We are on a week long trip to San Francisco for a series of meetings and had an opportunity to stop by Google today and visit with Bo Cowgill who runs Google's internal prediction markets. Besides having a great conversation, we were also exposed once again to the most unique office environment we've ever been in. Multi-story white boards, free food and drinks everywhere, temporary seating that look like mobile sterile rooms, exposed routers in the building lobbies, lava lamps.
But this is no 1999 dot.com office space where everyone is screwing around playing foosball. It's clear Google, while having oogles of money to spend on top notch office space, would prefer to maintain an air of "hackers work here" and purposely keep the pipes exposed. It's no wonder that this unique environment, combined with employees having 20% of their time to work on outside projects, is producing some pretty innovative stuff (including their work in prediction markets :) Even if 1 skunk-works project out of 1000 turns out to be something viable for Google, it's still worth it. More traditional companies, such as those we used to consult for, could learn a thing or two. Innovation is so often just lip service but Google lives it.
Now if they could just focus a tad more on their occasionally mediocre user-interfaces...
Wednesday, July 26, 2006
Tuesday, July 11, 2006
Behind the Scenes
Some of you may have noticed it’s been a bit quiet around here lately.
That definitely has not meant we took an extended vacation. Instead we’ve been busy making some major improvements behind the scenes. Most notably, (and this is a good problem to have,) we were beginning to see some problems due to too much traffic to Inkling. With clients and trial corporate sites in full swing, we have picked up a LOT of new users and as some of you may have noticed, it was beginning to cause sporadic outages, etc.
A couple days ago we switched hosting providers and we’re happy to say the switch went smoothly and people should be seeing a lot fewer “OOPS” screens.
Many other changes are on the way soon too so watch for them!
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