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Who's Afraid Of Google Glass?

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"First you see video. Then you wear video. Then you eat video. Then you be video." — Pat Cadigan, Pretty Boy Crossover
Sheesh. A whole lot of people who presumably have never actually seen Google Glass in action appear to be really upset. "People who wear Google Glass in public are assholes," says Gawker's Adrian Chen. "You won't know if you're being recorded or not; and even if you do, you'll have no way to stop it," doom-cries Mark Hurst.
Seriously, people? Seriously? DARPA has built drone-mounted 1.8-gigapixel cameras that can recognize people waving from 15,000 feet. Gait recognition software is good enough that they probably don't even need to see your face. Oh, yes, and they're working on legions of drones the size of insects, too, while they're at it. There's already one closed-circuit camera for every 32 people in the United Kingdom. And the NSA is building a new 65-megawatt data center in Utah to parse this brave new world of big data.
Meanwhile, everywhere you go, hardware is getting faster, software is getting better, everything is being networked. We're marching boldly into a panopticon future. I've been writing about this for years. And now, suddenly, you're irate about the potential privacy repercussions of a few geeks bearing glasses? What is wrong with you people? Where have you been?
I think cameras on the glasses of random passersby are among the least of your privacy concerns. At least there's a red LED that winks on when Google Glass is recording, so you'll know that you're suddenly starring in your interlocutor's home video. As panopticons go, the Google Glass version is pretty mild-mannered and half-hearted. The recent spate of furious privacy concerns are enormously overwrought compared to how much we should be concerned about our governments.
But there's something about being caught on video, not by some impersonal machine but by another human being, that sticks in people's craws and makes them go irrationally berserk. If these were glasses that recorded audio and took still photos when the wearer double-blinked, would anyone be near as upset? Hell, no. But video is somehow primal; video hits us where we live. (That's why it's so insanely popular. Did you know that YouTube is arguably the world's second most popular social network?)
To a limited extent I actually want Google Glass surveillance, in an uneasy Pandora's-box kind of way. I want police officers, border guards, and other authorities to be required to wear them every moment that they're on duty, and I want that data to be available to those who report police brutality or other abuses of authority. (I've been saying that for five years, ever since I was mugged at gunpoint in Mexico City. Pretty sure it would have made a big difference to, for instance, my friend Peter Watts.) I want street protestors to be videoing the authorities at all times. I do not trust the powers that be.
If pervasive, ubiquitous networked cameras ultimately make public privacy impossible, which seems likely, then at least we can balance the scales by ensuring that we have two-way transparency between the powerful and the powerless, rather than just a world where the former spy on the latter; and we can give people the tools required for online and/or personal privacy, such as pseudonyms and easy-to-use strong cryptography.
That's not to say I'm feeling all Panglossian about Google Glass. (Panglassian? Sorry.) My concern is far more petty: it's that other people's videos are almost uniformly terrible.
I know a little about moving pictures. I've done camerawork for TV shows, just helped build a site that shows curated movies, and I take the odd pretty good photo, if I do say so myself. But video is hard. Much harder to do well than pictures, which anyone can get right now and again via trial and error. Take a look at Vine, or Takes: one reason they're only a few seconds long is that, if they were any longer, almost all examples of the form would quickly be revealed as nearly unwatchable crap.
Don't get me wrong, putting new tools in everyone's hands, and making them easier, inevitably leads to some awesome outsider art, and that's always been doubly true for video. Take my friend Count Jackula's series of horror-movie reviews, for instance, which increasingly have become hilarious short films in their own right.
So let's hope the next generation, born in video, will use it more fluently, and find ways to make use of the petabytes of data that Google Glass or its ilk will generate. And that's "will" not "may." Yes, it's entirely possible that Google Glass is like Apple's Newton, 10 years ahead of its time, but –

No Google Glasses allowed, declares Seattle dive bar

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Google's high-tech augmented reality "Project Glass" spectacles are still in development, and not available for purchase. But Seattle's 5 Point Cafe is getting ahead of the game — and fueling a debate over privacy — by banning the devices from the bar in advance.
Sorry, not allowed in this bar. The 5 Point posted this message on its Facebook page this week: "For the record, The 5 Point is the first Seattle business to ban in advance Google Glasses. And ass kickings will be encouraged for violators."
[FOLLOW-UP: Seattle bar that banned Google Glasses has its own surveillance cams.]
Why is the 5 Point doing this?
"I'm a thought leader," jokes Dave Meinert, owner of the 5 Point, speaking on the Luke Burbank Show at our news partner KIRO-FM this morning. "First you have to understand the culture of the 5 Point, which is a sometimes seedy, maybe notorious place. People want to go there and be not known ... and definitely don't want to be secretly filmed or videotaped and immediately put on the Internet."
He admits, "Part of this is a joke, to be funny on Facebook, and get reaction. But part of it's serious, because we don't let people film other people or take photos unwanted of people in the bar, because it is kind of a private place that people go."
Meinert notes that the 5 Point is near Amazon, and acknowledges that "tech geeks" have been known to patronize the bar. "It's OK if you wear them," he says. "I just don't want them worn inside."
Presumably this rule would apply to Seattle's notorious Creepy Cameraman, too.
Here's Luke Burbank's full interview with Meinert this morning. See KIRO Radio for more.

Eto, Google Glass će da bidne i daljinski

via Bruce Sterling

Razgaljujuće paranoidan tekst na slešdotu:

Google Glass and Surveillance Culture

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If Google Glass becomes as ubiquitous as the iPhone, will Google attempt to abuse its remarkable power? 

Google's April Fool spoofs have never been particularly funny, but it was only this year that they became slightly sinister: Google Nose, a satirically imagined search service for smells, reminded us that the company has graduated beyond the intellect and is now moving in on the senses.
Consumer hardware may not yet have the power to capture and process olfactory search terms, but it is more than capable of augmenting sight. Thus we have been gifted Google's latest, most horrendous idea: a wearable, Internet-enabled computer it has christened "Glass," but whose inelegant aesthetic is better represented by the product's goofy unofficial moniker, "Google Goggles."
It's an audacious product for a company no one trusts to behave responsibly with our data: a pair of glasses that can monitor and record the world around you. But they do so much more than that. Let's not beat about the bush here: these specs are a thing of wonder. They can email, take pictures, record video, provide walking or driving directions, conduct searches, translate signs... the possibilities are endless.
But if Glass becomes as ubiquitous as the iPhone, are we truly to believe that Google will not attempt to abuse that remarkable power?
To do so, we would have to accept that Google, to select just three examples from just one recent New York Times report , only collected passwords, emails and data from private WiFi networks "accidentally"; that the company meant well when it deliberately bypassed security protocols in the Safari browser in 2012; and that the FTC was wrong to call its Buzz launch tactics "deceptive" and impose a twenty year audit ruling thereafter.
Journalists privately remark that Google, like Facebook, has become practically impossible to libel when it comes to privacy, and that the company has only itself to blame, for two reasons.
Firstly, we are moving toward a world in which technology corporations have at least as much influence over the average person as national governments do . That may sound daft, but ask yourself whether a few dollars off your tax bill would really make as much difference to your life as the withdrawal of Gmail, or the disappearance of all your Apple products. (Oh, and pause for a moment, before you answer, to remember that Facebook is now cited in a third of all divorces.)
Google is both the originator and the archetype of the invasive-tech-firm cliché. It has done more to bring shame on the technology industry than the most feverish imaginings of dedicated Microsoft haters and has been caught with its hand in the privacy till many times. It is also terrifically rich and considerably globally powerful, thanks both to its lobbying efforts and its peerless in-house engineering talent.
It is also one of the leading lights of the cloud revolution, with all the concomitant privacy assaults, data centralization and ready access to data for law enforcement agencies that go with it.
Secondly, in the real world, Google regularly goes rogue, like a vigilante ideologue armed with every possible technological advantage: more power, in fact, than it can safely or maturely handle. Depressingly, the only war this outlaw sees fit to wage is against citizens who refuse to share their toilet habits with the Kimberly-Clark Corporation. That's to say, Google isn't fighting organised crime with its unprecedented power; it's peering into your downstairs lavatory so it can sell you the right toilet paper.
To assist in its disquieting mission to "organise the world's information," Google is recruiting an army. Not a real one, of course: the idea of Google mercenaries is far-fetched, albeit only slightly. Instead, it's recruiting members of the public to spy for it, simply by wearing its new specs. Google Glass doesn't represent militarism so much as espionage on a colossal scale.
According to the Economist, technology has already forced state-sponsored spycraft to morph from a profession into a set of freelance job postings . Mountain View looks on and laughs, applying research dollars and Internet-scale economics to the trend, turning its customers and acolytes into a private army of eavesdroppers by releasing irresistibly alluring new ways to explore our world and ourselves that somehow always get busted for phoning home and blabbing a bit more than they should to the mother ship.
Does that sound hysterical? It shouldn't. With each new eyebrow-raising court judgment and federal fine levied against Google, it becomes ever more clear that this is a company hell-bent on innovating first and asking questions later, if ever. And its vision, shared with other California technology companies, is of corporate America redefining societal privacy norms in the service of advertising companies and their clients.
It's important not to slide into conspiracy theorising when discussing Google, however tempting it might be. Nor should we scapegoat the company out of fear of the unknown. So it's worth reminding ourselves that the dangers arising from the concentration of influence by companies such as Google are inherent and structural.
In other words, Google need not be an evil corporation for us to have justified concerns about the power it wields. We should be concerned about what happens when the mounting social pressure of consumer temptations meets the economic imperatives of a multinational corporation, whoever that corporation is.
Yet there can be little doubt that Google will eventually be hauled in front of a judge for illicitly collecting data from its Glass products. No sane analyst or commentator would bet against it. As ever, corporate America's imagination and daring puts the hubris of nosey civil servants to shame.
And that's why it's fair to subject Glass to extra scrutiny: because it's Google we're talking about here. No other company has so consistently proven itself deserving of scrupulous attention.
The Moral Side The treatment of technology in Christopher Nolan's 2008 Batman movie The Dark Knight struck just one bum note, and that was the creepy, Gotham-wide sonar system created by tapping into private citizens' mobile phones. For one thing, fans didn't like Batman's wacky, glowing eyes whenever the system piped information to his cowl, but they also, and more vociferously, objected to the invention itself.
Fans didn't react badly because the idea of turning "every cell phone in Gotham into a microphone" was absurd and impossible. No: it was that, for a movie franchise crammed with outlandish, barely-possible gadgets, the hijacking of mobile phones for surveillance seemed... well, unambitious.
Moviegoers accustomed to having their email scanned for advertising keywords, their mobile app data tracked and stored and their houses photographed for public consumption on the Internet were hardly going to be blown away by the idea of someone listening in on their conversations. To put it bluntly: consumers already know their devices are spying on them.
But even this unarresting stab at private sector prying gave pause to one of the two moral guardians of the story—Morgan Freeman's avuncular Wayne Enterprises chief executive, Lucius Fox. Fox, if you recall, threatened to resign should the sonar device remain active after the Joker's capture.
The scene in question is charmingly naïve. "This is too much power for one person," intones Freeman, shortly before delivering a line that must have had tech executives everywhere sniggering into their lattes with derision: "Spying on 30 million people isn't part of my job description." You can almost hear the giggles from Palo Alto. Only 30 million?
Tech execs would have snickered, too, at a redemptive slow-motion sequence in which the machine is destroyed after serving its function. This is an act of conscience entirely alien to Silicon Valley.
Typing LARRY PAGE into Google's mainframe isn't ever going to precipitate the destruction of the company's Street View or search data, the same way typing LUCIUS FOX wiped out the sonar system in The Dark Knight—even though the data mined from any one of Google's battery of products is far more valuable, and dangerous, than Batman's kooky gizmo.
Wising Up A Pulitzer is on ice, waiting for the reporter who can demonstrate why human rights violations originating in Mountain View matter to all of us. Yet coverage of Google's perpetual privacy infractions is often limited to under-staffed Left-wing newspapers, self-righteous, illiterate fulminators on tech blogs and clunking European courtrooms.
The public may be wising up, but all things considered there are surprisingly few professional reporters willing or able to put in the legwork, given how important tech giants are, not just for the global economy but for the future of society and culture. It's instead left to Luddites in cumbersome national judiciaries and to the whipped-up opprobrium of the masses, instead of the fourth estate, to enforce propriety on the private sector.
Perhaps it's just as well that the Internet is doing the policing. The software component to Glass means that the devices can be extended and upgraded in ways even Google hasn't thought of yet. On the one hand, that's toxic: they're in a class of devices, like smartphones, vulnerable to insidious, creeping changes, like the Facebook platform. So they need to be watched.
But it's also Glass's genius: in wafting the prospect of augmented reality for all before our noses, the spectacles do what Gmail did to email eight years ago: they take an essential daily task or tool (in this case, one of the very most basic) and make it rich, joyful, liberating—and easily upgradeable. Apple creates sexy but static objects in new verticals; Google makes the pedestrian both personal and delightful, and iterates rapidly.
A relatively common, if overwrought, view is that Glass is only the latest in a decade and half's worth of Machiavellian plays for advertising data, in which Google dreams up an irresistible product, gives it away cheaply or for free, and in return garners a vast, unprecedented catalogue of personal data to resell to its advertising partners.
Perhaps that's because Google is a company that often seems bewildered by its own creations, and which struggles to establish appropriate ethical standards even for itself.
Growing Unease There's a growing sense of unease inside Mountain View about the monstering Glass is receiving in some parts of the press. And that's before the goggles, which promise to bring Minority Report­-style interactivity to everyday life, are even on general sale. "Stop the cyborgs" is one phrase being used by privacy campaigners terrified about what might happen when Google Glass hits Main Street .
The mainstream reaction to Glass has been—how should we put it charitably?—mixed, prompting some to speculate that the product may arrive stillborn. "It's not," one well-known Silicon Valley analyst, who preferred not to be named, told me, "that these glasses are ahead of their time. It's actually that they're too late: tech writers and even the public are terrified by what they represent because Google has proven itself so untrustworthy.
"What I mean is, we've got Google's number."
We shouldn't get carried away imagining Google is waging some sort of war against the public. After all, it's the company's tech industry stablemates that stand to lose from Glass, should it prove commercially successful. Why? Because despite the reservations of the Wall Street Journal and seasoned Google-watchers, there's an irritating digital-era learned behaviour that these glasses might just help us to overcome.
It's a familiar scene. Two young professionals meet for coffee, yet beyond the air kisses and shallow, fashion-forward affirmations as they greet one another, half the time they spend together isn't dedicated to real interpersonal communication at all: instead, they are checking in, Tweeting, surfing, sharing and even, occasionally, sending each other messages, despite the fact that they are sitting opposite one another.
Academic Sherry Turkle, author of Alone Together, says that young people aren't learning basic body language any more, primarily thanks to their connected devices. The art of subtle cues that express a paragraph's worth of intimate expression is being lost. We don't make eye contact with each other any longer. We don't touch. In a world in which young are under pressure to be visibly connected, they're in fact lonelier and more isolated than ever.
Until now? At the TED conference earlier this year, Google co-founder Sergey Brin, wearing a pair of his company's internet-enabled spectacles, described the act of swiping and tapping on a touchscreen as "emasculating." It was a poor choice of words, but it revealed Google's dissatisfaction with the touchscreen as a primary interface method for mobile devices. And it affirmed the company's commitment to the heads-up, voice-controlled way of doing things.
Glass might be plugged into all the same services as your iPhone—Twitter, email, Foursquare and Google itself—but you interact with the platforms very differently: by using, as you do in real life, your eyes, mouth and ears. You are forced to acknowledge the primacy of what's around you and recognise the potential technology has to augment those things, but also the limitations inherent in it.
Encouragingly, journalists and Valley A-listers who have trialled Glass report that they spend less time on social networks, even when the amount of content they post goes up. Generally, they're querying other platforms for other kinds of data. That ought to worry social networks that rely on eyeballs and screen time for their revenue.
We should sound one note of caution here before celebrating the speculative demise of the social network: the data in this area are very mixed. It's unarguably true that people are beastly on the internet, but there's just as much evidence to suggest that young people use social media to supplement and not to replace their real-world relationships, which would appear to be no bad thing, if true.
Whether online friendships are as good as "the real thing" would appear at this stage to be a matter of individual parental choice. As for the effect of introducing Glass into the playground, no one yet has any idea about it.
It's possible that Google might even reboot interpersonal etiquette. Surfing Twitter on an iPhone, it's easy to forget there's a world out there. That's why people are so gruesome to one another online, after all: the screen provides a mediating layer between reality and us. We forget that the person at the other end is a human being too.
Glass's layer is thinner, more translucent—and not just literally. By removing some of the distance between us and other people, could Glass usher in more humane, healthier relationship architectures—models in which technology sticks to doing what it is good at and doesn't overreach itself, suffocating the message with the medium?
There are hurdles—perhaps insurmountable ones—that must be cleared before Google can be permitted to unleash Glass to the mass market. If that sounds like a call for regulation, perhaps it is. Already there are suggestions that the headsets will be illegal to wear in some countries under existing laws. Restaurants, we can only hope, are already planning ban them from being worn over supper.
That said, if Glass, or some other, similar wearable device, does manage to ingratiate itself sufficiently safely to welcome in ubiquitous, connected computing, dare we imagine an end to the pathological, Twitter-driven rudeness of anyone in public under 30 years old?
Who Watches the Watchmen?
There's one final consideration, when we look ahead to what many would describe as a classic dystopia—a future in which Glass and wearable computers like it are omnipresent—and that's the psychological effect of being surrounded, even more than is already the case, by recording devices.
Already the "surveillance state" is contributing to widespread fear and loathing for the Establishment in western democracies. (It's by no means the only factor, of course.) Governments, anxious about their declining influence in the age of the Internet, runaway capitalism and, even worse, runaway Internet capitalism, are engorging themselves, compulsively rummaging through their citizens' drawers and generally poking their noses where they don't belong.
That's bad enough. What happens, though, when it's not just governments but your friends, neighbours and colleagues who might, at any moment, be subjecting you to unwanted and unauthorised supervision? When the threat of censure from the state for putting trash in a wrongly-coloured sack becomes the threat of public ridicule from a friend who uploads a video of an unfortunate trip down the stairs? For many people, the latter could be a great deal more traumatic.
In the UK, a television show called You've Been Framed once held something of a monopoly on public embarrassment: viewers would send in home-made videotapes of their friends and relatives in "hilarious" accidents. (Some were faked; most were not.) Today, thanks to YouTube, Jackass culture is everywhere; cruelty and voyeurism are de rigueur. There's even a social network start-up in Germany dedicated to sharing "stunts" and practical jokes; inevitably, it descends into barbarism .
The potential for social disaster would appear to be tremendous. As tech journalist and political blogger Greg Stevens put it to me this week, "The vector that is traced out by Google Glass could be called 'the technological globalization of private experience.'" If that doesn't send chills down your spine...
And it's not just the potential for mean-spirited public shaming. There's also the more unpleasant temptations inherent in spying on one's own community: the opportunity to take the law into one's own hands, or simply to enforce one's own, morally superior ethical systems.
Imagine it: the stuff of dreams for big government cronies. Social engineering democratized out to the lowest possible level, with citizens transformed into clipboard-waving busybodies, terrorising one another with the threat of prosecution for recycling infractions, newspaper thefts or violations of summer hose-pipe bans. It's those Internet-scale economics again—this time leveraged by the grassroots activists of the global guilt industry.
At the heart of privacy campaigners' fears about Glass is that potential for social destructiveness; the power of always-on surveillance, storage and sharing to turn people against one another. We have learned the hard way, primarily thanks to Facebook, that the efficiencies and opportunities created by technology come with social consequences. The question is: will the fun and utility of Glass come at too great a societal cost?
More Like Botox In evolutionary terms, Google Glass represents a tentative step toward the artificial augmentation of our sensory apparatus. So it's not ridiculous to speak about it in the same breath as genetic engineering.
There's a view that the human race modifying itself is inevitable, and even natural: Stephen Hawking has said that while genetic engineering "may not be in accord with democratic or egalitarian principles," nor has Darwinian evolution ever been "politically correct." But Glass is, in its present incarnation, little more than an accessory that hints at things to come.
In fact, Glass is very unlike the invasive body modification experiments and genetic tampering that some scientists claim are inevitable. It's more like Botox than plastic surgery: a temporary, cosmetic upgrade. And because it's a consumer product, everyone is free to discuss it—and decline to buy it. As a result, it is subject to the demands of moral argument in a way that some scientists claim that genetic engineering isn't or shouldn't be.
The community-based political activism Glass will encourage will undoubtedly be deeply annoying. But there's little to suggest an apocalyptic societal breakdown just because a few hipster tech execs want the ability to tweet hands-free from their scooters. We may not be able to resist the allure of modding our bodies and even our species, we do have a defence against the charms of Glass, supposing we've been tempted into a purchase.
Version 1.0 of Glass isn't an inevitability of evolution: it's a rich kid's toy. For now, at least, we can simply take the damn things off.

