Ingenial

In a fascinating article China’s state-run news agency Xinhua delivers a parting word to Google: “good riddance.” The article is actually stunningly insightful with quotes like:

The Reform and Opening-up policy in China has been carried out for 30 years since 1979, with earlier icons like Coca-Cola, and later McDonald’s, KFC and Starbucks Coffee.The incoming Western goods also brought Western cultures and lifestyles. For instance, the biggest Internet retailer Amazon named its service in China Zhuoyue (excellence).The albums of the U.S. pop star Lady Gaga and Britain’s talent Susan Boyle fly off the CD shelves in China.

All commodities come with some cultures and ideologies. China definitely is influenced by the West, but the influence is mutual. People of a certain culture learn to know a different new thing, but the new thing also has to learn to suit its new customers. That’s why KFC serves Chinese porridge and McDonald’s provides Chinese food menus here.

Fascinating. Bringing up Lady Gaga’s runaway record sales in China and the ways various other businesses have adapted to China’s cultural distinctives is a stroke of genius. Of course this isn’t exactly comparing apples to apples since Google is pulling out of China for reasons of conscience.

Read the article over at Xinhua

The burgeoning war of mid-sized cities clamoring for 1 gigabyte per second internet from Google just heated up a bit. Topeka, Kansas renamed itself Google, Kansas. Then city officials in Duluth, Minnesota posted this skit offering to rename all firstborn males in the city “Google Fiber” and all females “Googlette Fiber.”

In 2002 Paul Ford wrote a brilliant speculative short story about the “Google of the Future.” In it he discovers Google bots crawling his apartment indexing and posting all the information they find there. Well, the future is here thanks to Swedish hackers!

Enter the GåågleBot: “a ‘home crawler’ consisting of a vacuum roomba with an on board webserver and camera. While the vacuum goes about its business, it extracts text from the images it takes. The text is later put in a database on the roomba and searchable through a web interface.

via Boing Boing