I took this photo in downtown Washington, D.C.
Unlike the Google Car, which is purported to drive itself…this one let’s the rider sit on top (that’s a joke people)!
Doesn’t matter if you bend the roof with your butt.
The view is much better from on high, and it’s oh so comfortable on the white aluminum with your pants bottom shining it up.
Maybe this is a give-a-way for the next carathon or something equally prizeworthy. 😉
(Source Photo: Andy Blumenthal)
IF
1) you are a dissident living in a country that suppresses basic human rights
OR
2) you are a person seeking to help others suffering under authoritarian regimes
THEN
consider signing up at Movements.org, an organization that connects people in need of human rights help with those wanting to provide assistance.
After you create a profile, which is given a star rating depending on a vetting process, you can post requests for help or offers of services to help others.
Available services for “advice, contacts, training, and services,” include those from:
– Lawyers
– Journalists
– Technologists
– Translators
– Policy Makers
The great Soviet Jewish dissident, Natan Sharansky, who spent 10 years imprisoned in a tortuous gulag, wrote in the Wall Street Journal that Movement.org is a “transformative approach to an old problem” for collecting and trying to get information on human-rights abuses to reach the free world and to seek justice and freedom.
While dictators looks to suppress freedom of speech and information flow, social media is combating it, and Movements was provided a grant from Google, I believe, to do just that. 😉
I read with great interest this week in BBC about 2 mysterious barges off the East and West coasts of the U.S.
One barge is by San Francisco and the other by Maine.
The 4-story barges belong to Google.
There is speculation about these being, maybe, floating data centers.
I think that is more likely than showrooms for Google Glass.
These barges would potentially avail themselves of the ocean water for cooling the IT equipment.
I would imagine that there could be some backup and recovery strategy here as well associated with their terrestrial data centers.
But how you protect these floating data behemoths is another story.
A white paper by Emerson has data center energy consumption in the 25% range for cooling systems and another 12% for air movement, totaling 37%.
Other interesting new ideas for reducing energy consumption for data center cooling include submersion cooling.
For example, Green Revolution (GR) Cooling is one of the pioneers in this area.
They turn the server rack on its back and the servers are inserted vertically into a dielectric (an electrical insulator–yes, I had to look that up) cooling mineral oil.
In this video, the founder of GR identifies the potential cost-savings including eliminating chillers and raised floors as well as a overall 45% reduction in energy consumption, (although I am not clear how that jives with the 37% energy consumption of cooling to begin with).
Intuitively, one of the trickiest aspect to this would be the maintenance of the equipment, but there is a GR video that shows how to do this as well–and the instructions even states in good jest that the “gloves are optional.”
One of my favorite aspects of submersion cooling aside from the environmental aspects and cost-savings is the very cool green tint in the server racks that looks so alien and futuristic.
Turn down the lights and imagine you are on a ship traveling the universe, or maybe just on the Google ship not that far away. 😉
(Source Photo: Green Revolution)
Google, which touts itself as the one that “organize[s] the world’s information and make[s] it universally accessible and usable,” ended its Reader product on Monday, July 1.
The RSS reader was a terrific tool for aggregating content feeds on the Internet (and Google is a terrific company that benefits the whole world’s thirst for knowledge).
With Google Reader you could subscribe to tens or hundreds of news services, blogs, and other information feeds and read it on your desktop or mobile device.
Reader represented the Google mission itself by pulling together all this information and making it available in one reading place, simply and easily for anyone.
While the Goolge line is that they killed Reader, because of a declining user base, I find this less then credible, since anecdotally it seems like a very popular that is helpful to people. Moreover, Google could’ve chosen to competitively enhance this product rather than shut it down.
So why did they end a great product that literally fits their mission perfectly?
We can only surmise that the ad clicks weren’t there (and thus neither was the profit) or perhaps Google felt this product was cannibalizing attention from their other products like Google News (a limited aggregator) or from some of their paying ad sponsors or partners feeding other products like Google Glass.
We may never know the answer, but what we do know is that, in this case, Google sold out on it’s core mission of organizing and providing information and abandoned their adoring userbase for Reader.
Feedly and other more clunky readers are out there, but Google Reader is a loss for the information needy and desirous and a misstep by Google.
RIP Reader, I think we will yet see you, in some form or fashion, yet again. 😉
(Source Photo: here with attribution to Laurie Pink)
The Atlantic (21 June 2013) has a startling article about hiring at Google–“It’s a complete random mess.”
