A new report claims that Google is delaying manufacturers from releasing HTML5-based Smart TVs due to a drawn out process to earn YouTube certification. According to ETNews, the company requires manufacturers to go through “browser conformity tests” at is Mountain View headquarters before they can have access to an app for the popular video-sharing site. Google is also said to be requiring smart TV operators to place the app on the interface’s main home screen as well, and an industry insider blasted Google for taking away a company’s right of choice.
The anonymous individual suggested that Google is delaying manufacturers because they opted for HTML5-based solutions rather than Google TV, adding that requiring them to place the YouTube app in a certain location is “an act of coercive sales tactics.” Samsung was reportedly forced to delay the launch of new products because it waited three months to receive Google’s YouTube conformity certification.
A Google spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
If you've already signed up to Google's experimental field trials, you might have started to notice people you know appearing within search queries. Expanding on shipping and flight results offered previously, Google's pulling that information from your Gmail account, meaning that you'll be able to poll for contact numbers, addresses (and more) through the search box. Of course, only you will be able to see the results and the beta feature can even link up to voice search. It currently supports all of your Gmail contacts, while Google+ connections are in the pipeline for future field tests. You can sign up to the trials at the second link below.
It looks like it may be back to the drawing board for Google on the European competitive front: hundreds of publishers and publishing trade associations today are coming out in force to ask the European Commission and its Vice President Joaquín Almunia to “reject outright” Google’s draft remedies, which Google suggested to rebalance competition in search and other online products where it is dominant in the region. The move, by the European Publishers’ Council, comes on the same day that other would-be Google competitors, including online mapping and travel companies, as well as the Fairsearch consortium, are also expected to call for much deeper scrutiny of Google and rejection of its proposals.
Google originally published its draft remedies on April 25, which included suggestions for how it would offer competitors some concessions such as labelling Google’s own links more clearly (a more detailed list of the remedies Google proposed is below). Google competitors were already stirring with negative responses early on, but Almunia, who oversees antitrust and other competition issues, gave them had until June 27 to respond formally. What’s coming out today appears to be a concerted effort to coordinate those negative reponses — claiming Google’s suggestions do not go far enough — for maximum effect.
We will be listening into the Fairsearch-led press conference later today and will update the post with more as we learn it.
The EPC includes big names like the FT, News International, Guardian Media Group, Axel Springer, Thomson Reuters and Reed Elsevier, but also more regional players. Among those coming out against Google, for example, is Dr. Hubert Burda, president of the German magazine publishers’ association VDZ. He echoes the basic line that Google needs to go back to the drawing board.
“If Google does not come up with fundamentally improved proposals very soon, we call on the Commission to use its full legal powers, including an immediate Statement of Objections with effective remedies,” he said in a statement. “Fair and non-discriminatory search with equal criteria for all websites is an essential prerequisite for the prosperous development of the European media and technology sector.”
As we reported before, here are the proposals as Google has made them to date:
label promoted links to its own specialised search services so that users can distinguish them from natural web search results,
clearly separate these promoted links from other web search results by clear graphical features (such as a frame), and
display links to three rival specialised search services close to its own services, in a place that is clearly visible to users;
offer all websites the option to opt-out from the use of all their content in Google’s specialised search services, while ensuring that any opt-out does not unduly affect the ranking of those web sites in Google’s general web search results,
offer all specialised search web sites that focus on product search or local search the option to mark certain categories of information in such a way that such information is not indexed or used by Google,
provide newspaper publishers with a mechanism allowing them to control on a web page per web page basis the display of their content in Google News,
no longer include in its agreements with publishers any written or unwritten obligations that would require them to source online search advertisements exclusively from Google, and
no longer impose obligations that would prevent advertisers from managing search advertising campaigns across competing advertising platforms.
