Category Archives: Google

The Snowden effect (contd.)

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The Snowden effect continues. And affects not just companies getting nervous of the US cloud, but alsop, apparently, American internet users. Which in due course will affect US advertisers.

In the days after one of the most damning intelligence leaks since the birth of the Internet, polls were showing that average Americans felt sort of “meh” about the whole NSA-monitoring-our-calls-Skype-emails thing. But according to a new analysis from Annalect, a digital data and analytics firm, two months of ongoing discussion about online privacy have actually had major impacts on consumer behavior. Online consumers, riled by political sentiments or not, are changing their privacy and tracking settings–and if the trend continues, the advertising industry could be dinged in a significant way.

On June 10, nearly four days after journalist Glenn Greenwald published the Snowden scoop in the Guardian, a Washington Post-Pew Research Center Poll found that 56% of Americans felt that NSA monitoring was a-okay. In fact, government monitoring could go even further, 45% said, if it prevented terrorist attacks. Seven weeks later, the Annalect study, which began as a longitudinal investigation into consumer awareness of online privacy in early 2013 (before the Snowden kerfuffle), shows that collective sentiment may have shifted–consumer concern about online privacy actually jumped from 48% to 57% between June and July.

“This jump is largely from unconcerned Internet users becoming concerned–not from the normal vacillation found among neutral Internet users,” researchers wrote.

Google becomes just another big corporation

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Interesting Quartz story:

Google’s “20% time,” which allows employees to take one day a week to work on side projects, effectively no longer exists. That’s according to former Google employees, one who spoke to Quartz on the condition of anonymity and others who have said it publicly.

What happened to the company’s most famous and most imitated perk? For many employees, it has become too difficult to take time off from their day jobs to work on independent projects.

This is a strategic shift for Google that has implications for how the company stays competitive, yet there has never been an official acknowledgement by Google management that the policy is moribund. Google didn’t respond to a request for comment from Quartz.

Interesting also to see how the company has achieved this. Not by formally cancelling the 20% ‘right’, but simply by requiring that managers have to approve a request to devote 20% of employee’s time on a personal project. And if just so happens that everyone is 100% committed on whatever corporate project they’re currently assigned to.

Neat, eh?

Edward Snowden’s not the story. The fate of the internet is

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This morning’s Observer column.

Repeat after me: Edward Snowden is not the story. The story is what he has revealed about the hidden wiring of our networked world. This insight seems to have escaped most of the world’s mainstream media, for reasons that escape me but would not have surprised Evelyn Waugh, whose contempt for journalists was one of his few endearing characteristics. The obvious explanations are: incorrigible ignorance; the imperative to personalise stories; or gullibility in swallowing US government spin, which brands Snowden as a spy rather than a whistleblower.

In a way, it doesn’t matter why the media lost the scent. What matters is that they did. So as a public service, let us summarise what Snowden has achieved thus far…

The unbearable wearable

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Great blog post by about Google Glass by Jason Calcanis.

I’ve run into several friends wearing Google Glass in the past three months, and I have three words of advice for them:

Take. Them. Off.

First, you look like an idiot.

Second, you’re killing the party.

Third, are you recording me right now?!?

Great, illuminating post. Worth reading in full.

Google fires its old hiring system

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Well, well. Google is famous for its demanding and wacky job interviews, in which candidates used to be asked questions like “How many golf balls can you fit in an airliner?” But apparently all that has been junked because, basically, it doesn’t tell you anything useful about how people will do when they work for the company.

How do we know this? Because Laszlo Bock, Google’s VP for HR (‘human resources’ as ‘personnel’ used to be called) says so. Here’s how The Register summarises his interview with the New York Times:

“After two or three years, your ability to perform at Google is completely unrelated to how you performed when you were in school, because the skills you required in college are very different,” Bock told the NYT. “You’re also fundamentally a different person. You learn and grow, you think about things differently.”

In fact, Bock said, Google is increasingly hiring candidates who have no formal education, to the extent that you now see teams at the Chocolate Factory where 14 per cent of the team members have no college background.

The bottom line, he said, is that Google’s earlier hiring practices simply weren’t effective. When Google studied its employees’ performance and compared it to how the same employees scored in interviews, there was no correlation.

“We found zero relationship,” Bock said. “It’s a complete random mess, except for one guy who was highly predictive because he only interviewed people for a very specialized area, where he happened to be the world’s leading expert.”

So how does Google plan to handle hiring from now on? According to Bock, the online giant is leaning toward behavioral interviews that emphasize the candidate’s own experience, with questions such as, “Give me an example of a time when you solved an analytically difficult problem.”

Example of “an analytically difficult problem”: how to square protecting your user’s privacy with co-operating with the NSA.

Google’s choice: between a rock and a very hard place

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My Observer Comment piece about the dilemma facing Google and the other Internet giants: do they co-operate with the National Security State? Or look after their users’ (and their own commercial) interests?

The revelations of the past week explain why Schmidt was so preoccupied with the power of the state – especially of the national security state, which is what our democracies are morphing into. The apparent contradictions between, on the one hand, Google’s vehement insistence that it has “not joined any programme that would give the US government – or any other government – direct access to our servers” and, on the other, the assertions to the contrary in the leaked National Security Agency slide-deck that demonstrate the extent to which Google (and the other internet companies) are caught between a rock and a very hard place.

The rock is that the national security state, as embodied in the National Security Agency, GCHQ and kindred agencies, shows no sign of withering away. Au contraire. In the end, companies such as Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Apple will be compelled to obey the state’s orders. If they don’t, their executives will find themselves sharing jail cells with the likes of Bradley Manning.

The hard place is corporate terror that their users will become alienated by the realisation that personal communications cannot be safely entrusted to internet companies based in the US. Crunch time has arrived for Google & co, in other words. I look forward to the second, revised, edition of Schmidt’s book.

Voltaire and the autonomous car

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This morning’s Observer column.

The best is the enemy of the good,” said Voltaire. It’s a maxim that has a particular resonance for tech designers, because it highlights the intrinsic tension between ambition and pragmatism that haunts them. Many perfectly viable products have never made it beyond the prototype stage because their designers felt they fell too far short of the ideals they had set for themselves. One of the reasons why Steve Jobs was so remarkable as a company boss is that he was the exception that proved Voltaire’s rule. He was a perfectionist for whom the good was the enemy of the best. Which is why working for him was such an exhausting business and also why Apple’s products became so distinctive.

As it happens, Voltaire’s maxim may also be useful in explaining what will happen in the field of autonomous vehicles, aka self-driving cars…

YouTube is eight today!

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From the Official YouTube blog:

When YouTube’s site first launched in May 2005, we never could have imagined the endless ways in which you would inspire, inform and entertain us every day.

Today, more than 100 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. That’s more than four days of video uploaded each minute! Every month, more than 1 billion people come to YouTube to access news, answer questions and have a little fun. That’s almost one out of every two people on the Internet.

All of which suggests that YouTube was a very smart investment for Google. Better, I suspect, than the $1.1 billion that Yahoo is about to pay for Tumblr.

Google Glass: half full or half empty?

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This morning’s Observer column.

The Chinese name their years after animals – the year of the goat, the rat and so on. In the tech world, we name years after devices. Thus, 2007 was the year of the iPhone and 2010 was the year of the iPad. It’s beginning to look as though 2013 will be the year of Glass. This prediction is based on the astonishing level of comment, curiosity, excitement, trepidation and hostility surrounding an augmented reality device created by Google and called Google Glass…