Books – Page 103 – artdiamondblog.com

“Israel’s Entrepreneurial Character”

(p. 272) Israel’s entrepreneurial character led Google to establish a center in Haifa as well as the more expected Tel Aviv. The Haifa office was a move to accommodate Yoelle Maarek, a celebrated computer scientist who had headed IBM’s labs in Israel. Google hired another world-class computer scientist, Yossi Matias, to head the Tel Aviv office. (In 2009, during Google’s austerity push, the company would merge the engineering centers and Maarek would depart.)

Source:
Levy, Steven. In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011.

Amazon’s Story of the Evolution and Revolution of Disruptive Innovation

Source of book image:
http://i1.wp.com/allthingsd.com/files/2013/10/Stone_EverythingStore1.jpg

(p. C5) Mr. Stone, a senior writer for Bloomberg Businessweek and a former reporter for The New York Times, tells this story of disruptive innovation with authority and verve, and lots of well-informed reporting. Although “The Everything Store” retraces early ground covered by Robert Spector’s 2000 book, “Amazon.com: Get Big Fast,” Mr. Stone has conducted more than 300 interviews with current and former Amazon executives and employees, including conversations, over the years, with Mr. Bezos, who “in the end was supportive of this project even though he judged that it was ‘too early’ for a reflective look” at the company.

“The Everything Store” does not examine in detail the fallout that Amazon’s rise has had on book publishing and on independent bookstores, but Mr. Stone does a nimble job of situating the company’s evolution within the wider retail landscape and within the technological revolution that was remaking the world at the turn of the millennium.

For the full review, see:
MICHIKO KAKUTANI. “BOOKS OF THE TIMES; Selling as Hard as He Can.” The New York Times (Tues., October 29, 2013.): C1 & C5.
(Note: the online version of the review has the date October 28, 2013.)

The book under review is:
Stone, Brad. The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2013.

“Brad Stone” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT review quoted and cited above.

Google Surprised at Success of Chinese Cyberattack

(p. 268) Though the underlying issue of Google’s China pullout was censorship, it was ironic that a cyberattack had triggered the retreat. Google had believed that its computer science skills and savvy made it a leader in protecting its corporate information. With its blend of Montessori naiveté and hubris that had served it so well in other areas, the company felt it could do security better. Until the China incursion, it appeared to be succeeding.

Source:
Levy, Steven. In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011.
(Note: italics in original.)

Nebraska Teenager Becomes the “George Clooney of YouTube”

(p. 263) Google also became more aggressive in connecting sponsors for popular videos. A paragon of YouTube’s business model was “Fred,” a video channel created by a Columbus, Nebraska, teenager named Lucas Cruikshank. The teen pretended to be a six-year-old kid named Fred Figglehorn in a series of two-minute videos. “Fred is the George Clooney of YouTube,” says Hunter Walk. “He was the first one with a million subscribers. He uploads videos, and we put ads against them. Sometimes he sells product placement ads. Fred makes a million dollars a year. He just signed a movie deal.” The Fred videos– generally manic rants in which Cruikshank portrays a hyperactive, possibly brain-damaged child who speaks like one of Ross Bagdasarian’s chipmunks– often sported commercial messages for sponsors such as Samsung, the Food Channel, and Bratz on an overlay at the bottom of the window. Since he started in 2008, at age fourteen, Fred’s (p. 264) YouTube videos have chalked up over half a billion viewings. Though Fred’s success was solely a product of YouTube, people in the company never met the phenom. “We sent him a cake once,” says Walk.
YouTube helped Fred’s youthful creator not just by selling ads but by providing analytics, the same way it did for AdSense publishers. (This was a result of an initiative called the YouTube Insight project, developed by engineers in Google’s Zurich center.) Such data helped creators learn what was working and where. “They’re like, ‘Oh my God, I’m big in the U.K.! I never knew I had a London following!'” says Walk. Superusers such as Cruikshank were so successful in exploiting YouTube’s business initiatives that corporations such as Sony were studying their methodology and even paid some of them consultant fees to help them understand the digital world.

