This Week in Google 242 (Transcript)

Show Tease: It’s time for TWiG; this week in Google. Great big panel for you, including Kevin Marks and Kevin Purdy. We’re going to talk about the latest news from the Googleverse including the big story out of Facebook. Facebook buys Oculus VR and the crowd goes nuts! We’ll find out why next on TWiG.

Netcasts you love from people you trust. This is TWiT. Bandwidth for this week in Google is provided by Cashfly. cachefly.com.

Leo Laporte: This is TWiG; This Week in Google, episode 242 recorded March 26, 2014

That’s Numberwang!

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It’s time for TWiG; This Week in Google - the show that covers Google, the Googleverse the cloud,  the Facebook, the virtual reality helmets and all of the above. Ladies and gentlemen, we brought in a massive panel for today’s show. I’m going to start waaay on my left with Mr. Kevin Purdy, who wants everyone to know he does not normally comb his hair like that.

Kevin Purdy: Hello. I’m going to a girl developer party later and the theme is nerds.

Leo: That doesn’t help.

Kevin P: Yeah I know.

Leo: completeandroidguide.com, ladies and gentlemen.

Kevin P: Or thepurdman.com

Leo: thepurdman.com. He’s the purd man of Alcatraz.

Kevin P: yes

Leo: Nice to have you Kevin. Gina Trapani, still in her mom’s basement so it’s really not going well.

Jeff Jarvis: She’s being held prisoner. Would someone please call the authorities?

Gina Trapani: This is the last show in the basement. If I have to be in my home with holes in the walls, that’s what it’s going to be. Next week I will be either in my home or in my office. I’m not sure, but I won’t be in Mom’s basement anymore.

Leo: I don’t want to discourage this.

Gina: No, you want to discourage this!

Leo: I love it. I love that.

Gina: I know you guys love it.

Leo: I promise you will be in your new house next week. It’s not like a contractor is going to put a hammer through the wall into the next apartment or anything like that. It’s going to all be done soon.

Gina: It’ll be fine.

Leo: Both Kevin and Gina are doing home remodels right? And I also was getting some stuff put in. What is it about contractors? They get half done and they leave you and they don’t come back?

Gina: And you’re like UUUUUUH?

Leo: And they left the drop cloths everywhere!

Jeff: Like some developers I know, too.

Leo: Ouch! Burn! That’s Jeff Jarvis in his beautiful library. Looks good. What’s different?

Jeff: Next time I want to do the show from the road. I quite liked that.

Leo: Yeah we watched Jeff pull up by Skype. That can’t be safe.

Gina: He was in action!

Jeff: Well, I have this great this little thing on the dashboard. And the phone’s right there and I can just drive and talk. Yeah, I think it’s fun.

Leo: Awesome! We loved it. And we got a good look too, at your beautiful estate. Country estate.

Jeff: A snow pile.

Leo: Yeah, hard to believe. Wow. Kevin Marks and his birds are back. Hey Kevin good to talk to you.

Kevin Marks: Good to see you too.

Leo: We’ve got a great panel today. I think we should kick things off with the big announcement that yesterday Facebook was acquiring Oculus VR, the makers of the Oculus Rift virtual-reality helmet that blew everybody away last year. And actually this year, too. For $2 billion. Not exactly sure what Facebook wants to do with the virtual-reality helmet. Kind of mixed reactions, too.

Gina: Mixed? It seemed uniformly pretty pissed-off.

Leo: Go to the Kickstarter project. As many of you know, the Oculus Rift was a Kickstarter project. A lot of people put money into it. They were asking for a few hundred thousand dollars and ended up getting $2.4 million.

Jeff: They got what they paid for, right? They got their developer gifts.

Leo: Well it depends what you paid for. For instance, if you just supported it with $10 saying “I think this is a great thing. I can’t afford to buy one. I just want to put some money in this so that you continue to build a fantastic virtual-reality experience for gamers.” Then you might feel a little miffed. If you read the comments, there are a lot of people who feel very miffed. I was a $300 level backer so I got exactly what I paid for - an early Rift developer kit. But I think, also, you give people – well, for instance, let’s go to Notch, the creator of Minecraft at Mojang.  He was very interested in the Oculus Rift, went to visit them, and thought “this is really an exciting thing for us”. As soon as Facebook bought them - well I’ll give you his post at notch.net:  “Virtual-reality is going to change the world. It’s amazing! You strap on some gear and you’re inside whatever world you want. I got my Oculus Rift development kit. Played around with it. It was convincing.” He visited the office a couple of weeks ago. They wanted Minecraft.  “I said that it doesn’t really fit the platform, it’s on Java, but maybe we could do it.” So, he and the folks at Mojang started talking to the folks at Oculus Rift. And then, he says, “Not two weeks later, Facebook buys them. Don’t get me wrong, VR’s not bad for social and I think social could be one of the biggest apps on VR. But I don’t want to work with social. I want to work with games. And I did not chip in 10 grand to see the first investment round build value for a Facebook acquisition.” So he’s pulling out. So that’s an example of some of the people who are little bit upset. I don’t think anybody who has invested however, real-world invested, in Oculus VR’s too unhappy. They’re going to have a big payday.

Kevin P: As someone pointed out, I think if you had invested the $300 for the kit - the developer kit and the headset - and if that had been a real investment like it eventually will be under title III, you would now have on the order of $20,000.

Leo: Had this been an actual investment, you’d have 20 grand in your pocket.

Kevin P: There’s a great piece by Joel Johnson in Valley Wag this morning -

Leo: That’s who gave that number, yeah.

Jeff: I think it was actually more than that, Kevin. I think was more like $220,000.

Leo: No, he said that, and then somebody calculated it better.

Jeff: Oh is that what it was?

Kevin P: Factor of 10 in there. You have on the order of $200,000. What I found most interesting about that piece and that argument is that it’s true that down the line are some regulations that will allow people to invest at that kind of level without having to be what they call an accredited investor. And so-

Leo: That’s the JOBS Act which was passed into law.

Kevin P: JOBS Act Title III, I think currently making its way through SEC hell. But when it arrives, it would prevent it from seeming like –

Leo: You got muted, Kevin, right when you said “seeming like.” We’ll never know what it seems like. Can you unmute it there? Now he’s just frozen in time.

Kevin M: Oh, dear.

Leo: Well, yeah I think that Joel Johnson has the right title for this Valley Wag piece. “Oculus Grift” he calls it. “Kickstarter is a charity for venture capitalists.” Is this unreasonable? Don’t we all know going in that -

Jeff: I think so. I think that’s the deal. No, you don’t get equity. Even in the piece by Joel he says “I got what I paid for. I may not like it but this is the deal.”

Kevin P: He also points out, though, that it would feel a lot different if it was a company that got to $2 billion through hard work sales, iteration and such, versus a company that’s just being drained out at $2 billion.

Leo: Yeah in fact it seems unlikely that - although Mark Zuckerberg did say that there they were going to continue with the game stuff - it does seem unlikely that this is now going to become a consumer product. In the near timeframe.

Kevin M: Not necessarily. They’ve given them enough that they’re in the league of the other two that they bought that they haven’t completely destroyed.

Leo: WhatsApp and Instagram.

Kevin M: Yep. But a lot of companies they’ve shut down, pulling in the engineers, but they’ve said this is one of those.

Leo: Is this an investment, then, by Facebook, into a whole new category for Facebook?

Kevin M: Some of what I read was saying that Facebook missed the boat on mobile gaming, and they want to make sure they catch the next wave of gaming and that would be this. Which I’m slightly suspicious of, because like Notch I remember playing VR helmet games in the early 90s, late 80s. You remember the pterodactyl thing?

Leo: Yeah they had the pterodactyl. You’d put the big helmet on and you’d be flying.

Kevin M: It was actually in the arcades in London.

Leo: Really?

Kevin M: Yeah CN tower had one.  This is John Waldon, I actually know the guy -

Leo: But as Notch points out, you had to put on a big old thing on and -

Kevin M: It was a huge thing and it was really low res.

Leo: Right. This is the other sad thing. For people like me who bought in, we only got to see the lo-res version 1 of Oculus Rift. We never did get to see the second one that everybody said “now they’ve really got it down.” And we probably never will at this point. Joel Johnson suggested, and I think it’s a good idea, “What?  You know, you got $2 billion. Spend a little money and send all of the early backers the Version 2 development kit. Or maybe just 10 bucks.”

Gina: That would be a nice thing to do.

Kevin P: They have VCs now who would like to recoup as much of their initial seed investment as possible at as high a rate as possible. That’s the nature.

Kevin M: Well they already have. That’s the point. They just got their payday right?

Leo: 400 million in cash, 1.6 billion in inflated Facebook stock. Again, Facebook is using its stock really effectively to acquire stuff.

Kevin M: VCs are fresh out now.  The VCs are done.

Leo: Yeah. And there’s still money on the table, I would guess.

Gina: I get those points, but it feels indicative of this weird sense of entitlement that really turns me off. It’s like saying if you purchase something from a company that at some point goes IPO and makes millions of dollars that you’re owed something back. And I feel that that is very specific to our industry, because we have these crazy blockbuster stories of young kids making billions of dollars. And I think that on some level all of us are feeling like, “Well I’m owed the same thing because I’m just as smart or I could’ve had the same idea or I could’ve written that code.”  And that’s just not true. When you back a Kickstarter campaign, you’re not purchasing equity. And that’s very very clear. And I’m speaking as someone who crowd-sourced the early round of my own company. This feeling of like “I’m owed something” and with the Oculus deal it was particularly bad, because -  I didn’t know much about oculus and I’m not much of a gamer, but it felt like it really added more insult that it was Facebook. Because it was such a clash of cultures.

Leo: Absolutely. Had this been Google, I don’t think you’d see this.

Gina: I completely agree. But this whole, “How much are my tweets worth? How much money did I make Twitter?”    You chose to use the service and the idea was never “I’m owning a part of this company now.” There’s a way to do that. You can purchase shares in a public company right? But that’s not what you are doing, so I find that whole angle sort of off-putting, because I feel it’s indicative of a weird sort of sense of entitlement that’s false.

Kevin M: The counterpoint to that is the situation that happens all too often, which is the “Thank you for a wonderful  journey” letter that appears when the startup that you been dumping your data into for the last two years gets bought by Facebook or Google or Twitter and shuts itself down and all your data disappears.

Gina: Our incredible journey. Ha ha ha ha

Leo: And now we must part. We’ve come to a fork in the road.

Gina: It’s the “Our Incredible Journey” post. We are shutting down; you have this much time to get your data. This has been amazing! Thank you so much! Good luck!

Kevin M: There’s been enough of that happening that people feel that when this happens to Oculus Rift, even though I think in this case it’s fairly clear that Facebook wants to keep this going. And they’re not giving $2 billion just to hire John Carmack and the other chap whose name I’ve forgotten who founded the thing. They really do want to build something. They really do want to build something. Yes, it’s been a dream since the 1980s, 1990s.   We’ve got ages and ages of sticking screens on your face and hoping they work – and the vision may actually be doable.

Leo: So the way to contextualize this is; you gave your 10 bucks or 300 bucks or $10,000. And you established this company, you got them to the point where they can then go and get additional venture funding and they could go to the next prototype and then they could get acquired for 2 billion. I think you’re right Kevin. I think a lot of this is people just don’t trust that Facebook is going to continue on with Oculus Rift. But assuming they do, this is all how it’s supposed to happen. Is that what you’re saying? This is good!