It looks like the approach that competitors are taking is to take each of these suggestions, line by line, and show how they are not feasible. For example, on the suggestion on opting out from specialized searches (number three in the list below), the publishers’ group responds: “In other words, ‘if you don’t want us to steal your content, you need to make sure we can’t find it.’ An opt out from a 90% dominant player means of course that you become invisible to readers and is no option at all.”
We are reaching out to all the parties, including Google, for further comment.
As Google Reader’s death nears — seriously, July 1 is really soon – RSS reader Feedly is stepping up its game. Feedly, which hit 12 million users at the end of May (up from 4 million in March), announced Wednesday that it is now an independently operating cloud product — i.e., it’s no longer relying on Google Reader’s backend. (If you’re already using Feedly, here’s how to be prepared for the company to roll your account over to the new cloud.)
Feedly has also launched a web-only version, which it says was the top user-requested feature. Feedly already had Chrome and Safari apps, but this means that users of other browsers, like Internet Explorer, can access the service.
Finally, the fact that Feedly’s now operating in its own cloud means that developers can build apps for it. In its blog post, the company announced the first Feedly apps — including an IFTTT (if this then that) Feedly channel that lets you “connect your feedly account to 63 other services (including Evernote, Google Drive, Gmail, Pocket, Instapaper, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, WordPress, etc.),” social media management platform Sprout Social and RSS readers for various platforms from companies like Nextgen Reader, gNewsReader, Press and Newsify.
Meanwhile, we’re planning a guide to Google Reader alternatives to help you prepare for the switch, if you haven’t switched over to a new service already. If you were a die-hard Google Reader user, what product are you using now — or are you clinging to Google Reader until the bitter end? Let us know in the comments.
Google has added support for 18 new languages to its Google Drive web app suite. Besides Drive itself, this includes Google Docs, Sheets and Slides.
The newly supported languages are Afrikaans, Amharic, Basque, Chinese (Hong Kong), Estonian, French (Canada), Galician, Icelandic, Khmer, Lao, Malaysian, Nepali, Persian, Sinhalese, Spanish (Latin America), Swahili, Urdu and Zulu.
With these 18 languages, Google Drive now supports 65 languages in total.
To switch to a different language in Drive, users must click the gear icon in the upper-right corner, select "settings" and choose a new language under "general." To change the language in Google Drive for mobile, they must open their device's language settings.
Want to understand how Facebook connects its servers? Hear from VMware’s CEO how the virtualization giant plans to build its next big business? Discover why Snapchat builds on Google App Engine as opposed to Amazon Web Services? Or maybe you want to understand if Microsoft can compete in the cloud.
We’re going to have people discussing all this and more on Wednesday and Thursday at this week’s Structure conference in San Francisco. In the sixth year of the event we’re spending a lot of our time delving into the practical matters of building out webscale infrastructure, from the networking conundrums to the business process around scaling.
If there’s one big theme for the show this year, it’s what happens when IT meets the business and how to bring an understanding of business goals to scaling out services, whether you are Amazon or Revlon. We’ll have Kevin Scott of LinkedIn sharing how he re-architected the business social network’s infrastructure to better meet business goals. Cory von Wallenstein of Dyn will discuss the process the company follows to support existing features while building new ones that must scale rapidly without breaking the service or the bank.
We’ll also have executives from Warner Music Group sharing how the company is building out an internal platform as a service and what it will do for the business, while CIOs from Revlon, Kohl’s and The Clorox Company share their takes on the cloud from inside the enterprise.
Networking nerds from web giants will be there discussing the importance of using software defined networks and real-time information for building application aware networks. Plus, we have several talks from people such as Jeff Dean of Google, Jason Hoffman of Joyent and Adrian Cockcroft of Netflix that will discuss how to push our infrastructure’s boundaries for the data-rich era we’re entering.
We’ll also have ten three-minute talks from our Cloud Trailblazers who will be there ready to talk about their ideas for how to rethink infrastructure. You can meet the stars of tomorrow over the course of the two-day event. Or you can network with the stars of today. Plus, two hot startups will debut and there’s also a six-company LaunchPad with very young startups.
