Google And Virgin Team For Human Settlement On Mars
Sir Richard Branson has announced on the Google Blog Virgle, a joint Google/ Virgin project to establish permanent human settlement on Mars.
Sir Richard writes:
Larry Page, Sergey Brin and I feel strongly that contemporary technology is sufficiently advanced to make such an effort both successful and economical, and that it’s high time that humanity moved beyond Earth and began our great, long journey to explore the stars and establish our first lasting foothold on another world…In the years to come, we’ll be sending up a series of spaceships carrying (along with the supplies and tools needed to build the new colony) what eventually will be hundreds of Mars colonists, or Virgle Pioneers — myself among them.
Virgle is currently taking applications on its site here. The official site also includes a 100 year plan for Mars Settlement and a statement explaining the benefits of the project being Open Source.
Update: there’s also a YouTube competition and official video channel. Page and Brin explain:
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
Gmail April Fools Not Very Funny. On the Upside, They Started A Wikipedia War
Right on schedule: Google is releasing their April Fools jokes onto us as the calendars hit April 1 on the east coast (here’s last year’s efforts). Google Australia got a head start earlier today with the very funny Future Search. Gmail’s effort this year isn’t in my opinion as funny.
Gmail Custom Time lets users send emails with a custom date in the past, putting it in the recipients inbox at the old date:
How do I use it?
Just click “Set custom time” from the Compose view. Any email you send to the past appears in the proper chronological order in your recipient’s inbox. You can opt for it to show up read or unread by selecting the appropriate option.
Is there a limit to how far back I can send email?
Yes. You’ll only be able to send email back until April 1, 2004, the day we launched Gmail. If we were to let you send an email from Gmail before Gmail existed, well, that would be like hanging out with your parents before you were born — crazy talk.
Funny? You decide. The team did better last year in my opinion.
But the joke has started a minor Wikipedia war, which makes it more interesting. In describing the technology Google says “Gmail utilizes an e-flux capacitor to resolve issues of causality (see Grandfather Paradox)” and links to the Grandfather Paradox on Wikipedia. Someone changed the words “time travel” to “gmail” in a revision, along with the comment “Gmail starts a wiki-war by linking directly to this article on April 1st…”
The change was quickly put down by the Wikipedia police, of course. And then changed back. And then reversed. You can watch the drama in real time on the article’s revision history page.
I wonder who’ll get tired first.
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Cholesterol DrugsTake a Fall
The marketing of Vytorin and Zetia raced ahead of the science. Now Schering and Merck shareholders are $22 billion poorer
Cholesterol Drugs Take a Fall
The marketing of Vytorin and Zetia raced ahead of the science. Now Schering and Merck shareholders are $22 billion poorer
ChaCha Ditches Guided Search Model. I Love To Hate This Startup
Well it only took ChaCha fourteen months to figure out what everyone except ChaCha (and these guys) knew when it launched - search with a human guide as a business idea is ridiculously stupid.
The idea is that you do a search on ChaCha and a real person works with you via a chat interface to give you results. In theory those results would be better than Google. In reality, they weren’t (see image to right), and ChaCha still had to pay all those guides.
Today, according to an email sent to ChaCha’s guides titled “The Future Is Here,” they announced that guided search will be discontinued in favor of the one product they offer that isn’t monumentally dumb - mobile search. They claim that “new users are growing at a staggering rate every day” (most likely due to cell phone spamming).
So what happens to all the guides who worked on desktop search? Some of them, at least, can now apply for new positions on the mobile product.
The full email is below, and details of the company and their funding are here. Thanks Luke Kling for the tip.
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Volatility: What Is It Telling Us?
Recent price action may signal that while stocks have not yet hit bottom, the worst of the bear market is behind us
High Hopes for an Intel-STMicro Spin-off
If Numonyx's memory chip plans pan out, tech companies could save big and PC users could get the performance that's been promised for years
YouTube RickRolls Users
If you aren’t familiar with RickRolling - it’s when someone puts a link on website to something, but it actually takes you to a music video of Rick Astley’s “hit” song Never Gonna Give You Up.
YouTube is RickRolling its own users on April 1. All of the featured videos for YouTube UK and YouTube Australia actually link to the Rick Astley video. We’ll see if YouTube.com does the same at midnight EST tonight, too.
This is ok, but not nearly as funny as it would be if the YouTube team broke into the Google search servers and simply redirected Google.com to the video. Now that would be funny.
More coverage of this here.
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An Absolut Marketing Dream
Pernod Ricard, new owner of the popular vodka, must continue to market it successfully, and keep an eye on Grey Goose and Ketel One
Autodesk’s Turnaround Secret
How the CAD software maker reinvented itself by refocusing on its customer segments, product differentiation, and a new sales model