Kevin M: I don’t think this is that feeling of they bought this thing and it’s going to die now. I think they may keep working on it and potentially Facebook can take it further. I don’t know. We don’t know. The thing is that VR has been a dream for a long time. I watched The Matrix with my son this week, because he hadn’t seen it. It was interesting to sort a watch that and go “Yeah, I remember this theory as well.”

Leo: To me it goes back to Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash. That was the first time I think a lot of people… Maybe Neuromancer, by William Gibson. It’s science fiction

Kevin M: Snow Crash was better. So, Neuromancer, there was never any technology and it. I just said “He sees this thing” and there was never any explanation of how it worked.

Leo: Well he was jacked in. He had a little port the back of his head. We don’t know exactly how it worked.

Kevin M: Gibson deliberately didn’t describe anything, so you could imagine.

Leo: He wasn’t a technologist.

Kevin M: Whereas Stephenson was like, “There’s a lady that’s stabbing your eyeball . . .”

Leo: But either way, I think we fell in love with this idea of a virtual world we could enter that would be indistinguishable from the real world, except that all this amazing stuff could happen.

Kevin P: I think part of the other pathos behind it is whether - when Kickstarter really works well, I think you help create a product or a project that would not have existed were it not for your support. And I think you might question, or someone might question, whether they helped create prototype VR kit that would have never existed if it wasn’t for geeky enthusiasm. Or if you helped some folks get closer to Facebook. I kind of see both sides of it. I totally get that Kickstarter is not a store, but you’re also not a shareholder, but I think it’s tough when the idea is to help individuals and small things get started, and then you see something like the $2 billion figure show up all of a sudden.

Jeff: Yeah but listen at the end of the day – and I’ve been around investors who’ve invested in companies. And the wise investor, even if it is an investment, puts the money in and then lets the smart company run itself. It’s got to do what’s best for the company from that point out. And so what were they to do? Say “No, We’ll turn down this $2 billion, because we want to stay in our garage? We want to be loyal to our peeps who gave us a few bucks in the beginning.” It’s just too Shirley Temple.

Leo: Does it hurt Kickstarter in any way? I mean the other when you might look at, and Kickstarter blazons this on their front page when you go to Kickstarter.com, is Veronica Mars a Hollywood movie that was made with money from its fans. I think the fans don’t feel left out, they’ve got the movie.

Kevin P: Something that would not have existed were it not for their money.

Leo: It wasn’t enough money to make the movie, just gave Sony pictures or whoever enough input that they said “Yeah, maybe we should do this.”

Kevin P: Sure.

Gina: Kick starter is never going to have on their front page, Sold to Facebook for 2 billion, right? I mean they’ve always been about works of art and supporting the creators. I even think they’re moving away from software projects a little bit, although this really is hardware. But look, you know, in five years if Facebook invests in Oculus or Oculus operates on its own and it comes that the vision becomes a mainstream consumer product, then I can say Kickstarter saying, “Hey they got their start here.” But not now.

Jeff: The other thing about this whole thing to is I still don’t know what Facebook does with it. I’m getting flashbacks to Second Life.

Leo: Yeah, I think it’s well beyond that, but the reason I bring up Snow Crash or Neuromancer or The Matrix, whatever, is because I think that many of us geeks share that dream, right?, of a world we can enter. It’s a social world, isn’t it? It’s a social network. I think what Zuckerberg said I felt was very important yesterday which is he sees it as a platform. I think Facebook’s being very aggressively interested in what’s the next thing. They almost missed mobile, which could have killed them. I think they’re getting very aggressive with Instagram and Whatsapp. I think they implied that they feel like VR could be the next thing. Maybe after Wearables or part of Wearables.

Kevin M: Raph Koster posts – he was talking about different variations on a theme. He basically says there are four different – well you do a quadrant diagram which is what you do when you’re a game theorist. There’s this difference between virtual worlds and augmented reality and life logging and that you end up in different quadrants depending on which species you’re doing. And Google Glass is basically mostly useful for life logging with a little bit of augmentation. But to do an actual reality you want to have glasses that will let you overlay stuff on the world. Some of this stuff that Don Walton who did the original VR headsets is doing now -he’s doing very very good heads-up display things, mostly military, but useful for individuals too. They’re just giving you little terminal displays as opposed actually replacing bits of the world, which is one of the things that people wanted to do with it. The idea of a Virtual World that you could completely disappear into, has been this thing that people have dreamed about for a long time. And that is potentially doable. I’ve always found that it gives me a headache, but that could be for the same reasons that watching 3-D at the cinema gives me a headache, because your eyes are trying to focus on this at the wrong depth.

Leo: Raph quotes John Carmack who is, of course, the creator of Doom and very famously went to Oculus VR to work on this. He tweeted today “I have a deep respect for the technical scale that Facebook operates at. The cyberspace we want for VR will be at this scale.” It’s true, Facebook’s got the money, Facebook’s got the scale, and it’s got a billion users. If you’re going to make a metaverse, I can’t imagine a better company to be doing it with. Well maybe Google.

Gina: His reaction was a little bit defensive. He tweeted something like, “I’m coding today which is the same thing I was doing last week at this time.” I’m like, “Okay”.

Leo: See? Nothing’s changed.

Kevin P: I’ve still got long hair and a katana. I can do this.

(All laugh)

Leo: I like this Raph Koster post. It’s very interesting.

Kevin M: One of the interesting things last week with GDC and the reaction at GDC, was a lot of people being sort of stressed about where gaming had gone - distraught to the affect that all this selling rubbish all the time inside metaworld gaming has had on game development and the ideas of it. I think part of this sort of backlash is that this reaction was, they were thinking , “Great, this is finally us dedicated console gamers going to get something more immersive than standing in front of the TV.  And it’s not real life like all that rubbish on mobile and Facebook, which has been this whole culture war going on in gaming for a while.  So, in a sense this is selling to the biggest enemy of the core gamers. And I think that’s part of the culture clash there.

Leo: I agree. And if you are a core gamer, then you’ll probably be relieved to know that Microsoft and Sony are both working on their own virtual-reality projects. Although, I don’t know if they are the companies that are going to innovate in that space.

Kevin M: I’d be amazed if Google wasn’t doing something as well but I suspect theirs is more augmented than virtual. They’ve got already got the little tiny screen thing with Glass.

Leo: I always thought Glass would be much better as an augmenter reality device. It’s really just a second screen that you look up at. I’d love to see it overlaid on Life.

Kevin M: I going to put a link in here.  Here, this is pretty cool. This is the company that John Waldon who did Virtuality, twenty-odd, twenty-five years ago, which was the original arcade VR stuff. He’s still working optics. He’s got these overlay glasses that are bright enough and high res enough to overlay stuff on your vision. The point is they’re building chips for it right now. And there’s a little interesting history on all the different variants they’ve had.

Leo: And of course their friend Jeri Ellsworth, she came up here. She had a Kickstarter project called CastAR, which was again for gaming war, but it was kind of wild. You wore glasses that project a gaming space onto a screen in front of you so that you can interact with it. I think this is something that - It’s very often the case with science fiction that it inspires development. They want something that they read about. I think this is great. Raph talks about the metaverse. I think this is what geeks want, so a lot of people are working on it in a lot of directions. It’s just that it’s Facebook. Do you want Mark Zuckerberg to be - - -

Jeff: If it hadn’t been for Kickstarter and they hadn’t got a dime from Kickstarter and they hadn’t started that, would there be the same resentment?

Leo: No. Of course not.

Jeff: Well it’s not Facebook’s fault.

Leo: No one resents WhatsApp’s getting 16 billion. I mean we’re all kind of flabbergasted, but nobody resents it. So yeah. And I think that if it had been Google or Apple, I don’t think there would’ve been this kind of reaction. Maybe Apple, I don’t know.

Kevin M: The metaverse was a very commercialized vision.

Leo: Right.

Kevin M: And there was the assumption that it would eat the Web. Which was, remember this was - when did Snow Crash come out?

Leo: It was a long time ago.

Gina: It was required reading at the first dotcom I ever worked at. It was like part of orientation.

Leo: See what I’m saying? That’s exactly it. People wanted to live that. 1992

Kevin M: 1992 that’s right.

Leo: 1992 feels like a long time ago.

Kevin M:  Okay, this can be my link of the week if you like. It’s Hyperland. If you haven’t seen this is, it was a documentary that Douglas Adams did in 1989 with friends of mine at the BBC, which was talking about what it means to interact.  Starting at the beginning it’s a good idea because it takes a lot of time to get going and Douglas Adams is just sleeping. He talks about the idea of interactivity and the examples are based on HyperCard and videodiscs and little bits of VR and icons and things. It was an idea of how you interact with things.  And, wonderfully, the avatar talking to him is Tom Baker.

Leo: Dr. Who!  It all comes back to Dr. Who, doesn’t it?

Kevin M: If you haven’t seen this, see this.  So you watch this, and he predicts – he asks questions and everything’s linked to everything else.  There he is, he’s sticking his face in. And then at the end they start going into VR. There’s a great bit . . .

Leo: I found the VR helmet they’re showing at NASA.

Kevin M:  Oh yeah, just this bit. So this is the NASA guy, he puts the VR helmet on.

Leo: Look at the size of that thing!

Kevin P: Oh my God!

Kevin M: This thing is huge. He’s got a motor sitting in it. It’s like a gray cubical.

Leo: But understand this is the basic technology.  We just got better and better and better is all.

Kevin M: This was ’89, we had this.  1991 was when Virtuality bought had the arcade things and the pterodactyls.

Leo: Right. So these both predate Snow Crash.

Kevin M: Well Snow Crash was written about that time. It took him a while to write it, and it was published in 1992, so he was probably writing it in 1991 as well. But that was thought through what you would actually do with this. And then the Web came through and sideswiped everyone and this piece was sitting on the side for a bit. So it’s nice to see it coming back again. But the other fork of this is Second Life, which was the other assumption of the metaverse and the virtual world. But that was all done on the screen. Still taking over, and it’s there, but there was a huge excitement around it.

Jeff: I would nominate Second Life as the single more over-hyped thing on the net.

Leo: But like all of these, they’re early stage and things will evolve. The early Web was pretty awful, too. I think that this is aiming toward something very exciting.  And if $2 billion from Facebook moves it along, I guess I’m all for it.  We’re going to take a break and when we come back, change log time. Gina Trapani will have the latest from Google.  There’s a lot to talk about, so we’re going to dig right into it.

But first a word from our friends at lynda.com. Lynda.com the best online learning company ever, can help anyone learn not just – I think a lot of people think oh that’s where I go to learn file code or Photoshop. But not just software you can learn creativity, business skills. At Lynda.com you can learn operating systems. If you’re trying to get used a Windows 8.1 OS 10 Mavericks they’ve got it. Over 2000 courses and many many new courses daily. The thing about Lynda.com is that the instructors are all the top in the business. They are great teachers, but more importantly, they’re actually doing these things. Many of them are good friends of Photoshop. Burritt minority is a wonderful regular show on Lynda.com. So soft skills as well as hard-core skills. The content is curated. Chapter by chapter each Lynda.com course is carefully constructed so you can learn from start to finish. And, if you wish, you can jump right in because they’ve got for every course a complete text transcription. So you can say well I’m learning the camp but I just want to know how I make a 3-D model and you can jump right into the part you want. Courses for all experience levels, too - Beginners intermediate, and yes advanced. You can watch from your computer, your tablet and your mobile device. You can pause on one intake it right up where you left off on another. And Lynda.com now has certificates of course completion that you can publish to your LinkedIn profile. At Lynda.com, since you are a Google fan you might want to know you can learn the latest in Google software and services, how to make the most of Google’s cloud apps for business, productivity and fun. You also can explore developing for the Google cloud platform, learn all you need to know about building android apps with your SDK and developer tools. I mean this is all in there. Try it free right now. It’s only $25 a month for access to the entire course library. 3750 a month for the premium plan. But you can try it free right now for seven days, full access the entire site, over 2000 courses for free when you visit Lynda.com/twig. Lynda.com/twig. This week in Google thanks Linda so much for the work she’s done and her support.

