Google at Picnic 2008

On the last day of Picnic 2008, on Friday at Zuiveringshal West Gisel Hiscock, the Google’s EMEA business development director appeared with the company’s newest initiatives and strategies. She works for Google for 5 years. She spoke on how Google innovates, what applications Google offers and plans to offer, about the principles of work and creation.
Gisel Hiscock outlined company’s scheme of acting opposing the traditional approach –the so called “the mother ship model”. Within this concept a headquarter builds products and when the company grows and goes international they outsource the low-cost work and starts translating and shipping out internationally.“This is not going work for us.” – states Gisel Hiscock. She adduces several reasons for why Google opts for a different model.
To innovate globally and build useful things it is necessary to have diverse work and diverse ideas which come from around the globe and not from one place. So Google builds engineering centers around the world, the last year Google opened 26 new centers, 12 of them in Europe in different countries, for instance, in Zurich, where over 40 different nationalities are working.
Another reason against “the mother ship model” is the fact that people are different. People have different languages, people use internet and technologies differently. Google’s engineers have been developing around the world and innovating collaboratively to get to people a lot of access to information.
Now Google faces the challenge how to stay innovative in this sometimes confusing and chaotic environment. They masterminded some principles to meet it. First of all they believe that it is important to start with a very clear mission. Gisel Hiscock addressed that mission as to build best services to provide the world with open and acceptable information, to democratize the information. To make it available everywhere and anytime whatever device you use. Speaking about devices, it seems like Google prepares a great future for mobile internet. According to the statistics there are 3.3 billion mobile phones in the world and a billion of personal computers. Internet is predicted to be used much more on mobile than on PC, especially in such regions as Africa.
Along with stating the mission Gisel Hiscock suggests to go out with a clear statement of what Google doesn’t do.First of all Google’s position is not to be a traditional and conventional company. They don’t do traditional product management, don’t think small and short-term. All information and vision must be shared across all teams, users come first, don’t money – these are some of the principle with which Google came out with at Picnic 2008.
Google’s HR politics has a bit untraditional approach as well, it is not about degrees and grades you have, but the passion you show. They believe that people who passionate will innovate and bring change to the world. So does for example an engineer from Pennsylvania who is very interested in astronomy and who came out with an idea after Google earth appeared to create Google sky. So now we have our own planetarium in our computer.
The collaborative approach is very strong in Google’s politics. They do believe that everyone can contribute, bring innovation and ideas of different level. Engineers at Google have open database of who and on what is working now in the world, it is a culture of openness where they share information and have access to all kind of information. They post objectives online, so everybody knows each others plans for let’s say, the next 3 months.
Another thing to consider is to allow ideas to change, as it might be not the right time for the product now, it will probably be popular in future whenever the demand is there or technology allows to build it. So they have Google lab, the area of products, where they receive feedback from users and customers. As an example we can see G-mail, the product which is constantly changing and updating, new features are being added taking into account the people feedback and need.
A great number of Google’s products was built on the real people’s need. I haven’t yet seen and used Google’s translator built for I-phone, but it is what I needed sometimes when I hear an unknown word I wanted to know in real time its meaning and was looking for this application for my smartphone. It was created by a Google engineer when he faced the same real need being out his native London in Italy. The idea is that users come first the rest they believe will come later. If you build a great product, monetization, advertising will come later, it is more important to focus on user, what information he needs, what he wants to do online, how he can get more information.
The most exciting and prospective project that Google now have is Android software system with T-mobile’s the first wireless G-phone. It is an open platform, software for mobile, that can be changed by users depending on what they want or need.Of course, it is an extremely fertile soil for Google people to show their creativity. One of the project they already have is the possibility whilst you shopping to use your mobile camera to picture the barcode of the product and receive online the complete product information.
The era of mobile internet is coming and Google is ready to provide us with applications that will meet our every single need.

