Labour Day 2013: Google builds a Doodle for May Day.. – #GoogleDoodle

Google is saluting the workers of the world with a building doodle on the occasion of Labour Day 2013. The doodle features the Google logo in the shape of a building with several workers on their job.

The doodle features an IT professional on her computer, a gardener watering a tree, a painter giving the letter ‘O’ a paint job and a plumber fixing a leak around the letter ‘E’.

There is also a helicopter hovering above the second ‘G’ and a satellite dish, indicative of modern-day communication, perched on the ‘E’.

Labour Day has its origins in the labour union movement, especially the eight-hour day movement, which urged eight hours for work, eight hours for recreation, and eight hours for rest. Labour Day is an annual holiday to mark the celebration of the economic and social achievements of workers. It generally sees organised street demonstrations and marches by labourers and their unions, on this day.

The Labour Day public holiday is fixed by the state and territory governments, and so it varies considerably.

In India, Labour Day is celebrated on May 1 every year. It is an official public holiday. The first May Day celebration in India took place in Madras by the Labour Kisan Party of Hindustan on May 1, 1923

May 1 is a national holiday in more than 80 countries including Bolivia, India, Chile, Peru, Mexico, Uruguay, Bahrain, Bangladesh, China, Israel, Philippines, Nepal and Pakistan. It is also celebrated unofficially in various other countries.

In the Australian Capital Territory, New South Wales and South Australia, it is celebrated on the first Monday in October. In Canada, Labour Day is celebrated on the first Monday in September.

Though Google had a Labour Day doodle in 2012 it was not posted on the Google India home page.

Related articles

• All aboard India’s first passenger train with the Google Doodle! (ktrmurali.wordpress.com)

All aboard India’s first passenger train with the Google Doodle!

If you’re a fan of spotting Google Doodles, this is a great week for you.

A day after Google honoured Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler with a doodle, the search giant has come up with one more to commemorate the 160th anniversary of the first passenger train in India.

The doodle is a simple affair, with a steam locomotive pulling a train. The engine forms the first “O” in “Google”. The whole doodle wears a very old-worldly look and resembles a painting more than a drawing. The train is surrounded by open fields and palm trees, trying to bring back the charm of the 19th century.

The first passenger train in India ran between Bori Bunder in Bombay and Thane on April 16, 1853, signaling a new era in travel and communication in the country. The train was pulled by three locomotives – Sultan, Sindh and Sahib and had about 400 passengers on board its 14 carriages. The journey of the first passenger train in India lasted for a good 57 minutes between Bori Bunder and Thane and had just one halt.

Celebrating the 160th anniversary of the first passenger train

 

Interestingly, this was only the first time a passenger train was run in India. The first rail line had come up near Chintadripet Bridge in the then Madras Presidency in 1836 as an experimental line.

After the first passenger train was run between Bombay and Thane, the first passenger railway line in north India was opened between Allahabad and Kanpur in 1859.

The train doodle is a slightly less interactive one this time round and slightly inaccurate too, given the fact that the train was actually pulled by three locomotives.

To celebrate Euler’s birthday yesterday, the doodle was a partly animated one. The doodle included geometrical figures and mathematical formulae, scribbled on a partially yellow piece of paper. Some of the mathematical elements on the doodle, included the mathematical constant, his polyhedral formula, now written as v-e+f=2.
 
An important name in the field of mathematics, Euler’s genius can be affirmed from the fact that he is the only mathematician to have two numbers named after him – the Euler’s number in calculus (e, i.e. approximately equal to 2.71828), and the Euler’s Mascheroni Constant (gamma), also called as “Euler’s constant” (approximately equal to 0.57721).

Earlier in December, Google had honoured another mathematician, Srinivasa Ramanujan on his 125th birthday. The doodle in the memory of this genius was endearing, to say the least and best described what Ramanujan lived for – his love for mathematics. The doodle showed a young lad, believed to be young Ramanujan, on his fours, writing the mathematical constant Pi, which is approximately equal to 3.14159. The word ‘Google’ was thoughtfully etched out of the different formulaes and other mathematical depictions.

