The Glass Room New York/London
At the centre of Alphabet Empire a web of threads and nails form the words “We know where you are”. This meaningful sentence originates from Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Alphabet Inc., the parent company of Google and a huge amasser of data and wealth.
The nails represent more than 180 company acquisitions and over 400 investments since Alphabet’s founding in 1998. The colour of the threads indicate the respective area of interest, while the radius around a company corresponds to the expenditure made in US dollars. At first glance, enormous expenditures – such as the purchase of Motorola, YouTube or Nest Labs Inc. – jump out, but the sheer amount of “smaller” investments also demonstrates how wide Alphabet Inc. has cast its net already. The work reveals Alphabet’s areas of interest and enormous influence on future technologies and their users.
“Alphabet Empire” is based on an updated version of the dataset already used for “The Google Empire“, and provides an example of the different ways of visualising data.
