Googlified

Silicon Alley Insider guesstimated that Google spends about $70 millions a year in U.S. offices for the free food program that Google offer to its employees. The free food program covers snacks, drinks, and two to three meals a day.

SAI’s calculation: (8000 Googlers at Googleplex + 1600 more in other U.S. offices) * ($30/day for each employee) * (Google opens 251 days a year) = ~ $72 million

SAI updated the post saying that it’s more like $20/day per employee, shrinking down the guesstimate total to ~$48 million - that’s still a huge chunk of money. Kaching!

[photo by Ian Kennedy (in the photo is Googler Don Loeb), used under a CC-license]

OMG, it’s Google, run!

Last month, Googler (Noogler?) Yew Jin blogged about the “layoff” at Google - well not really a layoff, but it feels like it (”the [layoff] atmosphere in Google”). As far as I know, nobody got lay off, but it’s certain that a number of notable people have left Google recently, including CIO Douglas Merrill, who left to become president of music company EMI, and Blogger’s product manager Eric Case, who left because “it’s time to move on” after 5 years at Google. Even Josef Desimone, the executive chef left Google for Facebook, now how do you suppose the atmosphere be like when the foods don’t taste the same.

Oh, Gmail is hiring.

The following post is totally unrelated to Google, but I think I should show some appreciation to the folks at Automattic who developed the Akismet service (and the great WordPress, despite that I am not very satisfied with, but still great), which had caught over 200,000 spam comments on this blog since I installed it in the late 2006. (200K is about 0.0038% of all spam Akismet ever caught)

The above line chart shows the amount of spam comments accumulated over time. Well, thank you Akismet!

The American Dialect Society voted Googlegänger - “person with your name who shows up when you google (sic) yourself” - as the winner in the “Most Creative” category of its 18th Word of the Year event. Googlegänger was also nominated for Word of the Year, but was defeated by “subprime” (79 to 2 votes).

Despite winning the Most Creative category, Googlegänger is not widely used - a Google search for the word turns up a mere 3000 results. I personally haven’t seen or heard of that word before.

Remember the “Google Me” movie?

UPDATE: Ha, this is funny. “I have a Googlegänger, Chris Abraham the Director from Canada. We fought over top Google dog for years but now I pwn him.” [Marketing Conversation]

[via ResourceShelf]

Google “quietly” launched a new service (not really, as it has already been around since Google launched Shared Stuff - if I remember correctly, that is - and it’s now being used in Google Reader) called Google Profile (service name is socialsharing) that “lets you tell others a bit more about who you are and what you’re all about. You control what goes into your Google Profile, sharing as much (or as little) as you’d like.”

The FAQ says that anyone (potentially stalkers) can see, and search your profile by your name, if “you put your full name in the ‘Nickname’ field.” When gathered enough information, Google will probably release a mini-version of Spock.

Also, when Blogger announced support for OpenID-based commenting, they mentioned that they are “also working on functionality to let Blogger’s URLs (both Blog*Spot and custom domains) be used for commenting elsewhere on the web.”

Palo Alto Daily News reports that a Palo Alto review board has unanimously approved Google’s plan to open a new child care center. The two-story, 18,500-square-foot child care center will “accommodate about 80 children of Google employees and 25 staff members” and just minutes away from the Googleplex.

Oh, so this is the Google University, teaching kids about cryptography and open source. :P

[via InsideGoogle]

The Official Google Blog is debunking the popular “Black Google Saves Energy” myth that’s running around the WorldWildWeb recently.

[O]ur own analysis as well as that of others shows that making the Google homepage black will not reduce energy consumption. To the contrary, on flat-panel monitors (already estimated to be 75% of the market), displaying black may actually increase energy usage. Detailed results from a new study confirm this.

I suggest Blackle to change their tagline to “Over 100 thousand watts wasted” to avoid misguidance. Sweet, if you need a slogan for you startup, contact me. :)

[Screenshot by Jarques Pretorius]

Google recently put up a “Google Council Bluffs Data Center” site to let the Council Bluffs residents know more about the $450 million data center Google is going to build there…

We anticipate opening the Council Bluffs data center in Spring 2009. Eventually, we plan to employ approximately 200 people, ranging from technology assistants to experienced data center managers. We’re confident this $450 million investment will be good for Council Bluffs, Google and our Internet users.

The construction of this data center is in process on the 55 acres of land near the Lake Manawa.

By the way, the Google guy in the video, Paul Froutan, is Google’s Director of Hardware Operations.

[via SeekXL->GoogleWatchBlog]

The San Fransisco Chronicle today has an article on Google becoming the world’s most visited site. According to comScore’s latest figures on the web properties, Google had 528 million unique visitors in March, compare to Microsoft’s 527 million - SF Chronicle calls the lead is “little more than a statistical hair”.

Google is now also the most powerful brand in the world.