost reputation under the lead of someone else (The Guardian, 2017).
Meanwhile, Lyft is getting the $1billion investment and the company benefits from a good reputation (Nu.nl, 2017). Nevertheless, the company is still only available in the USA, but is becoming a serious competitor of Uber. Especially after the investment lead by Alphabet and the announcement that Alphabet want to partner with Lyft on a self-driving car project (Isaac, 2017).

All this makes me wonder whether we will soon be ordering Lyfts instead of Ubers in Europe as well. I always looked at Uber as a company that was never going to give up the spot it created in the taxi market, but after reading all this, I might have been wrong…

Balakrishman, A. (2017). ‘Alphabet is leading a $1billion round in Lyft – despite being an investor in Uber.’ CNBC.com. Accessed: 23 October 2017 at https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/19/lyft-funding-alphabets-capitalg-leading-1-billion-dollar-round.html

Isaac, M. (2017). ‘Lyft and Wymo reach deal to collaborate on self-driving cars.’ The New York Times. Accessed: 23 October 2017 at https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/14/technology/lyft-waymo-self-driving-cars.html

Maessen, L. (2017). ‘Andere topman Uber stapt op na seksistische grap.’ NRC.nl. Accessed: 23 October 2017 at https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2017/06/14/andere-topman-uber-stapt-op-na-seksistische-grap-a1562925

Rawstorne, T. (2017). ‘How safe is Uber? Growing concern as police figures suffest company’s drivers are linked to one sex attack in London per week.’ Daily Mail. Accessed: 23 October 2017 at http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4741030/Figures-Uber-drivers-linked-one-sex-attack-week.html

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How can the technological expertise of Google be used to improve people’s lives? What are the future trends in HealthTech?

Imagine a chemist and an engineer and a doctor and a behavioral scientist, all working together to truly understand health and to better prevent, detect, and manage disease.

– This is what Verily is all about.

Verily was formerly a division of Google[x] and is now an independent company of Alphabet officially founded in December 2015. Its mission is to employ technology to uncover new truths about health and life science. What is most interesting about this company is its multidisciplinary team: it is composed of experts turning ideas into products by cross-pollinating medicine, engineering, and data science. As an example, they have already produced a smart contact lens for diabetics that continuously monitors glucose in tears (instead of having to prick their fingers to test their blood glucose levels).

What does Verily deal with?

The company targets health issues affecting millions, such as cardiovascular disease, cancer, and mental health. It is organized in four business units: hardware, software, clinical, and science. This is not the first time that Google deals with health issues, and indeed Verily was previously known as Google Life Science.

The software Business Unit

Of particular interest for our field of study, the software team is composed of engineering and data gurus who intend to better predict, diagnose, and improve treatments of diseases. Wearable technology is very useful in the prediction phase. The collection of psychological, behavioural, biological, and environmental variables could result in a more detailed patient-segmentation analysis, and allows to gain more knowledge about a disease and why it progresses differently among individuals. This, in turn, gives the possibility to better tailor treatments, and to personalize them based on the specific needs of the individuals.

There is a lot of information residing in our bodies – from our genes to our sleep patterns. The software business unit tries to use this information by developing products, platforms, and computational algorithms to improve people’s lives and to increase patients’ empowerment. In this way, people do not need to spend as much time in hospitals and can get the right medications, while avoiding the risk of side effects (and the associated costs).

HealthTech trends to keep an eye on

Verily is just one of the many companies dealing with HealthTech: the future of medicine will have a lot to do with technology, more than it ever did. Below, a list of three important trends for the near future is proposed:

DATA: the importance of monitoring and evaluation of data will keep on rising thanks to the growing adoption of wearables and mobile technologies. The collected information will, in the longer term, allow to have personalized treatments.
VIRTUAL / AUGMENTED REALITY: a lot of potential resides in this hardware technology. Surgical training and study can benefit a lot, as the VR / AR can be used for simulations before surgery. Also, they could be used as a psychological relief for patients (e.g.: in Argentina, VR is being used to help cancer patients escape the harsh process of chemotherapy).
COMMUNICATION: technology could have a strong impact on the communication means of patient-to-doctor (and viceversa), and patient-to-patient. Mobile devices allow to have instantaneous communication, which enables a doctor to have real-time updates about a patient. Also, Social Media empower patients to create communities of people suffering from the same disease, and they may receive support from the community.

How is HealthTech going to evolve in the next few years, in your opinion?

Interested in the topic?

Here are some interesting videos: