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Billion-Dollar Business:
10 Industries To Watch 2020
WHAT IS CB INSIGHTS?
1. Consumer electronics 6
2. Healthcare 9
3. Next-gen computing 24
4. Transportation 30
5. Energy 36
6. Smart cities 39
7. Travel 42
8. Gaming 46
9. Media 49
10. Banking 51
With growing threats from its big tech peers Microsoft, Apple, and
Amazon, Alphabet’s drive to disrupt has become more urgent than
ever before.
Since its launch, Google Assistant has been rated far more capable
and useful than its main competitors, Microsoft’s Cortana and
Apple’s Siri. Driven by Google’s internal deep learning-focused
Tensor Processing Unit chips (discussed later in Next-gen
computing), Google Assistant is available on all Android and
Google Home devices and runs on a reported 1B devices.
All of these efforts could be extremely valuable for Verily and for
Alphabet as a whole. The global market for diabetes devices is
projected to be worth $38B by the year 2026, propelled mostly by
increasing incidence of the disease.
Verily’s robotic surgery patents show that the company has made
significant progress in developing tools for doctors to conduct
tests remotely. One patent describes an abdominojugular reflex
test, which Verily claims can be performed more accurately using a
pressure cuff and camera than by an in-person physician.
Revelations about the depth and detail of the data that was given
to Google — including patient names, dates of birth, hospitalization
records, immunizations, and more — triggered the beginning of
a federal Health and Human Services inquiry. It also prompted a
Google whistleblower to write an editorial on their concerns
about the project’s HIPAA compliance, which was published in
The Guardian.
Alphabet’s DeepMind and Verily have both run projects over the last
several years dedicated to identifying and treating various types
of cancers.
In July 2019, both Verily and GV took part in the $160M Series B
round for Freenome, a San Francisco-based startup working on
a early cancer detection screening system that uses machine
learning to find markers of cancer in the blood before conventional
tests can detect them.
Verily has made progress, but still lags behind Apple, which has
been focused on incorporating healthcare features in the Apple
Watch for years.
With its legacy systems, high margins, and middle men, the
pharmaceutical industry presents numerous $100B+ opportunities
for Alphabet.
While studies have been run on similar or larger scales in the past,
no study has ever looked into this volume of people at this level of
detail — including sleep, emotional health, heart rate, the genome,
blood, tears, urine, and more — according to Stanford cancer
researcher Sam Gambhir.
New chips, on the other hand, are increasing at a pace of only about
3% every year, and even top-of-the-line hardware is inadequate for
the needs of the most complex AI work today.
Source: Zdnet
Reports from early trials of the technology have not been uniformly
positive, with complaints emerging about how Waymo cars dealt
with certain kinds of complex road situations, leading ultimately
to Waymo electing to put safety drivers back into vehicles that
had gone driverless. Waymo vehicles have also been involved in
“dozens” of crashes according to the company’s own reporting,
though no significant injuries have been reported.
Source: Dandelion
With Alphabet’s ability to share in the risk of getting the smart city
up and running, as well as its ability to be a “one-stop shop” for
smart city technology, Alphabet and Sidewalk Labs have built a
powerful set of competitive advantages in the smart city space.
What that dominance means depends largely on how the Quayside
experiment goes and how willing other cities and towns prove to
be when it comes to giving a company like Alphabet a key role in
urban development.
Source: Google
Google doesn’t yet sell its own flights and hotels — it aggregates
listings from all the major OTAs and presents them on its search
engine results pages and on its Google Travel tool pages.
The major OTAs spend significant sums every year marketing and
running search ads through Google, which means that Google
must toe a cautious line to avoid upsetting its partners.
Source: Google
Users can input their travel dates and see a list of all the available
hotels that have capacity for that period, including highlighted
“great deals” (rooms that are normally more expensive for that
historical date). Each hotel’s page shows the different classes of
room available, reviews sourced from Google users, other things to
do in the area, and booking options.
Google could one day sell flights, hotels, and other kinds of trips
and accommodations to the millions of people who use Google
every day right through its search results — and there’s evidence to
suggest that many consumers would be on board.
• Owlchemy Labs
• Agawi
• Niantic
• Beyond Games
• Bionic Panda
With its newest and biggest gaming project, Stadia, Google aims
to leverage its scale, machine learning expertise, and technological
infrastructure to build a new kind of console-less gaming experience.
A 2015 patent filed by Google sketching out the basic idea behind Stadia.
Source: US Patent and Trademark Office
However, Stadia’s efforts thus far have generally not lived up to the
hype. The platform has experienced issues with pre-ordering, lags
in gameplay, and lackluster reviews for its games library.
With its live TV and DVR service YouTube TV, Alphabet is trying to
leverage YouTube’s dominance in general streaming media and the
power of its brand to compete with traditional broadcast TV.
One big problem YouTube has faced is concern over its reluctance
to censor allegedly damaging or harmful content uploaded to
the website. Alphabet’s Jigsaw, an internal unit working on
identifying emerging societal threats on the internet, is trying to
solve that problem.
Despite these issues, YouTube does have one big advantage over
other television streaming services like Amazon Prime Video and
Hulu: it has better penetration into regular consumers’ everyday lives.
Now, in 2020, the company aims to make its biggest foray into
banking yet. Google says it plans to begin offering consumer
checking accounts in 2020 in partnership with Citi and Stanford
Federal Credit Union.
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