Gugl je objavio specifikacije za Glass:

Google Glass Specs Hit the Web

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Google Glass will feature WiFi, Bluetooth, a camera capable of snapping 5-megapixel photos, and more.   
Google has issued the specifications for its spectacles.
The search-engine giant's Google Glass, an augmented-reality headset that allows wearers to view information on a tiny screen embedded in one of the lenses, features a camera capable of snapping 5-megapixel photos and 720p video. That aforementioned screen, in the words of Google's just-released specs sheet , "is the equivalent of a 25-inch high definition screen from eight feet away."
Google Glass can rely on WiFi (802.11 b/g) and Bluetooth. It features 12GB of usable memory, synced with Google's cloud storage (actual onboard storage is 16GB). Google has built a "bone conduction transducer" into the device, which transmits sound to the inner ear through the cranial bones; it's the same sort of technology used in everything from hearing aids to specialized headsets for high-noise environments.
Google Glass is compatible with any Bluetooth-capable phone. Its MyGlass app, which enables SMS messaging and GPS, requires a companion device running Android 4.0.3 (the "Ice Cream Sandwich" build) or higher. Google claims the battery will provide a "full day of typical use," although the company warned in the specs sheet that certain functions—most notably video recording and Hangouts—could drain the battery faster.
Google used this year's South by Southwest conference in Austin, Texas to show off some apps currently under development for the eyewear, including a New York Times app that will provide headlines and images to the tiny screen embedded in the lens. Google Glass's voice-recognition capabilities will also have a large role to play with the Gmail app in development, with the ability to answer incoming emails via speech.
Google has poured considerable effort into demonstrating that Google Glass can be a viable product. In February, it launched a Website demonstrating the core software features, including the ability to snap a point-of-view image simply by saying, "Take a picture." They can also ask questions of Google Glass ("How many miles between New York City and Washington DC?") and receive answers on the screen.
All that being said, Google Glass also raises some thorny questions about surveillance culture, and whether people really want whole crowds recording every moment of our collective lives. But those are the sort of conundrums that will only become more clear when Google Glass is actually released sometime later this year.

Gugl zabranio reklame u aplikacijama za Glass (što kapiram znači da će oni sami plasirati iste):

Google: 'Glassware' developers prohibited from displaying ads

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Google releases its policies for third-party Google Glass developers. In the fine print: they can't display ads or charge for the software.


Google, which relies on advertising for some 95 percent of its revenue, doesn't want ads on its hotly anticipated Google Glass eyewear.
The blanket prohibition came in the fine print of a policy made public this evening, which says "Glassware" developers may not "serve or include any advertisements" and they "may not charge" users to download apps for the device.
Today's announcement, which coincided with news that Google Glass Explorer Edition prototypes were about to ship, indicates that the Mountain View company is proceeding carefully, even slowly, when allowing third-party developers access to the head mounted display's full capabilities. It also means that developers won't have an obvious way of making money from their apps.
A Google representative sent CNET a statement saying: "Developers are crucial to the future of Glass. The focus during the Explorer Program is on innovation and experimentation, but it's too early to speculate how this will evolve."

Google has taken a different approach than other platforms have, including Apple, Microsoft, BlackBerry, and even Android: instead of encouraging native code that tends to be faster and more flexible, that approach is not permitted. The new Google Mirror API suggests that the intelligence behind Glassware will, at least for now, reside on third party servers and communicate with the eyewear through encrypted links, much like Web apps do today.
That should reduce the likelihood of crashes, malware, and unexpected battery drain from buggy software -- at the expense of limiting developers' ability to take full advantage of Glass. Voice input, for instance, is not currently accessible to developers. User interaction with Glassware is limited, and more advanced hardware features like real-time image recognition that would lead to augmented reality applications are also not accessible. (So much for the makers of Adblock Plus' jest about the Glassware they want to build.)
The documentation does say that Glassware will be able to share "photos taken by the built-in camera," display images, and with permission access the user's current location.
It's possible, of course, that advertisements from third-party developers or Google itself will eventually appear on the eyewear or a Glassware store will be created. Project Glass lead Babak Parviz left open that possibility in an interview in the January issue of IEEE Spectrum. "At the moment, there are no plans for advertising on this device," he said.
"We know a lot of you are eager to learn more about it, and I have some great news," Google developer programs engineer Jenny Murphy wrote in a post on Google+ this evening. "Today we're releasing the API documentation and a bunch of example code, so even though the API is in a limited developer preview, you can start dreaming with us."
Also released today are the tech specs for Google Glass: a 5 megapixel camera, a bone conduction transducer for audio, Bluetooth, WiFi, and 12 GB of usable memory.
Disclosure: McCullagh is married to a Google employee not involved in this project.

Takođe, Gugl ne dozvoljava da prodate svoj primerak Gugl Glasa. Mada, pošto je to u suprotnosti sa važećim propisima, možda to važi samo za devkitove???

Google Bans Selling or Lending of Glass

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If Google thinks any of its new Google Glass owners have been flogging them on eBay or loaning them their to friends it has the right to remotely deactivate the tech spectacles, according to the Ts & Cs in the contract this first wave of buyers have agreed to.
The oppressive Google Glass terms state that: "...you may not resell, loan, transfer, or give your device to any other person. If you resell, loan, transfer, or give your device to any other person without Google's authorization, Google reserves the right to deactivate the device, and neither you nor the unauthorized person using the device will be entitled to any refund, product support, or product warranty."
It's sad news for anyone who managed to bag one of the $1,500 devices in the hope of flipping them for a quick profit. One recent attempt at eBaying a retail Google Glass hit the highs of around £60,000, before the seller cancelled the auction in the face of mass public outrage at how he dared to sell the magical new glasses of power. [Wired]

Quote from: Meho Krljic on 20-04-2013, 09:40:39

Takođe, Gugl ne dozvoljava da prodate svoj primerak Gugl Glasa. Mada, pošto je to u suprotnosti sa važećim propisima, možda to važi samo za devkitove???

Google Bans Selling or Lending of Glass

Quote
If Google thinks any of its new Google Glass owners have been flogging them on eBay or loaning them their to friends it has the right to remotely deactivate the tech spectacles, according to the Ts & Cs in the contract this first wave of buyers have agreed to.
The oppressive Google Glass terms state that: "...you may not resell, loan, transfer, or give your device to any other person. If you resell, loan, transfer, or give your device to any other person without Google's authorization, Google reserves the right to deactivate the device, and neither you nor the unauthorized person using the device will be entitled to any refund, product support, or product warranty."
It's sad news for anyone who managed to bag one of the $1,500 devices in the hope of flipping them for a quick profit. One recent attempt at eBaying a retail Google Glass hit the highs of around £60,000, before the seller cancelled the auction in the face of mass public outrage at how he dared to sell the magical new glasses of power. [Wired]

Ekvivalent čipu za praćenje, zabijenog u guz'cu očni nerv vidno polje!

William Gibson vs Google Glass

Gibson: "Meh"

via SlashGear

Eve ga ovaj što ga ne skida

Robert Scoble shows Google Glass

http://www.cracked.com/quick-fixes/5-reasons-no-one-will-use-google-glass-explained-by-google/

Google Glass Photographer

Google Glass Porn App

via Wired

Google BANS porn on GLASS

Google BANS porn on GLASS

Kada se Google Glass rastavi na delove

via Catwig

I, Glasshole: My Year With Google Glass

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An anecdote: I wanted to wear Google Glass during the birth of our second child. My wife was extremely unreceptive to this idea when I suggested it. Angry, even. But as we got a bit closer to the date, she began to warm to it and eventually landed somewhere in the neighborhood of bemused hostility.

I assumed the plan would sell itself. Glass has a slew of features that made my case: hands-free Internet, voice recognition, and a camera that makes snapping pictures an automatic action. Touch it at the temple and you take a photo. Hold the button a second longer and you're shooting video. Bark a few commands, and you can send that photo or video to anyone. Even better, you can share what you are seeing, live, with other people in real time. I have no idea why my wife was resistant to live-casting the birthing experience.

It seemed a great way to remain in the moment yet still document it and share it with our far-flung family. I could Hangout ™ with our parents during the birth of their grandchild, even though they were half a continent away. I figured I'd just wait until the time came, pop them on, and see what happened.

As it turned out, I never  got the chance — babies keep unpredictable schedules. But what was interesting to me in retrospect was I had to work to convince my wife to let me use Glass. I didn't have to convince her I should take pictures or shoot video. She hoped I would do that. It was the form factor of the camera that irked her. It was the way Glass looked. It might let me remain in the moment, but my wife worried it would take her out of it, that its mere presence would be distracting because it's so goddamn weird-looking.

There's some weird shit on your face.

