Google Bought The Building

Wired one way to think about 111 Eighth Avenue is like the Empire State Building on its side. It’s worth noting that the Empire State Building has just over 2 million square feet of office space — about 1 million less than 111 Eighth Avenue ..... the structure sits almost directly on top of where the Hudson Street/Ninth Avenue fiber highway makes a dog-leg to the right before heading north-east toward the Upper West Side. ..... 111 Eighth Avenue has become known as one of the most important so-called telecom carrier hotels on the Eastern seaboard, if not the entire United States..... The city of New York netted $46 million in transaction taxes on the deal. ..... by far the largest U.S. real estate transaction of the year. ..... Google clearly loves New York, as well
Google Blog

There Is No Cloud OS

Image via Wikipedia

Paul Buchheit: The Cloud OS: The basic idea is that apps and data all live on the Internet .... Apple is lame for not allowing a native Gmail app on the iPhone -- email is the one place where Android really outshines the iPhone for me ...... One way of understanding this new architecture is to view the entire Internet as a single computer. This computer is a massively distributed system with billions of processors, billions of displays, exabytes of storage, and it's spread across the entire planet. Your phone or laptop is just one part of this global computer, and its primarily purpose is to provide a convenient interface. The actual computation and data storage is distributed in surprisingly complex and dynamic ways, but that complexity is mostly hidden from the end user. ..... the development of this global super-computer is one of the most important technological advances in history. ..... the design target of ChromeOS. They are building laptops that run the Chrome web browser and approximately nothing else. ..... ChromeOS assumes a mouse/track-pad while Android currently assumes a touch interface ... and ultimately everything may end up with a touch screen anyway.

There is the cloud. But the OS resides firmly on your laptop. It is thin. It only runs a browser, and that browser takes you to the cloud, but the OS is not in the cloud. So the term cloud OS is misleading.

JP Rangaswami: Chief Scientist: Salesforce.com

Image via CrunchBase

ZDNet: JP Rangaswami and the future of Salesforce.com: The appointment of JP Rangaswami as Salesforce.com’s first chief scientist could push the company in an even more radical direction than we’ve already seen if he’s given any say in product strategy.

This is the first I am learning of JP's move from British Telecom to Salesforce.com. JP, of course, is the guy who introduced me to Twitter. According to WeFollow.com, I am number 52 in NYC on Twitter.

Congrats JP. Keep making bold moves.