Google Buys Kaggle, a Data Science Community, to Bolster Cloud Offerings

Developers and the enterprises, which Google will need to attract more business away from Amazon and Microsoft, are taking notice – as was evidenced here by big crowds and a standing-room only audience at the company’s Google Cloud Next conference.

Urs Hölzle, the senior vice president of technical infrastructure and Google, opened the day two keynote with some statistics-claiming that the Google Cloud services touch one billion end users every day.

Google’s computer vision technology is now so good it’s able to find specific objects within a video or group of videos. Google has always been proud of its work in artificial intelligence and that can be seen in whatever it produces. Now, it’s adding data science provider Kaggle, which runs contests related to machine learning and provides services for data discovery and analysis, to the fold.

It also gives Google a compelling way to sell its cloud services to its existing advertising customers.

Based in San Francisco and founded in 2010, the Kaggle data science community provides a crowdsourced and competitive platform for solving problems involving analytics and predictive modeling. That said, the API could also be an interesting tool for individual viewers. As previously mentioned, this technology was only realized using still images prior, but with the help of a new API, developers will finally have the freedom to build applications that can allow users to search information in videos. The API can now recognise millions of entities from Google’s Knowledge Graph and offers enhanced Optical Character Recognition (OCR) capabilities that can extract text from scans of documents such as legal contracts or research papers. In addition, the API can identify scene changes within a video. Cloud SQL is a fully-managed service, making it easier to set up, maintain, manage, and administer PostgreSQL relational databases on Google Cloud Platform. Blair Hanley Frank notes that for an eight-hour response, it will be $100 USA per month, one-hour response is $250 per user per month and for 15 minute, 24/7 response time, it is $1500 per user per month.

Meanwhile, Google will continue to be focusing on its Business Apps as a key selling point for the cloud.

Google Next ’17 Google Cloud is in a full-on push to build an ecosystem for itself with a fresh line of partnerships. “We can’t take things away”, she said. “This is an incredibly serious mission”.

GCP’s Director of Engineering Support, Benjamin Smith noted that the partnership will play to the strengths of both companies. “You have better uses of your money”.