Facebook for Fun

Facebook is the second largest social network after Myspace.com in U.S. with around 60 million members. But it is the fastest-growing and best-known sites on the Internet today and taking into account its great expansion overseas it became number 1 since may 2008. Facebook is translated into all main world languages, globalizing social networking. It is getting to be a worldwide new medium with an impressive reach and frequency of audience, mostly young one. In other words – a dream of an advertiser!
Speaking about advertising on Facebook, Microsoft has an exclusive agreement with facebook.com company to advertise on this platform. By the way Microsoft was one of the first, along with Apple, a corporative user of facebook. Yes, it was not available to everyone in the beginning. It was launched on February 4, 2004 by a former- Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg(while at Harvard) who ran it as one of his hobby projects and was originally located at thefacebook.com. It was intended for Harvard students only. Quite a fancy start! In comparison with myspace.com which was founded in 2003 and achieved mass-market success in a relatively short time by gearing itself toward independent bands and their fans. Eventually facebook.com became available for a number of recognized schools, colleges, universities, organizations, and companies within the U.S., Canada, and other English-speaking nations. You were supposed to have a valid e-mail ID with the associated institution. Nowadays facebook is globalized and speaks the big part of world languages, including Russian and Chinese.
It’s getting to be huge, I would say giant concerning the quantity of users, the seriousness of its intentions and the desire to embrace the boundless. Facebook can offer such an amount of applications that would be enough to create a number of separate web2.0 sites. You can blog with facebook, you can chat with facebook, you can share photos, share status, so we have Flicker, Twitter, Blogger and God knows what else in one facebook. It seems like quantity matters for facebook, and it does as much users it attracts.
This web2.0 application possesses the quality of addictiveness. Once you registered you don’t understand what to do with it, but after a short period of time you fall in love with it and can’t spend a day without checking what are the news from your friends, or to post something new from yourself or just have fun with one of tons of applications.Do you really think that facebook is for fun? Than what are Mr. Mc Caine http://www.facebook.com/johnmccain?ref=pdb and Mr.Barack Obama http://www.facebook.com/barackobama doing on facebook, having fun? Moreover I should add that the amount of money spent for promotion and developing of the facebook.com is really not funny, they had approximately 40 million U.S. dollars just to start..

Book Review: Literate Technologies. Language, Cognition, Technicity by Louis Armand

In this work the thread of eternal philosophical thoughts embracing the Greek schools of thinkers and sciences of the 20th century, psychoanalysis, cybernetics, semiotics, etcetera, leads to a new theoretical approach in questioning the dichotomy of existence and consciousness , the science of man and what literacy and language is in a new spatio-temporal environment of information age.

The book “Literate Technologies. Language, Cognition, Technicity” was written by a Prague-based and originated from Australia writer and visual artist Louis Armand, a director of the Intercultural Studies Programme in the Philosophy Faculty of Prague's Charles University. He develops the theory of 'literate technologies' that deals with the treatment of the reading and writing processes that devolve upon a materialist conception of agency. He comes to the conclusion that the word is technical per se as well as sign operations and not founded in either a transcendental ego or genetic faculty - such as, for example, Chomsky's 'universal grammar'. This approach is only peripherally concerned with so-called reading machines or artificial intelligence, except to the extent that such machines pose the question of the definability of such terms as 'intelligence'. The technical status of literacy, moreover, is viewed as being contiguous with the advent of language as such, and not as a 'technologisation' of language.

This volume is definitely not intended for an unprepared average reader who is not acquainted with basic anthropological, psychological, philosophical, semiotic, cybernetic, linguistic, philology and many other theories. It calls for an appropriate academic level. It is written with a classical discursive philosophically- scientific language and reeks with references and quotations of acknowledged giants of thought, such as Aristotle and his notion of techne, Descartes, with his Cartesian Metaphysics, Newton and his mechanistics, Claude Shannon, Ferdinand de Saussure with general linguistics and semiology, Jacques Derrida and semiotics, Claude Levi-Strauss with poststructuralist theories, A.J. Toynbee, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Sigmund Freud, and his theories of unconscious, Nietzsche, Norbert Wiener and his cybernetics and so on and so forth. So the work possesses a very strong framework and basis of theories and knowledge on which the discourse is held. All the philosophical speculations start with questions. Louis Armond articulates new questions in his work:

1. How stochastic qualities of abstract writing systems (theoretical mathematics and other symbolic systems, including binary computer code) may shed light upon the prior condition and possibility of literacy per se (and hence communication, discourse, language, thought, etcetera)?

