The founder and former administrator of 4chan is now a Googler. Chris Poole, more famously known as “moot,” has announced today he is joining the Mountain View company.
A Google engineer by the name of Benson Leung is one of the many proponents of USB Type-C at the Mountain View company, and he’s now doing us the kind service of reviewing dozens of third-party Type-C cables on Amazon. Why? Because some of the cables coming from a variety of manufacturers could be “dangerous,” according to Leung, and are likely less-than-functional…
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In a recent interview with Forbes regarding benefits for Google employees, Google Chief People Officer Laszlo Bock explained the company has recently announced death benefits for Googlers.
“This might sound ridiculous,” Bock told me recently in a conversation on the ever-evolving benefits at Google, “But we’ve announced death benefits at Google.”
According to Bock, spouses of Googlers whom pass away while employed at the company will continue to receive 50 percent of the employee’s annual salary for 10 years following. Children will also receive $1,000 monthly until they reach 19 (or 23 if they are a full-time student):
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Google is once-again touting support for the LGBT community by participating in worldwide Pride events and expanding company-wide benefits.
According to “Gaygler” Randy Reyes on the official Google blog:
We encourage people to bring their whole selves to work. And this month Googlers, Gayglers (gay Googlers), and their families and friends took this spirit to the streets in Pride parades and celebrations around the globe. In Sao Paulo, a group of 50 marched as a Google contingent for the first time ever. In San Francisco, more than 1,000 Googlers and allies marched (nearly doubling the number of people we had in 2011!). In New York, more than 700 of our friends and colleagues took over 5th Avenue marching alongside our double-decker Pride bus. And this weekend in Singapore, we’re sponsoring the Pink Dot celebration for the second consecutive year.
Reyes further revealed action-based plans to celebrate World Pride in London this year. The Mountain View, Calif.-based Company will host a “Legalise Love” Conference at Google London, with hopes to “eliminate homophobia” and “decriminalize homosexuality.”
Google also significantly increased coverage of transgender health care for its U.S. employees. Transgender-inclusive benefits, such as “transitioning procedures and treatment in accordance with the World Professional Association for Transgender Health’s Standards of Care,” now receive a lifetime maximum coverage of $75,000.
“Next month we’ll carry the energy of Pride into our fourth annual company Diversity & Inclusion celebration, the Sum of Google. The Sum is an opportunity to celebrate and engage in a discussion about diversity and inclusion across our offices around the world,” Reyes concluded.
A picture gallery is below.
Google just announced, well, boasted, about its involvement with the 2012 World Wide Web conference that occurred last month.
Vice President of Engineering Prabhakar Raghavan took to the Official Google Research Blog this afternoon to detail the search engine’s role in the widely popular and annual series. Google was a major supporter of the conference and even sponsored it, coupled with many Googlers having taken an active role through keynotes and papers.
“More than forty members of Google’s technical staff gathered in Lyon, France in April to participate in the global dialogue around the state of the web at the World Wide Web conference (WWW) 2012,” explained Raghavan. “A decade ago, Larry Page and Sergey Brin applied their research to an information retrieval problem and their work—presented at WWW in 1998—led to the invention of today’s most popular search engine.
The new VP further said Mobile Web in the technical program is becoming more apparent as the conference has “evolve[d] over the years,” and then he noted the WWW community is transitioning from a “classic ‘bag of words’ of web pages” to an “entity-centric view.”
Raghavan is Yahoo’s former chief scientist, but 9to5Google reported that he left the position in March to take an executive job at Google amid massive cuts at the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based search engine.
A list of Googlers and their conference contributions is below:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z07MnBf9QNY]
Fluent is a web-based workflow stream that works with existing Gmail accounts to bring a Sparrow-like user interface to email.
Users can stream email threads and replies, preview aggregated attachments in a tab, quickly reply or compose inline, archive messages, and even add a to-do list with the new design concept that claims to run on any web browser.
Sparrow is a great success as a Mac-only application, and now Fluent hopes to balance the playing field and snag users whom are in dire need of a new Gmail look and functionality. Fluent’s website specifically praises its workflow ability, multiple accounts options, and “blazing” fast search-as-you-type filter.
The streaming email UI is the work of three former Googlers who quit the Mountain View, Calif.-based Company. BusinessInsider said Cameron Adams, Dhanji Prasanna, and Jochen Bekmann left because designers were “less valuable” than engineers at Google, and they felt disconnected from Google’s culture while operating from across the world in Sydney, Australia…