king talk

Every new business niche goes through specific stages. Launch, proof, competition, consolidation. The business of your genetic code has now entered stage two, proof. Also known as, show me the money. Of all today’s start-ups it’s the best known, 23andme, which seems to be facing the stiffest headwinds. It has slashed prices, brought in new leadership, and faced no small amount of media ridicule, as reporters start asking the hard question — what’s it for? While 23andme has headed directly toward the mass market, Knome has headed to the class market. It puts its genome sequences on a stick, puts the stick in a box (above), then gives the box a fancy lid.

Compared to Moore´s Law the improvements in genetic engineering are more frequently. In 2001 a test costed about 3 million EUR. Knome said that they will store you genetic data as a backup. One of the investors for Knome is Google and the founder of Knome Anna Wojcicki is the wife of Google founder Sergei Brin. As Google is aimed to restore all data, this becomes all little bit scary. To Google:»I like your search engine, using maps everyday and I enjoy youtube, but don´t scan my DNA, please!«

via Sueddeutsche Zeitung (13th August 2009) and ZDNet

This week we crept in the innovation café at FH Munich, because Philipp Karmires (Enterprise Account Manager) was talking about »start-up mentality as the road to success«. He pointed out that Google has to fight short development periods of a 1/2 year while automotive companies are developing up to 7 years to launch a new model (except Toyota). Afterwards he showed the »5 pillar model« of Google which is based on Scale, Platform, SearchAdsApps, Footprint and Trust. At the end of the talk, the topic Trust resulted in a l00ong discussion about the trustfulness of Google. Maybe it has something to do with the Google Masterplan video on youtube?

After this, Philipp was talking about »Sergey´s Resource Allocation Rule« (which is pretty similar to our allocation of the designprocess). Every Google employee is organising like this…

70% for Search, Ad & Apps:
improving search quality, page crawl, page index, AdWords, Google Apps

20% for Strong Potential:
Scholar, Picasa, Blogger, News, Pack, Froogle Wireless, orkut

10% for Wild & Crazy Stuff:
Google Wave, offline Ads, Google Wifi, Google Transit

For those who don´t know the latest Google App called Wave, which is still under development right now, we have a video for you…

At the end of the talk he brought some statistics which were just impressing:
- 1 Billions of queries at Google everyday
- 80 Billions of eMails and SMS send everyday
- 130 Billions of e-commerce transactions are held everyday
- 250 Million people are part of a social online network
- 500 Million youtube videos are uploaded per day, this means that every Minute 12 hours of movie are added to the site

After all it was very informative event. We will see who will be there next time at SCE…

Jeffrey Martin of 360cities.net has posted a new link with the short message »be sure to zoom in« at facebook. He created a stunning panorama shot of the San Francisco Skyline.

We met Jeffrey one year ago as we build up the Earthwalk installation for a Google event. 360cities.net is a co-operation partner of Google, linking panorama pictures to their maps. You can visit the San Francisco map to explore the area.