For much of 2013, I wore the future across my brow, a true Glasshole peering uncertainly into the post-screen world. I'm not out here all alone, at least not for long. The future is coming to your face too. And your wrist. Hell, it might even be in your clothes. You're going to be wearing the future all over yourself, and soon. When it comes to wearable computing, it's no longer a question of if it happens, only when and why and can you get in front of it to stop it with a ball-pein hammer? (Answers: Soon. Because it is incredibly convenient. Probably not.) In a few years, we might all be Glassholes. But in 2013, maybe for the last time, I was in dubiously exclusive face-computing company.

Here's what I learned.
Look at that asshole.

Even in less intimate situations, Glass is socially awkward. Again and again, I made people very uncomfortable. That made me very uncomfortable.

People get angry at Glass. They get angry at you for wearing Glass. They talk about you openly. It inspires the most aggressive of passive aggression. Bill Wasik refers apologetically to the Bluedouche principle. But nobody apologizes in real life. They just call you an asshole.

Wearing Glass separates you. It sets you apart from everyone else. It says you not only had $1,500 to plunk down to be part of the "explorer" program, but that Google deemed you special enough to warrant inclusion (not everyone who wanted Glass got it; you had to be selected). Glass is a class divide on your face.

The people who were selected too often made things worse. I'm not talking about provocateurs like Robert Scoble, but the precious set of beautiful millennials you most commonly see wearing Glass in social settings here in the Bay Area. Bay Area Explorers tend to be young, dressed in expensive denim and bespoke plaids.

The few times I've seen multiple people wearing Glass in public, they've  kept to self-segregated groups. At the party, but not of it. Worse is the evangelism, full of wide-eyed enthusiasm that comes across as the arrogance of youth and groupthink. It has its own lingo, its own social norms, and of course you must pay top dollar to enter. No wonder it reminds me of Landmark Forum.

And yet I'm one of them. I know that I've enraged people because I've heard them call me an asshole. "Look at that asshole," they say. And I always sort of agree.

Where can you wear wearables?

My Glass experiences have left me a little wary of wearables because I'm never sure where they're welcome. I'm not wearing my $1,500 face computer on public transit where there's a good chance it might be yanked from my face. I won't wear it out to dinner, because it seems as rude as holding a phone in my hand during a meal. I won't wear it to a bar. I won't wear it to a movie. I can't wear it to the playground or my kid's school because sometimes it scares children.

It is pretty great when you are on the road — as long as you are not around other people, or do not care when they think you're a knob.

When I wear it at work, co-workers sometimes call me an asshole. My co-workers at WIRED, where we're bravely facing the future, find it weird. People stop by and cyber-bully me at my standing treadmill desk.

Do you know what it takes to get a professional nerd to call you a nerd? I do. (Hint: It's Glass.)

Google Now for your face is uhhhhhhhhmazing.

Whatever you may think of Glass and those who wear it, it's a completely unique experience. Even that itty-bitty display, which fills your vision, is like nothing I'd seen before.

You could install some apps on it from the get go, and more over time. But I never found the first batch of third-party apps particularly useful. Twitter was just too much; it was too noisy for something that was, literally, in my face. The New York Times breaking news alerts were okay. But mostly the third party apps were just noise.

Google's native apps, on the other hand, were pretty great. I loved Glass for (very basic) rapid-fire email replies. The navigation stuff was aces. And the Google Now for your face is incredible — its ambient location awareness, combined with previous Google searches, means extremely relevant notifications come to your attention in a way they just can't on a smartphone, unless you wear your smartphone on your face. If you want to know what Glass is really, really good at, it's Google Now for your face.

You are so going to love Google Now for your face.

I'm so bored.

Glass is still very limited. Aside from directions, it's more novelty than utility. The really cool stuff remains on the horizon, which means I got tired of it before I'd had it for even a year.
It took a long time before Google truly opened it up to third party developers. Once it did, things got interesting again. The Strava cycling app, for example, really shows off the promise of Glass by combining location tracking with updates that let you keep your eyes on the road and hands on the handlebars. So too does AllTheCooks, which lets you create and follow recipes without taking your eyes and hands away from sharp knives and hot ovens. There's another app that will translate signs just by looking at them. What a world.

Which is to say, I'm really, really excited about where Glass is going. I'm less excited about where it is.

The inadvertent Android

Did I mention I swapped to Android because of Glass? That was weird and unexpected, but it happened.

I've been an iOS guy since the first iPhone, which I bought with my own hard-earned dollars the day it shipped. And although I've gone full time Android a few times in the past, mostly to stay current, it's never taken. But I started lugging around a Nexus 4 when I began wearing Glass regularly because tethering to my iPhone didn't work well. (Glass needs to hook up to a phone to take advantage of its internet connection when there is no Wi-Fi.) So everywhere I went, I had two phones in my pocket.

An aside: Few things will make you feel like quite so big an asshole as stepping out in public with Glass and two smartphones.

I gradually noticed I was pulling the Nexus out of my pocket far more often that I was reaching for the iPhone. That was especially true after I started running iOS 7. That's not a knock on iOS as much as it is a testament to how much Google has improved its mobile operating system. For sheer brutal efficiency, Android is ace.

But moreover, Glass changed the way I think about phones.

Phones are the worst.

Glass kind of made me hate my phone — or any phone. It made me realize how much they have captured our attention. Phones separate us from our lives in all sorts of ways. Here we are together, looking at little screens, interacting (at best) with people who aren't here. Looking at our hands instead of each other. Documenting instead of experiencing.

Glass sold me on the concept of getting in and getting out. Glass helped me appreciate what a monster I have become, tethered to the thing in my pocket. I'm too absent. Can yet another device make me more present? Or is it just going to be another distraction? Another way to stare off and away from the things actually in front of us, out into the electronic ether? I honestly have no idea.

Glass is normal. Kind of. One day.

Glass, and the other things like it, won't always be ugly and awkward. At some point, it's going to be invisibly indistinguishable from a pair of glasses or sunglasses. Meanwhile, Google is going to continue getting better and better at figuring out what to send you, based on where you are and when you're there, and what you've done in the past. Third-party developers will create amazing new apps, things we haven't thought of. Its form will encourage new functions, new ideas, new realities.

And here's the thing I am utterly convinced of: Google Glass and its ilk are coming. They are racing toward us, ready to change society, again. You can make fun of Glass, and the assholes (like me) who wear it. But here's what I know: The future is on its way, and it is going to be on your face. We need to think about it and be ready for it in a way we weren't with smartphones. Because while you (and I) may make fun of glassholes today, come tomorrow we're all going to be right there with them, or at least very close by. Wearables are where we're going. Let's be ready.

Heh... Sa jedne strane, pomisao da čovek nosi google glass usred bioskopa u nama proizvede želju da mu se desi nešto loše (jer smo cinične svinje), ali sa druge, kad vidimo kako ga je DHS tretirao, pomislimo da Ameriku treba bombardovati iz orbite jer je to jedini način da budemo sigurni...

AMC movie theater calls "federal agents" to arrest a Google Glass user

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A long time Gadgeteer reader contacted me today through Google Hangouts to tell me that he had a story that he thought I'd be interested in reading. He then forwarded me a long email with a story from a very good friend of his. It was such a surprising story that I asked if I could have permission to post it here on The Gadgeteer. I ended up communicating with the author of the story and have posted it here for everyone to read...

I have been using Google Glass for about 2 months now, and about 2 weeks ago I got prescription lenses for the glasses. So in the past two weeks I was wearing Google Glass all the time. There were no stories to write about, until yesterday (1/18/2014).
I went to AMC (Easton Mall, Columbus, OH) to watch a movie with my wife (non- Google Glass user). It is the theater we go to every week, so it has probably been the third time I've been there wearing Google Glass, and the AMC employees (guy tearing tickets at the entrance, girl at the concession stand) have asked me about Glass in the past and I have told them how awesome Glass is with every occasion.
Because I don't want Glass to distract me during the movie, I turn them off (but since my prescription lenses are on the frame, I still wear them). About an hour into the movie (Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit), a guy comes near my seat, shoves a badge that had some sort of a shield on it, yanks the Google Glass off my face and says "follow me outside immediately". It was quite embarrassing and outside of the theater there were about 5-10 cops and mall cops. Since I didn't catch his name in the dark of the theater, I asked to see his badge again and I asked what was the problem and I asked for my Glass back. The response was "you see all these cops you know we are legit, we are with the 'federal service' and you have been caught illegally taping the movie".
I was surprised by this and as I was obviously just having a nice Saturday evening night out with my wife and not taping anything whether legally or illegally, I tried to explain that this is a misunderstanding. I tried to explain that he's holding rather expensive hardware that costed me $1500 for Google Glass and over $600 for the prescription glasses. The response was that I was searched and more stuff was taken away from me (specifically my personal phone, my work phone – both of which were turned off, and my wallet). After an embarrassing 20-30 minutes outside the movie theater, me and my wife were conducted into two separate rooms in the "management" office of Easton Mall, where the guy with the badge introduced himself again and showed me a different ID. His partner introduced herself too and showed me a similar looking badge. I was by that time, too flustered to remember their names (as a matter of fact, now, over 30 hours later I am still shaking when recounting the facts).
What followed was over an hour of the "feds" telling me I am not under arrest, and that this is a "voluntary interview", but if I choose not to cooperate bad things may happen to me (is it legal for authorities to threaten people like that?). I kept telling them that Glass has a USB port and not only did I allow them, I actually insist they connect to it and see that there was nothing but personal photos with my wife and my dog on it. I also insisted they look at my phone too and clear things out, but they wanted to talk first. They wanted to know who I am, where I live, where I work, how much I'm making, how many computers I have at home, why am I recording the movie, who am I going to give the recording to, why don't I just give up the guy up the chain, 'cause they are not interested in me. Over and over and over again.
I kept telling them that I wasn't recording anything – my Glass was off, they insisted they saw it on. I told them there would be a light coming out the little screen if Glass was on, and I could show them that, but they insisted that I cannot touch my Glass for the fear "I will erase the evidence against me that was on Glass". I didn't have the intuition to tell them that Glass gets really warm if it records for more than a few minutes and my glasses were not warm. They wanted to know where I got Glass and how did I came by having it. I told them I applied about 1000 times to get in the explorer program, and eventually I was selected, and I got the Glass from Google. I offered to show them receipt and Google Glass website if they would allow me to access any computer with internet. Of course, that was not an option. Then they wanted to know what does Google ask of me in exchange for Glass, how much is Google paying me, who is my boss and why am I recording the movie.
Eventually, after a long time somebody came with a laptop and an USB cable at which point he told me it was my last chance to come clean. I repeated for the hundredth time there is nothing to come clean about and this is a big misunderstanding so the FBI guy finally connected my Glass to the computer, downloaded all my personal photos and started going though them one by one (although they are dated and it was obvious there was nothing on my Glass that was from the time period they accused me of recording). Then they went through my phone, and 5 minutes later they concluded I had done nothing wrong.
I asked why didn't they just take those five minutes at the beginning of the interrogation and they just left the room. A guy who claimed his name is Bob Hope (he gave me his business card) came in the room, and said he was with the Movie Association and they have problems with piracy at that specific theater and that specific movie. He gave me two free movie passes "so I can see the movie again". I asked if they thought my Google Glass was such a big piracy machine, why didn't they ask me not to wear them in the theater? I would have probably sat five or six rows closer to the screen (as I didn't have any other pair of prescription glasses with me) and none of this would have happened. All he said was AMC called him, and he called the FBI and "here are two more passes for my troubles". I would have been fine with "I'm sorry this happened, please accept our apologies". Four free passes just infuriated me.
Considering it was 11:27pm when this happened, and the movie started at 7.45, I guess 3 and a half hours of my time and the scare my wife went through (who didn't know what was going on as nobody bothered to tell her) is worth about 30 bucks in the eyes of the Movie Association and the federal militia (sorry, I cannot think of other derogatory words). I think I should sue them for this, but I don't have the time or the energy to deal with "who is my boss – they don't want me, they want the big guy" again, so I just spilled the beans on this forum, for other to learn from my experience.
I guess until people get more familiar with Google Glass and understand what they are, one should not wear them to the movies. I wish they would have said something before I went to the movies, but it may be my mistake for assuming that if I went and watched movies two times wearing Glass with no incident the third time there won't be any incident either. As for the federal agents and their level of comprehension... I guess if they deal with petty criminals every day, everybody starts looking like a petty criminal. Again, I wish they would have listened when I told them how to verify I did nothing illegal, or at least apologize afterwards, but hey... this is the free country everybody praises. Somewhere else might be even worse.

Crazy huh? His story read like something out of the Jack Ryan movie that he and his wife had gone to see. Are there any other Google Glass users out there that have been treated badly just for your wearable tech? If not, are you reconsidering wearing a pair to the next movie you attend?
Update (01/21/14):
Wow, this article has completely blown up our web server due to the traffic. I just wanted to follow up with a few comments and info. First of all, I'm not a journalist, I'm a tech geek writer. Posting this article has given me a good learning lesson though, which I'll use if I ever post a similar article in the future.
I have been criticized for not citing my sources and following up with the theater to verify that the story was true. I didn't feel the need at the time because the person who gave me the story is a long time Gadgeteer reader and works in law enforcement. I felt 100% confident the story was not a hoax. I did however call the theater in question and tried to get in touch with someone there for a comment. My calls went unanswered.
After the article was posted. Rob Jackson of Phandroid posted his take on the article and asked me for the author's contact info. With the author's permission, I forwarded that info and Rob followed up with some questions and answers that he posted on his site. Take a look for more info on this story:
http://phandroid.com/2014/01/20/fbi-google-glass-movie/
Update #2:
I just received info from the author with regards to the agents that questioned him:

For the sake of having all the facts right.
I have been trying to find out who the agents that "interviewed" me at
AMC were, so I asked help from a guy I know at FBI. I worked with this
guy in the past when I was employed at a webhosting company. He did
some digging, and he tells me the "federal agents"
talking to me were DHS.

