Google has launched an app to rival WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger

Google took aim Wednesday at the red-hot mobile messaging market, with a new artificial intelligence-powered Allo app that seeks to compete with popular rivals such as WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger.

But the app’s reliance on Google’s predictive software drew immediate criticism from privacy advocates who argued it could open up user data to law enforcement — with former US intelligence contractor Edward Snowden warning people not to use it.

Google defended its privacy stand, saying users can opt for a more secure “incognito” mode if they prefer.

The app includes Google Assistant, an artificial intelligence program which makes live suggestions as you chat.

“You no longer need to leave a conversation with friends just to grab an address, share your favorite YouTube video, or pick a dinner spot,” Google said in a blog post.

“Google Allo can help you make plans, find information, and express yourself more easily in chat. And the more you use it, the more it improves over time,” Google said.

The app will adjust according to whether its user’s style is usually an emoji or written response, for example.

Like rival apps, it has tools for personalizing chat messages including changing the size of emojis and a choice of stickers.

– Keeping pace –

Allo was unveiled by Google in May at the same time as Google Duo, an app for video calls, which hit the market last month.

The app is available on smartphones using Google’s Android system and Apple’s iOS.

Google faces a challenge in carving a place in a sector dominated by popular apps such as WhatsApp, which Facebook acquired for some $20 billion in 2014 and which counts more than a billion users.

In July, Facebook said that users of its own Messenger application had also passed the one billion mark.

Apple has also moved to catch up with rivals, upgrading the messaging app in its latest iOS 10 launched last week.

Google and its earlier messaging app Hangouts had failed to keep pace in a market that also includes Snapchat, Skype and global rivals such as WeChat, Viber, Line, Kik and Telegram.

– Privacy, encryption –

Conversations in Allo will be encrypted, according to Google. And additional privacy will be offered with an “incognito” option in which messages will disappear after a fixed period.

But some analysts expressed disappointment that Google did not go further in agreeing not to store messages on its servers, where they can be accessed by authorities.

Christopher Soghioan, a privacy researcher with the American Civil Liberties Union, lamented that Google “decided that improving auto responses was worth making all messages accessible to law enforcement.”

Snowden, the former US intelligence contractor wanted for leaking National Security Agency documents on surveillance, said in a tweet, “Don’t use Allo.”

A later tweet from Snowden called Allo an “app that records every message you ever send and makes it available to police upon request.”

Google argues that the “smart” features of the application require “data processing” and that the tech giant needs to store chats to improve responses.

“We’ve given users transparency and control over their data in Google Allo,” a Google statement emailed to AFP said.

“Our approach is simple — your chat history is saved for you until you choose to delete it. You can delete single messages or entire conversations in Allo.

“We also provide the option to chat in Incognito mode, where messages are end-to-end encrypted and you can set a timer to automatically delete messages for your device and the person you’re chatting with’s device at a set time.”

AFP

Why Google is paying $625 Million to Acquire API Company

Cloud chief Diane Greene is in charge as Google and Apigee announced a definitive agreement for Apigee to join the Googleplex in a deal valued at about $625 million. 

With the new acquisition announced on Thursday, Google continues to “get with the program” in building out a new-look cloud offering to go toe-to-toe with the likes of Amazon and Microsoft.

 And in a conversation with Forbes following the announcement, Greene said the Apigee acquisition is all about APIs.

“Almost every customer that I talk to is talking about how they’re using APIs, and what a step function they are for their business,” Greene says. “It’s an incredible fit for us to be able to offer enterprise customers what they need in their digital transformation.”

Google has raised its cloud profile under Greene, investing in reorganizing the unit’s structure while bringing in new faces and technology through hiring and acquisition. The company pitches itself as having particular strengh in back-end services, analytics and machine learning—who knows better than the search giant about how to crunch data, the argument goes—but Google lacked a true proxy tool that would connect on-premise back-end services to the increasingly mobile-first applications that businesses are building today. “We had pieces of it, but we didn’t have a full solution like Apigee,” Greene says.

Apigee, meanwhile, went public in April 2015 but endured a rocky year-and-change on the public market. After pricing at $17 per share, the company was trading as low as $7.75 in March, when CEO Chet Kapoor told Business Insider he had no regrets about the IPO. Apigee’s stock since made its way all the way back, up to $17.40 per share at the price Google plans to pay. On the phone with Greene, Kapoor told Forbes that his company has found traction especially with retail and financial services companies, as well as telcos. “They want to make sure they have a rich experience with customers and partners, and they have to take advantage of the back-end they have,” he says. Using APIs, “you can decrease time to market and make it a richer experience.”

Kapoor had better get used to his future boss Greene jumping in; those words had barely left the CEO’s mouth before Greene interjected that Google has found its enterprise customers to be moving faster than she’d originally expected. “It’s not so much that they’re being disrupted so much as it’s, ‘Whoa, there’s so much I can take advantage of here,’” she says.

But Kapoor is excited to be overruled by Greene. Apigee chose to sell to Google for two reasons, he says: Google’s cloud platform committing to an open architecture ecosystem that embraces multi-cloud and hybrid cloud strategies in which customers can mix and match products from different vendors and keep their own pieces on-premise, and to work with Greene.

While Amazon Web Services remains the first mover in cloud services, leading challengers like Microsoft and IBM pitch themselves as the most hybrid cloud-friendly partners for large-scale businesses that have complicated infrastructures set up on their own servers that they don’t plan to walk away from anytime soon. Greene argues that Google’s on-premise efforts are already considerable, though they’ll get a jolt from including Apigee. Just the day before, Greene and Google announced a new partnership with Box to bring Box-secured data to Google’s business apps.

Apigee’s product will help those customers make calls for data between their back end and their apps and also keep track of what happens on each one. That gives the company an analytics component, though both say the focus is on the APIs.

The deal is expected to close by the end of 2016.

(FORBES)