I’m preparing to get on a plane from Austin to spend this week in San Francisco. I’ve made this trip dozens of times for dozens of GigaOM events, but this one has me the most excited. We’ve pulled some amazing people together to talk not just about defining the cloud or various trends in infrastructure, but how the shift in information technology is playing out at real companies whether they are startups, enterprises or the giants of the webscale world.
We have a few tickets left, so just sign up and get on over to the event. This isn’t some wannabe cloud show. This is Structure, the first and the best cloud show planned by myself, Derrick Harris, Barb Darrow and the GigaOM events team. We wouldn’t let you down.
A number of internet regulations, devised by different internet companies as well as regulatory authorities, have tried hard to curb online child porn. Google is now spearheading a new effort to that end, creating a new cross-industry database highlighting instances of child porn, making it easier for different organizations to report them.
Google will populate questionable images into this database through a method known as ‘hashing.’ Hashing essentially analyzes the different specifics of an image, without caring about the type or resolution of the file. This helps it identify exact components that are specific to child-porn images and then flag these images to be removed from the web.
According to an official blog post by Google, “Since 2008, we’ve used ‘hashing’ technology to tag known child sexual abuse images, allowing us to identify duplicate images which may exist elsewhere. Each offending image in effect gets a unique ID that our computers can recognize without humans having to view them again.”
The post further reveals how the database being created by Google will help law enforcement agencies, “Recently, we’ve started working to incorporate encrypted ‘fingerprints’ of child sexual abuse images into a cross-industry database. This will enable companies, law enforcement and charities to better collaborate on detecting and removing these images, and to take action against the criminals.”
The search giant has also dedicated millions of dollars to curb child abuse and to ensure, through different charities and organizations, to rescue such children who have been victim of such issues.
Appreciating these efforts, an official of the UK government stated, “Google have stepped up. No one can argue about that. In all my time working in this space no company has ever devoted anything like this level of resources to working with civil society organizations to attack online child abuse images.”
Yesterday, we reported that after working on ‘Project Loon’ for quite some time, Google has finally initiated the pilot phase of the project in New Zealand. The pilot phase will test the viability of providing internet access through hot air balloons. A professor at DePauw University has now stated that this project can potentially benefit huge segments of the population.
Google intends to bring internet access to the most remote regions of the world with the help of ‘Project Loon.’ One of the key reasons why a major portion of the world’s population have no access to internet is simply that the development of infrastructure is too expensive.
This is precisely why Google’s ‘Project Loon’ is so extra-ordinary. It has to rely on absolutely no infrastructure. A beacon is affixed on a hot air balloon and then the balloon is released into the air. Users within the range of the beacon’s transmission are able to receive signals from the balloon on specialized antenna and thus, are able to access internet.
Google hopes that in the coming days, it will also bring telecom services to remote areas of the world through similar measures. Professor Kevin Howley of the DePauw University has lauded the project envisioned by Google. According to him, “Whole segments of the population would reap enormous benefits, from social inclusion to educational and economic opportunities.”
Project Loon certainly has such a potential and we fervently look forward to the actual launch of the project which would be critical in bringing many more people online.
Google Reader is meeting its end in just a few weeks, and there’s no doubt it’ll be traumatic for users of the beloved service. There are a variety of replacement options already on the market, with more expected to launch in the next couple of weeks, and I’m curious to see what rises to the top.
But one replacement product that I wouldn’t use? An RSS news reader from Facebook.
We’ve seen that Facebook has no problem quickly launching products to try to disrupt a growing market, even if it’s not a sure thing they’ll succeed. (Just look at Poke, the company’s challenge to Snapchat.) And between the company’s launch of hashtags last week to improve the real-time nature of the news feed (even if I think hashtags are better saved for ironic conversation), and the addition of new tabs for following people on the new News Feed, Facebook clearly has ambitions to be more of a resource for news. (After all, brands and advertisers love the real-time nature of constantly updated live events and news.)
