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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