Buying home security business Dropcam

One of our core holdings in the US, Google has announced that they are buy video monitoring and security company Dropcam Inc for $555 million. The actual buyer of the company is Google's subsidiary Nest, the "smart appliance" division. The long term goal is to have all your house appliances controlled by a cell phone running the Android software.


Dropcam's current product allows you to monitor what is going on in your house through live streaming of video to mobile apps and through alerts that are sent to you. Security is a big component of being able to interact with your house and environment. Looking forward a couple of years, you will be able to see what is going on in your house to know it is safe to enter, turn on the heating and geyser, turn lights on and having music playing when you walk through the front door. All this will be able to be done on your Android phone, using your voice through Google's artificial Intelligence technology called "Google Now".


In other Google news, this week is their I/O conference, which is where they get to show off their new products. Google's Android is now on every 4 of 5 smartphones sold, breaking the 1 billion mark last year. Having that many people already in the Google ecosystem, the idea will be to keep them there through expanding the places where you can find Android. The conference is expected to give more details on "Google Wear", the wearable tech products, Android in cars through partnerships with manufacturers and further development on Google Now.


Currently Google still gets 90% of its revenue from advertising, but as the Android ecosystem expands along with other products like their Driverless car technology we should see a shift in revenue flows. Even though the word "Google" is in the dictionary as a verb and is something that modern society cannot live without, I think that Google will be an even bigger part of our lives going forward, and this is the reason why we own the shares.