Thursday, 15 March 2012

Why I Left Google

“The Google I was passionate about was a technology company that empowered its employees to innovate. The Google I left was an advertising company with a single corporate-mandated focus.
“Technically I suppose Google has always been an advertising company, but for the better part of the last three years, it didn’t feel like one. Google was an ad company only in the sense that a good TV show is an ad company: having great content attracts advertisers.“Under Eric Schmidt ads were always in the background. Google was run like an innovation factory, empowering employees to be entrepreneurial through founder’s awards, peer bonuses and 20% time. Our advertising revenue gave us the headroom to think, innovate and create. Forums like App Engine, Google Labs and open source served as staging grounds for our inventions. The fact that all this was paid for by a cash machine stuffed full of advertising loot was lost on most of us. Maybe the engineers who actually worked on ads felt it, but the rest of us were convinced that Google was a technology company first and foremost; a company that hired smart people and placed a big bet on their ability to innovate.”
@JW on Tech

[Data Viz] KONY2012: See How Invisible Networks Helped a Campaign Capture the World’s Attention

(Click to enlarge)

Germaine Greer glitter-bombed in NZ for trans comments

(Thanx Dave!)

Timeline of ANTISEC as Created and Operated Under FBI Supervision

Via

Derek Jarman: The Garden (1990)

Man I needed that!!!

GIG OF THE YEAR
(well actually it's the only gig I have been to so far, but still...)
Cleaned a few cobwebs out of my ear drums :)

Annie Clark/St. Vincent - HiFi Bar Melbourne 14/03/12
(Thanx you TimN for the photos & videos XXX)

Goldman Sachs director in London quits 'toxic' bank

A manager at US banking giant Goldman Sachs in London has quit, saying he could no longer work there "in good conscience".

Greg Smith, who headed Goldman's equity derivatives business in Europe, said it was common to hear talk of ripping off their "muppet" clients.
"The environment now is as toxic and destructive as I have ever seen it," he wrote in the New York Times.
Goldman said it disagreed with what Mr Smith wrote.
"We disagree with the views expressed, which we don't think reflect the way we run our business," a Goldman spokeswoman said.
"In our view, we will only be successful if our clients are successful. This fundamental truth lies at the heart of how we conduct ourselves."
Mr Smith said in his editorial that he appeared in Goldman's recruitment video, shown at universities around the world.
"I knew it was time to leave when I realised I could no longer look students in the eye and tell them what a great place this was to work," he wrote.
"It makes me ill how callously people talk about ripping their clients off. Over the last 12 months I have seen five different managing directors refer to their own clients as 'muppets', sometimes over internal email."
'Vampire squid'
Following the financial crisis, Goldman was among those bailed out by the US taxpayer and came under fire for its business practices, including accusations that it helped Greece hide some of its massive debts.
Rolling Stone magazine once likened Goldman to "a vampire squid wrapped round the face of humanity".
But the bank has denied any wrongdoing.
Famously, chief executive Lloyd Blankfein once told the Sunday Times that banks were "doing God's work", a phrase which made headlines around the world - but was meant as a joke.
The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) opened a fraud investigation in 2010 over the marketing of mortgage investments as the US housing market faltered.
These featured emails from trader Fabrice Tourre saying that "the entire system is about to crumble any moment" in 2007.
Goldman Sachs agreed to pay $550m (£356m) to settle civil fraud charges of misleading investors in 2010 - the biggest fine for a bank in the SEC's history.
Goldman was also fined £17.5m by the UK's financial regulator, the Financial Services Authority, for failing to tell it that the bank was being investigated by the SEC.
@'BBC'