But as a hardcore Google Reader user, I have no interest in using an RSS reader replacement from Facebook, and there are several reasons why it seems like an ill-suited product for the social platform.
The appeal of Google Reader was that it was a reliable tool for importing and consuming news — one that wasn’t influenced by trends. When I subscribe to a feed, I want to read everything in that feed. With Twitter and Facebook at my disposal, I don’t need another site to see articles that my friends are sharing. I rely on my RSS feeds for work to catch every item of technology news flowing across the internet every day — I need to see everything, not just what’s popular, to do my job. And I follow probably 20-30 blogs about topics like fashion or cooking, where the writers post infrequently but where want to read every one of their posts.
So why wouldn’t I look to Facebook to re-create this experience? Probably because I don’t want my RSS reader to be social — I have Twitter and the existing Facebook for social news. I don’t want all my friends to know that I read fashion blogs on a daily basis. I don’t want the news I read to influence the ads I see on Facebook, or the stories that show up in my news feed. As the Washington Post’s auto-sharing from its social reader experiment showed, people don’t want everyone to know what they’re reading.
Of course, we don’t know if Facebook is launching an RSS reader at all, let alone what it would look like. The company did not have any comment on the matter when we asked. But social sharing is embedded in Facebook’s DNA, so it’s a reasonable assumption that any RSS reader put out by Facebook would have serious social attributes, with a heavy emphasis on sharing.
Sure, there’s room for social news on Facebook. On my account, I “like” a lot of news outlets, as well as journalists and celebrities and business figures. In fact, a quick glance at my news feed would show mostly news stories, and very few posts from my friends. It’s a great way to see what’s popular right now in the news, or to catch an older story I might have missed on Twitter. But social news is a distinctly different experience from what people knew and loved about Google Reader — and that’s a distinction that a company like Digg seems to understand.
As I wrote previously, Digg’s new RSS news reader will likely incorporate some social features but will also serve as a separate product from the popular stories posted on Digg.com. And while Google Reader used to have much-beloved social features, these were complements, not a replacement, for the feeds themselves.
Would it make perfect sense for Facebook to create a dedicated spot on its site for news? Sure. But that likely wouldn’t keep me from searching for my next RSS relationship.
Google this week launched 30 balloons into the stratosphere in the first step toward creating what it calls a "network in the sky" that could eventually bring "balloon-powered Internet [to] everyone."
Dubbed "Project Loon," Google's balloon-based wireless networks aim to bring 3G-like speed to what Google says are the "2 out of every 3 people on Earth" who lack a fast, affordable Internet connection. Google's plan has been rumored for weeks. As we wrote earlier this month, balloon-based communications are well established for military communications and have been proposed for public safety use in disaster areas. Google could be the first to make balloon-based networks widely used for commercial Internet access.
Google is starting small and admits its system is just in the experimental stages. Google said the 30 balloons launched this week were sent into the air "from the Tekapo area of New Zealand’s South Island" and that a group of 50 pilot testers have been equipped with "special Internet antennas" to try to connect to the network. Google made the announcement late Friday night in the US, Saturday in New Zealand time.
The solar-powered balloons are 15 meters in diameter when fully inflated and are being sent 20 kilometers into the sky. "Project Loon balloons are made of a very thin plastic, about 3mil thick," Google said in a fact sheet. "We use superpressure envelopes—this means the volume of the balloon remains constant, like a mylar party balloon. This lets it float much longer than a balloon that stretches as it inflates."
While some balloon-based communications keep the balloons tethered to the ground, Google's will fly untethered and be controlled from the ground. "One of the most important balloon science breakthroughs of the project was around how to control the altitude of the balloon, which allows us to control where it will fly and to adjust speed," the company said. "The other critical computer science breakthrough we made was around our Mission Control, which makes balloons manageable in groups so they can provide consistent connectivity to a given area."