With all the Google information genius and the brainteasers they test people with, all the rounds of interviews they put them through, they found “zero relationship” between how people scored in tens of thousands of interviews and how they performed in their jobs.
No only didn’t the interviews predict good hires, but “colleges didn’t matter, GPAs…didn’t matter.”
Only one guy who was the world’s leading expert in something, and was hiring for a very specialized area seemed to be able to weed out the wheat from the chaff in interviews.
“People are complicated, organizations are complicated, matching people with organizations is complicated.”
This reminds me of what it’s like to match people for intimate relationships…very, very difficult. Sort of like, men are complicated, women are complicated, and matching men and women is complicated.
Whether matching people to organizations or to each other, getting a good Shidduch is a big challenge and hard to predict the outcome.
Perhaps that is why the average person goes through seven careers in a lifetime and “50% of all marriages in America end in divorce.”
Making a good match with a company or a person is hard–because as I heard as a teenager, “you never know what the person is really like until you wake up with them in the morning”–morning breath, hair messed, bad dreams, pissy moods, and all.
Similarly, with a company, until you work there and actually have to live the culture and deal with the people, policies, and politics, you won’t really know what it’s like just by asking around and reading up about them on Glassdoor.
Also, not only do you have imperfect information about the people and jobs when you try and match them up, but people change (organizations do to, but much more slowly–it’s a bigger ship to turn around).
Yes, while past performance are predictors of future performance–good skills and bad habits, they do stick around–at the same time, people do learn, grow, mature, and change–hopefully for the better.
As the old Jewish saying goes, “with age, comes wisdom”–and hopefully, more mature and better ways of dealing and coping with challenging and complex people and situations.
So what should you look for–whether in a new hire or a marriage mate?
Start with a good heart and a good fit; look for a track record of success in life, a hunger to succeed personally and professionally, someone willing to learn and grow, and not be afraid to work hard, have some failures, and get back on their feet again–that’s life.
Say a prayer and don’t be fooled by the superficial things or what people just say to get the job or the mate–look for what they do (action speaks louder than words) and remember, personal beauty is more than just skin deep. 😉
Apple which is under competitive pressure to come up with something new—since Steve Jobs, their chief and master innovator passed away—seems like a deer in the headlights, where they can’t sprint forward to the next innovation and instead, they just sit paralyzed in fear and stair dumbly into the oncoming Mac truck called Google and Samsung.
Apple, the pioneer of the mobile icons on your smartphone and tablet that look like what they are, has lost their way—big time.
Their new iOS 7 abandons this intuitive, user-centric architecture approach of skeuomorphism for instead a more amorphous look and feel—where the user has to guess what an icon is supposed to be (check out the unintelligible icons for Newstand or Passbook mobile wallet).
In other cases, there is virtually no significant perceptible change at all (see Messages and iTunes that are just a little bigger) or other changes that are actually detracting from what was in iOS 6 (see Reminders without the check marks, Notes without a notepad look, Settings without the gears, and the addition of clouds to the Weather icon).
I love Apple products—but just like they are flailing with a new backwards-leaning graphical user interface and Siri, the useless automated personal assistant, they are behind in the wearable technology arena, where Google Glass in almost off and running.
There is a reason Apple stock has tanked from over $700 to hovering in the low to mid $400 range,–without the brilliance of Job’s imagination, a laser-focus on perfecting their products, future-thinking functionality, and sleek elegant design–Apple is in trouble.
Will an Apple watch or television be unveiled soon and save the day?
It will extend Apple’s successful running streak, but their distinctive culture of creativity and excellence had better emerge in more ways than an iWatch or iTV for Apple to hold their crown of technology glory. 😉
(Source Photo: Facebook Fan’s of Apple)
I can only say that my fascination with Google continues to grow daily.
Years ago, I used to joke, “What is this G-O-O-G-L-E?”
But now, I know and marvel at how Google is information!
And every type of information from news and facts to shopping and entertainment:
Research is Google.
eCommerce is Google.
Entertainment is Google.
Google this…Google that.
Archive, index, search, discover, access…learn, grow.
Google has quite literally ushered in a new age of enlightenment, no really!
The focus is on information…Google’s mission statement is:
“Organize the world’s information and make it universally acceptable and useful.”
If you believe that knowledge and learning is one of the core underpinnings for personal growth and global development then you can appreciate how Google has been instrumental in unleashing the information age we are living in.
Of course, information can be used for good and for evil–we still have free choice.