Update #3:
The title of the article has been changed to reflect the recent update from the author that it was actually the DHS (Department of Homeland Security) who detained him and not the FBI as he originally thought.
Update #4:
The story has been confirmed. I just received this email from the author:
Julie, Rob.
I spoke with a reporter from Columbus Dispatch, who obtained a
statement from DHS and forwarded it to me. Here it is:
From: Walls, Khaalid H [mailto:Khaalid.H.Walls@ice.dhs.gov]
Sent: Tuesday, January 21, 2014 1:16 PM
To: Allison Manning
Subject: ICE
H Ally,
Please attribute the below statement to me:
On Jan. 18, special agents with ICE's Homeland Security Investigations
and local authorities briefly interviewed a man suspected of using an
electronic recording device to record a film at an AMC theater in
Columbus.  The man, who voluntarily answered questions, confirmed to
authorities that the suspected recording device was also a pair of
prescription eye glasses in which the recording function had been
inactive. No further action was taken.
Khaalid Walls, ICE spokesman
Khaalid Walls
Public Affairs Officer
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)
313-226-0726
313-215-7657(m)
Update #5
http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/local/2014/01/21/google-glass-at-easton-theater.html

Naravno, napadi na ljude koji nose Google Glass će u početku biti očekivani:


http://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-woman-attacked-says-she-wont-stop-wearing-google-glass-20140225,0,1735801.story

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SAN FRANCISCO -- The woman attacked in a San Francisco bar for wearing Google Glass said she won't be intimidated into taking off the Internet-connected glasses.
  "I don't want people to see me without Google Glass now," Sarah Slocum said in an interview. "Now that people know that this happened to me, I don't want them to think I am afraid to wear it. I don't want the people who verbally and physically attacked me and wronged me to have that."
Slocum, 34, who blogs about technology and works in technology marketing and public relations, is among the early testers of the device.
She has been wearing Glass for about a month and said 95% of the time the reaction has been  positive despite the fears triggered by the introduction of a new technology, even one as seemingly intrusive as this one.
"People are excited and they are curious. They want to try it on and see what it's like," she said.
Slocum, a Google Glass evangelist, said she understands that people may be nervous at first about the device, which lets wearers access the Internet, take photos and film snippets. So she spends time letting people play with the device and explaining to them how it works. When people express concerns about being surreptitiously filmed, she shows them how a light goes on when she is recording.
"Some people think, 'Oh, it's a privacy invasion.' But it's really no different than the smartphones people carry in their pockets," Slocum said. "People just don't understand the technology.... Once I allow people to try it on and show them how it works, they love it. They say, 'Wow, that's so cool.'"
Some people still don't like it when she wears the device. But Slocum said she was stunned by the "venom" she experienced when angry patrons attacked her at Molotov's bar early Saturday morning. She says they insulted her, shouted obscenities and even threw a bar rag at her.
Slocum said she was bar hopping with friends when they ended up at the bar in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood. She was showing one curious bar patron Google Glass when two women started shielding their faces and rolling their eyes, she said. One of the women made an obscene gesture, Slocum said.
Feeling threatened, she said she told them she was going to record with Google Glass. That's when she said one of the women and a man "charged" her, telling her they did not want to be filmed. The woman swore at her, Slocum said, then threw a bar rag at her. Slocum said the woman then ran up to her, saying "you are killing the city" and tried to grab Google Glass from her. Then the man "ripped them off my face and ran out of the bar," Slocum said.
Slocum said she ran after him yelling and trying to convince him not to take her Glass. He eventually gave Glass back, but by the time she ran back into the bar, her purse with her keys, wallet and phone were gone.
She has given the footage she filmed on Glass to KRON4 to air Tuesday evening.
Google Glass has had its share of troubles in bars.
In November, Lost Lake Cafe & Lounge, a 24-hour diner and bar in Seattle, said it had banned Google Glass after a customer refused to stop wearing and operating the device inside the restaurant.
"Our Official Policy on Google Glass: We kindly ask our customers to refrain from wearing and operating Google Glasses inside Lost Lake. We also ask that you not videotape anyone using any other sort of technology. If you do wear your Google Glasses inside, or film or photograph people without their permission, you will be asked to stop, or leave. And if we ask you to leave, for God's sake, don't start yelling about your 'rights'. Just shut up and get out before you make things worse," the restaurant said on its Facebook page.
The customer, an early adopter of Google Glass named Nick Starr, posted his side of the story on Facebook, saying he did in fact leave when he was asked, but only after debating whether the manager should ban Glass. Another bar in Seattle, the 5 Point Cafe, was the first to ban Google Glass. The two establishments are owned by the same restaurateur.
Google has published a social etiquette guide for Google Glass wearers, advising among other things to ask permission before filming.
"Standing alone in the corner of a room staring at people while recording them through Glass is not going to win you any friends.... The Glass camera function is no different from a cell phone so behave as you would with your phone and ask permission before taking photos or videos of others," it reads.
Despite the controversy that has hounded the device even before it has gone mainstream, Slocum predicted Google Glass will quickly become as popular as smartphones are today.
"Once Google Glass is introduced to the mass market and Google brings the price down, they are going to sell like hot cakes," Slocum said. "Everybody hating on it now are going to be wearing it in six months to a year."

Da ne otvaram novi topik...

Gugl ima Projekat ARA, što je ideja da će mobioni telefoni budućnosti (bliske) biti modularni - dakle nešto kao desktop računar gde komponente biramo sami po svojim potrebama... Nije baš da je to ono što mase traže, reklo bi se, da ne pominjemo još veću fragmentaciju koju će ovo doneti, ali... nek Gugl proba...


Three Big Ideas in Google's Modular Phone That No One's Talking About

QuoteIt's easy to see the appeal of Project Ara, Google's modular smartphone concept. With Ara, a dead battery in the middle of a day trip doesn't set off a frantic search for someone with a charger. Instead, you pop in a spare. A cracked screen wouldn't mean buying a new phone, or turning to Craigslist to find a shady, warranty-voiding replacement. It would just mean swinging by the mall to pick up a new one.
But to hear Gadi Amit explain it, Project Ara is about much more than building a smartphone with a chance of outlasting your two-year cell contract. Working with both a small team inside Google and a number of outside experts, Amit's studio, New Deal Design, has swiftly and quietly ushered Ara from the realm of fantasy to something surprisingly close to a real, viable product.
If it works, Ara could reshape the smartphone landscape dramatically. Its modular design could reshape not just how phones are used but how they're made, too. It's an audacious undertaking, and we'll see if Ara will deliver on its promise. But it's potential goes well beyond fixing broken screens.

The Ingenious Skeleton That Makes Everything Possible Project Ara is not just paying lip service to the idea of modularity. As designed, you could pull out the battery from your Ara phone, pass it to a friend, and she could pop it in hers phone without any trouble. You could upgrade your camera to the latest model. But you could also sell your old camera module to anyone else with an Ara phone. In theory, everything works with everything, all hot-swappable, pure plug-and-play.
Many gadget lovers got their first glimpse of this sort of mix-and-match smartphone future last fall, when a concept called Phoneblocks became a viral sensation. Conceived by Dutch designer Dave Hakkens, the first Phoneblocks video outlined a hypothetical smartphone where individual components could be recycled and upgraded. It did a terrific job making the case for modular smartphones. What it didn't do was offer much in the way of explaining how they might actually work.


When Phoneblocks went viral, New Deal Design was already months into work on their own modular smartphone concept. The studio, whose previous projects include the Fitbit family of activity trackers and the focus-shifting Lytro camera, had been tapped by Paul Eremenko, head of what was the Motorola's ATAP division, to come up with a smartphone that could push configurability and personalization to an entirely new level.
"What they had envisioned in terms of modularity is being able to tailor functionality in a trillion ways," Amit says. That meant figuring out how to get all those countless modules to play nice with eachother.
Once you've seen pictures of Ara prototypes, the design seems obvious–almost inevitable. But New Deal explored all sorts of options on the modular spectrum, including some with more hidden interchangeability. Ultimately, they opted for a fairly ambitious take on the concept, one where every single component–even things like the battery and processor–exists as its own module, rising gently above the smartphone's body, like bumps on a turtle shell.



The two breakthroughs that make this design possible are a piece of hardware dubbed the endoskeleton and a concept New Deal refers to as "parceling."
For a modular phone to function, the designers surmised, each module will need to have direct access to a central piece of electronics, without having to worry about neighboring modules impinging on its space or function. "We want an arbitrator–some element that is objective and is neutral, that nobody can manipulate, that has a very clear spec that everyone can adhere to," Amit says. The endoskeleton is that arbitrator.
Created with NK Labs, the Massachusetts firm responsible for the bulk of Ara's electrical and mechanical engineering, it's the bus to which all modules attach. Parceling dictates that every module has its own plot on the endo, making it so that module makers don't have to worry about building on top of other modules–or other modules building on top of them.
Ara's hoping to tap into a handful of next-gen technologies to make it all work. A prototype uses electropermanent magnets for attaching modules and an emerging standard called UniPro for letting them talk to the endo. Still, the concept of parceling was crucial to the vision. Creating a design where modules are both physically and electronically independent from their neighbors was the only way to establish an ecosystem in which anyone could bring a module to market.
"We had to create a system that allows everyone to understand the boundaries of where they can operate or not," Amit says. "That was somewhat restrictive. But the notion was that this minimal restriction would allow this economy of third parties to thrive."

Changing How We Think About Smartphones That third-party ecosystem is one of the most radical aspects of the Project Ara concept. The plan is to let anyone offer up any type of hardware they want, leaving the people who own the phones with the decision of what modules to buy for their own device.
By opening up hardware decisions to outside players, Ara could effectively wrest the future of smartphones away from entrenched smartphone makers. "It's a huge burden of proof for innovators today to get into one of the main phones, whether it's Samsung or Apple or whomever," Amit says. With Ara, those companies are no longer the gatekeepers of functionality. As New Deal envisions it, the Ara will incubate and accelerate hardware that could take years to show up otherwise.
Just what these technologies might look like is hard to say. There are possibilities not just for better cameras but for other types of cameras; you could have modules dedicated to night vision, say, or thermal or 3D imaging. There's potential for medical hardware, or modules dedicated to other specialized fields. The ecosystem, Amit muses, could let us experiment to find the ideal biometric security solution, perhaps combining a 3D camera with some sort of microphone to authenticate our identities.
There's no denying that it's a hazy, hopeful vision of what Ara could become. But as Dan Clifton, a New Deal designer who's worked closely on the project explains, we should understand that uncertainty as opportunity. "Think about apps," he says. "No one had any idea of what kind of apps they wanted before they existed."
The other side of the hardware ecosystem is giving users the ability to choose their own smartphone experience. Ara's magnet-based attachment system makes it exceedingly easy to reconfigure a device on the fly. In terms of difficulty and effort required, changing the components on your Ara phone will be more like rearranging apps on your home screen than installing new RAM in your PC.


Amit thinks this flexibility will lead people to think of their phones in much more fluid terms. Google's announced three sizes of endoskeletons–a small one about the size of a pack of Trident gum, a medium one about the size of a standard smartphone, and a large one slated to roll out sometime later. (In the past few months of showing off prototypes, Amit notes, the small version is the one everyone gravitates toward.)
Since modules could be swapped between any of these sizes, Amit envisions a scenario in which you could have a medium endo for your everyday phone, a smaller one for times when you'd want to travel light, and any number of modules that could be added or subtracted between them depending on the circumstance. In this future, you don't own a single smartphone so much as whichever one you happened to build for the occasion.
Serving Ultra High-End and Low-End Markets at the Same Time It's hard to say just how much people will want to customize their phones. Consumer electronics have trained us to be maximalist when it comes to our gadgets, and people may be unwilling to give up their camera for a night out, even if it means a slimmer device in their pockets. Regardless of how much we'll fiddle with our phones day to day, however, Ara's configurability still could have radical implications on how smartphones are sold–and resold.
For one thing, Ara constitutes an exceedingly rare attempt to create a product versatile enough to make headway in both first- and third-world markets. The original brief called for a phone that could come in with a bill of parts as high as $500 or as high as $50, depending on how it's configured. Google's hoping to sell a so-called "gray phone"–a barebones $50 Ara model with a processor, a Wi-Fi chip, and a screen–next year.



This new type of smartphone will require new means of distribution. One of the ideas ATAP is pursuing is an app that would let a prospective buyer configure a new Ara on a friend's Ara phone. Retail kiosks will serve as a physical point of sale. Of course, all of these phones can be upgraded with new modules at any time.
But "new" modules are only half the story. In addition to creating an ecosystem of new parts, Ara's design could give rise to a thriving aftermarket of old ones. Since parts are totally interchangeable, aging screens, processors and cameras could filter downmarket, instead of remaining trapped inside last-gen carcasses inside nightstand drawers. Even if we never end up swapping modules in and out quite as actively as Google and New Deal hope we might, Ara would increase smartphone fungibility dramatically.
Ara's modularity makes it uniquely capable of serving a wide swath of consumers. But it also aims to appeal to users who are accustomed to the latest and greatest in smartphone technology. Paul Eremenko, the ATAP lead, has said that Ara's currently about 25 percent behind today's phones in terms of efficiency and performance. Where that 25 percent shows up, and how noticeable it is, will play a significant part in determining Ara's success.
To Gadi Amit, though, trying to find an alternative to today's smartphones is a worthy pursuit in itself. In a category that for so long has followed the Apple's lead toward a more perfect black rectangle, Ara is a chance to pursue an entirely different approach to our most closely held devices.
"I grew to understand, to cherish, to respect the design values that these guys are doing," Amit explained, turning his iPhone over in his hands. "But effectively, they are perfecting a monolith."
Ara is many things. Monolithic is not one of them.

Matt Lake piše zašto je posle tri nedelje korišćenja GG-a, sve spakovo nazad u kutiju i vraća ga Guglu:


http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9248434/Why_I_m_sending_back_Google_Glass?taxonomyId=128&pageNumber=1

ево нама читача ума за гугл глас!
радуј се свете!
више не мораш да вичеш у микрофон 'сликај!' (ову или ону) па (ова или она) поквари слику изразом исконског гађења - само помислиш(!) и имаш је за вјек и вјеков 'сачувану' и на облаку и на драјву и на усбу (само не у мозгу), сви да ју виде у њеној слави - а ако бог да, да је одма и нађеш на фејсбуцима, плусовима, твитерима, па сталкујмо до миле воље и туђе невоље, док (ова или она) ништа не слути, са очима изван сваког зла (бар док не провали)...


MindRDR on Vimeo

Quote
New technology that lets wearers control Google Glass using brainwaves could let people snap a photo and upload to the internet just by thinking about it.


Created by London user experience company This Place, the MindRDR app uses a third-party EEG headband (electroencephalography) to measure electrical activity in the brain and convert these signals into instructions for Glass.


Google Glass, which launched in the UK last month, is usually controlled by voice commands or via a touchpad located on the arm of the device.


Although the MindRDR technology might appear frivolous at first glance, its creators hope technology like it could one day help individuals suffering from locked-in syndrome or quadriplegia the opportunity to use technology like Glass to interact with the world.


Google itself does not officially support MindRDR (or offer it in the Glass app store) but a spokeswoman for the company told the BBC: "Of course, we are always interested in hearing about new applications of Glass and we've already seen some great research from a variety of medical fields from surgery to Parkinson's."


"Google Glass cannot read your mind," the spokeswoman added.


In its current implementation the MindRDR only has two 'controls' – a 'yes' signal triggered by a peak in electrical brain activity and a 'no' signal triggered by a trough in activity.


This lack of nuance is one of the defining challenges facing current-generation EEG technology. Although the hardware used to detect brain activity are now fairly cheap (This Place used a NeuroSky headset that costs less than £100), the fidelity of their measurements and the difficulty for users to broadcast 'precise' brain signals will mean that it's many years before we're all uploaded snaps to Instagram just by thinking about it.