In a video, Project Loon Chief Technical Architect Rich DeVaul explained that "the stratosphere is different because we tend to have layers of winds that go in very particular directions. By moving up and down through these layers we can steer. By catching the right winds we can keep the balloons together enough to get good coverage on the ground."
Antennas on people's homes will communicate with the balloons. Each balloon "talks" to its neighbors and to a ground station connected to a local Internet provider. Google said this will allow high bandwidth over long distances, with antennas on the ground able to "connect to the balloon-powered Internet when the balloons are in a 20km radius."
Balloons can be directed throughout the world and reused. Once airborne, each balloon is capable of flying for quite a while, from west to east because of the wind patterns in the stratosphere. "If the balloons are circling around the bottom half of the world, eventually the balloon that's over South Africa will pass over South America," said Astro Teller, Google's so-called "Captain of Moonshots." Launches are coordinated with air traffic control authorities.
Google noted that it's not the first to consider balloons for commercial Internet deployments, but previous attempts were stymied by the challenges of trying to keep the balloons in one place. "So the idea we pursued was based on freeing the balloons and letting them sail freely on the winds. All we had to do was figure out how to control their path through the sky," Google said. "We’ve now found a way to do that, using just wind and solar power: we can move the balloons up or down to catch the winds we want them to travel in. That solution then led us to a new problem: how to manage a fleet of balloons sailing around the world so that each balloon is in the area you want it right when you need it. We’re solving this with some complex algorithms and lots of computing power."
Google didn't say what frequencies it is using, but said it has designed its system to filter out competing signals.
Just when Project Loon could provide reliable Internet access to large populations isn't clear. Google said it chose the name "Loon" in part because "the idea may sound a bit crazy." The experiences of the pilot testers "will be used to refine the technology and shape the next phase of Project Loon," Google said. "This is the first time we’ve launched this many balloons and tried to connect to this many receivers on the ground, and we’re going to learn a lot that will help us improve our technology and balloon design."
Microsoft today announced a number of updates to its Azure Mobile Services that include support for Git source control, custom APIs and Android push notifications through Google Cloud Messaging to its mobile backend service. Azure users now also get a free 20MB SQL database for mobile services and web sites for 12 months.
The highlight of today’s update is clearly support for Android push notifications in Azure Mobile Service’s Notification Hubs. The Notifications Hubs, which Microsoft launched earlier this year, previously allowed developers to send push notifications to their apps on Windows 8, Windows Phone 8 and iOS, but with the help of MS Open Tech, the platform now also supports broadcasting notifications to Android devices via Google Cloud Messaging. With this update, Azure’s Notification Hubs now support all the major smartphone platforms and, according to Microsoft, allow developers to push notifications to millions of devices with low latency.
The other update developers will surely appreciate is the addition of source control integration with Git. As Microsoft’s Scott Guthrie notes, this now allows developers to cone their git repository on a local machine, work on their scripts and then “”easily deploy the mobile service to production using Git.” It’s worth noting that Microsoft also recently added Git support to Visual Studio and its Team Foundation Server and Service.
Developers can also now create and expose custom APIs with Azure Mobile Services. This, Guthrie says, will allow developers to work with data sources other than SQL databases and broker calls to third-party APIs. The custom APIs can be written using Node.js and can use Node’s NPM packages.
The free 20MB SQL database is unlikely to be large enough for a popular mobile app or web site in production, but as Microsoft rightly notes, it should be enough to help developers develop and test their apps.
You can find a full list of today’s updates (and a few code examples) here.
Google Inc. has aggressively avoided paying corporation tax in Britain and its reputation won’t be restored until it begins to pay what is due, a U.K. parliamentary committee said Thursday, in the latest sign that governments around the world are stepping up scrutiny of the tax affairs of multinational firms.
In a strongly worded 64-page report, the public affairs committee also criticized the U.K. tax authority, Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, for failing to challenge Google about its “highly contrived” tax arrangement and called on it to fully investigate the Internet giant.