Source:
Levy, Steven. In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011.

Malcolm Gladwell Has High Praise for Michael Lewis

“Malcolm Gladwell” Source of caption and image: online version of the NYT interview quoted and cited below.

I have found the two books that I have read by Michael Lewis to be very useful. But I have found the five books that I have read by Malcolm Gladwell to be full of wonderful and important examples and thought-provoking insights. So I am a bit surprised by the level of Gladwell’s praise for Lewis. (Maybe the problem is that I have not yet read Moneyball or The Blind Side.)

(p. 8) What books, to your mind, bring together social science, business principles and narrative nonfiction in an interesting or innovative way?
. . . Bringing together social science and business principles is easy. Doing that and telling a compelling story is next to impossible. I think only Michael Lewis can do it well. His nonbusiness books like “The Blind Side,” by the way, are even better. That book is as close to perfect as a work of popular nonfiction can be.

For the full interview, see:
“By the Book; Malcolm Gladwell; The author of “David and Goliath” compares Michael Lewis to Tiger Woods: “I’ll never play like that. But it’s good to be reminded every now and again what genius looks like.” The New York Times Book Review (Sun., October 6, 2013): 8.
(Note: bold in original; ellipsis added.)
(Note: neither the print nor the online version of the interview identify the name of the interviewer.)
(Note: the online version of the interview has the date October 3, 2013, and has the title “Malcolm Gladwell: By the Book; The author of “David and Goliath” compares Michael Lewis to Tiger Woods: “I’ll never play like that. But it’s good to be reminded every now and again what genius looks like.”)

“Engrossing, Brain-Tickling” Refutation of Al Gore’s Global Warming Assertions

“The Danish economist Bjorn Lomborg in “Cool It,” a documentary based on his book.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT review quoted and cited below.

(p. C8) Debunking claims made by “An Inconvenient Truth” and presenting alternative strategies, “Cool It” finally blossoms into an engrossing, brain-tickling picture as many of Al Gore’s meticulously graphed assertions are systematically — and persuasively — refuted. (I was intrigued to hear Mr. Lomborg say, for instance, that the polar-bear population is more endangered by hunters than melting ice.)
. . .
. . . “Cool It” is all about the pep: playing down the talking heads and playing up the “git ‘er done.” If algae can suck up carbon dioxide and spit out oil, what on earth are we worrying about?

For the full review, see:
JEANNETTE CATSOULIS. “Global Warming and Common Sense.” The New York Times (Fri., November 12, 2010): C8.
(Note: the online version of the review has the date November 11, 2010.)

The documentary is based on the book:
Lomborg, Bjørn. Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007.

Pretentious Studios Were Pushed Aside by Grounded Googlers

(p. 261) Kamangar didn’t put a value judgment on the way the labels and studios worked but tried to crack their code, talking to executives, producers, agents, and managers. One day he happened to be in New York and was invited to meet with the CEO of Universal Music Group, Doug Morris. Kamangar was escorted by bodyguards to a private elevator and ushered to a fancy office high above the city. He couldn’t help thinking of the contrast with Google, where you stumbled in and went to the microkitchen for coffee. Kamangar didn’t dwell on the (p. 262) irony that it was the scruffy kids in shorts, munching energy bars and writing analytics programs, who were pushing aside the old power structure. While he put the pieces of YouTube together, though, he always kept in mind that he was documenting a traditional media system on the verge of collapse. He had to deal with the music world as it was but also plan for the way it would be after disruptions, which Google and YouTube were accelerating.

Source:
Levy, Steven. In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011.

After Humans, Earth Would Quickly Revert to Its Pre-Human Condition

Source of book image: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/8/88/The_World_Without_Us_(US_cover).jpg

When I saw the mention of this book, quoted below, I thought it must be closely related to the 2008 History Channel program “Life Without Us” that I liked very much. Apparently the two overlap on the message that a post-human planet Earth would quickly return to its pre-human condition, but they differ in that the program does not share the book’s anti-technology leitmotif.
The main take-away from the program, for me, was that environmentalists worry too much about the long-term damage that humans can do to the planet—for the most part, the planet is pretty resilient and can quickly return itself to something close to its pre-human condition.