Jeff: And let me add, Leo, that at the CUNY graduate school of journalism where I teach, we buy a site license for Lynda.com for all of our students. And that’s how they learn an immense number of the tools that they do and how they can dig into more tools on their own. It’s a valuable resource.

Leo: We do kind of the same for our editors. When they need to learn Final Cut or a new version we always go out and get them on Lynda.com it’s a great place to learn. Let us bang the drum slowly. It’s time for the Google change log. Gina Trapani is in her basement with the latest Google stuff.

Gina: Man I just love that intro. Thank you Leo. Google Now. Google now has arrived in a stable built of Chrome for Windows and Mac. We saw this in the beta version of a couple weeks ago. We’ve been talking about Google now on the desktop. Well it’s rolling out to everyone now. The cards are only visible on your computer if you use Google now on your mobile device and if you’re signed into Chrome. And the cars that you see on your desktop Chrome are a subset of the mobile cards. So you’ll see weather, sports scores, commuter traffic, and event reminders. I’m seeing some stock prices on mine. Some cards may be based on the location of your mobile device, which hopefully is near the computer you’re using. But others will work independent of the location.

Leo: How do I see those cards? Where do they show up?

Gina: So if you’ve got Chrome installed, I’ve got a Mac here, I see a little bell in my menu bar.

Leo: Oh!

Gina: Yeah, you’re seeing Now cards there?

Leo: Well I see the notifications from Google Plus.

Gina: Well no no open your Mac menu.

Leo: All the Mac menu bar, there’s another little – oh look, it’s Greg Burnett’s birthday! Happy birthday, Greg. Yeah you’re right. Twitter stock falls. 7%, wow.

Gina: And there’s always the weather.

Kevin P: No love for Lenux though.

Leo: No, no love for Lenux.

Jeff: Oddly, I don’t think I have this in my Chrome book.

Leo: And no love for Chromo.

Kevin P: If you change to a nonstable channel, Jeff, it’s there, but -

Jeff: It’s there in the beta, ok.

Kevin P: Yeah

Leo: I always run my Chrome book in the beta channel. That seems safe enough. Yeah?

Kevin P: Mmmm.

Kevin M: I didn’t see the Now in mine, but maybe it hasn’t run the update.

Gina: It’s rolling out slowly. Google Play music got a bunch of new features to the web app, that is. Drag-and-drop uploads and many player off-line downloads. So you don’t have to use that desktop Music Manager in order to upload your music to Google Play music. You can just drag and drop your music in the browser. You actually have to up in to the Lab feature and then you can even configure your Google Play music in the browser to add music automatically in the top right, which is kind of nice. You can also download your music now from the web app and the little player has a new pop-out functionality that you can click the arrow on the bottom right on the corner of the UI and the pop out the player. Some nice upgrades there. A new Chrome experiment, called Chromecast Photowall. You can see it at g.co/photowall. So this is how it works. You got a Chromecast plugged in, and then you and your friends all have your android devices and you got this android app and then you can create a Photowall and everybody can start adding photos to that wall.

Leo: Neat!

Gina: Yeah, and it shows up on your TV, and it generates a YouTube video automatically when you’re done. And I think this also works just with your laptop as well if you don’t have Chromecast.

Kevin P: Yeah, we did that at Cowork Buffalo the other day. It got a little anarchic so we had to shut it down, but it’s pretty awesome.

Gina: Is it pretty awesome? So the Android app doesn’t have the best review in the Play store - we were talking about this last time about Android - but it looks really neat and it does seem like more of an experiment in the most stable app in the world, but Kevin I haven’t tried it so I’m glad to hear that you had it going at Cowork Buffalo and it worked.

Kevin P: Yeah, the setup is a little wonky, especially when you have to type in a code on your Android and then make sure you have the right Chromecast and stuff, but when it’s working it’s pretty neat. You’re all literally just kind of pin boarding in front of each other.

Leo: What happened that you had to stop? People put up naked pictures of themselves?

Kevin P: It’s a co-working space. A lot of sensitivities and sensibilities that play, so someone’s got a step in and be the police.

Gina: There is no one okaying photos they just go.

Kevin P: I think you can make it private, but then why are you hosting your own private Photowall? Like if you want to show people your vacation sides and force them to watch I guess. I don’t know.

Leo: You must watch this!

Kevin P: No, it’s really fun when it’s working. It’s very experimental but totally fun.

Gina: It sounds a lot like Google Plus Events where everybody can contribute their photos to add to a particular event. Like you’re having a picnic or something. I don’t know if that’s still around, I think it is.

Kevin P: One quarter of your event will email you and say they never got the invite, so…

Gina: Well, on that note, Google Drive adds image editing features in Slides and Drawings. This will just allow you to do basic editing tasks without having to leave the app. That means you can crop, apply shape masks and more from inside a presentation or drawing. You can also add borders. So, a little extras there for docs for Slides and Drawings users. And finally I know you’ve been waiting for this forever. I know this is what you wanted in Gmail forever. Pinterest for your inbox!

Leo: Ahhh!

Gina: The Gmail promotions tab is getting a little visual makeover. This is a test of the new design that switches from being a list-based view to a grid with big images, which of course Google is now caching on their servers right? So they’ve got all the images. So it shows images from the emails that will make it easier to see exactly what the message is promoting. And the grid view makes it easier to scroll through a lot of messages with infinite scrolling. And you can sign up to try this test. It’s a field trial so you have to opt into it. And you’ll be able to toggle between the traditional list view and the grid view within the promotions tab. In this test is just for desktop right now. I almost never look at my promotions tab, but hey. If you’re into coupons and promotions, this sounds cool.

Leo: Where do we sign up? In the labs? Because I don’t see it in the labs, in my Gmail.

Gina: There is a long link, sorry.

Leo: Well, if you go to the Google mail blog, you can get that link. I guess. All right.

Gina: Oh sorry.

Leo: A more visual way to view your spam. Thank you, Google. It’s at g.co/gmailfieldtrial is the shortened URL. And then you have to click join field trial, and then if you’re accepted. “Yes, I want to join the field trial.” And if you’re accepted they let you do it. If you are accepted, you’ll see a message in your promotions tab when this feature is turned on. g.co/gmailfieldtrial.

Gina: I opted in and I do not have it yet.

Leo: Let me check my email. Because I might be better than you.

Gina: You might be.

Leo: Not yet, not there yet.

Kevin M: I’m trying with my backup Google account, because it’s basically all spam.

Leo: Yeah, that’s why it’s perfect for that. All the stuff from promotions is spam, isn’t it? Isn’t that what it means?

Gina: It’s spam you signed up for. I don’t know that Google would call it spam. Let’s see. I have multiple accounts going on here, so… But that’s all I got.

Leo: And that, my friends, is what we call the Google change log. Ladies and gentlemen will take a break and come back with more. Kevin Purdy is here. We’re going to make Kevin say something. Maybe you could do a song from Grease.

Kevin P: One or two.

Leo: Or High School Musical, actually.

Kevin P: I don’t want to age myself, but I would be more familiar with Grease.

Leo: Kevin marks is also here - and listen for the Birdsong. Say the secret word and win a starling. And Jeff Jarvis from his beautiful library in upstate New York. I don’t know where it is. - upstate New Jersey, downstate eastside. And of course, from Brooklyn, Gina Trapani.

Our show brought to you by Squarespace. The secret behind some of the most beautiful websites in the world. That’s why Squarespace says “A better web starts with your website.” The hosting, of course - we never see a Squarespace site go down and I know I’m an expert on bringing sites down. Never a Squarespace site, so it’s great hosting. But it’s also great software running on top of it. That means it’s always secure, always up to date and always being improved. New features, new designs, better support. 25 beautiful templates to start with. If you want to see them, click the Get Started button at squarespace.com. You actually can use this free for two weeks. Features like the logo creator tool which lets you design a logo for yourself. If you get a little confused at any point, you can easily talk to support. At their 24/7, by email, chat, phone. Plus a completely redesigned customer help site for easier access to self-help articles and video workshops. Every Squarespace site has a couple of features. All the templates include mobile responsive design. That means they’ll look great at any size. Anything from an iPhone to a 30 inch display to Times Square, baby. But also they all have e-commerce. Even the least expensive eight dollar a month plan has e-commerce. This means it’s great for a nonprofit, a cash wedding registry, a school fund drive. The pricing really is right. For eight dollars a month, when you pay for the annual plan, you get a free custom domain name, e-commerce. The professional plan includes unlimited bandwidth and storage. Add a full e-commerce solution for 24 bucks a month including carrier shipping, calculators, label printing, integrated accounting. You’ve got the developer platform, so if you are a CSS or JavaScript wizard, you’ve got it all. They’ve got mobile apps, too. Really nice mobile apps that let you post and manage your metrics. I’ll tell you Squarespace has got it all going on. squarespace.com. Try it free for two weeks, no credit card required. When you decide to buy use our offer code twig and you get 10% off your new site. squarespace.com. A better web starts with your website at Squarespace.

You’re watching This Week in Google and we are talking about the Goog and the Cloud. There’s a lot of news about Google, not just Google but Google and Apple, Google Apple Intuit, Clear Channel, Comcast, eBay, Microsoft, Adobe. Apparently they’ve been colluding. Violating antitrust law by agreeing not to poach each other’s employees. And the really nasty part, we’ve seen this before - this antitrust case has been going on for some years - is the email from Steve Jobs to Eric Schmidt, then CEO of Google saying – Oh, you got it! What it that? Oh, you were in the class!

Kevin M: I was in the class. I was working for Google at the time.

Leo: My God!

Gina: Wow!

Leo: So tell us, Kevin Marks, why this was a bad thing for you?

Kevin M: It wasn’t a particularly bad thing for me. Google paid me fairly well.

Leo: Had you been looking for another job at Apple…

Kevin M: The thing is if you actually read the transcripts of what they were saying, it was fairly damning.

Leo: Oh, the smoking gun is horrible!

Kevin M: And they’re well aware of what they were doing. There’s Eric Schmidt saying, “Let’s do this verbally so we don’t leave a paper trail.” But they’re basically saying, “We’re all friends here. We shouldn’t recruit from each other’s companies.” The effect is basically that of forming a cartel. And it’s interesting reading Horowitz’s book, which is a great book, The Hard Thing About Hard Things, on being a CEO. The one piece in that that made me go “Wait a second”, was a chapter in which he talks about not poaching people from your friends. And you read that in the light of this, it made me think about how far reaching it is. From their point of view, you don’t want to annoy these other companies and get into a bidding war because it raises the price of engineers. But as an engineer, it’s like “Yeah, please raise my price.”

Leo: Raise my price! Yeah.

