Tag: Google

Apple’s iPhone

Steve Jobs announced the iPhone today. Very impressive. It has a touch screen, gesture recognition, a sensor that detects when you’re turning the phone so you can use it sideways (to read web pages, for example), it plays iTunes, you can use Google Maps with it, it has WiFi…. There’s a 4 Gig version for $499, and an 8 Gig version for $599.

Yes, I want one.

Maybe two.

You know, as for a spare.

…Anyway, it’ll be released in June, and Cingular will be carrying it. I imagine we’ll be seeing some deep discounts on Palm Treo and Windows Mobile phones this year. It’ll probably be a loooong time before they discount the iPhone though.

The Goog Life

Aaron Swartz makes a very interesting blog posting called The Goog Life: how Google keeps employees by treating them like kids on this blog Raw Thought.

From the posting:

“It’s about infantilizing people,” she explained. “Give them free food, do their laundry, let them sit on bouncy brightly-colored balls. Do everything so that they never have to grow up and learn how to live life on their own.”

Read the rest here…

Google Transferable Stock Options

Over on the Official Google Blog they have a posting about transferable stock options which they intend to implement soon.

From the posting:


Typically, employees get value from stock options by exercising them after vesting, and then selling the stock they get from the exercise at a higher price, provided the company’s stock price has appreciated since the time of grant. With the TSO program, employees will also be able to sell vested options to the highest-bidding financial institution, which may be willing to pay a premium above the difference between the exercise price and the market price for Google stock (even when the exercise price is higher than the market price). The premium paid is for the time value of the options.

Via Google Blog

Google Web Toolkit Code Released

Google released their code for the Google Web Toolkit under the Apache 2.0 license.

The interactive applications you’ve seen from Google, like GMail, use this. It allows you to write programs in Java, and then deploy them as Javascript applications and HTML. There are a few demos of applications available on the site, plus tips on how to get started.

Google – A villian??

Now, I like Google as much as the next person. They’ve come out with some great stuff (like Google Earth), put out two new betas this week (Google Desktop & Google Talk), and generally being a darn good search engine.

You’d think that would make a lot of people happy (and, well… it does), but there are apparently quite a few people in Silicon Valley that
don’t particularly like the way people at Google have been acting lately.

According to the article, one of the reasons for that is that they’re hiring so many talented people, and it’s causing the salaries out there to go up. Another reason is that it’s harder to get funding for startups.

Some of this might just be kvetching by people that can’t get people to sign on to the companies they’ve started, and don’t want to pay the going rate for the folks out there. I guess only time will really tell.

Me? I’m still using the tools Google provides, because they’re working well for me. And that’s really the bottom line.