Google pays $100 mn to Indian-American Neal Mohan to keep him from #Twitter

Google has paid a staggering bonus of $100 million to Indian-American executive Neal Mohan, just to keep him from accepting a job at Twitter.

Mohan is the man in charge of display ads for Google. He launched and developed the company’s approach and execution for that side of Google’s business. According to Business Insider which carries an excellent detailed profile of Mohan, He has a “special ability to understand what’s newly possible thanks to technology, and how this might be applied to serve a business strategy.”

He is expected to bring in an estimated $7billion for Google this year.

The report added that the bonus had come just as Mohan was on the verge of accepting an offer by Twitter to become chief of product in 2011.

A report in TechCrunch estimated that he was paid $100 million then, and Business Insider says that given the current value of Google stock, those shares are probably worth around $150 million today. The stock options will fully vest in three years.

Mohan graduated from Stanford in 1996 and worked for Accenture and NetGravity, before the latter was acquired by DoubleClick.

According to Daily Mail, “a private equity firm bought the company for $1.1billion and the CEO hired Mr Mohan to help rehabilitation. About 18 months later, after Mr Mohan implemented an aggressive plan to streamline and focus the business, Google bought it for $3.1billion.Since then, he has overseen Google’s acquisition of start-up companies to help bolster Google’s ad market.”

He reportedly also has a free rein to develop the display ad business as he sees first.

Business Insider had also collected a number of descriptions about Mohan from his co-workers who said things like, “He’s not a screamer or a big table-banger” and “”He doesn’t bullshit. If our numbers were going bad, I heard from him”. His clients were equally impressed saying things like “”He is the quiet assassin. He’s not a big show-boater.”

Leonhard Euler honoured by Google doodle

The mathematician introduced most modern terminology and was renowned for his work in mechanics, optics and astronomy

Leonhard Euler, the influential Swiss mathematician, has had the 306th anniversary of his birth honoured by a Google doodle. Photograph: Google

The birth of the Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler has been celebrated by Google with the publishing of an interactive Google doodle.

Euler was arguably the most important mathematician of the 18th century and one of the greatest of all time. He introduced most modern mathematical terminology and notation and was also renowned for his work in mechanics, fluid dynamics, optics, and astronomy.

Euler was born in Basel on 15 April 1707. He was tutored by Johann Bernoulli, a family friend who was also Europe’s leading mathematician. When Euler’s father tried to make him become a pastor, Bernoulli persuaded him that his son had the potential to be a great mathematician.

He travelled to Russia, where he prospered until foreign intellectuals became unpopular and he moved to Berlin. When Catherine the Great succeeded to the throne, Euler returned to Russia, where he died in 1783.

Twenty Biggest Websites In The World

From online candy sales to a website to search other website, everyone has got a website under their name these days. The popularity of a website is the measure of visitors it has garnered, and it is what draws the defining lines between being big and being meager. If you were thinking Google is the biggest website in the world, you are wrong! It is another one from USA. comScore, the digital analytics company came up with the list of most popular Website in the world. If you are curious to know which ones found their way up in the ladder, then here are the 20 biggest websites in the world, compiled by Business Insider.

#20 Amazon.com 163 Million Unique Visitors

The company: Amazon.com is the world’s largest online retailer. Started as an online bookstore, it soon diversified, selling DVDs, CDs, MP3 downloads, software, video games, electronics, apparel, furniture, food, toys and jewelry. The company was founded in 1994, spurred by what Bezos called his “regret minimization framework”, which described his efforts to fend off any regrets for not participating sooner in the internet business boom during that time. Amazon was originally founded in Bezos’ garage in Bellevue, Washington.

The company also produces consumer electronics—notably the Amazon Kindle e-book reader and the Kindle Fire Tablet—and is a major provider of cloud computing services.

