15 Years of Googling; 15 Never-Known Facts

#15 Why Android is named after desserts and sweets?

Cupcake, Donut, Eclair, Froyo, Gingerbread, Honeycomb, Ice Cream Sandwich, Jelly Bean and recently KitKat- why do Google name Android versions after desserts and sweets? Google doesn't want to explain why, but Randall Sarafa, a Google spokesman said, "It's kind of like an internal team thing, and we prefer to be a little bit - how should I say - a bit inscrutable in the matter, I'll say.” "The obvious thing is that, yeah, the Android platform releases, they go by dessert names and by alphabetical order for the most part," he added.

To celebrate new version release of Android, a giant mock-up of the dessert that matches the codename is usually delivered to the Google Campus and put on display. You can see the mockups of all the Android versions placed together in the campuses; there is a mockup of KitKat Android too between them.

#14 Google Doodle

The first Google Doodle, which is when the Google logo is altered on the site's homepage, was in celebration Burning Man festival in 1998.

In May 2012, Google unveiled its first interactive Google Doodle to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the arcade game Pac-Man, in association with Namco. Searchers play Pac-Man within their browser by clicking the 'Insert Coin' button. The game got viral with the users; so that Google made it a permanent site after the Doodle had been removed.

Later the same year, Google unveiled its first animated Google Doodle to mark John Lennon's 70th birthday with a short clip of his song 'Imagine'. A similar Doodle was launched, using a clip of Queen's 'Don't Stop Me Now' song, to mark Freddie Mercury's 65th birthday in September 2011.

#13 Google Acquisitions

Google has acquired an average of one company every week since 2010. In 2010, Google Energy made its first investment in a renewable energy project by NextEra Energy Resources. In the same year it purchased Global IP Solutions, a Norway-based company that provides web-based teleconferencing and other related services. And in May 2010, Google announced it had also closed the acquisition of the mobile ad network AdMob. The acquisitions were then followed by acquiring Android, Motorola Mobility, Quickoffice and many others.

#12 Page and Brin wanted to sell Google for $1 million but it was offered with only $750,000

They went to Excite CEO George Bell and offered to sell it to him for $1 million. He rejected the offer and later criticized Vinod Khosla, one of Excite's venture capitalists, after he negotiated Brin and Page down to $750,000. On June 7, 1999, a $25 million round of funding was announced, with major investors including the venture capital firms Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Sequoia Capital.

#11 Google’s in house chef lead a team of 150 employees

Google hired its first in-house chef, Charlie Ayers, in November 1999, when the company had just 40 employees. His work there was widely publicized in the media, and David Vise's corporate history The Google Story contains an entire chapter about him called "Charlie's Place." By the time he left Google in 2006, Ayers and his team of five chefs and 150 employees were serving 4,000 daily lunches and dinners in 10 cafes across the company's headquarters campus in Mountain View, CA.

#10 Google IPO turned many of its employees into millionaires

Around 1,000 of Google's employees became millionaires when the company went public in 2004. One of those millionaires was masseuse Bonnie Brown, who worked at the company giving back rubs for $450 a week back in 1999.

#9 Google’s green data centers

Inside the Council Bluffs, Lowa data center there is over 115,000 square feet of space. There are 9 more such data centers owned by Google. These data centers are basic to run Google’s internet services like Google Search, Google+, Gmail, its cloud services and others.

At the Georgia data center, Google built an evaporative cooling system, which uses both outside air and chilled sprayed water to cool servers. Google in its blog post said that this evaporative cooling process commonly uses “hundreds of thousands of gallons of water a day.”

To counter such a huge waste of water, Google has turned to chilly outside air and even seawater for greener ways to cool its data centers. The search giant has also tapped into recycled waste water to cool a data center in Douglas County, Georgia. It’s the first time Google has used recycled waste water for a data center in the U.S. and the system was financed by Google and owned by the local water authority.

#8 “I’m feeling lucky”

Google's first official tweet was the words "I'm feeling lucky" in binary.

