April 1st is celebrated as April Fool’s Day or All Fools Day in many countries. People usually play prank on others and celebrate it. Tech companies also have celebrated April fools Day and, here is a list how the have … Continue reading
Google Celebrates April Fool’s day with some amazing features such as ‘Treasure Layer’ in Google Maps and a video suggesting YouTube will close tomorrow.
First up, as you can see in the photo above, a Google Maps look at San Francisco has a much different look that hearkens to old pirate tales. To see the Treasure Map layer, go into Google Maps and tap the Treasure option in the top right corner.
Google also released a three-and-a-half-minute April Fools’ video from the YouTube team (watch it below) saying that YouTube will close tomorrow and has actually been a massive contest to find the best video in the world. The company says it will review every video that has ever been uploaded and will delete everything else but the winner.
The search giant has also pushed out another practical joke called Google Nose, a program that lets you search by scent. This year Google’s flagship fake product is Google Nose. Nose purports to let you search for scents in Google search and use Android devices to smell objects and tell you what they are. Google says Nose can help you identify the smell of “a new car”, “the inside of an Egyptian tomb,” or “a ghost.”
“Our task as designers is to get our users the information they are looking for as quickly and beautifully as possible,” a Google user experience designer says in the video. “But until now we couldn’t give users what they are looking for — because sometimes they’re not looking at all.”
Blowfish12@2013 blowfish12.tk Author: Sudharsun. P. R.
Fox released the trailer for its comedy The Internship Movie following two “salesmen whose careers have been topped by the digital world. Played by Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson, the two set off to Silicon Valley to prove that they are still relevant by landing internships at Google. ”
It goes to show how mainstream Silicon Valley is becoming. It started with The Social Network, which took brought Mark Zuckerberg’s creation of Facebook straight into the heart of Hollywood. Now, we’ve got a focus on Google and its famed working culture of slides, great food, nap rooms, and more.
The trailer shows scenes from Google’s “campus,” including a clear dry-erase wall (that Vaughn writes on with Sharpie), a self-driving car, a Rubik’s cube competition, and a bunch of smart twentysomethings who have it out for the two “old guys.”
It’s a tale of old-timey institutions being overrun by the newer, younger, digital revolution. At one point, those crazy Google youngsters send Vaughn and Wilson off on an adventure to find “Charles Xavier,” a Stanford professor who is balding and in a wheelchair. It doesn’t end well for the pair.
Blowfish13@2013 blowfish12.tk Author: Sudharsun. P. R.
(Edit 3/16/2012: I am surprised that this post is picked up by a lot of media outlets. Given the strong interest, I want to emphasize what is measured and what is derived. The # of server racks in EC2 is what I am directly observing. By assuming 64 physical servers in a rack, I can derive the rough server count. But remember this is an *assumption*.
