Google joins the titans of Silicon Valley lobbying

With great power comes even greater headaches. Just ask Google.

The company's transition from upstart to Goliath has multiplied its legal and policy problems. There may be no better measure of this phenomenon than Google's expansion of its lobbying activities on Capitol Hill.

In just five years, the search engine giant has gone from almost no presence in Washington to spending more money on lobbying than all but one other Silicon Valley company in 2009. And in the past three months, Google topped all other valley spenders.

"The growth in their lobbying reflects what the company has become," said Dave Levinthal, communications director for the Center for Responsive Politics. "They've gone from a tiny company to a behemoth."

Google's drive for influence in D.C. extends beyond dollars and cents, and demonstrates remarkable savvy in the ways of Washington. These include Google funding policy fellowships and hosting politicians at the Googleplex, and Google employees taking jobs in the Obama administration.

Google seems determined not to repeat the mistake Microsoft made in the 1990s when the software company ignored politics until it was ensnared in an epic antitrust lawsuit.

There's certainly nothing unusual about a company aggressively pushing its agenda. But in Google's case, I think there's a disconnect between the company's view of these efforts, and how they look to outsiders.

Google has always been a company that believes it has a special mission to make the world better, and it sees its lobbying and policy efforts as part of that crusade. In truth, this massive investment in lobbying is just one more sign that Google is acting like the big corporation it has become.

That's neither good, nor evil. Sometimes Google's interests align with the interests of consumers, and sometimes they don't. But while Google believes it's not evil, its size means many others will increasingly question whether its motives aren't less than good.

I put this idea to Alan Davidson, head of U.S. public policy for Google, who said it's not true, and that Google works to show humility.

"We've always known that with growth comes responsibility," Davidson said. "We're grateful for the company's success. We know as we grow, we need to show that we're a responsible industry leader."

It seemed like just yesterday we were writing stories about "Google goes to Washington" as the Mountain View company opened its lobbying office in 2005. Now, Google's right at home.

In 2009, Google spent $4.03 million on its lobbying efforts, up from $260,000 in 2005, according to U.S. Senate records. In the valley, that's second only to Oracle, which spent $5.1 million. And in the fourth quarter of 2009, Google outspent Oracle $1.12 million to $1.05 million.

While Google's expansion is extraordinary, it does reflect an increase in the valley's investment in lobbying. The top 10 valley companies increased their lobbying expenditures from a total of $12.4 million in 2005 to $26.4 million in 2009. Only Hewlett-Packard, a company that's been around for decades, came close to matching Google's expansion, growing from $380,000 in 2005 to $3.62 million last year.

"There was always a plan for steady growth in our presence," Davidson said. "We knew when we started the office here, the issues facing our users and industries were only going to grow out here in Washington."

Davidson notes that on some of the issues that Google lobbies for, it now butts heads with companies that spend far more on lobbying. While Davidson wouldn't say which ones, he's most likely talking about telecom companies like AT&T, Verizon and Comcast, whose expenditures ranged from $12 million to $17 million in 2009. Google looks at them, and still sees itself as the guppy.

And in the tech industry, Microsoft and IBM spent more last year, $6.7 million and $5.4 million respectively. But the gap is closing fast.

Davidson said Google's efforts are benign, aimed at educating politicians and making sure its users' interests are being heard.

"We started this office with the same philosophy as we did the business," he said. "If you start with the user and focus on that, everything else will follow. If what we're doing is good for our users and the Internet community, then it will be good for us in the long term."

The problem is that the company often seems so certain of its mission that it can't believe anyone would question its motives.

For instance, in a New York Times op-ed last fall, co-founder Sergey Brin painted Google's efforts to scan books as a crusade to protect the world's knowledge against the ravages of history. He bristled over criticisms of a settlement with publishers and authors: "In reality, nothing in this agreement precludes any other company or organization from pursuing their own similar effort. The agreement limits consumer choice in out-of-print books about as much as it limits consumer choice in unicorns."

Sorry, but it is hubris to expect us to genuflect and accept that Google is doing this purely for the benefit of mankind. Google is scanning books because it expects to make money in some fashion down the road.

Lobbying on behalf of its position doesn't make Google evil. It just means it's a big corporation. But for a company with a messianic belief in its purpose, that's a hard truth to accept.

Source:http://www.mercurynews.com

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Nitin Chauhan | nitin@maximumhit.com | www.maximumhit.com

http://nitinmaximumhit.blogspot.com "We brand our clients to stand out from the competition."