#19 Sina.com.cn 169 Million Visitors

Sina.com is the largest Chinese-language infotainment web portal. It is run by Sina Corporation, which was founded in 1999. Sina was recognized by Southern Weekend as the “Chinese Language Media of the Year” for 2003 and in the early 2000s, it was known as the “Yahoo of China.” Sina launched a microblogging service Weibo in 2009, and has grown to more than 400 million users. Sina has said it has more than 60,000 verified accounts, consisting of celebrities, sports stars and other VIPs. The top 100 users now have over 180 million followers combined.

#18 WordPress.com 170.9 Million Visitors

WordPress.com is a blog web hosting service provider owned by Automattic, and powered by the open source WordPress software. WordPress has been able to attract users by offering dead-simple tools for blogging and web publishing. Given that it’s open source, WordPress has the upper hand on other platforms that require licensing fees.

There are nearly 60 million WordPress.com sites, which receive more than 100 million pageviews per day. Everyday over one million new articles and over one million comments are published. Some notable clients include CNN, CBS, BBC, Reuters, Sony and Volkswagen. In September 2010, it was announced that Windows Live Spaces, Microsoft’s blogging service, would be closing, and that Microsoft would instead be partnering with WordPress.com for blogging services.

#17 Apple.com – 171.7 Million Unique Visitors

Apple.com is online destination for Apple products and software. It is the domain for the Apple Store as well as customer support pages for all Apple products. It’s bookmarked as the default homepage on Safari browser that is the default browser in all Apple Internet-connected products which are owned by countless number of people already.

#16 Sohu.com – 175.8 Million Unique Visitors

Started in 1997 as the country’s first online search company, Sohu.com is a Chinese portal and search engine. It offers advertising, online multiplayer gaming and other services. Sohu was ranked as the world’s 3rd and 12th fastest-growing company by Fortune in 2009 and 2010 respectively.

#15 Bing.com – 184 Million Unique Visitors

Bing is a web search engine from Microsoft. The Redmond Company has aggressively advertised Bing, and made huge efforts to make the search engine much easier to use, with the addition of things like the social sidebar and improved algorithms. Microsoft also pays other Websites to link to Bing.
On July 29, 2009, Microsoft and Yahoo! announced a deal in which Bing would power Yahoo! Search.[6 hat it is: Web search engine.

#14 Twitter.com – 189.8 Million Unique Visitors

Twitter is an online social networking service and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read text-based messages of up to 140 characters, known as “tweets”. Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and by July, the social networking site was launched. The service rapidly gained worldwide popularity, with over 500 million registered users as of 2012, generating over 340 million tweets daily and handling over 1.6 billion search queries per day. Since its launch, Twitter has become one of the ten most visited websites on the Internet, and has been described as “the SMS of the Internet.”

The presence of news organizations, politicians, and other industry-specific experts have turned Twitter into the ultimate source of information.

#13 Taobao.com – 207 Million Unique Visitors

Taobao.com is Chinese marketplace for clothing, accessories, jewelry, food, electronics, and more, similar to eBay and Amazon, operated by Alibaba Group. Founded by Alibaba Group in May 10, 2003, it facilitates consumer-to-consumer (C2C) retail by providing a platform for small businesses and individual entrepreneurs to open online retail stores that mainly cater to consumers in mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan.

#12 Ask.com – 218.4 Million Unique Visitors

Ask is a question answering focused web search engine powered by Google. It founded in 1996 by Garrett Gruener and David Warthen in Berkeley, California.

#11 Blogger.com – 229.9 Million Unique Visitors

Blogger.com is one of the earliest dedicated blog-publishing tools; it is credited for helping popularize the format. It allows private or multi-user blogs with time-stamped entries. It was created by Pyra Labs, which was bought by Google in 2003. Generally, the blogs are hosted by Google at a sub domain of blogspot.com.

#10 MSN.com – 254.1 Million Unique Visitors

MSN is a collection of Internet sites and services provided by Microsoft. The Microsoft Network debuted as an online service and Internet service provider on August 24, 1995, to coincide with the release of the Windows 95 operating system.

MSN was once a simple online service for Windows 95, an early experiment at interactive multimedia content on the Internet, and one of the most popular dial-up Internet service providers. Today, MSN is primarily a popular Internet portal.

