In the center of Google's universe

After seeing Google's new product this week, Universal Analytics, I realised what the center of Google's universe is. It's data. If you look at Google since it's start, they were always interested in data. At the start their search was faster and had more pages indexed than any other search engine; their gmail was all about getting Gigabytes of data for free; they bought youtube, a service that absorbed more petabytes than we've ever seen before and with Google Universal Analytics they have the intention of inventing their own Internet of Things.  What Google is trying to achieve with Universal Analytics is bringing their analytic tool to the offline world. Analytics has evolved of being a simple view of the number of visits to a website/webpage to a more complex web intelligence tool where the behavior of a customer is analysed. To be able to do that one must check what a customer does on the web, on mobile devices and in the real world. That's were Google Universal Analytics comes in, you can send information from any device with a unique customer id to Google Universal Analytics. This is cool, and a bit scary too, but like Ajaz put it in his book velocity :"By contrast, many organisations view data as something you take. If they were to view data as something entrusted to them by people to refine and return something better, we'd see much stronger value creation for both sides."

Google Now is one of my favorite Google apps. It notifies my of everything I need to now, just in time. people's birthday based on Google+ data, traveltime to my next meeting based on my agenda, etc...

Imagine Google Now being fed by my unique customer id shopping behavior. This would be awesome, no thinking when shopping, Google does it all for you. Can you imagine what a richness of data this would be, and what it would mean to adWords customers of Google ? This goes way beyond Google Glasses, it's a very smart and intelligent use of all data that is collected by Google. I've always admired Google for implementing smart business models behind free services.

The next step is the context. Based on all the behavioral data that Google could collect online and offline, you could add the context to that. People use sites, apps and other services differently depending on the device and the context, context being location, environment, timing. This would create extreme interesting scenario's where a banking site could behave differently depending on the fact that you visit it in the evening from an ipad or a reatil app on an iphone in a shop. There's been a lot of talk about big data, but if there's one company in the world who knows what big data really is, it's Google.