But hopefully, by building not only our knowledge, but also understanding of risks, consequences, each other, and our purpose in life–we can use information to do more good than harm (not that we don’t make mistakes, but they should be part of our learning as opposed to coming from malevolent intentions).
Google is used for almost 2/3 of all searches.
Google has over 5 million eBooks and 18 million tunes.
Google’s YouTube has over 4 billion hours of video watched a month.
Google’s Blogger is the largest blogging site with over 46 million unique visitors in a month.
But what raises Google as the information provider par excellence is not just that they provide easy to use search and access to information, but that they make it available anytime, anywhere.
Google Android powers 2/3 of global smartphones.
Google Glass has a likely market potential for wearable IT and augmented reality of $11B by 2018.
Google’s Driverless Car will help “every person [traveling] could gain lost hours back for working, reading, talking, or searching the Internet.”
Google Fiber is bringing connection speeds 100x faster than traditional networking to Kansas City, Provo, and Austin.
Google is looking by 2020 to bring access to the 60% of the world that is not yet online.
Dr. Astro Teller who oversees Google[x] lab and “moonshot factory” says, “we are serious as a heart attack about making the world a better place,” and he compares themselves to Willy Wonka’s magical chocolate factory. (Bloomberg BusinessWeek)
I like chocolate and information–and yes, both make the world a better place. 😉
(Source Photo: here by (a)artwork)
Two interesting recent articles discuss the importance of building in simplicity to product design to make things more useful to people.
Contrary to popular belief, simple is not easy. Mat Mohan in Wired Magazine (Feb. 2013) says that “simplicity is about subtraction,” and “subtraction is the hardest math in product design.”
Two of the best recent examples of simplicity through subtraction is what Apple was able to achieve with the iPod, iPhone, iPad, and iTunes, and what Google did through its “sparse search page.”
Unfortunately, too many companies think that “quality is associated with more,” instead of less, and so they pack on options, menus, and buttons until their darn devices are virtually useless.
Similarly, an article in the Wall Street Journal (29 March 2013) advocates that “simplicity is the solution,” and rails against the delays, frustration, and confusion caused by complexity.
How many gadgets can’t we use, how many instructions can’t we follow, and how many forms can’t we decipher–because of complexity?
The WSJ gives examples of 800,000 apps in the Apple store, 240+ choices on the menu for the Cheesecake Factory (I’d like to try each and every one), and 135 mascaras, 437 lotions, and 1,992 fragrances at the Sephora website.
With all this complexity, it’s no wonder then that so many people suffer from migraines and other ailments these days.
I remember my father telling me that you should never give consumers too many choices, because people just won’t know what to choose. Instead, if you simply give them a few good choices, then you’ll make the sale.
Unfortunately, too many technologists and engineers develop ridiculously complex products, and too many lawyers, legislators, and regulators insist on and prepare long and complex documents that people aren’t able to read and cannot readily understand.
For example, in 2010, the tax code was almost 72,000 pages long, the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) is about 2,700 pages, and the typical credit card contract now runs to 20,000 words.
Even the brightest among us, and those with a lot of time on their hands, would be challenged to keep up with this.
While rewriting and tax code is a welcome topic of discussion these days, it befuddles the mind why most of the time, we simply add on new laws, rules, regulations, amendments, and exclusions, rather than just fix it–plain and simple.
But that’s sort of the point, it’s easier for organizations to just throw more stuff out there and put the onus on the end-users to figure it out–so what is it then that we pay these people for?
The plain language movement has gotten traction in recent years to try and improve communications and make things simpler and easier to understand.
Using Apple as an example again (yes, when it comes to design–they are that good), it is amazing how their products do not even come with operating instructions–unlike the big confusing manuals in minuscule print and numerous languages that used to accompany most electronic products. And that’s the point with Apple–you don’t need instructions–the products are so simple and intuitive–just the way they are supposed to be, thank you Apple!
The journal offers three ways to make products simpler:
– Empathy–have a genuine feel for other people’s needs and expectations.
– Distill–reduce products to their essence, getting rid of the unneeded bells and whistles.
– Clarify–make things easier to understand and use.
These are really the foundations for User-Centric Enterprise Architecture, which seeks to create useful and usable planning products and governance services–the point is to provide a simple and clear roadmap for the organization, not a Rorschach test for guessing the plan, model, and picture du-jour.