#9 Baidu – 268.7 Million Unique Visitors

Baidu is a Chinese web Services Company headquartered in the Baidu Campus in Haidian District, Beijing. It offers many services, including a Chinese language search engine for websites, audio files, and images. Baidu also offers 57 search and community services including Baidu Baike, an online collaboratively built encyclopedia, and a searchable keyword-based discussion forum. Baidu was established in 2000 by Robin Li and Eric Xu.

Baidu is one of China’s most popular search engines. It employs thousands of China’s best engineers to continually update the quality and speed of its search engine.

#8 Microsoft.com – 271.7 Million Unique Visitors

Microsoft.com is destination for purchasing Microsoft products, and downloading MS software and updates. There are a lot of Microsoft Windows-powered computers out there, and most of them come with Microsoft.com bookmarked for customer support and lots of other functions, no wonder it’s on this list.

#7 QQ.com – 284.1 Million Unique Visitors

QQ.com is China-based search engine and portal. QQ is an abbreviation of Tencent QQ, which provides customers with a popular instant messaging software service. Due to popularity of the instant messaging software service, by 10 September 2012, there were 784 million active user accounts with approximately 100 million online at a time.

#6 Live.com – 389.5 Million Unique Visitors

Live.com is Microsoft’s new email service. It was a customizable portal launched by Microsoft in early November 2005 and it was one of the first Windows Live services to launch. Live.com lets users add RSS feeds in order to view news at a glance. Building off Microsoft’s Start.com experimental page, Live.com could be customized with Gadgets, mini-applications that could serve almost any purpose.

Some gadgets integrated with other Windows Live services, including Hotmail, Live Search, and Favorites.

#5 Wikipedia.org – 469.6 Million Unique Visitors

Wikipedia.org is simply the easy and best source of knowledge. It is a collaboratively edited, multilingual, free Internet encyclopedia supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its 24 million articles, over 4.1 million in the English Wikipedia, are written collaboratively by volunteers around the world.

As of February 2013, there are editions of Wikipedia in 285 languages. It has become the largest and most popular general reference work on the Internet, having an estimated 365 million readers worldwide.

#4 Yahoo.com – 469.9 Million Unique Visitors

Yahoo.com is a search engine and platform that connects to users to other Yahoo properties, such as Yahoo Finance and Flickr. Yahoo is one of the original Web portals from the 1990s; it offers news, sports, finance, and email.

#3 YouTube.com – 721.9 Million Unique Visitors

YouTube.com is the platform for uploading, sharing, and watching user-created videos. It was created by three former PayPal employees in February 2005. In November 2006, YouTube was bought by Google for US$1.65 billion, and now operates as a subsidiary of Google, and the site got more popular.

#2 Google.com – 782.8 Million Unique Visitors

Google.com is web search engine, popularly known as ‘search giant’. Google entered a crowded search engine market in the late 1990s, but won because it was the fastest and had a clean design. It was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while both attended Stanford University.

#1 Facebook.com – 836.7 Million Unique Visitors

Facebook.com is the largest social networking site with over a billion registered users. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg with his college roommates and fellow Harvard University students Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes.

Chidambaram to interact with citizens on Budget through Google+ Hangout

Union Finance Minister P. Chidambaram will respond to citizens’ questions on the Union Budget 2013-14, at 8 p.m. today by joining the multiparty video conference on Google+ Hangout.

This is for the first time that any Union Cabinet Minister is using this medium to interact with the citizens and to respond to their questions about the Union Budget.

This is a powerful communications platform and is accessible across the world for internet users. Google+ Hangouts allow up to 10 people participating at a point of time. One can later share the hangout on YouTube or live stream it using Hangouts on Air.

Chidambaram will be joined by a group of esteemed panelists on a Google+ Hangout. It includes among others Jahangir Aziz, Senior Asia Economist and India Chief Economist, JP Morgan, Anand Mahindra, Chairman and Managing Director of Mahindra and Mahindra, Amit Singhal, Senior Vice President, Google Inc. and Manish Chokhani, MD and CEO, Axis Capital.