Kevin M: “Please fight over me.” And that’s effectively what happens when they do these acquihires. They end up getting into these bidding wars for a company to get the engineers. And those are the ones who benefit. And I suspect this is the unexpected consequence of what they’ve done by deciding not to bid against each other and hiring a whole host of engineers, they’re creating a reason for people to leave and go instead and get hired that way. So I think they’ve probably shot themselves in the foot. I’m fairly sure this is this is going to be a lawsuit some lawyers will make a lot of money out of it and they’ll be a settlement and -

Leo: Maybe not. This is the Department of Justice suing here. This is the US government. This is antitrust law. There is a class-action suit as well. This is a classic violation of antitrust law. Everybody knows this rule. Steve Jobs was apparently furious that… Here’s the email from Sergey Brin, “So I got another irate call from Jobs today. I don’t think we should let that determine our hiring strategy, but I thought I’d let you know. Basically he said, If you hire a single one of these people this means war. In any case, let’s not make any new offers or contact new people at Apple until we’ve had a chance to discuss.” Eric Schmidt agrees. He says, “I got a call from Meg Whitman over at eBay, let’s do this orally.” The one that’s really reprehensible is Eric Schmidt writing to Steve Jobs saying, “Don’t worry we fired that person that offered an Apple employee a job. They were out of here within one hour. We’re going to make a public an example of them.”  And Jobs sending back a little smiley face. And then Larry Page says, “Gosh I never got a smiley space from Steve.”

Kevin P: One thing that amazes me about a paper trail like this is that publicly-traded companies that you assume have these huge structures and delegation and so many committees and shareholders meetings, but the way this article reads it’s like Steve calls Larry, Larry tells Eric “Hey Eric. Got some friction over here from Steve.” Steve is like “Yeah, I heard from Meg, too”. Like it’s a clubhouse.

Leo: Very much so.

Kevin P: Like it’s not multibillion-dollar companies with hundreds of thousands of employees.

Leo: Here’s the email from Steve Jobs: “Eric, I’d be very pleased if your recruiting department would stop doing this. Thanks, Steve.” The next day Schmidt sends an email to Google’s top HR people, “I believe we have a policy of no recruiting from Apple. This is a direct inbound request. Can you get this stopped and let me know why this is happening? I need to send a response back to Apple quickly. Let me know as soon as you can.” Then they respond, “The person who contacted the Apple employee will be terminated within the hour. We’re going through your records to make sure she didn’t contact anyone else. Please extend my apologies to Steve Jobs. This was an isolated incident.” Then Steve sends back the smiley face.

Jeff: Wonder if anybody’s yet surfaced that fired that HR person?

Leo: Boy, you know, that would be interesting.

Gina: Doesn’t somebody in HR say “Hm, that sounds weird. Why are we doing this?”

Kevin P: No, because that’s what Steve Jobs is like.

Leo: And they know it’s illegal. They know it’s illegal. It is a clear violation of antitrust law. There is no, “Oh, we didn’t know that. You can’t do that? OH, I didn’t know that.” They knew that.

Kevin M: That was interesting about Horwitz’s book. When you’re a company of 20 people, not poaching your friends’ startups employees makes a bit of sense. You don’t actually want to do that. And the problem is, as these companies grow, they forget they are now behemoths. Microsoft was a classic for this. They always thought they were a startup, even the point where they were powerful and conspiring to knock other companies over. Apple and Google and Facebook are like major employers around here. They employ thousands and thousands of people. At some point, what seems like a reasonable “Okay, let’s not enter a war over this” that becomes this power structure, but the companies still think of themselves as small and scrappy. And that’s the piece that’s tricky. Because when these companies grow like this, it does creep up on you.  And the challenge is to put structure in place in time. A similar thing with the GetHelp fiasco last week, where they’ve grown to be this huge company without a management structure, still behaving like a bunch of kids hanging out. And that’s blown up in their face, because they’re ridiculously unprofessional.

Leo: Mike Arrington’s at it again.  I just love this.

Gina: Oh, we’re going to do the Arrington story, aren’t we? Let’s do it.

Leo: Let’s do it! So, it goes back to the story we’ve been talking about for a couple days now. Microsoft had an employee who is leaking code to a French blogger. He was very loyal to the company, doing it on Hotmail, Microsoft MSN messenger and Sky Drive, so Microsoft said, “Well let’s just look at that. Let’s take a look at that hot mail thread “, and read his stuff. Obviously you don’t need a subpoena to read your own email server. We don’t do that, though, unless there’s a clear violation of law. But from now on we’re going to have it live up to the standard that we would have to do if we were trying to read Google’s mail. The standard subpoena, we’re going to hire council who’s a former judge, we’ll review all requests before it happens. Not that it happens often. So Mike Harrington’s reading about that and he says, “I have first-hand knowledge of this. A few years ago I’m nearly certain Google accessed my Gmail account.”

Jeff: I love that phrase. I’m nearly certain.

Leo: I’m almost positive. Mike, by the way, this is his MO.  A little paranoid. “Nearly certain Google accessed my Gmail account after I broke a major story about Google. A couple weeks afterwards the source approached me in a very inebriated state said that he or she had been asked by Google if they were the source. They denied it, but they were then shown the email that proved they were the source and a little while later was unemployed.” Google says no we don’t do that. No that never happened. Google General Counsel told Liz Gaines at Recode, “Mike makes a serious allegation here, that Google opened the email messages in his Gmail account to investigate a leak. While our terms of service might legally permit such act…” That’s kind of a point to underscore – “All email services have these words in there that allows us to do this we’ve never done it and it’s hard for me to imagine circumstances where we would investigate a leak in that way.”

Kevin M: There are two things about that. One is, how would you change or terms of service to make that not possible in the future? Will the Chief Counsel please do that? Because you should not have been let to do that. The other piece of it is we did not investigate it in this way. What will have happened is that they will have had some kind of security team go and look at this, and that may have been an outsourced team that went and did something more fishy. They may have gone and looked through the employee’s mail.

Kevin P: It’s far more likely that they looked at the email on the employee’s computer, not on the Gmail server.

Leo: Okay, but Arrington said that the email he sought the party was sent from a non-Google account to Arrington’s Gmail account.

Kevin M: But if you hire a private investigator, what you think they’re going do? They’re going to go and try and hack the employees email.

Leo: You don’t really have to hack it. Just look at it.

Kevin M: Clearly, he was like clumsy and drunk according to Mike.

Kevin P: The drunk thing. Why does that need to be…? Couldn’t you just say the employee came up to me at a party.

Leo: This is Mike Arrington! He’s making it colorful.

Kevin M: He has to be a dick about it.

Kevin P: Well, there’s my answer.

Leo: Kevin and I have some experience in this matter.

Kevin M: You don’t want to bring that up. He’s a good journalist and knows interesting things, but he will grandstand a little bit about this - like the way he got all the Twitter internal emails. And he’s not in the greatest position to grandstand about this, given that he got leaked with this internal email . . .

Jeff: That’s a good point.

Leo: We should just say, your email is never, and has never been, private. And if you want to send private email, there’s encryption. So use it. Because those are really the facts.

Kevin M: What Google should say is, if we don’t want to do this and were not going to do this, then we should change our terms of service. And it shouldn’t be us saying change or terms of service to be like this it would be, “Okay General Counsel, you said it that we don’t do this, therefore change the terms of service so you can’t.”

Kevin P: As John Gora said, it is interesting that they chose to respond at all. To this particular allegation of email reading, whereas there are $6000 that exist on the Web in some form.  But they said “We didn’t do this” to Mike Arrington’s claim.

Kevin M: It was re-reported and spread out and went out of control.

Leo: Let me look at the smoking gun on the Google terms of service. Let’s see if we can find that. Apparently Yahoo, Microsoft, Google, all do this. They all have these terms in their terms of service. Let’s see. Oh well, I can’t quite find it, but it says “under certain circumstances” -

Kevin M: And that may well have been put in because they get subpoenas etc. The very common one is someone’s going through a divorce and they subpoena the spouse’s emails. And that goes on all the time.

Leo: For a subpoena I understand, I think the issue is . . .

Kevin M: The Microsoft thing was that they didn’t require investigators to get a subpoena.  They reported this thing to the investigators and said “Oh, we’ll just go and look at this journalist.”  So they didn’t get the clear separation of powers thing going. Google has been good about that in the past.  Making sure to come back for a court order type stuff. And I don’t think that they would have - I’d be surprised if they did that internally.

Leo: Microsoft’s response I thought was fairly good.  They changed their terms of service. They still allow it, but they’re going to have a high standard, etc., etc.

Kevin M: That’s the problem. “Trust us; we’re going to do this internally.”  Same people who were doing this and firing people and conspiring in that way, it just makes me a little suspicious.

Leo: The M8 – I bet you guys talked about this a little bit on All About Android last night.  The new HTC One?

Gina: We did.

Leo: You are an HTC One owner?

Gina: I am.

Kevin M: It’s a really bad name, isn’t it?

Gina: The M-eight?

Leo: They are offering in the Google Play store, the M8, because - Oh, Mate, I didn’t get that.

Jeff: I didn’t either.

Leo: It was the M7, last year’s. You own an M7

Gina: Yeah.

Leo: So you can get it from three of the four big carriers.  And there’s a Google Play edition. Which is great news!

Gina: It’s in my cart at the moment.

Jeff: Oh, really!

Leo: You haven’t pushed the button.

Gina: No, I haven’t checked out.

Kevin M: Why is it nicer than a Nexus 5?

Leo: I could go on and on.

Jeff: Do. Sell me on it, man.

Kevin P: There’s a Gizmodo post that is side by side and a gif that has the photos from the Nexus 5 and the new HTC One, giffing in and out and in and out and that’s all I need to know.

Leo: Camera – well, camera?  There’s a little bit of a debate about the camera. It’s similar to the one you have Gina, the old HTC One camera. Still 4 megapixels, although the front camera is 5 megapixels.  But they’re doing super pixel thing. They are putting two pick-ups on the back so you can have selective focus on your images, which is odd, again.

Gina: You can change your focus after the fact.

Leo: Yeah, the second sensor is actually a depth sensor.  So, something’s going on there. I’m not sure what.

Jeff: You could also just take - the things in the foreground can be treated one way and the rest of the photo can be treated another way, because if I understand this –

Leo: Yeah, but it’s still a 4 megapixel camera and a lot of the issues I think that I had with the M7 are still there.  It’s good in low light, except it overexposes. There are still some issues. I’m not sure that it’s a great camera.  Do you really like your camera on the M7?

Gina: I think the camera’s okay. 

Leo: It’s the ultra-pixel thing. I’m not sure I buy it.

Gina: It definitely doesn’t focus the way I’d like. It’s okay.  My daughter likes to throw my phone a lot, and I can’t boot it up today, that’s why the M8 is in my cart.

Leo: That gives you a pretty good excuse.

Gina: It seemed like a good excuse to me.  My problem with the M7 is the battery life and the Verge and everyone are saying that the battery life on the M8 is way better.

Leo: It’s a bigger battery and it’s also using the new Qualcomm quick-charging capability. It comes with Quickcharge 1, which is not great, but the new Quickcharge 2 which apparently is just a software update means it can charge twice as fast.

Gina: Yeah, that’s really nice.  I’m not big on cases, but I love that Dot View case.

Leo: Yeah, that’s kind of neat.

Gina: Yeah.

Leo: So that gives you a dot, you know small, kind of like the Moto X, where you have a version of the screen that does not use up the power so you can if it's...

Jeff: But hold on Gina, hold on Gina.

Gina: Kind of like a light bright.  

Leo: It's like a light version, it is.

Jeff: We're going to torture you more than this, because when you bought the, that one, the Nexus 5 wasn't out, the Moto X wasn't out as I remember. So, now that you, you have a panoply of choices. S5, Moto X... 

Gina: Yes.

Leo: Okay. For the Moto sound, you've got the two speakers on the front. That's a big difference. 

