Tag: Google

“The idea seems to be that we all live in the great database in the sky, occasionally summoning aliens with our minds.” Emily Harnett explores Silicon Valley’s appropriation of UFO culture.

Amid controversies and unethical practices, tech giants like Facebook and Google are no longer dream companies to work for.

Tim Berners-Lee: “For people who want to make sure the Web serves humanity, we have to concern ourselves with what people are building on top of it.”

The popular online tool is great at rapid decoding. Extracting meaning? Not so much.

Some tech companies are taking a stand against neo-Nazi users, but claim it’s a still dangerous decision to make.

Google had a plan to scan every book in the world. 25 million books later, the project lost its way.

The story of Google’s groundbreaking, buzz-generating modular smartphone — aka Project Ara — from bang to whimper.

“As we grow more reliant on applications and algorithms, we become less capable of acting without their aid.”

I have a dear friend who’s working at the library in Chattanooga, which is one of the rare states where the budget is increasing, and she’s doing all of this neat stuff with technology: bringing in 3-D printers, teaching web-use skills, all of these public services that are really necessary beyond making books available for […]

Science fiction writer Eileen Gunn recently wrote in Smithsonian magazine about how the science fiction genre informs the way we think about the real world. Here, Gunn writes that big tech companies like Microsoft have hired science fiction writers to do “design fiction”—coming up with new technology ideas through imaginative works: Microsoft, Google, Apple and […]

Even in Google’s earliest days, Page had always wanted the company to do more than just basic Web search. Since he was a kid, he’d been dreaming up world-changing schemes. As an undergrad at the University of Michigan, he’d proposed that the school replace its bus system with something he called a PRT, or personal […]

“Google is visually impressive, but this frenzy of energy and hipness hasn’t generated large numbers of jobs, much less what we think of as middle-class jobs, the kinds of unglamorous but solid employment that generates annual household incomes between $44,000 and $155,000. The state of California (according to a 2011 study by the Public Policy […]

Tim is Director of Social Media at Marquette University and writes about beer and running for DRAFT Magazine. “Whenever I hear people talking about how technology is ruining our attention spans and turning our collective brains to mush, I like to tell them about #longreads. This article is a perfect example. I saw a link […]

Inside Google’s secretive Ground Truth program—and why it suddenly makes sense that they are working on a self-driving car: Let’s step back a tiny bit to recall with wonderment the idea that a single company decided to drive cars with custom cameras over every road they could access. Google is up to five million miles […]

An explainer on Google’s challenges with privacy, its competition with Facebook and Twitter, and two big questions: Is search no longer central to its mission? And are Google’s recent moves “evil” by its early company standards?  It’s hard to understand how Google could screw up its core product like that. But there’s a remarkably simple […]

Google and YouTube exec Robert Kyncl’s plans for the future of web TV—and the company’s big bet on professional content:  “Kyncl’s relationships in Hollywood would help in securing premium content; and, more important, he understood entertainment culture. He brought ‘the skill set of being able to bridge Silicon Valley and Hollywood—an information culture and an […]