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 them,” London told me. “The heart of the movie is their wonderful edict, don’t be evil. At a certain point in the evolution of a company so big and powerful, there are a million challenges to that mandate ...”
Also see the completely hypotethical Who’d play Who in Google the Movie.
[Image from the 
Sam!]
[By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: Google the Movie Coming? |
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“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!]
[By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: Google CEO Believes That in the Future, We Ma ... |
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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 he’s even willing to go to jail. Spiegel says Jens already found over 200 people who want to help out in this project and look for removed locations in Google Street View, as there’s no official list of such places published by Google.
[By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: German Guy Wants to Photograph Those Building ... |
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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.
[By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: Virus Game Attachments, Or Whatever It Is |
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[By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: Free Sounds |
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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’ve heard in various iPhone-related discussions, selling your app in Apple’s store is also far, far from easy...
[Via Reddit.]
[By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: Android Developers Lose Money Because Apps Ca ... |
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Also see the lost features of Google, and the
Google Answers interviews.
[By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: Google's "Product Flops & Failures" Illustrat ... |
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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.]
[By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: Paul Graham On What Happened to Yahoo |
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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.
How do you know if you got a two-player game in front of you? I think the litmus test is whether the action of one player will cause a (partially predictable) reaction of the second player. If two people are merely playing at the same time, like on a split screen, but they're not interacting... then you don't have a real two- (or three-, four-) player game.
Even if you don't have a split screen and even if you are affecting what happens on the opponent's side, it's not granted there's any interaction. Imagine a wild west shooting game in which you destroy the bottles on the opponent's side, and your opponent destroys yours. Will there be real interaction? No, because you will not adjust your strategy of shooting the bottles as a result of which of your own bottles will have been destructed. It may be more fun than shooting by your own, but much less fun, I think, than if there were real interaction.
Now what if your action will force the other player to change their moves, but it does so in an unpredictable way? Say you're each shooting into the center of the board where there's colorful pegs popping up, and when they they're being hit, the impact will cause them to be thrown across the board. If this is mostly chaotic movement, then it won't yield semi-predictable reactions from the other party. Which can be much less fun because the game won't help to create a common story about it being told by the players. A story of tactics, defeat, caution, surprise, revenge, friendship and more (for instance, one story could be "I built a defense line here and then you had to save energy in order to advance the devilish thing you call a Left Side Brute Force Maneuver which you tried for the second time in a row but then suddenly..." etc.). A story which is personal to the players and requires creativity, and which isn't necessarily one written or even foreseen by the game creator.
How can one aid such a story being personal to the players? I think a big part is allowing room to make decisions, allow combinations to explode tactical possibilities, as well as having the game design and story being open and even ambiguous in what it represents.
A word-less interface can be one piece of the puzzle -- it's not only automatically cross-language, but it also allows players to come up with their own names for things. Graphics which are rather neutral and unspecific -- which don't depict happiness or sadness, aggression or peacefullness, male or female, which don't depict "stuff girls like" or "stuff parents in India like" or "stuff boys who are into robot battles like" -- may also help. (Not getting in the way with your story also helps making it more casual; for instance, the lack of a title screen allows to just pull the game out anywhere and start playing immediately, to have it really be yours.) The goal is not to have everyone like the game, but to at least not make people who may like this type of game run away because it's aimed at another group. Admittedly, that's just one aspect, and diversity and experimenting may be better than coming up with too many rules restricting the design. And I'd also just love to create a game which has lots of robot battles in it...
[Thanks to the makers of PhoneGap!]
[By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: Ogs, an iPad Two-Player Game |
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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 privacy of their services, while at the same time pronouncing privacy erosions as inevitable and giving users the illusion of control.
The Google CEO talked about much more – including the China issues, the economy, and reasons for acquisitions – in a recent interview with CNBC.
[By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: Google CEO On Anonymity |
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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 said. Eventually, he acquiesced and plans for Google to sell ads targeted to people’s interests went ahead.
Google launched the new advertising product, “interest-based ads” in March 2009. The service, currently available only to a limited group of advertisers, uses cookies to track any time a user visits one of the more than one million sites where Google sells display ads.
[Thanks TomHTML!]
[By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: Google Founders Were Disagreeing Over Interes ... |
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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:
I’m wary of them differentiating between a ’public internet’ and other services in the fifth section and the Q&A portion of the announcement. It seems to me that the implementation of such services degrades the quality of the ’public internet’ by channeling funds towards them rather than the advancement of the public infrastructure, which is contrary to the rest of their announcement. I kind of shuddered when I saw “new entertainment and gaming options” tacked on to that statement.
Also, this entire announcement of supporting net neutrality only applies to “legal” and “lawful” services. So if something is deemed unlawful, none of these policies apply and the ISP has permission to nuke its bandwidth from orbit. Again, there are escape clauses all over the place.
A commenter at Google’s blog named Systemaddict argues that the part reading “wireline broadband providers would not be able to discriminate against or prioritize lawful Internet content, applications or services in a way that causes harm to users or competition” (my emphasis) means that “centralized agencies can shut down – or degrade access – to ’unlawful’ (defined by US government) content such as wikileaks, etc.”
A user named Animalk points out the following portion from the
Scribd document (emphasized):
A provider that offers a broadband Internet access service complying with the above principles could offer any other additional or differentiated services. Such other services would have to be distinguishable in scope and purpose from broadband Internet access service, but could make use of or access Internet content, applications or services and could include traffic prioritization.
[Thanks DPic!]
[By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: Google & Verizon Proposal, and Net Neutrality |
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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, Düsseldorf, Essen, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Hannover, Cologne, Leipzig, Mannheim, München, Nuremberg, Stuttgart and Wuppertal.
[Thanks TomHTML!]
[By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: Google South Korea Office Raided |
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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 laws stop them. For the time being we may want our faces and living rooms blurred, but who knows where we’re headed. Will there be a day where everyone’s non-privacy is our best privacy protection (like a camouflage pattern), or will we be scared to do anything unusual, creative and progressive with so much supervision (like 1984)?
[Photo by Microdrones.com.]
[By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: Micro Drones for Google? |
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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 raising money and building infrastructure.
Whereas we have all of that. Somebody can learn how to use it in their first day and say, “OK, I have an idea, and these pieces are already here, and I can just connect them together and see if it works.” And if it doesn’t work today, next week I’ll have another idea. And I haven’t wasted months going down one path. It’s like playing with tinker toys or something. You plug ’em together, you try something, and if you think it’s good, you keep going. And if it isn’t, you put them down and start on something new.
[Thanks Jérôme!]
[By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: Google's Ultimate Demo System |
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