The creators of MindRDR recognise this and for that reason have launched their app on the developer community GitHub, allowing programmers around the world to take a look at their code and hopefully tweak it to make it more useful.

а најлепше од свега, сваком критичару-параноичару можемо рећи - скоте један, не мислиш на квадриплегичаре, не мислиш на паркинсовце, њима ће живот бити тако много олакшан, за њих смо ово правили!!!! за њих - 0,0004% популације планете, који су познати по свом богатству нарочито у индији, африци, азији и јужној америци (рачунајући и русију). Они су наше тржиште, сви они и стева хокинг! ми смо овде само да помогнемо, да учинимо овај свет праведнијим и једнакијим, а ти тако, срам те било!


питам се, да ли је егерс погрешио што је објавио круг?!
толико 'добрих' идеја и још увек неискоришћених механизама управљања масовним мишљењем има у тој књизи да ми сваки нови 'пробој' изгледа као директно преписан од њега.

Google Glass future clouded as early believers lose faith

Quote
After two years of popping up at high-profile events sporting Google Glass, the gadget that transforms eyeglasses into spy-movie worthy technology, Google co-founder Sergey Brin sauntered bare-faced into a Silicon Valley red-carpet event recently.
He'd left his pair in the car, Brin told a reporter. The Googler, who heads up the top-secret lab which developed Glass, has hardly given up on the product - he recently wore his pair to the beach.
But Brin's timing is not propitious, coming as many developers and early Glass users are losing interest in the much-hyped, $US1500 ($1714) test version of the product: a camera, processor and stamp-sized computer screen mounted to the edge of eyeglass frames. Google itself has pushed back the Glass roll out to the mass market.


While Glass may find some specialised, even lucrative, uses in the workplace, its prospects of becoming a consumer hit in the near future are slim, many developers say.
  Of 16 Glass app makers contacted, nine said that they had stopped work on their projects or abandoned them, mostly because of the lack of customers or limitations of the device. Three more have switched to developing for business, leaving behind consumer projects.
Plenty of larger developers remain with Glass. The nearly 100 apps on the official website include Facebook and OpenTable, although one major player recently defected: Twitter.
"If there was 200 million Google Glasses sold, it would be a different perspective. There's no market at this point," said Tom Frencel, the chief executive of Little Guy Games, which put development of a Glass game on hold this year and is looking at other platforms, including the Facebook-owned virtual-reality goggles Oculus Rift.
Several key Google employees instrumental to developing Glass have left the company in the last six months, including lead developer Babak Parviz, electrical engineering chief Adrian Wong, and Ossama Alami, director of developer relations.And a Glass funding consortium created by Google Ventures and two of Silicon Valley's biggest venture capitalists, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Andreessen Horowitz, quietly deleted its website, routing users to the main Glass site.
Google insists it is committed to Glass, with hundreds of engineers and executives working on it, as well as new fashionista boss Ivy Ross, a former Calvin Klein executive. Tens of thousands use Glass in the pilot consumer program.
"We are completely energised and as energised as ever about the opportunity that wearables and Glass in particular represent," said Glass head of business operations Chris O'Neill.
Glass was the first project to emerge from Google's X division, the secretive group tasked with developing "moonshot" products such as self-driving cars. Glass and wearable devices overall amount to a new technology, as smartphones once were, that will likely take time to evolve into a product that clicks with consumers.
"We are as committed as ever to a consumer launch. That is going to take time and we are not going to launch this product until it's absolutely ready," O'Neill said.
Brin had predicted a launch this year, but 2015 is now the most likely date, a person familiar with the matter said.
Glass selling... on eBay
After an initial burst of enthusiasm, signs that consumers are giving up on Glass have been building.
Google dubbed the first set of several thousand Glass users as "Explorers". But as the Explorers hit the streets, they drew stares and jokes. Some people viewed the device, capable of surreptitious video recording, as an obnoxious privacy intrusion, deriding the once-proud Explorers as "Glassholes".
"It looks super nerdy," said Shvetank Shah, a Washington, DC-based consultant, whose Google Glass now gathers dust in a drawer. "I'm a card carrying nerd, but this was one card too many."
Glass now sells on eBay for as little as half list price.
Some developers recently have felt unsupported by investors and, at times, Google itself.
The Glass Collective, the funding consortium co-run by Google Ventures, invested in only three or four small start-ups by the beginning of this year, a person familiar with the statistics said.
A Google Ventures spokeswoman declined to comment on the number of investments and said the website was closed for simplicity. "We just found it's easier for entrepreneurs to come to us directly," she said.
The lack of a launch date has given some developers the impression that Google still treats Glass as an experiment.
"It's not a big enough platform to play on seriously," said Matthew Milan, founder of Toronto-based software firm Normative Design, which put on hold a Glass app for logging exercise and biking.
Mobile game company Glu Mobile, known for its popular Kim Kardashian: Hollywood title, was one of the first to launch a game on Glass. Spellista, a puzzler released a year ago, is still available, but Glu has discontinued work on it, a spokesman for the company said.
Another developer, Sean McCracken, won $US10,000 in a contest last year for creating an aliens-themed video game for Glass, Psyclops, but Google never put it on the official hub for Glass apps, making it tougher to find. He has quit working on updates.
Still, there are some enthusiastic developers. Cycling and running app Strava finds Glass well-suited for its users, who want real-time data on their workouts, said David Lorsch, vice president of business development. And entrepreneur Jake Steinerman said it is ideal for his company, DriveSafe, which detects if people are falling asleep at the wheel.
Pivoting away
In April, Google launched the Glass at Work program to help make the device useful for specific industries, such as healthcare and manufacturing. So far the effort has resulted in apps that are being tested or used at companies such as Boeing and Yum Brands' Taco Bell.
Google is selling Glass in bulk to some businesses, offering two-for-one discounts.
CrowdOptic, which uses Glass as portable computers for surgeons and other people out of offices, is currently in use at 19 US hospitals and expects that to grow to 100 hospitals early next year, said chief executive Jon Fisher.
Alex Foster began See Through, a Glass advertising analytics firm for business, after a venture firm earlier this year withdrew its offer to back his consumer-oriented Glass fitness company when it became clear no big consumer Glass release was imminent.
"It was devastating," he said. "All of the consumer glass start-ups are either completely dead or have pivoted," to enterprise products or rival wearables.
Reuters

Nije vezano za Gugl Glas, nego za Jutjub ali je zanimljiva vest:

YouTube Now Lets You Make GIFs From Videos

QuoteMaking short GIFs of YouTube videos is a pretty well-established practice now — so much so that there's dozens of websites dedicated to this finest of art forms. But YouTube might be about to make them all obsolete, thanks to a new built-in GIF maker.
At the moment, it looks like the feature is experimental — the only channel we can find with it enabled is the PBS Idea Channel. In practice, it's pretty slick: on a video with GIF capability, you click Share, then GIF, and can then customize your clip. Maximum length is six seconds, with options to add top and bottom text if needed. Actual GIF creation takes seconds.
It's unclear what YouTube's plans for the future of this feature are, at this stage. But assuming that a site-wide rollout is imminent, you should probably prepare your browser for the impeding onslaught of moving images.
What this means for the future of the cat-GIF genre is unclear.


Youtube

Gugl prestaje sa prodajom Google Glass u ovoj formi. Vele da nastavljaju rad na projektu (ali u drugoj diviziji) ali da za sada nemaju ni procenu kada će neki naredni model da se pojavi...



Google Glass is being removed from sale

QuoteGoogle will no longer be selling Google Glass in its current form.


As reported by the BBC, Google is terminating the Explorer programme, which gave software developers the chance to buy Google's wearable computing device for $1500.
Google maintains that it will continue research on "future versions of Glass," but will be moving the research out of its Google X division and offered no estimate when we can expect to see a new model.
Google Glass's current manager Ivy Ross, who comes from the fashion industry, will now be reporting under Tony Fadell, an ex-Apple designer and owner of the smart thermostat firm Nest, who will oversee the future of Google Glass.
Google Glass has seen a lot of backlash in recent times as numerous restaurants have banned the wearable device due to privacy concerns.
BBC technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones noted that he was one of about two people wearing Google Glass at CES in Las Vegas this year. "It was the least cool thing you could possibly do," he said of the tech. "My friends, my wife, my children thought I looked an idiot. That's what a lot of people found."

Nije da je Gugl izmislio JuTjub, al da ne otvaram novu temu za ovaj lepi napis:

The revolution wasn't televised: The early days of YouTube

Quote

A decade ago, Netflix meant DVDs by mail, video referred to TV and the Internet meant simple text and pictures.

All that changed in about 20 months. That was the period in which three former PayPal employees created YouTube on Feb. 14, 2005 and sold it to Google for $1.6 billion on Oct. 9, 2006.

The journey began with a possibly fictitious dinner party in San Francisco and ended with a breakfast at Denny's in Redwood City, California. In between, there were maxed out credit cards, arguments over copyrights, humungous rats, a cameo by MC Hammer and the exit of a third, mysterious founder. When it was all over, digital media would be completely transformed.

Before YouTube's 10th anniversary, Mashable talked with some of the people involved in YouTube's formation. The picture that emerges is of a smart startup that came along at the right time but also had the right connections, philosophy of design and, above all, the superb execution that allowed it to come from nowhere and dominate the online video market.

The business they built was worth $1.6 billion for Google at the time, which let Google own the world's second largest social network and the primary purveyor of online video. Since 2006, YouTube has been as synonymous with online video as Google is to search.

We'll never know how YouTube might have looked if it had decided to go solo — perhaps it could have been as big as Facebook or Google, or maybe it would have been smothered by copyright lawsuits and huge bandwidth bills.
The origin
In January 2005, two former PayPal employees — Chad Hurley and Steve Chen — attended a get-together at Chen's new house in San Francisco. After shooting some video, the two realized they had no way to share it. The video files were too big to email and loading them to the web took hours. Hurley and Chen were flush with cash from eBay's $1.54 billion purchase of PayPal in 2002, so they decided to solve the problem themselves.

The reality was a lot messier than that neat little narrative. As Chen later admitted, the event "was probably very strengthened by marketing ideas around creating a story that was very digestible."

The artistically minded Hurley and the tech-savvy Chen made for good copy for reporters looking for a Steve Jobs-Steve Wozniak dynamic. However, a third YouTube creator, Jawed Karim, was around for YouTube's early days and didn't re-emerge until Google bought the company. Karim, who was also a PayPal engineer, enrolled in Stanford University after YouTube was founded and was omitted from most early news accounts.

Though each of the three founders showed promise in his early years, none stood out as being unusually talented or destined for greatness. What they had in common was a love of technology.

Chen and Karim, who were from Chicago and St. Paul, Minn., respectively, were hard-core coders who both went to the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, the same school Marc Andreessen attended when he helped build Mosaic, the first commercially successful web browser, in 1993. Hurley, who is from Birdsboro, Penn., a Philadelphia suburb, took a more offbeat path, attending the Indiana University of Pennsylvania where he received a fine arts degree.
PayPal
While Chen and Karim were recruited to join PayPal, Hurley pushed his way in. After reading an article about PayPal in Wired, Hurley arranged a phone interview for a job. Part of his test in the interview was to design a logo for PayPal. Hurley did and the company used the logo for more than a decade. He sent PayPal a resume on a Wednesday and was hired by that Sunday. When he arrived in California, Hurley was broke, so he slept on a friend's floor and scrounged money for pizza until he got his first paycheck.


There wouldn't be a YouTube without PayPal. YouTube was created by three former PayPal employees, staffed by other veterans of the company and bankrolled by people who used to work at PayPal. Originally known as Confinity, PayPal was launched in 1998. The early  team included many would-be tech luminaries, including Max Levchin, LinkedIn's Reid Hoffman, Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. Originally, Confinity's mission was to create cryptography for handheld devices, but the company wound up pivoting about five times before settling on online payments.

As Karim later recalled, what he learned at PayPal could be summed up in two words: "Stay flexible." That mantra would help guide YouTube.

PayPal's culture encouraged entrepreneurship. "At PayPal, we first and foremost, hired people always looking for those that could [form companies], and many did," Levchin told Mashable. " A key interview question was 'are you thinking of starting your own company after this?' Most said 'yes.'"

Roelof Botha, who rose through the ranks at PayPal, eventually becoming its CFO, worked with Karim the most and remembers him best of the three. Karim was a "very independent thinker, fiercely independent," Botha told Mashable. Chen, meanwhile, used to take frequent smoke breaks. Hurley, he recollects, was quiet and often the odd man out because he was one of the few people at the company who was married at the time. (Hurley met Kathy Clark, daughter of Netscape cofounder Jim Clark, in 2000, and married her in the early 2000s.)

Chen and Hurley worked closely together from 1999 until eBay's acquisition of PayPal in 2002. After the eBay deal, Hurley left to become a freelance design consultant and worked on the film Thank You For Smoking, which came out in 2005 and gave Hurley a "special thanks."

Chen, meanwhile, stayed on at PayPal to help the company launch in China. Karim left sometime in between. All had received a decent payout from the eBay acquisition.

Youtube.com

The idea for YouTube came at exactly the right time. Previously, a handful of factors limited online video's adoption, and there wasn't a standard for video playback. Most people didn't have broadband, which made viewing videos very clunky. Finally, people didn't have an easy way to share videos online.

For Karim, two disparate incidents crystallized this problem: the Dec. 26, 2004 tsunami in Indonesia and Janet Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction" during Super Bowl XXXVIII in January 2004. In the latter, Karim found that although everyone was talking about the incident, you couldn't find a clip of it anywhere online. With the tsunami, Karim said he believed there were probably lots of videos of the disaster, but no way to access them.

At the time, many people in the industry were thinking about online video and looking for a better way to upload and deliver clips. For this reason, the exact origin of YouTube may forever be shrouded in a Rashomon-like haze since the three founders have different versions.

"Chad and I are pretty modest, and Jawed has tried to seize every opportunity to take credit," Chen told Time in 2006.

None of the three founders could be reached for comment for this story.

One thing they do agree on is the date: On Feb. 14, 2005, the three officially started work on YouTube.

"That's one of those things about being a computer science major," Karim later deadpanned. "Valentine's Day is just another day."

In fact, while the three registered the domain name on Feb. 14, the real work actually started before that. At some point earlier, the three had run through a whiteboard of possible names before settling on YouTube. Chen said he initially wasn't keen on the name, but when he saw Hurley's logo, it clicked. It also helped that the domain name was free, though Universal Tube & Rollform Equipment later sued YouTube when its utube.com domain got overloaded with bad spellers looking for YouTube.

Beyond hosting a site for videos, the three only had a vague notion of what YouTube would be. As Karim recalled, he was partially inspired by HotOrNot, a dating site that ranked people on a 1-to-10 scale in terms of attractiveness.