Blogger clearly benefits from a larger screen, yet Android tablet owners haven't had a native editing space since the Blogger app launched on their platform. Thankfully, Google is rectifying that problem today: the Android release now occupies a tablet's full screen space while users compose and review their posts. The refresh also offers WYSIWYG editing for current entries, regardless of the screen size. However much they'll use the improved workspace, would-be Android auteurs just have to swing by Google Play for the update.
Apple said on Tuesday that Bing would be the default search engine in the upcoming iOS 7.
It’s the latest prying apart of Google services from default placement on Apple devices, following YouTube and Google Maps.
Here’s what going on: If you ask Siri a question that it cannot answer with its pre-programmed system, the virtual personal assistant tries Web search.
Currently, Siri defaults to the user’s preferred Safari search engine, which is set by default to Google but can be changed to Yahoo or Bing.
But with the debut of iOS 7, Siri search will default to Bing instead. Not only will it use Microsoft’s search index to answer all queries that it can’t quickly answer on its own, it will skip the “would you like me to search the Web” interim step entirely.
Caveat: You can force Siri to search Google by asking it to do so — “search Google for smartphones.” But that requires an explicit command, one that adds an additional layer of complexity to a voice interface that’s supposed to be intuitive.
So, with Siri’s next iteration, Google search has very clearly been pushed to the side. And that’s worth noting. Because while Siri might not be widely used to search the Web today, it likely will be soon. The speech recognition and natural language technology that underlies Siri is the future of search. Indeed, Google itself is on record saying as much.
If voice is the future of search, and Bing becomes Siri’s go-to search engine come fall, what does that mean for Google and its place in iOS? What happens when Google is no longer the middleman for all those search results it currently monetizes on iOS? There’s far too little information available currently to really say. But those are questions worth asking. Because come fall, the last place where Google services will remain the default on iOS will be in the search bar for mobile Safari.
Signalling the tensions underlying this simple switcheroo, Google and Apple representatives declined to comment on the matter, even to clarify what exactly was happening. Microsoft Bing VP Derrick Connell said in a blog post, “Making sure customers can have access to the power of Bing where and when they need it has been a big focus of the work we have done over the past few years, and we are excited to work with Apple to deliver it to Siri users this fall.”
Less than a month ago, a Windows 8 advertisement made fun of Siri with the slogan “Less talking, more doing.”
Google Glass has been criticized by many as a device that would allow easy invasion of others’ privacy. Although Google has refuted such contentions, the company seems to act by itself. In its shareholders meeting, Google recently restricted anyone from bringing Google Glass to the venue.
According to the instructions provided by Google for its stakeholders meeting, “Cameras, recording devices, and other electronic devices, such as smart phones, will not be permitted at the meeting. Photography is prohibited at the meeting.”
Given the fact that Google Glass falls within this category, certain activist groups have taken the occasion to criticize Google for having created Glass. These groups allege that Google is being hypocritical by not allowing Glass into its own meetings but continuing to push it in the consumer arena.
However, these contentions seem fairly childish. Going by this logic, a smartphone vendor can be accused of conspiring to destroy users’ privacy by equipping a smartphone with a camera. One can easily snap a photo, in public, with a smartphone camera. But that argument does not hold up. And since it’s pretty much the same argument that is being levelled against Glass, it doesn’t hold up in this case either.
Like Google, any other entities who are sensitive about being photographed or filmed can simply ban Google Glass on their venues. For instance, if a university feels that Glass can lead to privacy violations, the device can simply be banned on campus.
A month after rumors emerged that Facebook was close to buying mapping data company Waze for a billion dollars, a new report from Israel’s Globes Online says that now Google is looking to acquire the company for a whopping $1.3 billion. At this point we shouldn’t treat it more than just a rumor. Waze was also linked to Apple, but Tim Cook denied any interest at the D conference earlier this year. The four-year-old company has raised $67 million in funds from the likes of Horizon Ventures and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Previous investors include Qualcomm, Bluerun Ventures and Microsoft.