The session will be moderated by senior journalist Senthil Chengalvarayan.

Citizens will be able to watch the special budget Google+ Hangout live through the Google India +Page at google.com/+GoogleIndia or on the InConversation YouTube channel.

Before the Hangout, the citizens can submit their questions to P. Chidambaram either by uploading a video or commenting on the YouTube channel, or through the Google India +Page and tagging text or a video with the hashtag #asktheFM.

GOOGLE DOODLE – Nicolaus Copernicus 540th Birthday

Commemorating the 540th birth anniversary of Nicolaus Copernicus, Google has posted a doodle which features an animated heliocentric model formulated by the Polish astronomer. Born on February 19, 1473, Nicolaus Copernicus was a Renaissance mathematician and astronomer.

The doodle shows the sun placed at the centre of the universe and has the Moon revolving around earth. It also depicts the then known five other planets – Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn – revolving around the sun.

The second ‘O’ of the Google logo has been replaced with the sun, while the other letters of the word Google, written in Google’s characteristic Catull font, appear in the backdrop.

Best known for his treatise “On the Revolution of the Celestial Spheres,” Copernicus asserted that the earth revolved around the sun — contrary to the medieval belief that the earth was the center of the universe.

The theory was viewed with suspicion by the Church, and his treatise was not published until 1543, the year of his death.

Eventually the theory became the cornerstone for a future generation of scientists including Kepler and Galileo, but one of its ardent advocates, Italian cleric Giordano Bruno, was burned at the stake as a heretic in 1600.

The astronomer’s processional transfer began at Olsztyn Castle in February, with extended stops at several northern Poland sites with which he had been connected along the way, and did not arrive at Frombork until the middle of last week.

The Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus has been reburied in Poland in a lavish ceremony 467 years after his death.

During a Roman Catholic ritual, the remains were interred beneath the altar of Frombork Cathedral in northern Poland, where the astronomer had been the canon (head priest) and where he originally was buried in 1543. Copernicus died on 24 May 1543.

 

#Google doodle commemorates #Jagjit Singh’s 72nd birth anniversary

Google dedicated its search homepage to late ghazal maestro Jagjit Singh (February 1941 – October 2011), whose 72nd birth anniversary is on Friday. Incidentally, the legendary singer recently topped a list of popular singers of the ghazal genre. According to Google Search Trends, Jagjit Singh was people’s first choice – both in India and abroad, when it came to songs, lyrics, and mp3s of ghazals.

To view a museum of Google doodles, visit http://www.google.co.in/doodles/

Can you ever erase yourself from the internet?

There is no black and white answer concerning consumers’ online privacy.

More and more each day the internet infiltrates commerce and social life and consumers are becoming more aware that their personal information is becoming less and less personal.  Some websites and apps have transparent sharing policies.  Some of them state exactly what information they will use for advertising but others aren’t so clear.

 So what if one day you’re fed up? Tired of the eerie advertisements that seem to cater perfectly to your personal history, hobbies and wants? What if you want to erase your online identity with no strings attached, which brings us to the question: Once your information is on the web, does it ever really go away?

The problem with online privacy

That was the question some of the top names in tech privacy were trying to answer at Churchill Club’s “The Privacy Gap” panel on Wednesday, including Brendon Lynch, chief privacy officer at Microsoft, and Facebook’s former chief privacy officer, Chris Kelly.

“There are still people who don’t know what they’re giving up when they sign up for services,” Lynch said. “They don’t know how much value is being derived from their data.”

The general theme of the talk seemed to center around the fact that in today’s climate, there is no black and white answer concerning consumers’ online privacy. While some panelists called for major innovation in regards to online privacy – World Privacy Forum’s Pam Dixon urged that the industry needs to start looking at “privacy as a feature, not a bug” – some saw privacy as a user problem.

“If I say to a consumer, ‘I am collecting every single piece information about you but I am telling you this up front,’ and you choose to continue to use my app, that is an educated informed choice and consumers have the right to make that choice,” explained Jon Potter, president of the Application Developer’s Alliance.

