Google 'side businesses' exploding, offering telcos opportunities, competition

Google, announcing second-quarter earnings yesterday that surpassed industry expectations (a record-breaking $9 billion in revenue), offered a reminder — as it did during its stockholder meeting earlier this summer — of its vast earning power, sharp instincts and ceaseless desire to be a part of the next big thing.

Apple may be the rabbit other mobile device companies chase, jostling one another in their race to make their devices as slick and lovely, their app stores as full and their brands even a fraction as alluring. But it's Google that — despite its more conservative shareholders questioning its variety of interests and investments — that must have the mobile carriers cheering themselves hoarse.

"The internet is becoming richer, grander, more personal, more individual, more intelligent than anything that any of us could have imagined," Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt told shareholders during their 2011 annual meeting June 2. He added that every day, 15% of the search queries presented to Google are queries it's never seen before; query length has grown by 6% in the last five years; and people now crawl eight times the number of online documents than they did two years ago.

During its call yesterday, Google also shared that it's now activating 550,000 Android devices each day. And while in January 100 million Android devices were live, that figure is already at 135 million. And Android is just a side business.

Google's core business — search and ads — grew by more than 20% in 2010, "which at our scale is quite an accomplishment," Schmidt said during the shareholder meeting. While this was impressive, Schmidt added, particularly exciting was that Google's "emerging businesses grew at many times that rate —Display, Android, Chrome and YouTube are all growing significantly faster than our growth rate [which] produces great long-term value for all the players involved."

While several times during both the meeting and yesterday's call, CEO Larry Page insisted Google is a "careful steward of shareholder money," it's Google's very willingness to dedicate small teams and some funds to investigating a thing of interest — from wind farms to the driverless car — that seems to set Google apart and make it a winning partner for the carriers, regardless of the mobile OS races. Particularly given how big the payoff is, when one of those investigative areas hits.

Android, said Page, was one of those "risk" areas Google looked into.

Now there's Google+, which, less than two weeks since launching, is 10 million users strong and seeing a billion items shared and viewed each day.

Google's goal for Google+, Page said, is the same for all its products.

"We want to make products that everybody uses twice a day, like their toothbrush. And we certainly think about Plus that way, and also just generally having a really great sharing experience and identity experience across Google and all of its products. That's how we think about success there."

He added, "We are only at 1% of what's possible. Google's just getting started."