Gina: I love the speakers on the front. 

Leo: Sound is really much better on the, on the HTC One, both the 8 and the 7. Do you ever...

Kevin M: It's costing twice what the Nexus 5 does.

Leo:  It's 700 bucks.

Kevin M: Instead of 350.

Leo:  You can put an SD card in it, which you can't do in the Nexus 5. 

Jeff:  That, that much is also right.

Gina: That's right! I'm sorry... I thought I liked Nexus 5...

Leo: I think the screen's better. I like the screen better. It's 441 dots per inch. Very high res screen. 

Kevin M: It's the same as this. I mean they're both... 

Leo: They're both 1080p.

Kevin M: Yeah!

Leo:  I guess it’s exactly the same isn’t it. They're both 5 inch screens. Okay.

Kevin M: Yeah. Okay.

Gina: And I think I shared with you guys, I bought the HTC One because of the design. I was completely just suckered in. I just think it's a beautiful phone. 

Leo:  Well, you'll like the M8. I played with it yesterday. It's very nice. Even nicer...

Gina: That metal on the back...

Leo: Yeah, it's even... I think it's even nicer frankly.

Gina: Yeah, yeah. A little softer than the, than the, not as quite as rectangular, it has more rounded edges than the...

Leo: Yes. More roundy, feels good in the hand. Yeah. I think if you're getting the Google play edition, I think you're spending 350 bucks for better, better hardware design. Because otherwise it's the same software, right?

Jeff: Yep.  

Gina: Yeah, Well the, yeah, the Google play edition is just the same as the Nexus 5.  

Leo: is the same as the Nexus 5. Yeah.

Gina: yeah. Same as the Nexus 5. 

Leo: yeah. Plain android. 

Gina: Exactly. 

Leo: I'm actually. I actually got a Verizon edition, because I like the, the HTC Sense. I want to see the new Sense. 

Gina: You like Zoes, right?

Leo: I love Zoes.

Gina: OK. Zoe.

Leo: Apparently they've improved, improved the Zoes as well. You know what's sad is this is, I think these really are great phones. They’re comparable to an Iphone. I mean they're really among the group, but because they don't have the marketing budget for Sam-, that Samsung does, they just don't, they get no attraction.

Kevin P: HTC itself is not doing so well. Every time I see a new story about them, right financially and market share wise, they're struggling. 

Leo: They're struggling. Yeah.

Kevin P: Despite putting out phone after ph-, a few phones now, where every side is almost in agreement about how good they are and how well designed.

Leo: Yeah. So 32 gig, a Nexus 5 is 399.  32 Gig HTC One M8 is 699. So...

Kevin M: So, is this round about...

Leo: 300 bucks more. 

Jeff: Would you push Gina to a Moto X, Leo?

Leo: No, she likes a...

Jeff: She's beyond that, right?

Gina: You, you love the Moto X though Leo.

Leo: I do, but I have a feeling, I maybe trading it in for the M8 IOS.

Gina: Oh really?

Leo: yeah. Well it’s, you all see, I got to get, I got the M8 with all that Sense stuff on it, so we'll see.

Gina: Yeah, that, I don't know that I'd buy a 5 right now. I feel like, you know, I can wait till after Google IO.

Leo: Oh. Yeah, you might get one in the mail, under your seat. 

Gina: Yeah, there might be, you know, there might be something new I presume, right? But that's always the case. 

Leo: Well, there will be a new Moto X this summer. 

Jeff: Boy, I've used the voice stuff on my, on my, I don't have a, as good a voice as you have. But, on my Nexus 5, I was using it today to get in a chat, tell you I was late coming, just dictating emails. Works pretty amazing though. 

Leo: yeah. Well the voice on android is great, period. We all know that. Somebody's getting a Skype call which is bizarre because we're all on Skype. 

Jeff:  I know.

Leo: Google IO is open for business. Well, it will be soon. Registration opens April 8th. It’s going to be random once again. 

Gina: Random.

Leo: Random. April 8th through April 10th. I don’t know why they have the extra two and a half days. 

Kevin: It doesn't make sense. 

Jeff:  So you can play the stupid game, before you sign in.

Leo: Is that what you have to do now? You have to play the game?

Jeff: It's not really a game. I mean, I went through them earlier on to get in, and you just kind of click it a bunch of times and it goes around and around and around. 

Leo:  It goes “What goes around must come around”. Do I have to do this to win a...

Jeff: No, it just kind of then goes through one of...

Leo: Gather these elusive sub-atomic particles.

Jeff: So, just click on the big thing and it...

Leo: Oh, I’m gathering them, because Google is gathering every bit of atom in the universe to become part of the new Google Universe 2.0. Larry Page's island. Now what?

Jeff: Now it will open another one. And, now you're going to...

Leo: Ooh! Who spends so much time in the GooglePlex?

Jeff: Exactly.

Leo: Right in this craft.

Jeff: Click, and you're making, you're making a...

Leo: a tetra-tomala-heden, poly-heden-mala-deden... This is what my pants are made of.

Jeff: Click on the pink thing in the bottom right. It will open a box to tell you what's happen...

Leo: Silicon. Build up the atoms to create a full crystalline structure of this highly abundant element. Click the blue balls to make more. This is beautiful. I don't know. Is this, Jeez, imagine how good this would be on Oculus Rift. Now what? I’m in their neural network. Add raw data to see what this networks processors can come up with. Okay. Sucking in the raw data. It came up with a rubix cube. Now, a doughnut. What is this? This is so stupid. 

Kevin P: We’ve entered into a post NSA world that goggle has to bunch of games for your app to gather everything from into your... keep it all safe...

Leo: Yeah. A sphere. Now what? Tap the earth to see how we connect with one another, to share ideas instantly. With balloons, project loon. What’s the point? Oh motos, and now satellite technology. Soon we will travel to Mars, and this strange jigsaw puzzle planet. 

Kevin P: Or possibly, the death star.

Leo: Oh, the death star. This is like, I feel like... oh, my god. 

Jeff: Yeah, and now it just starts over again.

Leo: What?

Jeff: After all that, you're back to the, back to the...

Leo: Oh, I should have just scrolled down. That was the test. That was the test. Scroll down. Oh, hey! Wow! Jeez. Let’s break stuff. Experience I/O. 

Kevin P:... the Facebook chatter? 

Leo: Getting to I… was it? They are round. 

Gina: ... break stuff, move fast and break stuff. 

Leo: Is that was Facebook says?

Gina: Yeah, yeah, move fast and...

Leo: Let's reboot. Let’s hack. Let’s grab a drink. 

Kevin M: If it's broken, break it is the Google oath I think.

Leo: If it's broken, break it more? 

Kevin M: Well, the, the point, if you find something broken, demonstrate that it's broken so people fix it, is the...

Leo: Oh, this is good. So there's no rush this year. Just apply to attend anytime during the two day window and we'll randomly select who gets to come. You, no. You, yes. 

Gina: It's pretty, it's pretty good of them to capture a lot of data about it, and people are interested in going IO. 

Leo: Yeah. 

Gina: It's also 900 dollars for general admission. 

Leo: They don’t mention that. There’s no price tag at this point. Okay, so we’re going to wait and use a binary clock. I think that...

Gina: It's on the, it's on the help page. And there's actually a press pass for Press One on the help page as well. 

Leo: There is? I guess I should fill that out. 

Gina: And you need to use Google Wallet, use Google Plus in order to apply. And it’s academic admission is 300. I mean, this is way better than rushing to try to register, you know at a...

Leo: Yes. 

Gina: ...moment in time but...

Leo: Yes. 

Gina: ...you are competing for the ability to have the privilege to pay 900 dollars to go.

Leo: Lot's more stories. I'm going to let each of you nominate a story from our long list, that you'd like to talk about. We’re going to get Rayban Google glass, Oakley Google glass. That's kind of interesting, Glass is, Google's doing a deal with Luxotica which makes all of the major consumer glasses brands. 

Gina: I want to talk about the cloud computing stuff a little bit.

Leo: Okay.

Kevin M: Yeah, that looks interesting.

Gina: Yeah. I actually, I went to, I got an email from Google a few weeks ago saying that they were doing a cloud platform live. the event's going to be in San Francisco but they were going to do, like, satellite viewings, like with streaming video, like Google New York, Google LA, a few other offices. And they were going to do a live demo on stage showing how to connect an android app to a cloud service, and that they'd found Todo.txt, and they thought Todo.txt would be a great candidate to do that, and was it okay with me if they, you know live coded the cloud plug-in for Todo.txt? And, you know would I like to attend the event? And I was like absolutely, I mean, whatever, the app is open source anyway, they don’t really need to ask my permission. So it was really neat. I went to Google New York yesterday, and just kind of watched the live stream, and there was quite a few people there. They announced a bunch of really cool features, some of which, I like, really didn’t even get my head around, because I’m just not this of engineer, and it does this kind of op stuff. But huge, huge price drops in cloud computing services, virtual machines. And you know as, as an OE these, these events, you know it was the competition that I had, with the Google group kind of in the back, in the hallway for five minutes that was way more informative than the actual presentation. But, you know the nut of it is that Google first of all is obviously taking on AWS. They, they want to take Google's internal operations, like all the systems they've set up to deploy code, to deploy servers. They want to turn that inside out and they want to offer that to companies, so, to startups. And they want everyone to sort of benefit from all the awesome automation that they do. And so, so this series of announcements yesterday, I think really lays the groundwork, I think, for some even bigger cloud platform stuff, that we're going to hear about at IO. Again this is like super back end systems kind of stuff. But some really, really neat stuff. And another thing, at the announcement that I found is that they're really embracing GetHop. They’ve stopped pushing developers toward co., Google.com. They say, you know, GetHop is where the code is. GetHop is where the community is. They’re doing continuous integration, and checkouts, and integration with GetHop doing poll requests, and requests. They, they're hosting a lot of their own open source projects on GetHop, which I was impressed by, and surprised by. I really liked that they were saying, you know, we're going to go to where the people are, versus ask them to come to us. So, anyway it was, it was a really cool event. And, yeah, they forked Todo.txt, and they picked it up to the Google cloud. 

Leo: Good!

Gina: It was kind of fun. I’m still awaiting my poll request, but...

Kevin M: So, yeah. I will say, because I want that. Yes.

Leo: Yeah. That’s nice. 

Kevin M: I don’t like using drop box. 

Leo: So, they, huge... these price drops compare, kind of mirror the price drops on the consumer storage that they, they announced last week on Google drive. And Google said at this event that up to now, pricing on this stuff has not fallen much lower, but now it's going to start falling much lower, which means dramatic drops. You, know, halved every 18 months or something. 

Gina: And they've got AWS in their sights. I mean the first question that they got, was like, are you going to offer tools? You know, a person in the audience got up and went to the mike and said, are you going to provide tools to move form AWS? And you know, the Google on stage said, we will provide tools to switch from other providers. Like, you know, they wouldn't even say Amazon. 

Leo: Right! Although Amazon's event is today, I might point out. 

Gina: Well, Amazon just, just announced virtual workspaces, which is really cool. I think that the point that...

Leo: I’m very intrigued.

Gina: Desktop. Yeah, you deploy a full desktop into the cloud. So, it's like you could have a windows desktop running on an Amazon workspace and get to it through your, through your Chromebook.

Jeff: Chromebook.

Gina: Pretty neat!

Leo:  Well, I think not on the Chromebook. I think it's not compatible with the Chromebook, the last thing I read, so...

Gina: Seriously?

