Google has a new policy blog (check out last weekend's NN post), and I love the opening line of this post: This year we've invited all the presidential candidates to come visit Google… I know they stole that plan from FM, of course. We've invited them all to come…
Wow. Two years. And hey, it did start in a garage…….
From the Google blog: We're pleased to announce that we've acquired the assets of Zenter, a company that provides software for creating online slide presentations. You've heard us talk a lot about using the web to improve group collaboration and information sharing. These days, when you create a document…
We’re pleased to announce that we’ve acquired the assets of Zenter, a company that provides software for creating online slide presentations.
You’ve heard us talk a lot about using the web to improve group collaboration and information sharing. These days, when you create a document — whether it’s a text document, a spreadsheet, or a presentation — you usually want to share it, collect feedback, or communicate about it in some way. We on the Google Docs & Spreadsheets team focus on making this experience easier and more powerful for you. In particular, we’re working to add presentation-sharing capabilities to Google Docs & Spreadsheets, and we’re excited about the addition of Zenter’s technology and team to that effort.
Now really, Wired. I'm so proud of being part of the founding of this great brand, but honestly, guys, I'm not "fighting the power." I'm asking a question….
Marc is writing up a storm on startups. This post really resonated (why not to do a startup) and in particular, this passage: You will flip rapidly from a day in which you are euphorically convinced you are going to own the world, to a day in which doom…
You will flip rapidly from a day in which you are euphorically convinced you are going to own the world, to a day in which doom seems only weeks away and you feel completely ruined, and back again.
Over and over and over.
Read MoreI've found myself more and more wary of doing things that I'd like to do with Google applications simply out of some primal, lizard brain fear of giving too much control of my data to one source. It's not that I don't trust Google, it's not that I don't…
Already, Google has my feed (through Feedburner), a portion of my business( through Doubleclick, which serves some of our ads at FM), most of my search history (I use Google more than any other engine), and another portion of my business (we use Google for backfill ads at FM). But yesterday I decided not to run Google Calendar for something business related, even though it would have been perfect for us, and earlier we decided to not run Google spreadsheets, because we didn’t want “Google” to have access to sensitive competitive information. I still use some Google services for other portions of the work I do – like planning conferences, for example.
But I have noticed that I’ve hit, perhaps, my “Google saturation point.”
Read MoreWell, perhaps really, the new (anti) portal. Paul posts a portion of an email from an ex-Googler who left for Facebook. A couple of months ago, after three years as a Google product manager, I decided to leave for Facebook. I am writing this note to spread Good News…
A couple of months ago, after three years as a Google product manager, I decided to leave for Facebook. I am writing this note to spread Good News to all the friends I haven’t already overwhelmed with my enthusiasm: Facebook really is That company.
Which company? That one. That company that shows up once in a very long while — the Google of yesterday, the Microsoft of long ago. That company where large numbers of stunningly-brilliant people congregate and feed off each other’s genius. That company that’s doing with 60 engineers what teams of 600 can’t pull off. That company that’s on the cusp of Changing The World, that’s still small enough where each employee has a huge impact on the organization, where you think about working now and again, and where you know you’ll kick yourself in three years if you don’t jump on the bandwagon now, even after someone had told you that it was rolling toward the promised land. That company where everyone seems to be having the time of their life.
Read MoreHas Steve peaked? My pal Heilemann asks in this week's NY Magazine….
As I said earlier, Tennessee got me thinking a lot last week, in particular about music as the canary in the coal mine of the entire Internet economy. I started imagining a major event in the business, and I wrote the below (entirely fiction) just to see how it…
Here’s a piece of it:
October 17, 2007 (San Francisco/Dow Jones) In a surprise move today that has the entertainment industry buzzing, Sony Chairman Howard Stringer announced that his company was encouraging its entire stable of musical acts to release their music freely on the Internet, effectively immediately. The company said it would release the masters, or original recordings of the artists’ work, back to the creator, and ask only that the artists work in good faith to find the best method for freely sharing the newly unencumbered work.
Read MoreI got a chance to spend 24 or so hours in Memphis before Bonnaroo. I'd never been. But I was lucky enough to have guides. My buddy Martin texts me a number as I'm leaving Orlando, Memphis bound. "Call Dallas" was the word, Dallas being the man who would…
My buddy Martin texts me a number as I’m leaving Orlando, Memphis bound. “Call Dallas” was the word, Dallas being the man who would be at the airport ready to take me to my destination, the vibrantly decomposed studio of Jim Dickinson and his boys Cody and Luther, who form two thirds of the North Mississippi All Stars. They were recording together, on the family farm 35 minutes or so outside Memphis in the North Mississippi woods. Dallas was going to take me there.
I rang Dallas while still on the tarmac. It’s been quite some time since I’ve had walking around time. You know, the kind of time where you land somewhere foreign, you know one guy maybe, or bump into someone, and that person takes you to another world. It’d been years since I’d been to Tennessee. The place lived in my mind as legend, mostly through music. And I’d never been to Memphis.
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