Although YouTube worldwide increasingly colocated staff in Google offices we maintained worldwide headquarters as a standalone building in San Bruno. Coming to an office every day that said YouTube in big letters and was filled w just other folks working on the same goal - incredibly motivating. We would have gotten lost on Google’s main campus. We needed separate space and identity. Not because we were better but because we were different. How could we have a community that believed in us if we didn’t feel like a tribe ourselves. We had a building, we had a heartbeat.
Elapsed Time: Don’t Mess Up Tumblr: Five Lessons Learned from YouTube
Google’s mobile platform now accounts for nearly 75% of all handset sales, a jump of almost 20 percentage points on a year ago, and equating to 156 million devices sold in the three-month period. Smartphones sales grew by 63 million units to 210 million for the quarter, making up nearly half of all mobile phone sales overall, at 425 million. With the number of mobile handset sales up by a mere 0.7% on a year ago, it’s clear that higher-end devices are very the much growth engine for the mobile industry at the moment.
Nearly 75% Of All Smartphones Sold In Q1 Were Android, With Samsung At 30%; Mobile Sales Overall Nearly Flat: Gartner | TechCrunch
Since we love open source hardware hacking as much as we love to share open source code, we decided to team up with the O’Reilly Data Sensing Lab to deploy hundreds of Arduino-based environmental sensors at Google I/O 2013. Using software built with the Google Cloud Platform, we’ll be collecting and visualizing ambient data about the conference, such as temperature, humidity, air quality, in real time! Altogether, the sensors network will provide over 4,000 continuous data streams over a ZigBee mesh network managed by Device Cloud by Etherios.
In addition, our motes will be able to detect fluctuations in noise level, and some will be attached to footstep counters, to understand collective movement around the conference floor. Of course, since a key goal of Google I/O is to promote innovation in the open, the project’s Cloud Platform code, the Arduino hardware designs, and even the data collected, will be open source and available online after the conference.
Cloud Platform Blog: Data Sensing Lab at Google I/O 2013: Google Cloud Platform meets the Internet of Things
So what did I learn from this lesson? First, trust your gut. I was using Feedburner and knew it was a very useful service. I felt that others would see that too. They did, but it took some time. Second, I learned that a service can get traction with the little guys and in time, the big guys will come along. I have seen that happen quite a bit since then. And finally, I learned that you can do too much due diligence. It’s important to talk to the market and hear what it is saying. But you have to balance that with other things; the quality of the team, the product, the user experience, etc. You cannot rely alone on due diligence, particularly early on in the development of a company and a market.
A VC: You Can Do Too Much Due Diligence
Facebook didn’t realize just how important widgets, docks, and app folders were to Android users, and that leaving them out of Home was a huge mistake. That’s because some of the Facebookers who built and tested Home normally carry iPhones, I’ve confirmed. Lack of “droidfooding” has left Facebook scrambling to add these features, whose absence have led Home to just 1 million downloads since launching a month ago.
Facebook’s iPhone Culture Builds An Overzealous Home On Android | TechCrunch
Users care about applications and services they use, not operating systems. Very few people will ask you, “Hey, how come MacBooks are on Mac OS-X and iPhone and iPad are on iOS? Why is this?” They think of Apple as iTunes, iCloud, iPhoto. Developers are people, too. They want to write applications one time, but they also want choice. What excites me in this new role is that I can try do the right thing for users and developers — without worrying about the fact that we have two things. We embrace both and we are continuing to invest in both. So in the short run, nothing changes. In the long run, computing itself will dictate the changes. We’re living through a pivotal moment. It’s a world of multiple screens, smart displays, with tons of low-cost computing, with big sensors built into devices. At Google we ask how to bring together something seamless and beautiful and intuitive across all these screens. The picture may look different a year or two from from now, but in the short term, we have Android and we have Chrome, and we are not changing course.
New Android Boss Finally Reveals Plans for World’s Most Popular Mobile OS | Wired Business | Wired.com
Forget sex: how the idea behind Bang with Friends could revolutionize social interaction
It’s a shame everyone is so fixated on the titillating aspects of Bang With Friends, because there’s a genius idea lurking just underneath the surface. When the creators of Bang With Friends went looking for a fling, they stumbled upon a formula that could bring people closer together, period.
What if you could talk about any embarrassing or obscure thing, knowing that another person already shares your interest?