"I was incredibly impressed with HotorNot, because it was the first time that someone had designed a website where anyone could upload content that everyone else could view," Karim told Time in 2006. "That was a new concept because up until that point, it was always the people who owned the website who would provide the content." (In 2003, Mark Zuckerberg was similarly gobsmacked by HotOrNot and created Facemash, a version for Harvard students that was a predecessor for Facebook. HotOrNot may be the most influential website of all time.)
Beta
On April 23, YouTube went live, taking advantage of a $129-a-month unlimited data plan from ISP ServerBeach. That was all YouTube needed for a time.

"In the beginning, we found that very few people came to our website," Karim recalled. "The product was so primitive that you couldn't even choose which videos you wanted to watch. Instead, the website picked the videos for you, randomly. And because there were so few videos, they were the same ones, over and over again."

One of those early videos has become among the most famous of all time, the 18-second "Me at the Zoo," in which Karim revealed the cool thing about elephants is that they have long trunks.

Yakov Lapitsky, a high school friend of Karim's, shot the video. "We met up to go to the San Diego Zoo and hung out when I was there for a conference," Lapitsky, now a University of Toledo professor of chemistry and engineering, told Mashable. Lapitsky said he was only slightly cognizant what the video would be used for. "He didn't really talk about his project at the time."


It was hard to get a handle on what YouTube was, exactly. 

   

The founders didn't know how to describe the project, so they called it a dating site. But since there weren't many videos on the site, Karim populated it with videos of 747s taking off and landing. Desperate to get people on the site, YouTube ran ads on Craigslist in Los Angeles and Las Vegas, offering women $20 for every video they uploaded. Not a single woman replied.


Another vision for YouTube was a sort of video messaging service. "We thought it was going to be more of a closer circle relationship," Chen said in a 2007 interview. "It was going to be me uploading a video and sharing it with eight people and I knew exactly who was going to be watching these videos — sharing with my family and my friends."

What actually happened was a "completely different use case" in which people uploaded videos and shared them with the world.
The big break
The founders' luck changed on July 4, 2005, when Karim attended a barbecue at PayPal alum Mike Greenfield's house. Keith Rabois, a former PayPal exec who is at currently part of Silicon Valley investment firm Khosla Ventures, was there and asked Karim what he was up to.

Karim replied that he was working on a new video-sharing site called YouTube.

Rabois then asked him three questions: Does it use Flash? Does it host professional or long-tail content? Can you distribute the content on the web?

Karim replied that it was based on Flash, the site hosted long-tail content and, yes, you could distribute it on the web.

Since in 2005 you couldn't watch video on your phones, Karim and Rabois went to Greenfield's bedroom, got on his PC and watched all the content YouTube at the time, a process that took about a half-hour.

Impulsively, Rabois said he wanted to invest. "There were only two times I've done that," Rabois told Mashable, referring to his instant decision to sink money into the venture. "The other was with Airbnb."

For Rabois, the Flash component was an important factor. A year or so earlier, Levchin had declared that Flash was the future. "So literally from February 2003, I'd been looking for something that used Flash," Rabois said.

Around the time of the barbecue, Karim got accepted to a Ph.D. program at Stanford University. The decision isn't as crazy as it now seems. YouTube then was still an interesting venture with an uncertain future.

But Rabois said going to Stanford was a difficult decision for Karim. "In many ways, I think Jawed was the most active founder," he said. "He uploaded most of the early videos." He said going to Stanford was a difficult decision for Karim.

   

"Against my advice, he decided to leave the company." When asked if Karim regretted the decision, Rabois said, "Obviously, in hindsight, he still got to be part of one of the most influential cultural phenomenons of all time.... I think he underestimated how culturally significant YouTube would become, though few companies ever [reach that level]."


In the summer of 2005, Karim's impending departure was just one of YouTube's headaches. As Chen later recalled, there was a staff of about eight or 10 people at YouTube who were unpaid. The startup's primary expense was bandwidth. As usage increased, the bandwidth bills got larger. Chen put that expense on an ever-expanding array of credit cards.

Rabois eventually provided an answer to YouTube's money woes. Shortly after the barbecue, he emailed Botha about YouTube. "Within 24 hours I had signed up," Botha said. The site was so small then that the site was still scanning the names of users, and the YouTube creators recognized Botha's name. Botha got married in 2003 and had videos on his hard drive that he hadn't been able to share. With YouTube, Botha saw the utility immediately.

By the end of the summer, Botha, who was then at Sequoia Capital, helped arrange Sequoia's initial $500,000 investment in YouTube.

Karim's departure complicated the elevator pitch to the press and investors. The company stopped mentioning his name and instead focused on Hurley and Chen. "It was awkward to talk about. 'There are three founders, but one's gone off to college,'" Botha said. "And at that point, Jawed did disengage."

The twist is Karim would never complete his Ph.D.

Hurley and Chen pressed on. The numbers steadily increased. After he invested, Rabois checked Alexa daily to see YouTube's progress. When it cracked the top 35,000 sites, that was a big deal.

YouTube's team consisted of about half a dozen people by then, including Chen and Hurley. All had been working out of their homes.

Most of the early YouTube hires were from PayPal, said Hunter Walk, who was Google's director of product management during the time of YouTube's formation. "As YouTube grew, that team reassembled," he told Mashable. "This was a real advantage versus someone who would have had to recruit from an unknown pool of talent."

In the summer, after a small angel-round investment by Sequoia, the team began working at Sequoia's headquarters on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park. They'd stay there until November, when they moved to a new space in San Mateo above a pizza joint. As Christina Brodbeck, a designer at YouTube recalls, the place was infested with rats. "Giant rats — like the size of cats!" she told Mashable. "I remember sleeping in the office one night on this old slip-covered sofa, and you could hear the rats crawling around in the wood rafters."

The video below documents the move to the San Mateo office, including the mention of a dead rat.
Marketing YouTube
Julie Supan worked at Inktomi during the first dot-com crash, then moved to Minnesota to work at Best Buy. Mark Dempster, who was then at Sequoia, knew Supan. When she returned to Silicon Valley in 2005, he called her and suggested she run marketing at YouTube.

Supan joined in September 2005 and for many weeks, she and the two founders brainstormed with Botha in endless whiteboard sessions about what YouTube stood for. Eventually, they positioned YouTube as a broadcast medium for average people. A Nov. 7 press release from YouTube described it as "a consumer media company for people to watch and share original videos through a Web experience."

A steady hand in marketing was important for YouTube since it had lots of competition. Supan remembers a report from the time stating there were around 280 other video-sharing sites, many of which had been around before YouTube. She told Mashable, 

   

"We were basically last to market. Really no service launched as far as I could remember after YouTube."
       Botha said that much of YouTube's success came because the site was so easy to use. Chen's team had made sure you could load a video in any format to the site. "You could load it and they took care of transposing it back in Flash," Botha said. YouTube also made it easy to cut and past a URL by making that feature prominent on the site. YouTube also had a public view count. As Twitter would later discover, public metrics can help grow your brand by appealing to users' vanity. Finally, YouTube also made it easy to embed videos, which many users opted to do on MySpace, the hot social network at the time.
"I often liken building consumer products to playing music or art," Botha said. "You can get 98% of the notes correct and it will still be off."
Gideon Yu, who left Yahoo to become YouTube's first CFO in September 2006, told Mashable that Flickr was also brand new at the time and the concept of online sharing wasn't proven. "A lot of people asked 'You make a website and people add their content and consume it and you make all the money?' In 2005, 2006 these were the questions. Now it's a given that people will contribute content. At the time, it wasn't obvious."
Supan has a slightly different view. She said the key to YouTube's success was that the video player always worked. Period. "People don't mind if products aren't perfect, as long as they work," she said. "You have to do one thing well."
As Hurley recalled in a later interview, the inspiration for YouTube's sharing functionality was once again PayPal, in particular a payment button bloggers and publishers could use on their own sites. "That button took them back to the PayPal experience," Hurley said "We tried to do the same thing with a video solution."
By providing easy sharing mechanisms, YouTube accelerated the growth of online video. Initially, the only issue hindering the spread of online video was the lack of viral content. That would soon change.   
In the meantime, YouTube had to vie with, among others, Google. On Jan. 25, 2005, Google published a blog post entitled "We're tuning in to TV." In the post,  John Piscitello, a product manager at the time, recalled how he had visited Wisconsin for a wedding and was looking for some travel information about the state. "I turned on the TV in my hotel room, started flipping channels, and was idly watching some travel show when a thought hit me: Surely someone, somewhere must have produced a travel show episode about Wisconsin..., but of course there was no way to find it."

Google's solution was Google Video, which let you search an index of transcripts from recent TV shows. In other words, Google viewed video as an adjunct to its mission of digitizing the world's information. Video, in its view was just another source of data to be strip-mined for searches. Piscitello, who is no longer at Google and currently makes scores for films, declined comment for this article.

Over time, Google would evolve Video, focusing on improving its quality. In Google's view, YouTube's clips were low-quality and junky, sort of like the chaff it tried to cull from its searches. Supan said that missed the point. 

   

"Their biggest argument against YouTube was it was low-quality and grainy, and who wants to see that? Well, the world did."

Botha recalls that after Google bought YouTube, he overheard a Google engineer complaining, "I don't know how they won. Our video quality was so much higher."

"With Google Video, you needed to know what codec your video and what was the dimension of the video frame," Yu recalled. "With YouTube it was all in Flash and when you wanted to upload a video to YouTube, the only thing you needed to do was push a button that said 'upload.'" 

In November 2005, YouTube closed a $3 million Series A round from Sequoia. Around the same time, a video appeared on the site featuring soccer star Ronaldo that was actually a Nike ad. "It was shocking," Supan said. "That was one of the moments at YouTube where the consumer surprised us." Botha was so impressed that he flew Hurley and Chen up to Nike's headquarters in Beaverton, Ore., to talk about YouTube. "There was a moment of connectedness," Supan said. "We married brand-building and entertainment."

Later on, marketers would get even slicker. In mid-2006, Lonelygirl15, a purported video blog of a teen girl, became a huge hit and made the cover of Wired magazine. By September 2006, the whole thing was revealed to be an elaborate, scripted show designed for YouTube and backed by the Hollywood firm Creative Artists Agency.

A bigger shock came the next month. Sometime after Dec. 17, when it ran on NBC's Saturday Night Life, someone uploaded a video featuring Andy Samberg and Chris Parnell of SNL mocking their own nerdniess with a rap music parody called "Lazy Sunday." Finally this was the viral content that would demonstrate YouTube's potential. Coincidentally, Micah Schaffer, the brother of Akiva Schaffer, a member of Lonely Island, Samberg's comedy troupe, joined YouTube about two weeks after the video hit.

By Dec. 27, the video had logged 1.2 million views on YouTube — a mediocre number these days, but a milestone back then. Though for some "Lazy Sunday" was their first exposure to YouTube, Botha says the common belief that the video was an inflection point for YouTube is misguided.

"If you read the press, you'd think our traffic jumped 50% after 'Lazy Sunday,'" said Botha. "But there was steady growth in user signups."

Supan, however, said "Lazy Sunday" was a big deal for YouTube because it made the company realize the site's entertainment potential. From an outsider's standpoint, "Lazy Sunday" was also a defining moment. Greg Kostello, who ran a rival video-sharing site called VMIX, recalls that things changed for him that December. "When I first started out reporters would ask me what Vmix did," said Kostello. "

   

By December people kept asking me 'How are you different from YouTube?' I knew at that point the game was over."


The video got NBC's attention. On Feb. 17, 2006, the network asked YouTube to take down "Lazy Sunday" as well as about 500 other copyrighted clips. In late October, after Google bought YouTube, the site purged more than 30,000 copyrighted clips.

In its 2007 lawsuit against YouTube, Viacom claimed the company didn't crack down on copyrighted clips. "Indeed, the presence of infringing copyrighted material on YouTube is fully intended...to drive traffic and increase YouTube's network, market share and enterprise value," Viacom wrote in its complaint.

Viacom wasn't alone in thinking that YouTube was looking the other way with regard to copyrighted material. "We got funding around the same time and we saw what they were doing," said Kostello. "They had a lot of copyrighted material on their site." In Kostello's view, YouTube calculatedly loaded its site with copyrighted material, then sold itself to Google, which could handle the legal challenges. "Having Google's endless pockets made all the difference in the world," he said.

The idea that the studios were preparing to sue YouTube out of existence may be misguided. Fearing another Napster, media companies were faced with a dilemma: Crack down on copyrighted videos and you miss the chance to go viral. Take a laissez-faire approach and lose out on ad dollars.

When it became apparent that people would soon be watching TV programming on their computers, the stage was set for a deal. The realization also spawned Hulu, a venture backed by Fox, NBC Universal and Disney-ABC. By the time the Viacom lawsuit was settled in March 2014, the YouTube issue was a footnote.

Later, the Google-owned YouTube would score agreements with all the major movie studios for an iTunes-like rental service. Google also introduced a fingerprint-like technology called Content ID for YouTube that let the studios and networks track copyrighted material and decide whether to pull it, share ad revenues or look the other way.

Others in the industry were quick to see the entertainment value of YouTube, which served as a talent scout for crowdsourced talent. In March 2006, YouTube also got a big break when Good Morning America began devoting a regular segment to viral views on the site. Every Wednesday, the ABC morning program showcased three videos. The relationship not only got YouTube's name out, but solidified its image as a consumer media brand that specialized in amateur, unpolished and sometimes oddball content. Some entrepreneurs were quick to see the site's potential. Supan recalled that by March 2006, "Ask a Decorator" was a hit and spawned imitators like "Ask a Contractor," "Ask a Gay Man" and "Ask a Ninja."

Traffic continued to build. In January, YouTube was getting 15 million views per day. By March, the figure had jumped to 40 million. In June, it hit 80 million. The growth was buoyed by increasing press attention. Supan says that a notable moment in press coverage was in April 2006, when Virginia Heffernan wrote about the YouTube phenomenon in The New York Times, which for the first time posited the idea that YouTube could create its own stars.

In mid-2006, YouTube was starting to get the attention of some of the top tech companies as well. Supan recalls that she and Hurley had dinner with Bill Gates in May 2006. Gates was "blown away" by the site's stats.

With interest in YouTube at a fever pitch, Hurley agreed to give the keynote at Allen & Co.'s annual media conference in Sun Valley, Idaho, in July. Hurley began by asking members of the crowd if they had ever watched a video online. A bunch of hands went up.

"YouTube has carved a new market for online video entertainment," Hurley said. He pointed out that YouTube had inked deals with the top record labels.  "We have listened to our community and have built the most innovative and easy-to-use service in the industry." Hurley then segued into the part that everyone was wondering about, the stats:

"More than 80 million videos are being watched every day on our site ... 60% of videos watched online in the U.S. are served from YouTube ... YouTube has the largest audience in Internet video with 20 million unique visitors, and we are currently ranked as the twentieth most-visited site on the Internet in the U.S., according to Nielsen NetRatings. More than 80 million videos are watched every day ... The average person is on YouTube for 17 minutes a session ... Every day 60% of videos are served from YouTube ... Our nearest competitor has 17%."