The general consensus was that online privacy issues are growing and consumers’ tolerance level with companies using their private information is dwindling fast.

Even Facebook was the target of FTC privacy charges back in 2011, accusing the social networking site of deceiving their users by telling them they could keep their Facebook information private, and then allowing it to be shared and made public. They have since reached a settlement, and one of Facebook’s requirements now is to post a clear and prominent sharing notice and have users consent to having their information shared. Judging from Facebook’s over 1 billion users, most people continue to use the site despite knowing that their information is being shared and tracked.

It’s the same story with the thousands of mobile applications and other sites that share your information, essentially making your every online step traceable back to you.

These experts on privacy admit and agree that not only should there be more innovation that closes the rift between consumer privacy and sharing practices, but there also needs to be new technology surrounding deleting your data from the web.

“There needs to be an educated technological discussion about whether it’s possible to erase your data from the Internet, and what does it mean when you no longer use a website and you want to back your data out,” Potter said at the panel.

Tricks to erasing yourself from the Internet

If you don’t want to stick around for more online privacy innovation and want to clear the Internet of your data, you’re out of luck if you want an absolute erase button. For example, even after you delete your Facebook, some of your data traces may still remain, which is explained in their privacy policy.

So what can you do?

• Check out Google’s removal request tool: It allows you to ask Google to remove search results or cached content.
• Deleting accounts: When deleting accounts, you will notice that some sites simply “deactivate” it. A tip for these situations is to delete every bit of your information from these sites, then link the site to a newly-created email address, and then delete that email address (tedious, we know).
• Contact sites directly: You can also contact particular sites and companies that have your personal information and politely ask them to erase it (again, tedious).
• Do not track: AVG security software has developed a tool that allows you to opt out of tracking on most web browsers. This means that browsers like Internet Explorer, Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox won’t be able to track your Internet behavior.
• Keep your identity protected: Remember, if you find false information, or are afraid that your data is being used fraudulently, signing up for an identity theft protection service can help notify you of any fraudulent activity concerning your identity.

If you’d still like to use the Internet while protecting your privacy, you’ll need to keep reading privacy policies and exercising your choice of whether to continue using a website or application knowing their sharing practices.

Until there is more innovation and maybe some uniformity surrounding online privacy, being aware of what you are sharing when signing up for a service is very important, as well as knowing that your personal data is extremely valuable.

The moral of the story? Once you’re on the Internet, it’s very difficult to leave.

Who is Orkut ?

A guy lost his girlfriend in a train accident….

but the gal’s name nowhere appeared in the dead list. This guy grew up n became IT technical architect in his late 20′s, achievement in itself!!

He hired developers from the whole globe and plan to make a software where he could search for his gf through the web..

Things went as planned…

n he found her, after losing millions of dollars and 3 long years!!

It was time to shut down the search operation, when the CEO of Google had a
word with this guy n took over this application,

This Software made a whopping 1 billion dollars profit in its first year,

which we today know as ORKUT.

The guy’s name is Orkut Büyükkökten Yes it’s named after him only. Today he is paid a hefty sum by Google for the things we do like scrapping. He is expected to b the richest person by 2009..

Orkut Büyükkökten today has 13 assistants to monitor his scrapbook & 8 to monitor his friends-list. He gets around 20,000 friend-requests a day & about 85,000 scraps!!!

Some other Cool Facts about this guy:

* He gets $12 from Google when every person registers to this website.

* He also gets $10 when you add somebody as a friend.

* He gets $8 when your friend’s friend adds you as a friend & gets $6 if
anybody adds you as friend in the resulting chain.

* He gets $5 when you scrap somebody & $4 when somebody scraps you.

* He also gets $200 for each photograph you upload on Orkut.

* He gets $2.5 when you add your friend in the crush-list or in the hot-list.

* He gets $2 when you become somebody’s fan.

* He gets $1.5 when somebody else becomes your fan.

* He even gets $1 every time you logout of Orkut.

* He gets $0.5 every time you just change your profile-photograph.

* He also gets $0.5 every time you read your friend’s scrap-book & $0.5 every time you view your friend’s friend-list.