December 23rd, 2008
While Internet search giant Google handed out cash to employees last year, the company is scaling back and giving its workers a different kind of gift this holiday season.
Google is giving its employees a taste of its own Kool-Aid by passing out Android-based mobile phones to at least 85 percent of employees, a person described as “familiar with the matter” told Bloomberg News.
“The current economic crisis requires us to be more conservative about how we spend our money,” Google said in an internal memo that was posted on technology industry blog Valleywag.com.
Because the phone will not work in more than one dozen countries, including Turkey, Kenya, Brazil, Russia and India, Google is instead giving $400 to employees in those countries, which is the cash value of the phone.
Cash-Strapped or Celebration of Android? Read the rest of this entry »
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December 23rd, 2008
Todd Pierce recently put his job on the line.
To meet the computing needs of 16,300 employees and contractors at Genentech Inc., Pierce took a chance and decided not to rely entirely on business software from Microsoft, IBM or another long-established supplier that would have let Genentech own the technology. Instead, Pierce decided to rent these indispensable products from Google Inc.
The Internet search and advertising leader will run Genentech’s e-mail, as well as some word processing, spreadsheet and calendar applications, and it will do it over an online connection — an unconventional approach called “cloud computing.”
The decision has turned Genentech, a biotechnology pioneer, into a lab rat for Google and other alternative software services trying to convince skeptical corporate decision makers that cloud computing is more than a pie-in-the-sky concept.
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December 23rd, 2008
In the small hours of a summer night when I was in college, I heard a song play on San Francisco’s famous Live 105 that seemed, at the time, one of the most profound, melodic, and catchy tunes I’d ever come across.
It was called Dancing on the Planet, and even back then–in the late 80s or early 90s–a rare track I never again heard on the radio.
For years, it was jammed in the back of my memory, always there as this incredible song that I just had to find.
Some time after the Google era kicked in, I began looking for it, finding it listed here or there on some random music site, the artist identified as Dave Storrs. But there were few clues as to how I could get a copy.
Once, I found a European site offering a compilation that included Dancing on the Planet. I tried buying it, but it didn’t pan out. I also scanned various file-sharing sites and caught the occasional whiff of it. But still, the song was no more than an unimpeachable memory. Read the rest of this entry »
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December 23rd, 2008
VATICAN CITY – The Vatican is endorsing new technology that brings the book of daily prayers used by priests straight onto iPhones.
The Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Social Communications is embracing the iBreviary, an iTunes application created by a technologically savvy Italian priest, the Rev. Paolo Padrini, and an Italian Web designer.
The application includes the Breviary prayer book — in Italian, English, Spanish, French and Latin and, in the near future, Portuguese and German. Another section includes the prayers of the daily Mass, and a third contains various other prayers. Read the rest of this entry »
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