2. Louis Armand paraphrases one of the earliest questions “why is there something and not nothing?” to “why is there consciousness and not nothing?”

3. Are we yet prepared to accept that thought – even as something strictly delimited in terms of operating with signs – is conditioned by a purely mechanical agency?

4. What does it mean when we speak o the materiality of language?

5. What would it mean if machines could think?

He contests the definition of the term literacy as a condition of being-with-language in a particular way respectively the information age.

In search of the locality of thought the author particularizing the notion of consciousness, a screen between man and nothingness as Sigmund Freud defines it.Following his ideas there should be some man’s agent to attribute a thought. Basing on the theory of Ludwig Wittgenstein described in his “Blue book”, dilemmas regarding thought, language, in the form of questions about the means of explanation of meaning and the locality of thinking - define consciousness. Thinking – activity operating with signs the activity performed by the hand when we write; by the mouth and larynx when we think by speaking - we r using a metaphor thought, or sign-operation is locatable in some profound sense outside the materiality of these operations. The ideas echoes the idea of Cartesian homunculus, who thinks our thoughts in advance of us, and thereby intends them.

Psychoanalytics, Freud, Lacan put the question of an agency beyond the mind-body dichotomy. A new level of viewing the problem brought the theory of homeostasis. Mechanical grammar by Lacan displaces Cartesian subjectivity. Brain is considered to be a homeostat organ, that implies cybernetic approach as integrated, recursive, differential system. Thus the phrase “machine thinks” sounds as nonsensical as “brain thinks”.

So.., blogging, what, why and who?

The term "weblog" was coined by Jorn Bargeron 17 December 1997. The short form, "blog," was coined by Peter Merholz, who jokingly broke the word weblog into the phrase we blog in the sidebar of his blog Peterme.com in April or May of 1999. Shortly thereafter, Evan Williams at Pyra Labs used "blog" as both a noun and verb ("to blog," meaning "to edit one's weblog or to post to one's weblog") and devised the term "blogger" in connection with Pyra Labs' Blogger product, leading to the popularization of the terms.
Now I'm using the product of Pyra Labs, created in 1999 and purchased in February 2003 by Google, blogger.com. The year 1999 was a starting point for some other blogging tools, e.g. livejournal.com, and blog usage started spreading and gaining in popularity.
By the way, speaking about the time before the year 1999. Early blogs were simply manually-updated components of common web sites. After almost 10 years passed statistics show the existence of over 112.8 million blogs, the figure that doesn't reffelct possibly the actual number of blogs. It was calculated by Technorati, Internet search engine for searching blogs, competing with Google and Yahoo. But only in China 72.82 millions blogs are registered, the ammount that wasn't possibly tracked by Technocratu due to the language, so loads of other blogs in other languages. Some people even have several blogs on diverse platforms. And some people have ceased posting to their online diaries, the estimated figure of dead blogs constitutes more tnan 200 milion.
In terms of why and who is blogging I suppose the answer can be diverse as people and purposes are. The most popular blogs are personal which are refered to as microblogging and more likely to respond to the style of diary. As for me the purpose is educational, now I'm starting to find blogging a really approriate and comfortable tool of recording knowledge and mainly thoughts that arise during the education process. I asked some of my friends why did they start blogging. They did it because some of their friends was already blogging and they wanted to be in touch with them and what is most important to recieve reaction on their posts-thoughts-life ocurrances.
In conclusion I'd like to share a very relavant link I encountered concerning the most powerful blogs.

Here we go!

After the long time of ignoring the cyberspace as the tool for saying something to the world and people I set up this blog. Actually it is created as a part of my new media master at Universiteiet van Amsterdam. All inside outs of the subject!
Why haven't I done this before?..
I'm sure that people are devided into those who are active and not active in blogging.
To be continued..