Leo: Yeah, which is kind of interesting. I’m not sure exactly what that all meant. I read a long thread about, and it wasn't clear, but, yeah, apparently there was an issue with the Chromebook.

Gina: They said any device with an internet connection. So, that will be interesting. 

Leo: Yeah.

Jeff: Because there's an actual technical issue or a political issue? 

Leo: I, I don’t know. You know what, I’m going to have to, I read this on Google plus today. The idea is though that, for instance, a business could have a provisioned work space that you as a worker, or a student -could do it with a school - could log in to on any internet connected device. And there's your apps including Microsoft Office, for instance if you wanted or whatever. There’s all your data, for a company it means the data’s stored safely in the Google cloud instead of on, on some workers local desktop. 

Gina: The Amazon cloud.

Leo: I’m sorry. Yeah, the Amazon cloud. Although, I got to say Google’s got managed workspaces, managed virtual machines. I think that probably, they can respond by doing something almost identical.

Kevin M: But they don't...

Gina: Yeah, Google...

Kevin M: Sorry. I think Google is not saying they run Windows in our cloud at all, whereas Amazon is saying sure we can run Windows in our clouds but we're agnostic about that. So, that, they may be pushing that difference. You know, the...

Gina: The upshot is we’re in the middle of a war, and it's great for everybody, right? Because prices are going to go down, the tools are going to get better. It, it's great for everybody. 

Leo: We want a war.

Gina: Yeah. We want a war. This is good for consumer products. 

Kevin M: ...for all of these things which is good. That’s definitely true. 

Gina: Particularly for small businesses. 

Leo: So, this is actually in response to your post Gina. It would work well with Chrome OS, but doesn’t work with it all. You can use Chrome desktop sharing, if you first connected form some other client. 

Kevin P: So, you could point your Windows machine at in, and then Chrome into your Windows machine, which is pointed at Amazon?

Leo: I, I don't know if this guy, Charles knows what he's talking about or not. But, that's not encouraging, if that's the case. Yeah. That would be anti -competitive I would imagine. 

Kevin M: No, no. I suspect it's just that nobody's bothered to install yet. So, it's not a big...

Leo: Right. This says works with Windows, Mac, Ipad, Kindle Fire, Android tablets. 

Kevin P: Kindle Fire.

Gina: So, you need some sort of client app. It's not, not a browser based...

Kevin M: It's the browser based...

Leo: Ah! That’s probably it.

Gina: That's what I was; I assumed it was browser based.

Kevin M: That’s probably... so it's not browser based, then, that's a shame. So then it won’t work with a bunch of other things too. 

Leo: It's a good deal. For 35 bucks a month you get a single virtual CPU, 3.75 gigs of memory, 50 Gigs of user storage, Internet Explorer 9. Really? Firefox, Adobe Flash and Adobe Reader. That’s the standard bundle. You can get Office Professional for 75 bucks a month. 

Jeff: Things I never use. 

Leo: So, it's basically windows 7. You’re getting windows 7. 

Jeff: Beep. Ah!

Leo: Woohoo! 

Kevin M: Meanwhile Microsoft is taking the word windows out of the Zune.

Leo: Yeah. Now it's just Microsoft in a Zune. I don’t know what that means. 

Kevin M: Well, it means they're trying to, pitch the people who wanted to do Linux hosting there, which they've been able to do for a while but, this is good. The fact that we've got free suppliers that run stuff in the cloud, and don’t require us to use their technology as much as they did, is good. Because you get rid, Google app engine was originally, you have to in our own weird ways, in our own weird libraries, because then you can then use Google stuff and it can scale for you, and wouldn’t that be lovely? But people said, yeah, that'd kind of nice, but I don’t want to write in that weird way.  I just rather write things I know". And what’s changed with the Google cloud engine stuff is that they're saying, “Okay, we'll deploy Sequel, we'll deploy Cassandra, we'll deploy a bunch of other things". And they, they did a demo last week of, deploying some insane, like a million concurrent clients on a Cassandra entrance, instance in Google cloud which was, which is pretty impressive. So, there's, there's this new flavor.

Gina: Yeah. There was this little animation on the screen. I'll admit, I was multi-tasking, but there was this animation on the screen. They're like, "Okay, yeah, we're now inserting 45000 rows per, you know millisecond into our database, and look, it's going to do a live migration right over, and look, the animation is not even going to stop, and oh, my God, look , it didn’t". And everybody claps! And I was sort of like, what? It’s like one of these things is just so impossible to demo, you know, but okay, live migration happening, like, I believe you!

Kevin M: Well, it's also like they have to create a million, a million clients a well, in order to do this. That’s how fast it is.

Gina: Right, like, let’s deploy a million clients to run this...

Kevin M: So we got a new server, and then we got to deploy another million clients over here to attack our server. OK. I'm glad you guys are doing that. I don't want to do that. That’s good! The message is, "We deal with this, and you don't have to", which is... Yeah, that's the message I want as a, as a developer.

Gina: Right.

Kevin M: Doing that op stuff is really annoying. I've done it. It’s not fun at all and having people, specialists do it is a great thing. 

Gina: Yeah, and this is what this particular product manager was saying to me was that, you know, at Google; they don’t have ops teams, like they've automated the crap out of everything, right? And everything just kind of works, like they've got teams of, fleets of Site Reliability Engineers, SRE's right, but this ops stuff they don't do and nobody wants to do the ops stuff. And nobody should have to do the op stuff, like, and because they've optimized the crap out of it, and automated it all, they want to offer those services to everyone else, so that other start-ups don’t have to have ops folks doing migration. I was just, we just switched to AWS and I spent, I was up all night on Sunday migrating the database with my, with my ops person. And, you know, we had to take the site down for four hours. I mean, you know it was the middle of the night, but that's, but that’s something that really shouldn't have to happen, ever. So, I...

Leo: So, you appreciate this?

Gina: Yeah, I mean yeah, absolutely. I mean, I have somebody who's really good at this kind of thing. I just sort of, you know, ran some scripts and stayed and chat, and ate some, you know, some pizza, but...

Leo: Chinese food.

Gina: Yeah, exactly. But...

Leo: I forgot. You’re a Bu...You can’t eat pizza.

Gina: But it is, it is the works kind of work. So, the more that you can automate it, the more that Google can kind of open source their, their processes. It's worth the money. It’s worth the investment. 

Leo: Any other stories before we move on, you guys want to talk about? Jeff, anything, yeah, on your mind?

Jeff:  Well, I’ve got two things, Pew mapping twitter conversations, I’m interested in the analysis.

Leo: Pew, Pew is a non-profit. Does research on how we use the internet. 

Jeff: Does great, great stuff.

Leo: Great stuff. And, they're talking about political stuff?

Jeff: Ah, just conversations in general. So they worked with, oh, who was it?

Leo: Well, for instance they say that...

Jeff:  NodeXL. Social media research foundation which created NodeXL, which has logged the data and... So, they see various kinds of conversations. They see polarized crowd. We've heard a lot about that. We're talking about...

Leo: He said, she said.

Jeff: Yeah...

Leo: You idiot, you moron. Yeah. 

Jeff: And then they map a tight crowd, with highly connected internet people. So, it’s not as if to say that, that you know there's just one kind of conversation. 

Leo: Conferences. South by South West tweets for instance. 

 Jeff: Right. Ah, brand clusters. They’ve screened every brand there is out there; and community clusters.

Leo: I'd like to buy these maps and put them on my wall.

Jeff: Aren’t they pretty? 

Leo: Yeah.

Jeff: Then finally broadcast networks. You know, when important stuff go out and the hub and spoke. And support networks, that’s interesting to. You know, the whole Comcast, Dell and so on. Those kinds of conversations supporting one or the other. So, I just found, they were pretty interesting to see the different kinds of conversation that do occur on twitter.

Leo: Ah, this could take a long download. I can tell that the interactive version is of this...

Jeff: And, I think we should probably mention, I think, just for, kind of the record, as far I'm concerned, I see it as an Edward Snowden victory that, on the path to victory, that the white house is looking at ending, bulk collection of our metadata. 

Leo: Well, that would be amazing. Well, I , I, we'll wait and see.

Jeff: Yeah, yeah.

Leo: At least, they're making the right sense. Good news for Pebble. I didn’t realize this is a success story. Pebble has sold 400,000 watches. And they're on track to double their revenues in 2014. 

Jeff: Well, if Facebook buys them, their revenue is going to get pissed. 

Leo: Yeah. Another kick-starter project I sank my money into. 

Kevin P: Yeah, this is quietly chipping away at the smart watch market, despite all the big noise coming out of both Google and Apple lately. 

Leo: Yeah. The Pebbles aren’t as sexy. They don’t do as much, and yet, people really love them. You’re wearing one, I see, Kevin. Chad's wearing one. 

Kevin P: Yes. This is a Pebble Steel. I , they're intentionally kind of minimalists, as opposed to all the, kind of, things you've been hearing about what might come out of Google and Android is, monitor every aspect of your health, and connect everything. And pebble just wants to go "Okay, all your text messages, we got those". 

Leo:  Chad, you still enamored of the Pebble?

Chad: I'm still in love with the pebble. Yeah. 

Leo: Why?

Chad: \It’s, it's, it does basically everything I need. It, it allows me do triage on my digital life as fast as it all comes in. And, so, instead of pulling out my phone, or if I’m in a rush, which happens all the time, where I'm trying to get somewhere, or I need to do something, that I, to focus on. Instead of pulling out my phone, interrupting my life, I can basically look down at my wrist and see whatever notification or whatever thing sort of popped in. And it's expandable, and the battery lasts a really long time. It's really simple, I really, I actually really, it's, this kind of blew me away. I love that it's not a touch screen. I really like that it has physical buttons because I can check something and then go straight back into doing whatever the heck I was doing before. I don’t need to worry about the screen wake time finally turning off, so that I don’t actually, accidentally like ads, and do something to it, or if I’m in bed, and I get a message I can look and then, and then, you know, go back to sleep or whatever. I'm not worried that the touch screen is going to create some... 

 Jeff: That’s a sad, that, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait right there Chad. That’s sad!

Chad: But that's what you do, I mean, I mean, everyone has a story...

Jeff: I, even I don’t pick up the phone when it buzzes. 

Chad: Well, yeah, or I mean...

Jeff: Well, you don't have to.

Chad: Yeah, I can look and see who it is. Oh, it's mom and this may sound...

Kevin P: They just released the 2.0, from where the 2.0 app , and app store, and they're starting to get a little bit interactive. Just a little bit, back and forth, so I have a watch space for an app on here called Glance. It shows the weather, shows the time, and when someone texts you, you can actually respond to them with one of your preset responses. So...

Leo: Oh, so, it has touch?

Jeff : No, no. 

Kevin P: No, it's preset responses. So, I can set... I can set the lower right button to mean...

Leo: So primitive. Wow!

Kevin P: You can't see my eyebrows on the audio feature.

Leo: Scary high school musical.

Kevin P: As Chad was saying, this is nice. It's nice to not have a touch screen. It's nice to not get completely out of your zone and to have to like, type out, like "Can't talk right now, Gina. Explaining Pebble to Leo." I can actually just hit the bottom right button...

Leo: And you already have that as a preset? 

Kevin P: Well, yeah. And I can tell you how the dog did it on his watch. And then you can say 10-4, and all kinds of stuff. 

Leo: It's real, I have to say it, with 400,000 units it’s probably beating anybody else in that space. 

Jeff: Yeah. Well, they're in best 5 for God's sakes. 

Kevin P: Probably beating the pants of the Galaxy Gear, if I guess.

