Indie EdTech is many times a personal; a philosophical, decision. It’s also many times a practical; an economical, decision. Open standards are about accessibility as much as anything else.

Readium plug-in for Chrome

Don’t be evil. We believe strongly that in the long term, we will be better served—as shareholders and in all other ways—by a company that does good things for the world even if we forgo some short term gains.

Our search results are the best we know how to produce.

despite having promised not to track students, Google is abusing its position of power as a provider of some educational services to profit off of students’ data when they use other Google services—services that Google has arbitrarily decided don’t deserve any protection.

‘quality of life’

It’s free. 

Россия

We discuss two examples where, byprioritizing user satisfaction as measured by ads blindnessor sightedness, we have changed the auction ranking func-tion [10] and drastically reduced the ad load on the mobileinterface. Reducing the mobile ad load strongly improvedthe user experience but was a substantially short-term rev-enue negative chang

Google Annotations Gallery

The Google Annotations Gallery is an exciting new Java open source library that provides a rich set of annotations for developers to express themselves. Do you find the standard Java annotations dry and lackluster? Have you ever resorted to leaving messages to fellow developers with the @Deprecated annotation? Wouldn't you rather leave a @LOL or @Facepalm instead? If so, then this is the gallery for you.

For those who think Google is making us stupid

Inclusion Guidelines for Webmasters

“People form first impressions about web pages in 17 milliseconds.”

Thus, even though it is not pa r- ticularly helpful to talk about Google as a c ommunity in its own rig ht, 21 it and other search engines play an important role in the overall mo d eration of the Web . 22

with the answers they wanted

Yet ad-based financing means that the companies have an interest in manipulating our attention on behalf of advertisers, instead of letting us connect as we wish. Many users think their feed shows everything that their friends post.

Last year at Google I/O, Dugan showed us "a glimpse at a small band of pirates trying to do epic shit." This year, she’ll give us more than a glimpse: we’ll see several of those projects come to fruition and several more be announced. They include tech-infused fabrics, a new security paradigm for computers, and a computer small enough to fit inside a microSD card. ATAP is also premiering a 360-degree, live-action monster movie directed by Justin Lin called Help! shot with six Red EPIC Dragon cameras on a single rig.

Dugan describes everything ATAP does as "badass and beautiful," and after watching Help!, I’m inclined to agree.

There’s a scale for how to think about science. On one end there’s an attempt to solve deep, fundamental questions of nature; on the other is rote uninteresting procedure. There’s also a scale for creating products. On one end you find ambitious, important breakthroughs; on the other small, iterative updates. Plot those two things next to each other and you get a simple chart with four sections. Important science but no immediate practical use? That’s pure basic research — think Niels Bohr and his investigations into the nature of the atom. Not much science but huge practical implications? That’s pure applied research — think Thomas Edison grinding through thousands of materials before he lit upon the tungsten filament for the lightbulb.

ARE GOOGLE’S TRAVEL GOALS TOO AMBITIOUS?

Are Google's Travel Plans Too Ambitious?

Google and OTAs: the Bad, the Ugly and the Good

Google styles itself as a friendly, funky, user-friendly tech firm that rose to prominence through a combination of skill, luck, and genuine innovation. This is true. But it is a mere fragment of the story. In reality, Google is a smokescreen behind which lurks the US military-industrial complex.

Google’s ultra-efficient data centers, with a PUE of 1.12, are beating the PUE curve by miles.

Google is already doing this. They have an “app” called Chrome, and when their app makes SSL connections to their own services, it checks to make sure that the certificates it sees are the ones it knows Google is using. They call this “pinning,” and you should do it for your mobile apps.