Where is Google placing its bets?

GOOGLE is well aware of its vulnerability. More than 90 per cent of the company's revenues and almost all of its profits come from search-related advertising. As long as people click ads on computers, tablets and mobile phones, Google makes money. But if people click less often, or stop doing so all together, then the company is in big trouble. We spent three days at Google's Silicon Valley headquarters to learn about the bets (Alpha-bets!) that Google is making on its future.

Google thinks big. It was sobering to hear Google chairman Eric Schmidt say that unless a project has a potential scale-impact of a billion users, it is too small for Google to bother with.

Long-term bets reaching as far as the moon