The "I'm Feeling Lucky" button, which bypasses the results page to take users directly to the first result of their search, has been estimated to cost Google around $100m in lost ad revenue every year.

#7 Gmail

Gmail released on December 16, 2005, and is now available in more than 50 languages. The idea for Gmail was pitched by Rajen Sheth during an interview with Google, and went on to be developed by Paul Buchhe. Initially the email client was available for use only by Google employees internally. Google announced Gmail to the public on April 1, 2004 by making fun of paper-based archiving by introducing "Gmail Paper", where a user could click a button and Gmail would purportedly mail an ad-supported paper copy email archive for free.

#6 Google gets money from rival company’s too

Almost all of rival company Mozilla's money comes from Google. The firm pays $300m a year to be the default search engine on Mozilla's web browser Firefox. It is same with Apple using Google maps, where Google gets money for placing adds. The other rivals include Yahoo and Microsoft, which in one or other way depends on Google's services.

#5 Google’s Slogan

Its mission statement from the outset is "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful", and its unofficial slogan is "Don't be evil".

#4 The Founders wealth

Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin own just 16 percent of the company and it gives them a combined net worth of around $46 billion. Guess the initial investors are already billionaires now.

#3 Reading CAPTCHA

Google uses reCAPTCHA to teach computers how to read text. With 200,000 million CAPTCHAs solved each day. Google's computers learn how to identify words scanned from books even if they're warped.

#2 Google data

Google's search index is more 100 million gigabytes in size. It would take 100,000 one-terabyte personal drives to contain the same amount of data.

#1 The miscellany

Its main page is so sparse because Sergey Brin and Larry Page didn't know HTML. For a long time you could only search by hitting the return key – it didn't even have a submit button.

Google might be the only company with the explicit goal to REDUCE the amount of time people spend on its site.

 The world watches 450,000 years of YouTube videos each month, over twice as long as modern humans have existed.

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Michael Lazerow

Founder of Buddy Media, GOLF.com, U-Wire, Lazerow Ventures

Is Fear Stopping You from Starting a Company?