(p. C10) Mr. Weisman’s 2007 book, “The World Without Us,” was a surprise best seller that imagined what would happen to the planet were all humans to suddenly disappear. Turns out that nature would in short order erase pretty much everything we’ve done.

Source:
MICHAEL SHERMER. “Menace to the Planet?” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., Oct. 5, 2013): C10.
(Note: the online version of the review has the date Oct. 4, 2013, and has the title “BOOKSHELF; Book Review: ‘Ten Billion’ by Stephen Emmott | ‘Countdown’ by Alan Weisman; While some worry a booming population doom the planet, in many Western countries there is now a birth dearth.”)

The book mentioned is:
Weisman, Alan. The World without Us. New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2007.

Google Was Lax in Killing Failed Projects

(p. 255) Oddly, whereas Google had built its data infrastructure to reroute around failure, it had no human infrastructure to deal with failed projects. “We didn’t know which ones they were, because we never paused to ask ourselves that question,” says Pichette. “The people working on that project know it’s failing– as senior management you have to say, ‘Let’s declare failure– let’s get the champagne out and kill this puppy. Then we can put you on stuff that’s really cool and sexy.'” That had always been part of Google’s philosophy, but whether from lack of rigor or just distraction, the company had been lax in actually issuing execution orders. One of the first puppies Pichette helped drown was a virtual-reality-style communications program called Lively.

Source:
Levy, Steven. In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011.

Foreign Aid Frees Despots from Having to Seek the Consent of the Governed

Source of book image: online version of the NYT review quoted and cited below.

(p. 4) IN his new book, Angus Deaton, an expert’s expert on global poverty and foreign aid, puts his considerable reputation on the line and declares that foreign aid does more harm than good. It corrupts governments and rarely reaches the poor, he argues, and it is high time for the paternalistic West to step away and allow the developing world to solve its own problems.

It is a provocative and cogently argued claim. The only odd part is how it is made. It is tacked on as the concluding section of “The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality” (Princeton University Press, 360 pages), an illuminating and inspiring history of how mankind’s longevity and prosperity have soared to breathtaking heights in modern times.
. . .
THE author has found no credible evidence that foreign aid promotes economic growth; indeed, he says, signs show that the relationship is negative. Regretfully, he identifies a “central dilemma”: When the conditions for development are present, aid is not required. When they do not exist, aid is not useful and probably damaging.
Professor Deaton makes the case that foreign aid is antidemocratic because it frees local leaders from having to obtain the consent of the governed. “Western-led population control, often with the assistance of nondemocratic or well-rewarded recipient governments, is the most egregious example of antidemocratic and oppressive aid,” he writes. In its day, it seemed like a no-brainer. Yet the global population grew by four billion in half a century, and the vast majority of the seven billion people now on the planet live longer and more prosperous lives than their parents did.

For the full review, see:
FRED ANDREWS. “OFF THE SHELF; A Surprising Case Against Foreign Aid.” The New York Times, SundayBusiness Section (Sun., October 13, 2013): 4.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date October 12, 2013.)

The book reviewed is:
Deaton, Angus. The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2013.

Google Gave YouTube Entrepreneurial Autonomy

(p. 250) But after the purchase [of YouTube], Google did something very smart. Almost as if acknowledging that overattention from the top had hobbled Google’s original video effort, the company made a conscious decision not to integrate YouTube. “They were edgy and small, and we were getting big,” says Drummond. “We didn’t want to screw them up.” (Google was also smarting from its $ 900 million acquisition of dMarc Broadcasting, a company dealing in radio advertising, which had not gone well. “They had tried more of a top-down approach with dMarc and considered that a disaster,” says Hurley.) YouTube would keep its brand and even stay in the building it had recently occupied in San Bruno, a former headquarters of the Gap.

Source:
Levy, Steven. In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011.
(Note: bracketed words added.)