Google made the biggest management shake-up in a decade on Thursday, handing the reins of the company to one of its co-founders in an effort to rediscover its start-up roots, reports the New York Times. As it has grown into the dominant company in Silicon Valley, Google has lost some of its entrepreneurial culture and become a slower-moving bureaucracy, analysts and insiders say, in contrast to Facebook, Twitter and other younger, more agile competitors. To counter this, the company announced that Larry Page, its 38-year-old co-founder, would take over as chief executive from Eric E. Schmidt, a technology industry veteran who was brought in a decade ago to provide adult supervision, as Silicon Valley calls it…
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Explore the full series of eSchool News podcasts hosted by Kevin Hogan—created to keep you on the cutting edge of innovations in education.
Your online profile might hurt job prospects, warns Google boss
The chief executive of Google, Eric Schmidt, said the enormous quantity of detail left online by users could come back to haunt them when they apply for jobs in future, NDTV reports. “I don’t believe society understands what happens when everything is available, knowable and recorded by everyone all the time,” he told the Wall Street Journal in an interview. Schmidt’s comments could propel concerns about the sheer volume of personal information made available online, most of which is virtually un-erasable. Such information invariably includes the immature boasts of young people who would normally regret their mistakes as they grow older. An estimated 600 million people have personal online profiles, many of which are accessible to total strangers. Prospective employers are able to access photographs, videos and blogs that users might have long forgotten with a few simple clicks of a mouse…
…Read MoreGoogle: Brace yourselves for the data explosion
Google CEO Eric Schmidt had some scary things to say about privacy, reports PC World. In a nutshell, he said there’s an almost incomprehensible amount of data out there about all of us–much of which we’ve generated ourselves via social networks, blogs, and so on–and we are totally unprepared to deal with the implications of that fact. Schmidt was speaking at the Techonomy confab, currently underway at California’s Lake Tahoe, where large-brained people gather to talk about how technology and the economy intersect. Schmidt wasn’t really trying to draw disaster scenarios. He noted that a lot of positive benefits can come from the information explosion, and he’s right. Personally, if not for the internet, I might be in another line of work. I’d almost certainly live in another city. Being able to access vast amounts of data without lifting my butt from this ergonomic chair has transformed my life in dozens of ways, as I’m sure it has transformed others’. Of course, Google is in the business of monetizing that data, for which it seems to possess an insatiable appetite. And sometimes it screws up big time. Schmidt didn’t really talk about that. The good side of all this data: instant information about virtually anything. The dark side? Vast potential for personal profiling by your employer, your insurer, and The Man…
…Read MoreGoogle Wave is dead: Now what?
While very few of you may be shedding tears over the demise of Google Wave, or even knew what it was, we probably haven’t seen the last of this service, PC World reports. The search giant says the technology behind its ill-fated collaboration tool will live on in new products that have not yet been announced. Google isn’t giving any hints about what new those new products might be or how they would benefit from Wave features. But company CEO Eric Schmidt recently said the Wave team would be moving over to other products that are “like Wave but applied in some other areas,” according to a YouTube video posted by TechCrunch’s MG Siegler. So what might those other areas be that could benefit from Wave technology? The most likely candidate could be Google’s rumored Facebook competitor, Google Me. It’s unclear at this point what Google Me would be like or how it would differ from Buzz and Orkut, Google’s other two social applications.
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