Sunday, February 24, 2019

The long, long, long view
Google’s Hope and Dreams In India
… In 2011, Reliance, whose core business was oil and infrastructure, decided to build a vast broadband network, a business in which it had no experience but plenty of rivals. It had acquired a telecom company that owned mobile spectrum licenses, and it muscled in on its competitors. Barely 28 million Indians then owned smartphones. Reliance aimed to blanket India with broadband coverage, which was available only in big cities. After decades building pipelines and refineries, Reliance erected 220,000 mobile towers across India, often building more than 700 in a single day. In all, the project cost more than $30 billion.
In September 2016 it launched the Reliance Jio telecom network, offering people free mobile data for the first six months. Indians stampeded to grab the offer. Reliance Jio signed 100 million subscribers within six months and 250 million by its second anniversary last September. Its cheap plans set off a price war and drove down India’s data prices, from about $4.50 a gigabyte in 2016 to a rock-bottom 15¢ now, cutting deeply into competitors’ profits. For Reliance the pricing proved a masterstroke, establishing itself as a key phone and Internet service provider. Reliance Jio now sells $20 phones, and it is rolling out connected devices for cars, TV monitors, and home appliances.
For Google, the disruption is a potential gold mine. Together, Reliance Jio’s network and Prime Minister Modi’s policies have cracked open markets that until now have been out of reach, or too small to be worth the investment. In 2017, shortly after Jio’s launch, Google created its first-ever digital payments app, Tez, seizing on the millions of Indians who were suddenly making digital payments. Last year, it renamed the app Google Pay. It now has about 40 million monthly active users in India, and is available in 29 countries, including the U.S., with about $60 billion in transactions in 2018, according to Google.




My students will need to understand how this works.
A guide to protecting AI and machine learning inventions
… The European Patent Office has recently amended its ‘Guidelines for Examination’ by including a new section containing advice about how patents related to AI and machine learning technologies should be assessed. The guidance clarifies that whilst algorithms are regarded as ‘computational’ and abstract in nature, which means they are not patentable per se, once applied to a technical problem they may become eligible for patent protection. Beneficially, the approach outlined in the guidance is similar to that currently used to assess the patentability of computer-implemented inventions.
To clarify, one of the keys to patentability lies in an invention’s ‘technical effect’. If an AI or machine learning invention is shown to have an effect in a real-world application, it is likely to be deemed patentable under the European Patent Convention


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