Does India Ready to Take On Silicon Valley ?

Does Europeans and Americans still think that Indian technology sector as a nation of call centers workers or a low lever computer job worker like support engineer,database administrator,IT infra management etc.

Its time to wake up from the sleep as Indian IT morphed building into a giant R&D machine.There was a time when the Indian companies started with call centers and low level IT work but with the period of time the new face of Indian IT companies come up, who have climbed the value chain to become outsourced provider of critical R&D in sophisticated areas such as semiconductors design,network equipment,aerospace,automotive and medical devices.

Number of multinational companies are setting up there R&D departments in India and partnering the local giants. For example recently Intel in process to tie up with local Giants like Bharti Airtel, Reliance Communication or Tata Communication to bid telecoms spectrum which is going to be bid in January 2010.

Palm Pre smart phone and the Amazon Kindle, two of the hottest consumer electronics devices on the market, have key components designed in India.


Here are few more in Long list :-

• Intel designed its six-core Xeon processor in India

• IBM has over 100,000 employees in India.

• Cisco is developing cutting edge networking technologies for futuristic “intelligent cities”

• Google do lot of development work in India only.

• Adobe, Cadence, Oracle, CSC, Microsoft and most of the large software companies are developing mainstream products in India.


Now let’s see some of the Indian Multi National companies who are tackling the Global Market and give some major contribution in Global Market. Let start with automobile sector where TATA with its dirt cheap Nano car that the company is now positioning for a European market entry and Reva, which recently announced it was planning to build an electric car factory in New York state to address the U.S. market for electric vehicles.

• INDIAN origin TATA MOTORS is now the world largest automobile company.
  
  
• INDIAN origin BHARTI AIRTEL is now the world largest Mobile Service Provider.
  
  
• INDIAN origin Ambani Brothers, Sunil Mittal, Ajeem Premji are amount the top 10 Richest people in World.
  

In India start-ups companies are the new signs of life in technology entrepreneurship. Guys are really smart and Hungry, some of the companies are doing better than their silicon valley counterpart. If not all but many of the companies developing breakthrough technologies and solving problem where counterpart in silicon valley failed.

Here is an small example of tomorrow billionaire.. Mundane business of developing offset printer ink. Their ink is made from vegetable oil and is entirely bio-degradable. The offset printing industry consumes 1 million tons of petroleum products and emits 500,000 tons of volatile organic compounds every year. An IIT-Delhi incubated startup called EnNatura developed a printing ink which emits no volatile compounds and is washable. And the overall cost of their solution will be significantly less than all present compounds when produced at scale. Company like this growing into a billion dollar global business.


Interesting company was LiveMedia. This is an out-of-home advertising company that has 4,500 screens in 2,200 destinations with a total reach of 50 million people. Of course, you can find exactly these sorts of TV screens in thousands of places across the U.S. LiveMedia is in the process of building out a partnership with Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs India that would give the network even more interactive capabilities. Bell Labs has developed a content management and routing system, dubbed Mango, that makes it much easier and efficient to deliver high-bandwidth, high-quality video and interactive content over existing networks. In the developing world, everyone wants a TiVO-like capability to share, store and manage content. But existing GPRS or EDGE-based cell networks are not up to snuff. And the broadband infrastructure still lags behind that of the most developed telecom networks in places like Japan, Korea and Scandanavia. A product like Mango is tailor-made for VC investment to get it out of the lab and into a spin-off company.

Why so many U.S. venture capital shops have opened up branches in India. In fact, the two lead investors in LiveMedia are both U.S. venture capitalists including the respected Valley firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson. For example, in the first nine months of 2008, total early stage VC investments in India totaled $678 million, according to the Global India Venture Capital Association. In the U.S. over that same period early stage investments tallied $5.2 billion according to the U.S. National Venture Capital Association

The dynamics of entrepreneurship are the same in India as in America. Company founders usually come from the ranks of experienced business executives and are middle-aged. They get tired of working for others and want to make an impact and build wealth before they get too old. Given that there are now hundreds of thousands of R&D workers in India who are gaining valuable experience and are getting old, it is simply a matter of time before they begin to hatch their entrepreneurial plans. After all, their colleagues who migrated to the U.S. now start nearly one in six of Silicon Valley’s tech firms.

Source:www.techcrunch.com

Thanks and kind regards,

Nitin Chauhan | nitin@maximumhit.com | www.maximumhit.com