Google the Movie Coming?
According to Deadline... The founders of Facebook aren't the only game-changing geeks poised to have their story told on a movie screen. Michael London's Groundswell Productions has teamed with producer John Morris to acquire movie rights to the Ken Auletta book Googled: The End of the World As We Know it. They will use the book as the blueprint for a feature film that tells the story of Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page and the fast rise of the juggernaut web business that made them billionaires. (...) "It's about these two young guys who created a company that changed the world, and how the world in turn changed the ...
Google CEO Believes That in the Future, We May Be Automatically Allowed to Change Our Names to Escape Online Past
Eric Schmidt talked to the Wall Street Journal: "I don't believe society understands what happens when everything is available, knowable and recorded by everyone all the time," he says. He predicts, apparently seriously, that every young person one day will be entitled automatically to change his or her name on reaching adulthood in order to disown youthful hijinks stored on their friends' social media sites. (Would that even be enough to escape online detectives or future AIs which compare portrait photos, analyze a person's defining sentence structures and word usage, their location, social network connections and so on?) [Thanks TomHTML! ...
German Guy Wants to Photograph Those Buildings People Want to Exclude from Google Street View
Spiegel reports that German photographer and IT consultant Jens Best wants to personally take snapshots of all those (German) buildings which people asked Google Street View to remove. He then wants to add those photos to Picasa, including GPS coordinates, and in turn re-connect them with Google Maps. Jens believes that for the internet "we must apply the same rules as we do in the real world. Our right to take panoramic snapshots, for instance, or to take photographs in public spaces, both base laws which determine that one may photograph those things that are visible from public streets and places." Jens says that for his believe in the right of photographing in public places, as last resort h ...
Virus Game Attachments, Or Whatever It Is
Do these things have a name, and what do they typically do? Gmail is chronically bad at filtering them out (or perhaps they do filter out many but there's just too much of them). They usually come with an image attached, and as you can see in this case, a SWF attachment.
Free Sounds
Looking for free sounds for a project of yours... say, atmospheric background noises, or a dog barking, or laughter, piano music, a squeaking door, or anything else? FreeSounds.org is a great collection of Creative Commons licensed WAVs, MP3, AIFF files and more. You can enter a whole lot of things into their search engine and get back a whole lot of great samples. You can hear a preview for every sound, and for downloading a quick registration will do.
Android Developers Lose Money Because Apps Can't Be Bought In Most Countries, Pingdom Says
Pingdom writes: Google is talking about fighting piracy, but perhaps the first thing they should focus on is actually making it possible for users to buy apps. All users. Sounds rather logical, doesn?t it? So what are we talking about? The problem lies with Android Market. You can only pay for apps in 13 out of the 46 or so countries where Android phones are available. For those of you who like stats, 13 in 46 works out to less than 30%. Contrast this with Apple?s App Store, which supports paid apps in 90 countries. This is a huge advantage iPhone developers currently have over Android developers. Then again, from what I'v ...
Google's "Product Flops & Failures" Illustrated
Wordstream created a visual overview of what they call the "Google graveyard", that is, failed products. On the list are Google X, Google Catalog, Google Buzz and many more. (Nitpick: they call Google Answers the "answer to Yahoo Answers", though actually, Google Answers was made years before Yahoo Answers.) Then again, if you learn something from a cancelled product, perhaps in the end it won't have been a failure. Also see the lost features of Google, and the Google Answers interviews.
Paul Graham On What Happened to Yahoo
Paul Graham tells what went wrong, from his perspective, with Yahoo. "When I went to work for Yahoo after they bought our startup in 1998, it felt like the center of the world. It was supposed to be the next big thing. It was supposed to be what Google turned out to be ... What went wrong?" According to Paul, "Yahoo had two problems Google didn't: easy money, and ambivalence about being a technology company." [Via Andy.]
Ogs, an iPad Two-Player Game
I like the iPad as a casual device in general, but I love it as a two-player gaming device. Think of a board game where the pieces are magically moving... a game you can take to the cafe, to bars, play in the bus, on the train, whereever! With that in mind I created Ogs, which uses the great PhoneGap framework, allowing me to do it all in HTML/ JavaScript/ CSS. Please check out the video, and the game is now in the App Store.
Google CEO On Anonymity
NetworkWorld collected a couple of interesting quotes by Google boss Eric Schmidt on the subject of privacy and anonymity. He states that privacy is important, but shares some doubts over whether complete anonymity should/ will be granted in the future. Bruce Schneier on the other hand argues: Here's the problem: The very companies whose CEOs eulogize privacy make their money by controlling vast amounts of their users' information. Whether through targeted advertising, cross-selling or simply convincing their users to spend more time on their site and sign up their friends, more information shared in more ways, more publicly means more profits. This means these companies are motivated to continually ratchet down the ...
Google Founders Were Disagreeing Over Interest-based Ads, WSJ Says
Company-internal disagreements are natural and likely healthy but I think it's interesting what they are about -- from the Wall Street Journal: By late 2008, Google executives were preparing to launch ads targeted at users' interests. But the specifics still remained controversial. Tensions erupted during a meeting with about a dozen executives at Google's Mountain View, Calif., headquarters about 18 months ago when Messrs. Page and Brin shouted at each other over how aggressively Google should move into targeting, according to a person who had knowledge of the meeting. "It was awkward," this person said. "It was like watching your parents fight." Mr. Brin was more reluctant than Mr. Page, this person s ...
Google & Verizon Proposal, and Net Neutrality
Google and Verizon released a proposal relating to net neutrality. They claim their efforts are for an open internet: "[T]here should be a new, enforceable prohibition against discriminatory practices ... Importantly, this new nondiscrimination principle includes a presumption against prioritization of Internet traffic -- including paid prioritization. So, in addition to not blocking or degrading of Internet content and applications, wireline broadband providers also could not favor particular Internet traffic over other traffic." A user named QuantumBreakfast at Reddit on the other hand remarks:
Google South Korea Office Raided
ABC News writes: South Korean police said they raided Google Inc's Seoul office on Tuesday on suspicion that the Internet search leader had illegally collected data on users. Google has been preparing since late last year to launch its "Street View" service in South Korea and the data collection was related to the launch, police said. In other Street View related news, German Bild claims that the following German cities will be street-viewable starting November this year (with more cities coming next year): Berlin, Bielefeld, Bochum, Bonn, Bremen, Dortmund, Dresden, Duisburg, Düs ...
Micro Drones for Google?
German publication Wirtschaftswoche ("Economy Week") says that German manufacturer Microdrones has delivered a cam-equipped flying mini drone to Google. Microdrones boss Mr. Juerss is quoted as saying "We have good chances for a long term business relationship with Google" (is he just overly optimistic? Google wasn't available for comment to the magazine). According to him the drones "are superbly suited to deliver more up-to-date recordings for mapping service Google Earth." Another potential use mentioned by Juerss is inspecting wind farms. If Google continues to exist I guess it's only natural they continue to expand their tools (same could be said for the world at large), lest l ...
Google's Ultimate Demo System
Google's director of research Peter Norvig was interviewed by Slate: Google has been remarkably successful at creating popular products. How does the company create a culture that's conducive to generating new ideas? Well, we have great people, and that's a huge part of it. But I think the main thing is just trying a lot of ideas. We've built the ultimate system for making demos internally. If a startup company has an idea, it's like, "Well, I need a copy of the Web to make my idea work, I need a thousand computers, I gotta go raise money to do that." So they spend months or years r ...
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