Gina: Yeah, probably beating the Gear, which in and of itself is like, is awesome for them.

Leo: Yeah, good for Pebble. Good for Maker Studios, the YouTube network which produces PewDiePie. Sold it to Disney for half a million dollars. 

Jeff: For the record, that’s not PewDiePie.

Leo: That should be PewDiePie, but it's not. It's actually the founder of Maker Studios, who had a big payday. Hah! This puzzles me a little bit, because I would imag… Well, probably, they've got all these guys locked in, but I would imagine that they don't really own any of these shows. Maybe they do. That's why Walt Disney bought them. Alright, well, let's take a break. When we come back, we're going to get our Number, our tip, Kevin and Kevin can give us some products or something they're turned on by, as we wrap it up with this week's TWIG. Our show today brought to you by Atlassian, the folks who created the world's most powerful and customizable issue and project management system, Jira, J-I-R-A. It easily captures and organizes your workflow so you can prioritize and take action on what’s important while staying up to date with the activity going on around you. The hardest thing about talking about Jira, is it can do so many things. It's hard to really describe, believe me, you can use this. It lets you, if you've got a team, software development team, you can capture, organize and prioritize all the issues, tasks, features and bugs. It gives your team a simple intuitive interface for collaborating with one another in real time. Integrate your documents, your planning documents, your backlog, and all the code repository in one platform using Rest API's. Integration with GIT, so you can follow your code all the way from start to finish, to delivery in one single system. Expand infinitely in any direction with thousands of Jira add-ons including test management, time tracking, project management, hundreds of other uses. If you've got a big project in the works, follow along with 25,000 other companies. 70% of the Fortune 100, and NASA, and get Jira. And, avoid the problems of the mythical man month. Stay in the loop. Notifications by email, chat, at messenger or RSS, monitor streams of activity, self-updating reports and dash boards. Atlassian.com/TWIG for more information. A-T-L-A-S-S-I-A-N.COM/TWIG. Monthly plans start at $10 a month for up to 10 users. But, you could try it free for 30 days when you visit Atlassian.com/TWIG. Make life easy with Jira! Thank you Atlassian for your support of This Week in Google. Now we begin with Gina's Tip of the Week. 

Gina: Leo, you don't have you're pixel there, do you? You're not, you're not on your Pixel.

Leo: I don't. We're going to have to make Jeff do this.  

Gina: Yeah, I don't know. It’s like  quite unlike you to say. This is you know, this is something that, not a lot of people have in Chromebooks, but I thought it was really, really interesting. It’s especially interesting with the, with the Pixel. The Ctrl+Shift+Refresh, from OS rotates your browser so, 90 degrees.

Jeff: I think, I think it did it. It's a square, it's a square... Oh, no, it's 4:3, isn't it? Or 3:2?

Gina: Yes, you kind of hold it like a book and you can go up and down. I mean it's totally weird, and crazy, and probably that's something you could use, unless you were, I don't know, drinking your coffee in the morning and browsing the times or something, but still kind of cool, I felt.

Kevin M: If she cut Google, it would be on the chrome box, so the chrome box can drive a TV screen, which means it can give you a portrait, no-screen, that would be good.  

Gina: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That was...

Jeff: That would be a Step back, Gina. Oh no, now it's upside down. 

Leo: Oh, it goes all the way around?

Kevin P: Yeah, it keeps going.

Leo: It's very...

Gina: If you hooked up a keyboard and a, a mouse to it, I mean, I’ve seen a lot of developers who'd like to have their screens in portrait mode, right, because it'd get the longer scroll on their code.

Leo: How did we not know about this? That’s what puzzles me.

Gina: They tweeted about it today, and I was like, what? And I tried it on Pixel and I was like what?

Leo: Avid reader, press Control+Shift+Refresh.

Kevin M: So, so that would be good. 

Gina: It's particularly good on the Pixel because it's got the touch screen.

Leo: Yeah. 

Gina: …because, because typing like that doesn’t really work really well, but you do a, you know, scrolling works. 

Kevin P: If you’re on working something inappropriate, you can also...

 Gina: One other quick thing that I’m kind of excited about...

Leo: Hold on, hold on, Kevin’s saying something here. I don’t know if you can hear him. What did you say Kevin?

Gina: I'm sorry. 

Kevin P: I'm saying if you're looking at something inappropriate you, can then use your keyboard as your shield, so you make sure the person on the train sitting next to you can't see what you're looking at. 

Leo: It's upside down.

Kevin P: Right, just a tip for you commuters.

Jeff: I have had that problem lately. I’ve been watching shows on the path train coming back on my Nexus 7, and you know, just kind of cable shows, but you hit the sex scene, they're not even x-rated. So, you kind of feel a little awkward that the person sitting next to you sees what you're up... I had one do it twice on one train ride the other day. And totally naked, naked girls.

Leo: What else? 

Kevin M: So this is why you need the Occulus Rift. To sit there on the pot, that's right.

Leo: They still can here you go, woah! Jeff, did you have a number you'd like to share.

Jeff: Gina has something else, I think.

Leo: Oh, I'm sorry.

Gina: I, that's okay. I had one...

Leo: Oh, this one’s good. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. 

Gina: Yeah, this is pretty good. So, LastPass, which I know Leo, at least you know a lot, and you too Kevin Purdy. Their auto login to Android app's on the browser on Android just got way, way better. Like, it now, if you're subscribed to premium, which is like 12 bucks a year, it's literally like a dollar a month. Completely worth it. Well, it will auto fill your username and password into apps, and into your browser on android in the latest update. You have to enable the Pass abilities so it can do that screen overlay, and it can detect, you know, there's username and password getting, just getting displayed, but this is huge. This is really huge. 

Leo: This started with 3.2, like... oh. Yeah.

Kevin M: Oh, you can totally hack that…because that was the thing was putting me off using it, because the... right. It wouldn't hear that, and I’ve got...

Leo: Well, you just have to open LastPass, copy the password, basically in...

Kevin M: Well, but that’s like a...

Leo: the other way I used to do, when I, when I had a lot of, you know like a new phone and a lot of logins to do to install all my apps, was you can use the LastPass keyboard, and then it will do that. 

Gina: Yeah. The LastPass keyboard will do it. There was a short cut, you could say copy my username and password to clipboard and it would show it in shade. So, it was a little faster but kind of insecure, because if you left it up there, you know on your shade, or if you left it on your clipboard. This is way better, like this is how LastPass works in the browser. 

Leo: Right. 

Gina: And, which is the best way, and so I'm excited about that, and I just wanted to mention that.

Leo: And of course, I can't happen on IOS because Apple won't give them access to it. 

Kevin P: And its, it's optional too. It comes up and says, fill with LastPass, LastPass can help you fill logins in other, other apps. Would you like to enable those features? So, it's not like LastPass is going to start throwing your password on to the screen every chance it gets.

Leo: Very nice. Just checking myself. And now, it's time for Jeff's number of the week.

Jeff: Well, so I like this one. In Recode, the Bay Area Council surveyed 500 San Francisco residents and they found that, in this survey, people are just fine with the buses in the Google...

Leo:  Oh, really?

Jeff:  72% had strong or somewhat favorable views of tech workers. 57% had strong or somewhat favorable views of employee shuttle buses. 67% said that allowing them pickup and drop offs at a limited number of bus stops is just fine. Thank you very much. 

Leo: Well, we knew that. it was just a small group of people, who are, you know, they make a point, you know, it's very expensive to buy a house in San Francisco. But it always has been. That’s why I live here.

Jeff: Would you prefer the Detroit? I mean you know…

Leo: Right. Good point. Let's start with Kevin Purdy. You got a pick or something you'd like to say...

Jeff: Or Buffalo for that matter. Would you rather be in Buffalo?

Leo: No, no, no. 

Kevin P:  No way. Wow! Why do I have to put up with this?

Leo: Not right now. Is it snowing?

Kevin P: No, it's not warm. I will say that. There is sun. You can actually see it on my pale face. So, earlier you mentioned that Google, Gina mentioned in the change log that Google now has the visual promotions tab, so that you can see little visual previews of your mail, as you put it, you know, your desired spam mail. And, it reminded me that there's a really cool start-up that's been doing this kind of like visual inbox thing for a while called Unrollme. It's Unroll.me, and you can go there and it totally does require, you know, Gmail permissions, where you give them access to your Gmail inbox. That's going to be a full stop for some people but, if, you know, if you are really fed up with all the email you get, you can start using Unrollme. And, one of the things it does, is it matches all your email into, kind of, subscribe, you know, don't want, Roll it all up. The roll up though, the email's you sent to it to batch all into one big email, they arrive as these little thumbnail previews at the top of the email. Just like what Google did there, so... Whenever I see something like that, where a big company takes something that seems like something that I've already seen before, I always like to just point out that there is a, you know, some have charted that path before. So, if you are both inundated with email like we all are, and you're interested in that kind of like quick, heads-up, thumbnail preview of your email, try UnRollMe. It's a really cool service. 

Leo: Alright, now I have to turn on all mail on my Imap. That scares me. Alright...

Kevin M: Like I said...

Leo: Let's try it again. But, I do like the idea of getting out of all of these... Most of my mail now is that stuff. 

Kevin P: Is that Bacn? The spam that you want?

Leo: Yeah, it's Bacn. maybe I wanted it. At one point I signed up for...

Jeff: Then they can argue it's okay to send you...

Leo: Because Google does a great job stopping the spam, but they're just not great at the Bacn. Good, I’m running it right now. Thank you for...

Chad: I’ve been using it for a while and you can see like some, some of them, it will show a nice little preview of what, what does the message...

Leo: Don't unsubscribe to Night Attack.

Chad: Well, I didn't unsubscribe. I rolled it up`. SO now it will, it will come in. I have been doing it for a little while now. And it is, one of the nicest things is it will show you all the lists you’re subscribed to, and you can have an unsubscribe option, which you’re just like, that was seven years ago, that I subscribed to that.

Leo: A lot of stuff is that...They get rid of Ruby language mailing list. I really don't need it, to find the bugs in Ruby anymore. 

Leo: Kevin you have anything? Kevin Marks, you want to... Thank you Kevin Purdy.

Kevin M: Well I got a couple of updates on last week’s thing. So, 2048b has gone on to take over the world and destroy everyone's productivity. But, there are, but the fun thing is because it's open source, there are some other silly ones. So, there's the Numberwang version, which, so... Do you know, did you get the reference here? 

Leo:  Numberwang!

Kevin M: So, play this and see what happens.

Jeff: When Kevin Marks says, "Do you get the reference here?"

Leo: Almost always no!

Jeff: Odds are no!

Kevin M: So, now there’s a British comedy show.

Jeff: I'm so lost.

Kevin M: So basically it...

Gina: What is happening? 

Kevin M: It's randomizing the numbers. 

Leo: Oh, this is very frustrating. But it seems to, you...

Gina: Oh, it's the colors!

Kevin M: So you have to do it by color.

Leo: Oh, it's by color. Well, I can do that. 

Kevin M: Well, except that the yellows are all the same. So, once it gets the high numbers you can't play anymore.

Gina: Yeah, because they're some, where the levels are the same for different numbers. 

Kevin M: Yes, so...

Leo: I'm Numberwanging!

Kevin M: So, Numberwang is a parody of TV game shows done by Mitchell and Webb, where they just, they look the video up YouTube. You probably should play into the show, where they have this incomprehensible TV show where people shout numbers out and they say, "That’s Numberwang! Give them a point". It's just...

Leo: It's just made up.

