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A FiberHouse in Kansas City

Brad Feld:

I bought a house in Kansas City on Monday. It’s next door to the Homes for Hackers and KC Startup Village. It will have Google Fiber in it. I hope it becomes an integral part of the nation’s first Google Fiberhood.

I’m not going to be living in it. Instead, I’m going to let entrepreneurs live / work in it. Rent free. As part of helping create the Kansas City startup community. And to learn about the dynamics of Google Fiber. And to have some fun.

Brilliant idea. Entrepreneurs can apply here.

caro:

Official trailer for The Internship, in which Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson play aspiring interns at Google (my employer). I can’t tell from the trailer whether the movie will be any good, but I can tell you that pretty much every Googler must have been laughing at the part where they think they have to shout into a video chat…I believe this happens in everybody’s first Hangout ever.

Gonna be a great 90-minute commercial for Google. They were very smart to play along.

Android Jelly Bean hits 13.6% adoption

Emil Protalinski of The Next Web:

The bigger picture is still the same though: Gingerbread (released December 2010) is first, ICS (October 2011) is second, the latest and greatest Jelly Beans (June 2012 and November 2012) are third, and Froyo (May 2010) is fourth.

An OS that is 2 years and 2 months old controls over 45 percent of the Android ecosystem. An OS that is 1 year and 4 months old controls another 30 percent. 75 percent of the entire Android ecosystem is still on the non-current versions of the OS. It’s 2013.

The latest OS controls just 13.6 percent of the market, 8 months after its initial release — which is actually a huge improvement. And we wonder why developers are still going iOS-first.

Inside Netflix's Project Griffin

Austin Carr for Fast Company looks back at the project that started as “The Netflix Player” but was eventually spun out into the Roku box/company:

It was December 2007, and the device was just weeks away from launching. Yet after all the years and resources and talent invested in the project (a team of roughly 20 had been working on it around the clock, from ironing out the industrial design and user interface to taking trips to Foxconn to finalize production details), Netflix CEO Reed Hastings was having serious second thoughts. The problem? Hastings realized that if Netflix shipped its own hardware, it would complicate potential partnerships with other hardware makers. “Reed said to me one day, ‘I want to be able to call Steve Jobs and talk to him about putting Netflix on Apple TV,’” recalls one high-level source. “‘But if I’m making my own hardware, Steve’s not going to take my call.’”

In hindsight, good call.

And:

But ultimately, Wood says, “It was totally the right decision. Licensing [digital content] has been hugely successful for Netflix. [The Netflix Player] would’ve created tension with partners, and increasingly decisions would come up where Netflix would have to decide, ‘Should we make decisions based on what’s best for licensing, or what’s best for our own hardware?’”

Sounds eerily similar to the dilemmas that both Google (with Motorola) and Microsoft (with Surface) now face, no?

Google’s Larry Page on Why Moon Shots Matter

Since I couldn’t link to it from the previous “chat” post, I wanted to link to Steven Levy’s interview of Larry Page for Wired. “Moon shots”, Google as a million-person company — it’s fascinating stuff that’s well worth a read.

One thing that sticks out: Page starts out by saying over and over again that it’s important not to focus on competition. But then he says the following when asked about Google+:

> I’m very happy with how it has gone. We’re working on a lot of really cool stuff. A lot of it has been copied by our competitors, so I think we’re doing a good job.

That, to me, says a lot right there.