That was Google.
Final days
YouTube had succeeded in disrupting an industry. As a result, it soon became an acquisition target.

At Yahoo, Yu recalls that he first heard of YouTube during a board meeting. "We had a large discussion at one of the board meetings about interesting new companies and YouTube was discussed," he said. When Yu joined YouTube in September 2006, the company was fielding offers from Yahoo and others, including Google.

In September, David Drummond, Google's chief legal officer, sent Hurley an email expressing interest in the site. Google wasn't alone. Yahoo, Microsoft and News Corp. — which owned MySpace — all made overtures to YouTube. "They were just trying to make sure the other one didn't acquire [YouTube]," Supan said. "None of them understood what they were buying. They just didn't want Microsoft to buy it."

Yu disagreed. "Google was strategic in how it viewed YouTube," he said. "[YouTube] had a big early lead and it looked like we were only getting bigger. It would only get more expensive as every day went by."

That month, Hurley and Chen met with Yahoo execs at a Denny's in Redwood City. A day later, they met with Larry Page and Eric Schmidt of Google.

Yu says even the final deal was signed in the Denny's parking lot in the middle of the night. Later, after word of Denny's role in the deal became public, Yu said Denny's CEO sent Hurley and Chen Denny's gift cards.

On Oct. 9, Hurley and Chen announced to the world that Google was buying the company for $1.6 billion. Since that happened to be the same day that YouTube was moving into a new office in San Bruno, reporters were confused and swarmed the old office in San Mateo and even Supan's house.

"We were all pretty shocked," Supan said. "I was pretty stunned because we were in a major growth phase. There was a bit of a feeling that we were cut short."

Brodbeck recalls a celebratory dinner at TGI Friday after the news hit. "Really you couldn't help but smile seeing how happy your friends and coworkers were. There is nothing better than seeing genuine smiles on the faces of those you worked so closely with and care so much about," she said.

A more cynical view is that YouTube's founders cashed out just before the company was about to go under. Speculation that the firm was in dire straits was fueled by a Forbes report in April 2006, which stated YouTube was burning through $1 million in bandwidth expenses every month.

Supan says that figure was inaccurate. She said the real number was lower, though she can't recall the exact figure.

Another perception was that if Google didn't come along, YouTube would be sued out of existence.

Billionaire Mark Cuban was outspoken at the time, stating that only a "moron" would buy YouTube.

Botha said that view is nonsense. "The company could have made it on its own," he said. "YouTube had 55 people at the time of the acquisition, and we were profitable." (Yu disputed this account and said YouTube wasn't profitable at the time.) Botha noted, however, that the 2006 venture capital market was a lot different than today's. "The one thing that didn't exist was the expansion-stage capital market that exists today. We could have raised $40-$50 million, but I don't think we could have raised $100 million."

Saying yes to Google made sense in that it allowed YouTube to continue to grow without worrying too much about money. As Rabois put it, "They deferred the monetization question and focused on the execution. They allowed the product to flourish."

The payout was huge. In February 2007, Hurley got around $345 million in Google stock, while Chen received $326.2 million. At Google's current stock price, those payouts would be worth $780 million and $736 million, respectively. Karim received $64.6 million. Sequoia, which had invested $13 million total, got $442 million. Even YouTube's lower-level employees got a handsome payday — receptionist Shannon Hermes got $1.3 million in stock at the time.

Hurley and Chen stayed on for the first few years. Hurley, who is often described as unflappable, hasn't changed much, Supan said. "He doesn't need fame. He's actually a really down-to-earth guy. He has great values and comes from a great family." She says Chen has mellowed a lot in the last decade. The pair's personalities complement each other, Supan said. "Chad lets everything roll off him," she said. "[In the YouTube days] Steve was much more emotional."

Shortly after the acquisition, Karim reappeared as YouTube's forgotten third founder. Supan said that was the first and last time she met him.

Karim now runs Youniversity Ventures, a VC fund. He has kept a low profile for the most part, but spoke out in 2013, when Google began requiring YouTube commenters to have Google Plus accounts. Karim left a comment on "Me at the Zoo" stating "I can't comment here anymore, since i don't want a google+ account."

Hurley and Chen continued to work together after Google at incubator Avos Systems, which spawned MixBit, a mobile video-sharing site. Last June, the two finally split up. Hurley stayed on to run MixBit, and Chen left to become entrepreneur-in-residence at Google Ventures.

Whatever the three founders do, it will be hard to top YouTube. A 2014 report by Jefferies estimated YouTube's value at around $40 billion — that's one-tenth the size of Google, but bigger than Twitter and on par with Uber (at least, Uber at this writing).

Paul Verna, an analyst with eMarketer, said YouTube has proved its value over time. "It has defied expectations," Verna said. "When Google bought it, the price point was seen as exorbitant. Most people asked whether YouTube would recoup its investment. Many years later, $1.6 billion doesn't seem like that much." YouTube made $1.13 billion in U.S. ad revenues from its videos in 2014, according to an eMarketer estimate. Globally, the figure is about six times that.

Culturally, YouTube continues to make a huge impact. When President Obama recently decided to talk to the nation's youth, he chose to be interviewed by a cadre of YouTube stars. Chasing viral video success has completely transformed the advertising industry, which now measures success in YouTube hits. YouTube's emergence also forced the movie and TV industries to embrace online video.

By 2014, YouTube had 1 billion users. Some 100 hours of video are now uploaded every minute.

"YouTube — and fear of YouTube — accelerated online video in some major ways," Walk said. "YouTube removed gatekeepers, let new voices amass millions of subscribers. It also scared broadcasters into moving online with full-length programming faster than they otherwise might have. Hulu was a great product, but does anyone think it launches with the breadth of content and low ad load if YouTube didn't exist?"

Most importantly, YouTube is now the world's default repository for videos. While many copyrighted clips have been scrubbed from the network, if you want to check out the Dramatic Squirrel, Keyboard Cat, this past week's peace talks in Ukraine or Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech, it's all there, serving as sort of a video version of our collective consciousness.

As Botha said, "Now if you want to find a video, you go on YouTube and look for it. If it's not there, it doesn't exist."

Gugl na svojoj blog platformi Blogger od sada zabranjuje sadržaj za odrasle:


Google bans 'explicit' adult content from Blogger blogs

U međuvremenu, Gugl je, slušajući proteste korisnika odlučio da ipak ostavi pornografiju na Bloggeru.

U drugim vestima, Gugl je rešio da promeni kriterijum za rangiranje stranica u pretrazi. Kao što znamo, trenutni kriterijum je da su stranice sa najviše eksternih linkovanja "najbolje" pa izlaze prve u pretrazi. Što je zgodno kad je u pitanju vikipedija ali nije zgodno kad je u pitanju lažna objava da je neko umro, jelte. Pa će tako novi guglov kriterijum biti verodostojnost činjenica na stranici. Trenutno se testira tehnologija koja ovo treba da ocenjuje:


Google wants to rank websites based on facts not links

Quote
THE internet is stuffed with garbage. Anti-vaccination websites make the front page of Google, and fact-free "news" stories spread like wildfire. Google has devised a fix – rank websites according to their truthfulness.
Google's search engine currently uses the number of incoming links to a web page as a proxy for quality, determining where it appears in search results. So pages that many other sites link to are ranked higher. This system has brought us the search engine as we know it today, but the downside is that websites full of misinformation can rise up the rankings, if enough people link to them.
A Google research team is adapting that model to measure the trustworthiness of a page, rather than its reputation across the web. Instead of counting incoming links, the system – which is not yet live – counts the number of incorrect facts within a page. "A source that has few false facts is considered to be trustworthy," says the team (arxiv.org/abs/1502.03519v1). The score they compute for each page is its Knowledge-Based Trust score.
The software works by tapping into the Knowledge Vault, the vast store of facts that Google has pulled off the internet. Facts the web unanimously agrees on are considered a reasonable proxy for truth. Web pages that contain contradictory information are bumped down the rankings.
   There are already lots of apps that try to help internet users unearth the truth. LazyTruth is a browser extension that skims inboxes to weed out the fake or hoax emails that do the rounds. Emergent, a project from the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University, New York, pulls in rumours from trashy sites, then verifies or rebuts them by cross-referencing to other sources.
LazyTruth developer Matt Stempeck, now the director of civic media at Microsoft New York, wants to develop software that exports the knowledge found in fact-checking services such as Snopes, PolitiFact and FactCheck.org so that everyone has easy access to them. He says tools like LazyTruth are useful online, but challenging the erroneous beliefs underpinning that information is harder. "How do you correct people's misconceptions? People get very defensive," Stempeck says. "If they're searching for the answer on Google they might be in a much more receptive state."
This article appeared in print under the headline "Nothing but the truth"

Au, kakav socijalni megainženjering! Plašim se pomalo...

QuoteFacts the web unanimously agrees on are considered a reasonable proxy for truth.

Meni je ovo...predivno. 

U daljim Gugl svinjarijama: Momak je 2005. godine, čim se JuTjub otvorio, registrovao svoj kanal na njemu. Kako se momak preziva Lush, tako je i URL za njegov kanal ispao elegantno youtube.com/lush. U međuvremenu, svet se promenio, Jutjub je sada u vlasništvu Gugla, algoritmi vladaju ljudima i nedavno je jedan od JuTjubovih algoritama zaključio da pošto većina ljudi koji na Jutjubu u pretrazi kucaju "lush" traže nešto vezano za firmu Lush Cosmetics, onda taj URL dodeli Lush Cosmetics. Napominjem da ovde nema govora o kršenju trejdmarka... Elem, ne samo da originalni vlasnik nije imao nikakvu opciju za pregovaranje - a radi se o blogeru kome je njegovo prezime ipak brend koji se reklamira - već mu nije ponuđena ni kompenzacija (mada mu Gugl nudi da mu plate izradu novog promo-materijala jer mu stari više ne vredi)... Eh... internet se zaista menja 


Lush cosmetics in YouTube address dispute

Bonus Gugl vest: sada možete mejlove koje ste već poslali putem gmaila da opozovete u okviru kratkog ali razumnog roka od do trideset sekundi. Dakle, kad provalite da ste udarili reply all umesto reply ili kada ste slučajno sliku svog penisa atačovali umesto powerpoint prezentacije sa kojom kasnite već nedelju dana, ovo je neka vrsta spasa s neba.



Gmail finally lets you 'Undo Send' emails you wish you didn't send

Oh, haha, čoveku je potrebno da se malo nasmeje kad dođe na posao 


Google apologizes for labeling black people 'gorillas'

лепо је знати да моћ подсвести делује и кроз (релативно) нове медије/медијуме!

Gugl se restruktuira:


Larry Page announces Alphabet and massive Google restructuring with Sundar Pichai as CEO

QuoteSundar Pichai is the new CEO of Google as the company undergoes a huge restructuring. Co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin are moving to a new company called Alphabet -- which has a superb URL -- which will serve as an umbrella company for Google and its various projects.
Google itself is being, in Page's words, "slimmed down" and the change is quite an extraordinary one. Page quotes the original founders' letter that was written 11 years go. It states that "Google is not a conventional company", and today's announcement makes that perfectly clear. There's a lot to take in...
      Alphabet is, essentially, the new face of Google. Page chose to make the announcement in a blog post that went live after the stock markets closed. This is more than just a rebranding, it is a complete shakeup, the scale of which is almost unprecedented. Alphabet has Page as CEO, assisted by Sergey Brin in the role of president. Putting Pichai at the head of Google is part of improving the focus of the company.
Introducing the new company, Page said:

What is Alphabet? Alphabet is mostly a collection of companies. The largest of which, of course, is Google. This newer Google is a bit slimmed down, with the companies that are pretty far afield of our main internet products contained in Alphabet instead. What do we mean by far afield? Good examples are our health efforts: Life Sciences (that works on the glucose-sensing contact lens), and Calico (focused on longevity). Fundamentally, we believe this allows us more management scale, as we can run things independently that aren't very related.

He went on to explain that existing Google shares would be converted into Alphabet shares as Google becomes a wholly-own subsidiary of the new company. Two classes of shares will trade on Nasdaq as GOOGL and GOOG.
The new name is going to be hard for some to swallow. Even Page says:

Don't worry, we're still getting used to the name too!

Google Has a Secret Interview Process... And It Landed Me a Job

Proverio, tačno je:


These 16 characters crash Google Chrome

Da se ne kaže da gugl ovih dana ne radi baš ništa korisno za raju:


Google launches Brotli, a new open source compression algorithm to speed up the web

Quote
As websites and online services become ever more demanding, the need for compression increases exponentially. Fans of Silicon Valley will be aware of the Pied Piper compression algorithm, and now Google has a more efficient one of its own.
Brotli is open source and is an entirely new data format that offers 20-26 percent greater compression than Zopfli, another compression algorithm from Google. Just like Zopfli, Brotli has been designed with the internet in mind, with the simple aim of making web pages load faster.


It is a "lossless compressed data format that [c]ompresses data using a combination of the LZ77 algorithm and Huffman coding, with efficiency comparable to the best currently available general-purpose compression methods". Compression is better than LZMA and bzip2, and Google says that Brotli is "roughly as fast" as zlib's Deflate implementation.
While compression has endless uses online, it's something that is of particular interest to mobile users. Google hopes that the technology will be integrated into web browsers in the future, allowing for faster page load times, improvements to battery life, and lower data usage. How is the extra compression achieved? Google sheds some light on the matter:

The higher data density is achieved by a 2nd order context modeling, re-use of entropy codes, larger memory window of past data and joint distribution codes.

Oh, and if you were wondering, Google has adopted a naming convention for its compression algorithms just like it has with Android. As the company explains in a blog post, "Brötli means 'small bread' in Swiss German"; Zopfli was also named after a Swiss bakery product.
Brotli is available on GitHub now.

Dakle, otkad je Google postao podružnica Alphabeta, njihov kodeks ponašanja se promenio. Više u njemu nema slavne rečenice "Don't be evil" i umestonje se preporučuje da se "Do the right thing".