If Google buys Waze, then someone from Waze needs to send my colleague Mathew Ingram, a T-shirt. He astutely pointed out that Google should be snatching this company from Facebook or regret it later. Here is what he wrote:
Waze — which won our Launchpad event at Mobilize in 2009 — provides real-time information about everything from road closures and accidents to traffic backups and police speed-traps. The information is superimposed on a scrollable map, and there are also a number of social features built in, which allow users to see and share information, including messages, with other drivers. Waze even provides gas-price data.
Facebook has its own reasons for wanting a service like Waze, I think Google would be the real loser if it went to either of these companies, for the simple reason that Google Maps is a big part of the company’s mobile appeal — at least for me, and I would suspect for many others. Google Maps also has traffic data, and it is also based on real-time information, which comes from other users of the service who have their GPS location turned on. It is pretty accurate — but I don’t find it nearly as useful as Waze. I didn’t think enough people would take the time to enter information about things like traffic or speed traps into Waze to make it useful, but I was wrong. And Google doesn’t seem to have any plans to try and duplicate that, since it is more focused on automating that whole process, in typical Google fashion.
When Google pushed out face unlock security feature on Android, many lambasted the feature as fickle and inadequate. It now seems that the search giant had been working on improving the feature by adding more security measures to it. This is manifest in a new face unlock patent application.
The problem with face unlock feature is that it can easily be manipulated. For instance, you can unlock the security measure by waving a photo of the user in front of it. To counter this, Google has tried to implement more aspects to it. For instance, in Android 4.1, users are also required to blink in front of the camera to undo face unlock. This is done to ensure that the user is not a photograph but a real human being.
A new patent application by Google envisions even better methods of improving the face unlock feature. For instance, the application talks about coupling face unlock with certain pre-configured measures. Movements such as raising eyebrows or smiling can then be used, in conjunction with face unlock, to ensure that the real user is unlocking the device.
Moreover, the patent also speaks about the use of two different frames. This will essentially help the device recognize when a photograph or a video clip is being used to fool it. A 3D ‘range finder’ can also be used to ensure that the person smiling or waving at the device is a 3D object, not a part of a 2D video or a photograph. Such measures certainly seem promising in that they can truly render face unlock far more secure.
When I worked as a marketer at Google and learned of an upcoming comedy called “The Internship,” which was to reunite “Wedding Crashers” duo Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson as unemployed 40-year-old salesmen who luck their way into Google internships, most of the reactions I heard from my co-workers could be summed up as “meh.” Neither Vaughn nor Wilson has had a truly funny movie in years. And, I’d surmise, most Googlers have reached a point where the company quirks that the outside world finds so odd and intriguing are accepted as more or less routine, and certainly not interesting enough to hold up the foundations of a decent movie.
Well, “The Internship” hit theaters today, and, I’ll admit, both as an ex-Googler and a moviegoer nostalgic for the “frat pack” comedies of the mid-2000s, it was significantly better than I expected it would be. In fact, the only thing that really, truly disappointed me about it was that nowhere in its hour and 50 minutes is the food fight scene from “Animal House” recreated with soba noodles and gluten-free banana pudding in a Google cafeteria. (I was really hoping for that.)
The unexpected enjoyability of “The Internship” is due in large part to the quippy dialogue between Billy (Vaughn) and Nick (Wilson), which very much resembles their banter in “Wedding Crashers.” This is at its best in the hilarious scene where the two are in a job interview over a Google+ Hangout (of course) and are given one of the notoriously convoluted brain-teaser questions that are now a solid part of Google lore. (For the record, my half-dozen interviews there didn’t contain a single one.) It also routinely gets very funny when the two fast talkers are forced to contend with a company full of extremely young people who, whether they’re earnestly overeager or bitterly snarky, are all wildly lacking in social skills.