You probably have a number of interests that you wouldn’t bring up in casual conversation, and don’t display proudly on your Pinterest board. Things you don’t ‘like’ on Facebook, that you don’t share to any but your closest Google+ circles, and that you certainly wouldn’t tweet about. Your true tastes in music. Your Pokemon addiction. Perhaps even your favorite kind of porn. Your political stance, if it’s controversial. They aren’t necessarily deep secrets, but perhaps just mildly embarrassing things that you wouldn’t want to broadcast to the world.
http://www.theverge.com/2013/5/11/4319774/editorial-bang-with-friends-hides-a-good-idea
As you flip through the books, certain images will feature a “+” sign, which means that they actually contain a gallery — the images will automatically rotate like a slideshow, and you can tap them to get a closer look. These extras aren’t enough to double dip, so if you already own the hardcover books there’s little to see here. But if you’ve been holding out, the digital editions are the definitive versions — if you’re not overly attached to print, the bonuses are more than worth ditching paper
‘Halo’ and ‘Dead Space’ art books on iPad: is high-res art worth the shift from print? http://www.theverge.com/2013/5/8/4309134/halo-dead-space-digital-art-books-for-ipad
Did the future of wireless charging get decided by a coffee cup?
Did the future of wireless charging get decided by a coffee cup? http://www.theverge.com/2013/5/8/4312016/wireless-charging-coffee-cup-witricity-and-coffee-bean-join-power-matters-alliance
The tech industry has been waiting for Apple to release the next big thing for several years now. The clamoring is annoying and irrational—nobody knows what they want from Apple, exactly, just that they want something new, whether it’s a watch, a TV, a phablet, smart glasses, or who knows what. But I wonder if this is a giant distraction from the real story at Apple. In our obsession with the new, we’re missing the potential of the old. It’s very likely that Apple’s next big thing is already out there. The iPad is going to be huge. Just watch.
This means that the first phase of the smartphone industry is close to ending: the greater proportion of featurephone buyers have been converted to smartphones. This has happened so fast that perhaps 90% of current Android owners are still on their first one, and 70% of iPhone owners.
The second phase is ongoing replacement: what are those people’s second and third phones? As the industry moves on from converting featurephone buyers to fighting for replacement purchases, what happens to value? Growth for any given manufacturer necessarily becomes a matter of taking sales away from other smartphone manufacturers, not featurephone manufacturers (i.e. Nokia). Moreover, Moore’s Law is at work, driving down prices; you can now get a 4.5” dual core Android phone from Huawei for just $200, and one from a generic Chinese manufacturer for $120-$150.
This is clearly a challenge for any handset OEM, but especially for one at the high end. There are fewer and fewer new high-end buyers coming into the market and the ones you sold to in the past may increasingly be tempted by ever improving cheaper phones. So a high-end phone maker risks losing sales if it stays at the high-end, or losing margin if it makes cheaper phones, or both.
In case it isn’ t obvious, this is the essence of the bear story for Apple. There’s lots of froth and nonsense swirling around as well, but this is a perfectly coherent and intelligent story. It isn’t that Apple is losing sales to Android (it isn’t, at least not yet) - it’s that the high-end market itself may be close to tapped out.
Apple tipping points - up or down? — Benedict Evans
No it is, I mean it’s more how these journalistic processes fit into something that is much bigger, and the much bigger thing is that we as human beings shepherd and create our intellectual history as a civilization. And it is that intellectual history on the shelf that we can pull off to do stuff, and not do the dumb thing again. Someone already said said it was done and wrote about their experience and we don’t do it again. And so there are several different processes that are creating that record and other processes where people are trying to destroy pieces of that record and others that are trying to prevent people putting things into the record. We all live off that intellectual record, so what we want to do is get as much into the record, prevent as much as possible being deleted from the record, and then, and then have the record as searchable as possible.
Transcript of secret meeting between Julian Assange and Google CEO Eric Schmidt
JA
Transcript of secret meeting between Julian Assange and Google CEO Eric Schmidt
I am not sure about the impact on China. It is still a political society, so the impact could be very great. I mean I often say that censorship is always cause for celebration. It is always an opportunity, because it reveals fear of reform. It means that the power position is so weak that you have got to care about what people think.
JC
Right. It’s like you find the sensitive documents by watching them hunt.