Kevin M: It's just a dah-dah game show, but very funny. 

Leo: And so as you play this, everyone once in a while it shouts "That's Numberwang!" 

Kevin M: Yes. So, the fun thing to do with this is...

Jeff: I’m still so lost. 

Leo: Actually, this is pretty good one to play on the bus or train when somebody, they say, "what are you playing?" "Oh, I’m playing Numberwang!" And they'll say, “How do you play it?" "Well, you just, can’t you tell? It's obvious!"

Kevin M: Just watch it. That’s what my son said. He was doing this, in the break room at school to troll his friends. He was saying just see this...

Leo: Definitely a troll game. 

Kevin M: …and they were like. "What? Huh!"

Leo: Ah, I know what I’m doing. Some of the numbers come out backwards. That’s what's really funny. 

Kevin M: Yes, you have backwards as long as you get square roots. 

Leo: Okay. 

Kevin M: It's just very silly.

Leo: To even understand this besides the fact they have to understand British, a British game show parody? You also have to know about 2048 which we talked about on last week's episode. We’re going to pause the show now while you go and watch last week's episode, and some YouTube Numberwangs, and we'll be back, in an hour.

Kevin M: And the there's... oh, yeah, I’d like to give you something for you to look up. And then there's the next 2048 variant, which is the 2048 Meta edition.

Leo: Ah! 

Kevin M: So, in this game, you start out with 2048 and then you get to Dr. Who, and then you get the Forge one, and then you keep adding things and you get...

Leo: It's all the other ones. 

Kevin M: So, the other version of 2048 appearing as bits of 2048. It’s actually almost completely unplayable, because three of them are all the same, but...

Leo: This is fascinating.

Kevin M: But, I’m just loving... I haven't seen an open source game take off in this way before. That's the piece for me that's amusing about it, is that everyone is going, oh, I can mix this up with that, mix it up with that, and...

Leo: is it because it is so easy to write?

Kevin M: It's open source. It's already written. So people are just forking off the original 2048.

Leo: Right! Okay.

Kevin M: But also, there are like now, you 20 versions for Android and for IOS as well, I mean, pushing into the apps.

Leo: Right, right. Yeah, there's an infinite app store collection of...  

Kevin M: And, then there's everyone saying, "Oh!, It's just a rip-off of Threes" And it's like "Well, yes, but Space Invaders was a rip-off of breakup. What’s your point?" You know there's, there's a... The fact that they made it into something different that is fun is just interesting to watch. So, it's...

Leo: It's, this, it's only subtly different than Threes.

Kevin M: Well, that's the point. It’s a refinement. It’s actually more fun to play than...

Leo: It is more fun, I think, but Lisa who is a master at Threes won't play it. She says it's ruining, it's like playing badminton, if you're a racquet ball player or something. It ruins your…

Kevin M: It probably would ruin the Threes game. You just get cross with Threes, like why are these things in pink and blue again?

Leo: Right, right. It seems like the only difference is the way the tiles move, as far as I can tell, and I haven't spent a lot...

Kevin M: Yes, the way the tiles move all in one go here, which is actually nicer than Threes. but also the fact that powers of two rather than three means that you don’t have that awkward one, two, three bit.

Leo: Yeah. It’s prettier. Yeah. You don't have to seed it with ones and twos. Wow! 

Kevin M: So, then another update on the, something else I mentioned last week, this TanTek's people focus, focused mobile communication...

Leo: Ah, yes!

Kevin M: Which is part of the Indie-web stuff.

Leo: Oh, yes. 

Kevin: And he's, he did a post, I showed you the post of trying to put link icons on your home page so that people could contact you. And he went and worked out what the URL’s are for different ones. So, this is quiet fun. So, basically, you can put these kinds of links on your web page, and people click...

Leo: Oh!

Kevin M: ...it will launch that app and they can have a conversation with you in that particular app.

Leo: Oh! 

Kevin M: So, if you want to...

Leo: This is, so, any browser will understand this?

Kevin M: No, this is particularly focused on mobiles. This is Android and IOS. And , some of them will work with other browsers. He did not mention which ones do and which one don’t, and some of them don't work at all. Apparently the Gtalk thing has been dropped by Google, which makes it a part of that. But, if you do sms colon email address, both Android and IOS will then open a chat with you, using either Hangouts or Imessage, which is interesting. 

Leo: Would you suggest people make a page on their website with these links?

Kevin M: Well, this is, this is what I was telling you, the idea is that you want to have a contact me page, but he's saying well, we will make a contact me page where you can actually people on. 

Leo: Right. 

Kevin M: And basically most people are on the phone, but they don't want to copy and paste something and do that. How do we do this with…?  And they don't necessarily want to use email. They want to use the chat things they've got. So, how can we make that work?

Leo: Tantek.com. URL's for people focused mobile communication. I like this idea!

Kevin M: And, that's, there's a Homebrew website club tonight in San Francisco at Mozilla again, because it's Wednesday. 

Leo: So, what's the web? What's the address for that if we want to know more about the Homebrew?

Kevin M: Indiewebcamp.com is the best address.

Leo: Indiwebcamp.com. The Homebrew website club which meets every other Wednesday right after work.

Kevin M: I, I have one other thing which I kept to last, because it's funny, but it's also on YouTube so you can edit it out later in case it blows up. I will put the link in the chat. 

Leo: Alright, I’m going to click the link now, and we shall find out more. This is a Generic Brand. Oh, I’ve seen this. This is awesome. 

Leo: Let's, let's end the show before this... Before we do this, I just want to thank you Kevin Marks for being here. As always, a great pleasure. He is the man who is changing the world even as he speaks. We appreciate your time. Kevin Purdy...

Kevin M: What about Jeff's number?

Leo: We got a number, didn't we Jeff?

Jeff: Yeah, we did. 

Kevin M: Oh, okay, alright. 

Jeff: The Pew ones.

Leo: Wasn’t memorable?

Jeff: I, it was, it was a lead into my buffalo joke, remember? 

Kevin P: That's right!

Leo: You didn't mention Haber Moss or Chipotle, but...

Jeff: Wake up Kevin, wake up!

Kevin P: It was just, it was just that it was age, didn’t seem like we'd spoken about it.

Leo:  Seemed like such a low number. 

Jeff: Seemed liked such a low ball. I for one don't...

Jeff: So then Kevin, Kevin had all the numbers we need for the next ten years. 

Leo: Yeah. Lots of numbers there. Lots of numbers…

Kevin P : Numberwang! Numberwang this week!

Leo: Numberwang! We want to thank Kevin Purdy for joining us. Completeandroidbook.com, right?

Kevin P: Actually just thepurdman.com

Leo: Purdman. Just do thepurdman.

Kevin P: Link's just thepurdman, and I'm on twitter as Kevin Purdy. All on real!

Leo: Great to have you. Good luck with the remodel.

Kevin P: Thank you. Thank you very much. Floor's looking nice.

Leo: Yeah, I hope you have a door soon. And your hair looks great. I hope the female programmers just eat you up. Eat you alive!

Kevin P: Yeah, somewhere in between those two.

Leo: Gina Trapani spends her last show in the basement. We’re so sad to say goodbye to mom's basement. I wish you all the best in your move.

Gina: Great show! Thank you. Thank you. And actually I have a quick announcement. Thinkup is open to the public. Yeah! We opened up this week. Thinkup.com. You should come, come join us. 

Leo: Everybody should, I'll just show, you know what, real quickly...

Kevin M: So that's why you were doing in office in the middle of the night?

Leo: Yeah, now we know. 

Gina: That's exactly what we're doing in office in the middle of the night. Exactly. Yes. we’re like, ah yes.

Leo: I'll just show you. I'll go to LeoLaporte.thinkup.com which is my Thinkup page, and you can see all of the insights. You get people who've followed you, Matthew Ingram can thank me for more people seeing his tweet, 451,398 to be... Oh, that's interesting. So, it's the intersection, it’s the, because if I have... So, the shared followers don't count. You actually do an intersection on it. Wow!

Gina: yeah! So it's a wee funked a little. A wee funked a little. You got a big tweet here. Oh, the petition to end daylight savings. 

Leo: Yeah, that’s still a, that's still a beloved tweet. I don't think we’re going to ever get it. But, yeah!

Gina: This, I, you know, Leo, I laughed at the favorite that you were, about the bespoke app from the...

Leo: That was...

Gina: ...a year ago.

Leo: Yeah. Yeah. He was talking, I think it was Dave Morin who said I have two Iphones - each of them with a custom designed, one of a kind bespoke app, I had built for my assistant.

Jeff: Oh, God!

Kevin M: Who was on offense there, Rajeev?

Gina: See, it's finny even a year later. 

Leo: It's fun, that's what fun about this. Even if you don't, you know, get it, use it for anything else, just going through it is really, really fun. See who follows you, see who adds you to lists, see what your most popular tweet are, how many times you tweeted, things like that. It’s really great stuff! What the best times to tweet are and it's added enough about me. My tweets contain the word I, me, mine or myself twice last week. That’s six times fewer. I’m getting better, thanks to Thinkup.

Gina: Nice job.

Leo: Yeah. Thinkup.com. Join and you get these kinds of insights yourself. 

Jeff: Congrats Gina!

Gina: Thank you  

Leo: that is wonderful, congratulations!

Gina: Thank You.

Leo: You can also follow Gina on Google Plus and her blog where she hasn't been posting much lately. 

Gina: Haven't posted in a while.

Leo: ... for obvious reasons. It’s the smarterword.org. Jeff Jarvis is at buzzmachine.com. Professor of journalism at the city university in New York, the author of Public Parts and Gutenberg the Geek, all on Audible as well as on Amazon. 

Jeff:  These dulcet tones. 

Leo: So nice to see you all, thank you for joining us. We do This Week in Google at 1 pm Pacific when Leo's not playing around with the internet, 4 pm Eastern time, 21, I'm sorry, 2000 UTC on twit.tv. Please watch live if you can every Wednesday, but if you can't don’t worry. On demand audio and video available after the fact always at twit.tv/twig or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. We'll see you next time. Now let's end with this Generic Brand video thanks to Kevin Marks. Have a great day and week! Bye Bye!

Voice in video: We think first of vague words that are synonyms for progress and pair them with footage of a high-speed train. Science is doing lots of stuff that may or may not have anything to do with us. See how this guy in a lab coat holds up a beaker? That means we do research. Here’s a picture of DNA. There are a shit load of people in the world, especially in India. See how we’re part of the global economy? Look at these farmers in China. But we also do business in the U.S.A. Or want you to think we do. Check out this wind energy thing in Indiana, and this blue collar guy with dirt on his face. Phew. Also, we care about the environment, loosely. Here’s some powerful, rushing water and people planting trees.

Our policies could be related to these panoramic views of Costa Rica. In today’s high speed environment, Stop motion footage of a city at night with cars turning quickly. Makes you think about doing things efficiently and time passing. Lest you think we’re a faceless entity, look at all these attractive people. Here’s some of them talking and laughing and close-ups of hands passing canned goods to each other. In a setting that evokes community service. Equality, Innovation, Honesty and advancement are all words we chose from a list. Our profits are awe-inspiring. Like this guy who’s looking up and pointing at a skyscraper or a kite While smiling and explaining something to his child. Using a specific ratio of Asian people to Black people to Women to White men. We want to make sure we represent your needs and interests or at least a version of your skin color in our ads. Did we put a baby in here? What about an ethnic old man whose wrinkled smile represents the happiness and wisdom of the poor? Yep.

Leo: That's an ad for a stock footage company! Oh, my God that's awesome!