That friction is what makes “The Internship” less a commentary on Silicon Valley (which 2010’s Facebook origin tale “The Social Network” certainly was) than it is on Gen-Y and its supposed best and brightest. Nick and Billy are Gen-X’ers of average brainpower who are used to professional success that comes from boots-on-the-ground routine and a skillful command of smooth talking, whereas their 21-year-old intern counterparts are caricatures of millennials raised on SAT prep classes and flickering screens — one kid stares at his smartphone all the time, another keeps referring to his overbearing “tiger mom,” for example. Naturally, this becomes Nick and Billy’s secret asset, as they can bring people skills to the table.
But “The Internship” also gets the vibe of working at Google about as well as Hollywood possibly could, from the proverbial Googley details like nap pods, free food, and indoor slides; to more insidery tidbits like accurate internal slang (foodback, TGIF) and the fact that the interns are housed in what appears to be a mid-century Motor Inn by the side of El Camino Real in Mountain View. If you have ever been a Googler who was based outside of the Bay Area, you probably stayed in one of these every time you visited the mothership.
Of course, it’s simplified. Though I was never a Google intern, I’m pretty sure that the intern program is not a summer-long competition reminiscent of a ’90s tween sports movies — the scene where teams of interns are pitted together in a Quidditch match (yes) felt like “The Big Green” on fast-forward. Google is so notoriously complex internally that employees like to say it will take you six months just to get situated, so I’ll give “The Internship” a pass on making things a bit more Hollywood-friendly. And nothing’s wildly off-base. The script was vetted by senior Google executives, and the movie was filmed in full cooperation with the company — a sizable portion of it on Google’s own campus. In fact, Google confirmed to CNN that they requested the removal of a scene in which a self-driving car crashes.
What’s most impressive to me as an ex-Googler is how well the movie nailed a few very nuanced realities of working at the company — perhaps by accident. In particular, “The Internship” subtly highlighted the weird balance that Googlers have to strike between being in a high-stress environment rife with deadlines while also being in a sun-soaked paradise of expansive lawns, candy-colored “G-Bikes,” and beach volleyball courts in between office buildings.
One character, a middle manager played by Rose Byrne, is chronically over-scheduled, overworked and under-slept, and there are a few subtle nods at how she’s become over-reliant on Google perks because she has literally no time for life outside the company (concierge dry-cleaning, for example). This combination of the casual and the ultracompetitive is a vibe that runs through pretty much all of Google culture, and kudos to the writers of “The Internship” for picking up on it so well.
That said, “The Internship” gets quite tedious when it starts to veer into a commercial for Google, like early on when Billy gets a little too vocal about the company being a bright spot of hope in the midst of a terrible economy. These moments are thankfully minimal. Several reviews of the movie have already ripped into it for what amounts to product placement because of all the Google products shown onscreen, but to be honest, this is one of the most true-to-Google aspects of the film. Step onto Google’s campus and it actually is a celebration of the things the company builds, from plush stuffed Androids in lounges to Chrome on everyone’s laptops to meetings conducted over Hangout. They’re everywhere.
That’s one of the things I loved the most about my two years at Google: Just about every team uses just about every other team’s products, creating a sense of company unity that’s still admirably intact given how big it’s grown. The idea of teamwork is a big theme running through “The Internship” but also through Google itself. Sometimes our team-building moments really are that cheesy. (Man, sometimes I really miss that place.)
Oh, and there are two cameos by Google co-founder Sergey Brin. One’s very early in the movie, and one’s very late. Both are about half a second long, and the earlier one is particularly perfect.
Google pulled out of China in 2010 as a result of numerous hacking attacks on the U.S. that originated from inside the country. Despite the fact that China has more than 560 million people who use the Internet, Google has no plans to return its services there.CNET reports that during Google’s annual shareholder meeting on Thursday, chairman and former CEO Eric Schmidt said he was “troubled by continued reports of censorship and spying on people” by the Chinese government. He explained that until China changes the way it treats its citizens, Google has no plans to invest more resources into the country. Prior to pulling out of the country, Google’s search engine controlled 29% of the Chinese market. The company’s market share plummeted to just 5% in 2012, however.
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