Keeping it simple is hard work–because you just can’t throw crap out there and expect people to make sense of it–but rather you have to roll up your sleeves and provide something that actually makes sense, is easy to use, and makes people’s lives better and not a living product-design hell. 😉
(Source Photo: Dannielle Blumenthal)
One of the things that I love about the Intelligence Community (IC) is that they think future and they think big.
Noah Schactman in Wired Magazine (12 December 12–great date!), gave a snapshot view of 2030 as provided by the National Intelligence Council (NIC).
Some of the predictions (or aspirations) include:
– Bioprinting such as creating 3-D printed organs (how’s that for your orchestrating your own organ transplant?)
– Retinal implants for night vision thermal imaging, seeing the distance without binoculars, or even one-upping Google Glass by providing augmented reality in your eye instead of over it
– Brain chips for superhuman thought and recall (those without remain doomed to brain farts, in comparison)
– Bioweapons where DNA is used to target and take out people by genetically engineering viruses to attack them, specifically, without leaving any markers
– People embedded in machines–reminiscent of when Ripley in the movie Alien enters in an exoskelton robotic suit to kick some Alien butt!
Other predictions include: megacities, climate change, big data clouds, aging populations, and more drones.
While some of these advances are incremental in nature–for example genetic engineering and bioweapons are incremental steps from DNA sequencing of humans.
However, other leaps are more dramatic.
An article by Stephen Levy in Wired (17 January 2013) discusses how Larry Page (one of the Google founders) strives for inventions that are magnitudes of “10x” (often actually 100x) better than the status quo, rather than just 10% improvements.
Google has many examples of leaping ahead of the competition: from its transformative search engine which has become synonymous with search itself to Gmail which came out with 100x the storage of its competitors, Translations for the entire web from/to any language, Google Fiber with broadband at 100x faster than industry speeds prototyped in Kansas City, Google Books providing a scanned and searchable archive of our global collection of books and magazines, Google+ for social media (this one, I see as just a Facebook copycat–to get on Facebook’s nerves!), Google Maps for getting around, Android their open platform operating system for mobile devices, and even self-driving cars–many of these are developed by Google X–their secret skunk work lab.
I really like Google’s concept of going for the “moon shot” rather than just tweaking technology to try and stay ahead of the competition, temporarily.
And as in space, there is so much territory to explore, Google believes it is attacking just .1% of the opportunities out there, and that the tech industry as a whole is attacking maybe 1% in aggregate–that leaves 99% or plenty of opportunity for all innovators and inventors out there.
To get to 2030 and beyond–we’re just at the tip of the innovation iceberg! 😉
Today, Facebook announced it’s new search tool called Graph Search for locating information on people, places, interests, photos, music, restaurants, and more.
Graph Search is still in beta, so you have to sign up in Facebook to get on the waiting list to use it.
But Facebook is throwing down the gauntlet to Google by using natural language queries to search by just asking the question in plain language like: “my friends that like Rocky” and up comes those smart ladies and gents.
But Graph Search is not just a challenge to Google, but to other social media tools and recommendation engines like Yelp and Foursquare, and even LinkedIn, which is now widely used for corporate recruiting.
Graph Search uses the Bing search engine and it’s secret sauce according to CNN is that is culls information from over 1 billion Facebook accounts, 24 billion photos, and 1 trillion connections–so there is an enormous and growing database to pull from.
So while the average Facebook user has about 190 connections, some people have as many as 5,000 and like the now antiquated business card file or Rolodex, all the people in your social network can provide important opportunities to learn and share. And while in the aggregate six degrees of separation, none of us are too far removed from everyone else anyway, we can still only Graph Search people and content in our network.
Interestingly enough, while Facebook rolls out Graph Search to try to capitalize on its treasure trove personal data and seemingly infinite connections, Bloomberg BusinessWeek (10 January 2013) ran an article called “The Dunbar Number” about how the human brain can only handle up to “150 meaningful relationships.”
Whether hunter-gather clans, military units, corporate divisions, or an individual’s network of family, friends, and colleagues–our brain “has limits” and 150 is it when it comes to substantial real world or virtual relationships–our brains have to process all the facets involved in social interactions from working together against outside “predators” to guarding against “bullies and cheats” from within the network.
According to Dunbar, digital technologies like the Internet and social media, while enabling people to grow their virtual Rolodex, does not really increase our social relationships in the real meaning of the word.
So with Graph Search, while you can mine your network for great talent, interesting places to visit, or restaurants to eat at, you are still fundamentally interacting with your core 150 when it comes to sharing the joys and challenges of everyday life. 😉
(Source Photo: Andy Blumenthal)
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