I like it. The whiteboard seems to be an anachronism but in reality, I suspect its something people cling to. Just look at every office space. Whiteboard or Idea Paint galore!
There's an article I read saying that they will have sponsored locations soon. So I doubt they will monetize via a 3rd party ad SDK anytime soon. They'd rather sell the inventory themselves.
The key to get magic from Alexa long term will be get unsupervised learning working on it, and then shared back across the entire Alexa user base. The Brazilian real to USD is a great example. If by the 3rd try it gets the right answer, it should notate that and equate the first 2 questions as similar ones. I am surprised it couldn't catch the first 2. The word2vec output should be fairly similar.
I wouldn't be surprised. IFTTT has enough well connected investors that a tuck in by Goog isnt unreasonable. But with Ruth Porat as CFO, they aren't paying up anymore for acquisitions. Will come down to price. If you are IFTTT, you'd sell now instead of raising more $ and getting more diluted.