YouTube Is Getting Paid Subscriptions

Eric Schmidt gets a job at the Pentagon

Quote
Secretary of Defense Ashton Carton on Wednesday appointed Schmidt the head of a new Defense Innovation Advisory Board, which will help the Pentagon keep up with the latest Silicon Valley ideas and apply them at the Department of Defense.
The board will address problems in the way the Pentagon uses technology, and it will be tasked with offering "quick solutions." Schmidt's group will have no access to information about military operations strategy.
Schmidt will oversee a group of up to 11 other board members, who also have led large private companies and public organizations.
Carter said Schmidt has a "unique perspective on the latest practices in harnessing and encouraging innovation."
Schmidt had been a powerful advocate and confidant of President Obama in the early days of his administration. But Schmidt and the White House have had a more fractious relationship in recent years.
Related: Pentagon orders Windows 10 to be installed on all of its PCs
The FTC very nearly sued Google for antitrust violations in 2013 after a a hard-fought behind the scenes battle. Schmidt and Google have been strong opponents to the administration's policies on data collection, and Alphabet (GOOGL, Tech30) is expected to file a brief supporting Apple in its fight against the FBI's encryption unlocking demands.
Yet Schmidt remained in Obama's good graces, often appearing at technology leader summits -- and now chairing a Pentagon innovation board.
Also Wednesday, the Pentagon announced a "Hack the Pentagon" bug bounty program, which will pay hackers who discover vulnerabilities in the Department of Defense's systems. Bug bounties are a commonly used tool in Silicon Valley to help companies discover vulnerabilities before they're exploited by bad actors.
The Pentagon said its bug bounty would be done in a "controlled environment," and the hackers would be vetted first.
The Defense Department frequently attempts to recruit hackers to help it combat attackers and fight battles in cyberspace.
  CNNMoney (New York)  First published March 2, 2016: 1:46 PM ET

EU hits Google with second antitrust charge

Quote
BRUSSELS (Reuters) - The European Union charged Google on Wednesday with using its dominant Android mobile operating system to squeeze out rivals, opening a second front against the U.S. technology giant that could result in large fines.
EU antitrust regulators said that by requiring mobile phone manufacturers to pre-install Google Search and the Google Chrome browser to get access to other Google apps, the U.S. company was harming consumers by stifling competition.
The EU's move is the latest in a series of anti-trust challenges Google has faced in both the EU and countries including India, Brazil and Russia. U.S. regulators closed their most recent investigation of the company in 2013 without taking action.
The European Commission said Google's Android licensing practices, which started in 2011 when the company became dominant in mobile operating systems and app stores, showed Google was seeking to shield its search engine, the world's most popular, from competition.
Google is already facing EU charges over the promotion of its shopping service in Internet searches at the expense of rival services in a case that has dragged on since late 2010 despite three attempts to resolve the issues.
The stakes are higher for Google in the Android case as it made about $11 billion last year from advertising sales on Android phones through its apps such as Maps, Search and Gmail, according to estimates by financial analyst Richard Windsor.
"A competitive mobile Internet sector is increasingly important for consumers and businesses in Europe," European Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager said in a statement.
"We believe that Google's behavior denies consumers a wider choice of mobile apps and services and stands in the way of innovation by other players," she said.
The European Commission said about 80 percent of smart mobile devices in Europe and the world run on Android and that Google holds more than 90 percent of the market for general Internet searches on Android in the European Economic Area.
Wall Street analysts were sanguine about the financial consequences of the EU's action.
"In the near-term, we do not believe there will be any material financial impact," Mark Mahaney, a prominent Internet analyst with RBC Capital Markets, said in a research note.
He added that there could be a material impact down the line as the case moved forward, but that it was "almost impossible" to gauge the likelihood of the company being forced to change its business practices.
Still, Mahaney noted that regulatory risk was "something of a 'permanent' investment risk" for Google. And there were some signs Tuesday that the EU's action could help rekindle antitrust investigations in the United Sates -- potentially an even bigger threat.
Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat, said he hoped the action by European regulators prompts the Federal Trade Commission to take a close second look at whether Google is deserving of antitrust scrutiny in the United States.


FINANCIAL INCENTIVES
Google, which has 12 weeks to respond to the EU charges, said Android was a remarkable system based on open-source software and open innovation.
"We look forward to working with the European Commission to demonstrate that Android is good for competition and good for consumers," Google's general counsel, Kent Walker, said in a blog.
He said any phone maker could load Google apps and rival products and that users had freedom of choice as well.
Complainant FairSearch said Google was hindering the development of versions that might lead to new operating systems able to compete with Android, despite launching it as an open source project.
The Commission said while Android was an open source system that could be used to develop new mobile operating systems - known as Android forks - Google required phone manufacturers to sign an agreement not to sell devices running on such forks if they wanted to pre-install Google apps.
The EU also charged Google with giving "significant financial incentives" to some of the world's largest smartphone makers to pre-install Google Search exclusively on devices.
Mozilla, which develops the Firefox browser, said in a statement: "This behavior ... is one of the reasons why launching competitive products like Firefox for mobile and Firefox OS is challenging. We see substantial value in removing barriers to entry so competition and innovation can flourish."
Internet Explorer-browser maker Microsoft Corp declined to comment. Norway's Opera Software could not immediately be reached for comment.
Vodafone, BT Group's EE, Orange, Deutsche Telekom, KPN, Samsung Electronics and LG Electronics were not immediately available to comment. Huawei [HWT.UL] declined to comment.

Ko bi rekao da ovako ozbiljna kompanija ima problema sa izvršavanjem svojih obaveza. Jujuju...

tko bi rekao da nam je mladi google bio pojam funkcionalnosti bez trunke dodatnog bilo cega nepozeljnog i u sta se pretvorio.

Ovako nešto bih očekivao od Miškovića, ali od Mr Googla nikad! Izgleda da je svet zaista otišao u k. Šta je naredno? Bil Gejts je prevarant?

Još stvari koje bismo očekivali od Gugla, na primer, podrška Transpasifik Trejd Partneršipu.




Google backs Obama on the trade deal that some tech advocates hate

Jutjub uvodi novi sistem moderacije - Youtube Heroes - oslanjanjem na ideju da je najbolje da saržaj moderišu sami korisnici koji će, kako se budu bolje pokazivali sa vremenom otključavati sve jače i jače moderatorske moći. Zvuči razumno dok ne shvatite da je ovo u principu slično kao da gomili plemena pećinskih ljudi koja se već nekoliko godina krvnički međusobno istrebljuje kamenjem i zašiljenim granama date na raspolaganje automatske puške i nuklerno oružje. Džim Sterling i Engri Džou su samo delić cunamija glasova koji vape da se ovo malo bole promisli:

https://youtu.be/PU1F7yURZYA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7rgw0kmmsQ

Tako funkcioniše Stack Overflow, i što se same moderacije tiče sve je super. Ja to i predlažem i za Znak Sagite.

I slashdot moderiraju učesnici, ali ovo je drugačije, ovde ne daješ svima iste moći pa da na kraju većina pobedi (za to već imaš sistem lajkovanja). Ovde daješ nekima mogućnost da mašinama prijave masu videa kao uvredljive, rasističke ili već na neki način nepodobne i da to niko dugo vremena ne dovede u pitanje.



Pojašnjenja:

https://youtu.be/SrlGOAjK6Dg

Da li googleov AI može da pogodi šta ste nacrtali? Probajte!


https://quickdraw.withgoogle.com/

Nemojte misliti da posedujete ono što ste kupili. Naći ćemo način da vas kaznimo:


Google Hits Pixel Resellers With 'Digital Death Sentence' 

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Some of Google's unwitting users are learning a harsh lesson: If you violate the company's policies, it can abruptly cut you off from your Gmail account, online photos and other vital digital services.
Several people who recently bought Google's new Pixel phone on behalf of a New Hampshire dealer are now suffering that punishment after the company detected their online purchases and judged they violated its terms of service. Those rules, outlined in a document that few people read closely , forbid the purchase of the Pixel for "commercial" resale.
"There isn't an hour that doesn't go by that I don't think about the enormity of what Google has done to me," said one of the affected resellers, Shmuel Super of Brooklyn, New York. "This is like a digital death sentence."
SELL YOUR PHONE, LOSE YOUR ACCOUNT
Super and his fellow resellers got into trouble for buying up to five Pixel phones from Google's online store and having them delivered to New Hampshire for resale. They received $5 for each phone. As of Sunday, some started finding themselves locked out of their Google accounts.
In a Thursday statement, Google described the resale arrangement as a "scheme" devised by a dealer looking to sell the Pixels at marked-up prices in violation of its policies.
Google declined to say how many people were affected by the account lockdown. DansDeals , a consumer-focused website that first reported Google's crackdown, concluded that more than 200 people had been blocked from their Google accounts after talking to the New Hampshire dealer behind the Pixel buying spree. The Associated Press was unsuccessful in its efforts to identify and interview the dealer.
The crackdown may come as a surprise to the hundreds of millions of people who now routinely rely on Google, Facebook, Apple and other tech companies as the caretakers of their digital lives. Few of the people involved in this situation appear to have backed up their data outside of Google.
Google said it plans to restore the accounts of customers who it believes were unaware of the rules, although the company didn't specify how long that might take.
LIVING WITHOUT GOOGLE
Once they figured out why they were being locked out, the exiled consumers realized how dependent they had become on Google as the custodian of their digital communications, records and other mementoes.
Some said they couldn't retrieve confirmation numbers for upcoming flights or notices about an upcoming credit-card payment. Others couldn't fetch work documents or medical records. Some started getting phone calls from friends, family and colleagues wondering why they weren't responding to emails.
Like other two other people interviewed by the AP, Super said he had no idea that he was violating Google's policies when he bought the Pixels for the New Hampshire dealer. He can't believe Google would do something as extreme as locking him out of his account without warning, rather than just banning him from buying its phones in the future.
"Google's slogan is 'Don't be evil,' but to me, there is nothing more evil that what Google has done here," Super said.
CRIME AND PUNISHMENT
Some of the Pixels purchased for resale were delivered before Google recognized the violations and meted out a punishment spelled out in a separate terms-of-service document . "We may suspend or stop providing our services to you if you do not comply with our terms or policies or if we are investigating suspected misconduct," Google warns in one section.
Google doesn't give any advance notice before it shuts down an account, and doesn't make distinctions between minor and major violations. Affected users can appeal for reinstatement, though it's unclear how long that might take or what criteria Google uses in such cases.
Apple also forbids online purchases of iPhones for resale, although its terms of service say only that the company reserves the right to cancel any order suspected of breaking the rule.
Daniel Levy, who has been locked out from his Google account since Monday, said he has learned a hard lesson, though not necessarily the one the company intended.
"They confiscated my property and shouldn't be trusted," said Levy, who lives in Lakewood, New Jersey. "I will never use their services again."

More big brands pull ads from YouTube in widening boycott

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An advertising boycott of YouTube is broadening, a sign that big-spending companies doubt Google's ability to prevent marketing campaigns from appearing alongside repugnant videos.

PepsiCo, Wal-Mart Stores and Starbucks on Friday confirmed that they have also suspended their advertising on YouTube after the Wall Street Journal found Google's automated programs placed their brands on five videos containing racist content. AT&T, Verizon, Johnson & Johnson, Volkswagen and several other companies pulled ads earlier this week.

The defections are continuing even after Google apologized for tainting brands and outlined steps to ensure ads don't appear alongside unsavory videos.

It's not an easy problem to fix, even for a company with the brainpower that Google has drawn upon to build a search engine that billions trust to find the information they want in a matter of seconds.

Google depends mostly on automated programs to place ads in YouTube videos because the job is too much for humans to handle on their own. About 400 hours of video is now posted on YouTube each minute.

The company has pledged to hire more people to review videos and develop even more sophisticated programs to teach its computers to figure out which clips would be considered to be too despicable for advertising.

Contacted Friday, Google stood by its earlier promise, signaling the company's confidence that it will be able to placate advertisers. As part of that effort, Google intends to block more objectionable videos from ever being posted on YouTube — an effort that could spur complaints about censorship.

Some outraged advertisers are making it clear that they won't return to YouTube until they are certain Google has the situation under control.

"The content with which we are being associated is appalling and completely against our company values," Wal-Mart said in a Friday statement.

Besides suspending their spending on YouTube, Wal-Mart, PepsiCo and several other companies have said they will stop buying ads that Google places on more than two million other third-party websites.

If Google can't lure back advertisers, it could result in a loss of hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. Most analysts, though, doubt the ad boycott will seriously hurt Google's corporate parent, Alphabet Inc.

Although they have been growing rapidly, YouTube's ads still only represent a relatively small financial piece of Alphabet, whose revenue totaled $73.5 billion last year after subtracting commissions paid to Google's partners. YouTube accounted for $5.6 billion, or nearly 8 percent, of that total, based on estimates from the research firm eMarketer Inc.

At most, RBC Capital Markets analyst Mark Mahaney said he expects the YouTube ad boycott to trim Alphabet's net revenue by about 2 percent this year.

Moody's Investor Service predicted the backlash won't last long because Google is "laser-focused" on cleaning things up on YouTube.

Alphabet's stock price has fallen nearly 4 percent since the boycott began last week after an investigation by The Times in London revealed the ads of major brands were appearing in YouTube videos delving into contentious themes. The shares fell $4.51 to close at $835.14 Friday.

Google glass nije mrtav:

One of Google's most embarrassing flops is turning into a real business

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Google (GOOGL) Glass isn't dead. In fact, it's a growing business.
That's according to developers who license the smart glasses technology from Google Glass' enterprise-focused "Glass at Work" program.
Google unveiled the smart glasses at its I/O conference in April 2012 in a high-profile demonstration featuring  skydivers,  and rolled them out to developers a year later. But the product was pricey at $1,500, and not particularly stylish. Onlookers were also concerned about the glasses recording them without their knowledge, which led to several Glass-wearers being attacked in public. Google discontinued Glass as a consumer product in 2015.
But a version for the workplace lives on.
"It's a big market today, and it will be an even bigger one in the future," said Brian Ballard, founder and chief executive officer at Upskill, a Google Glass partner that makes augmented reality apps for workers in the field. Its customers — and as of recently, its investors — include industrial giants like Boeing (BA) and GE (GE).
Upskill works with other smart glasses makers as well, like Intel (INTC), Microsoft (MSFT) and Vuzix. (VUZI) Ballard declined to comment on how many units it has deployed, but he did say it is targeting companies that will need "thousands of these devices in the field to do one job."
Where Google could boost the business further and stand out from competitors, he says, is by adding advanced computing, like machine learning, to its offering. An example might be in incorporating computer vision technology so field workers simply have to snap photos for the purposes of documentation.
Augmedix, a San Francisco-based start-up with nearly 1,000 employees, built its business off smart glasses. Unlike Upskill, the vast majority of its customers — doctors at large hospitals — are using Google Glass. CEO Ian Shakil said the company expects to deploy 1,000 Google Glass devices by the end of the year.
Augmedix sells its application to 12 hospitals, including Dignity Health, Sutter  Health  and TriHealth, to help doctors transcribe notes from patient interactions. Doctors wear the glasses during consultations and transmit video to medical scribes, who take notes. That way, the doctors are freed up to focus on the patients.
Shakil wouldn't tell us how much the company pays Google but says it's in the realm of $1,500, which is the price Google charged developers for the original product.
Augmedix, which raised $23 million in December, is poised to triple its growth year over year, said Shakil. Thus far, he said, most patients seem open to their doctors wearing the device: "We've already done tens of thousands of patient interactions."