March 18, 2013

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You've done what you were supposed to do. You got a great degree. You landed your first job. You've done what you were supposed to do. You got a great degree. You landed your first job. You've now been promoted a few times. And you're now hanging on LinkedIn like every good professional should do.
You now are making decent money—more money than you ever thought you'd make. You're married and now have responsibilities – kids, a mortgage, parents who may outlive their savings.
But you're not living the life that you envisioned. You may say you are. But be honest. Brutally honest with yourself. Move all fear to the side. Admit it.
The great job that you worked so hard for years and years to put yourself in the position to get is now your jail.
What you didn't realize then you realize now. You shouldn't have done what you were supposed to do. You should have done what you wanted to do, what made you happy, and what would have provided you the freedom to live the life you wanted.
And THAT is start your own business.
You didn't start the business because you were scared. You didn't have the money to do it. You didn't have the time. Whatever. But you didn't do it. That's a fact.
Don't worry. It's not too late to start a company, which is your only hope to live the life you want. But if you fail to act now or soon, it may be too late. And getting off your current path onto a more fruitful one may be less risky than continuing to cash the regular safe paycheck and building for the long term.
If we can all agree on one thing (and it may be the only thing we can agree on), it is this: The "security" society is over. OVER! And it's never coming back.
Social security is bankrupt. We know that. The program, like many others in the US, is a GIANT PONZI SCHEME! The money I pay today for social security goes right out the door to pay for benefits of others.
Job security? Forget about it. Assume you will be laid off, no matter what industry you're in. Expect it to happen sooner than later.
Unemployment, COBRA, the EPA, FEMA, SEC, and most other government safety blankets and protectors are irrelevant. It's not that the good people (in most cases) who work there are all ignorant and don't mean well. We've seen over and over again that government protections don't work.
Government security is over. Job security is over. Financial security is over. Sit with it. Feel it. Be with it. And start acting.
Does your personal financial future look like China and Brazil? Or are you Greece? The decisions you make today to build for your future will determine your fate.
Why does it make financial sense to start your own business? Even if you continue to get your paycheck, you're paying 40 percent to the local, state, and federal government. So the real opportunity cost is the after-tax money, the in-your-pocket money.
I'd argue that investing that money in your future is a better investment than investing 10 hours a day, and probably many weekends, trying to make someone else money, someone who may lay you off very soon.
Say you make $120,000 per year, a healthy salary for a college-educated professional. Of that, $48,000 goes right out the door. So your "in-your-pocket pay" is really $72,000, or $6,000/mo. That's the investment you'll be making in your future, it's your opportunity cost. It's a lot of money but definitely not enough to build any sort of real cushion or wealth, especially if you live in any city.
Now the old model was to slave away at a company earning enough to "survive" and support your family in hopes that you'd move up and make the big money in a decade (or two). Well, now that golden payday has been crushed and the only constant is change.
Entrepreneurs take advantage of change. Change is their muse, their catalyst, their lover and their protector.
Change chews up and spits out workers, employees, and the status quo of how things were done. Change looks at the above as inconvenient barriers to getting to a better place, temporary barriers that can be removed at any time.
So the question you need to ask is simple: Is your annual take-home pay, after taxes, really enough for you to justify the status albeit-potentially-fleeting quo? I'd argue for many of you that the answer is NO by a long shot. And you taking your paycheck and deluding yourself to think that this too will pass is dangerous and short-sighted. Fear is holding you back.
Starting a company provides you two main benefits: flexibility and a prosperous future where you'll control your own destiny. You'll also have learned the financial survival skills necessary to thrive in any environment without sitting at your desk worrying about whether you're on the chopping block. What I love most about starting companies is being able to show up to see my kids at school whenever I want. I work harder than most people. But I do so more on my terms than anyone else's.
I am a realist. I know that not everyone is capable of quitting their job and starting up. Bills need to be paid. Responsibilities don't go away. But for those of you who are in a position to invest in yourself and your future, look in the mirror and ask yourself if fear is getting in the way.
If it is, attack it and start living the life you want to live.

The #1 Mistake Entrepreneurs Make

I’ve started 4 companies and have invested in 25 more. And I can say, with supreme confidence, that I have made or seen almost every mistake possible.
I’ve hired the wrong people. And fired the wrong people.
I’ve raised too much money (yes, it’s possible). And too little.
I’ve launched products that not one person used and have pivoted so many times I’m still dizzy.
None of these are fun to live through, I assure you. But they are not nearly as fatal to a young company as the #1 mistake entrepreneurs make – FOCUSING ON THE WRONG THINGS.
Successful entrepreneurs focus exclusively on efforts that matter and are able to tune out the rest. People who focus succeed. It’s that simple.
A critical difference between a startup and a large company is resources. Specifically, time and money. And having little of both is oftentimes a godsend and leads to some of our best work. Just look at your favorite indie movie!
Google can give its employees 20 percent of their time to pursue their crazy ideas. If Buddy Media had done that, we would have been out of business.
Focusing is not a natural exercise for many entrepreneurs. More ideas pop into my brain during my morning shower than many people get in a month.
So in order to focus, you need to build your “focus” muscle and train your brain to focus and stay focused.
Volumes have been written about how to do just this. One of my favorites is “Organize Your Mind, Organize Your Life: Train Your Brain to Get More Done in Less Time” by Dr. Paul Hammerness, a Harvard Medical School psychiatrist and Margaret Moore, an executive wellness coach and codirector of the Institute of Coaching.
But you don’t need to read books to bring focus to your entrepreneurial life. Here is an exercise I use with entrepreneurs I have invested in to make sure they are truly focusing on the right things.
I ask a very simple question: What are the top 3 things you need to accomplish in the next 6-12 months to give the company the best chance of long-term success?
I push them to be specific. And rank the responses in order of importance.
Is creating the best product most important? How about locking down distribution? Are those both more important than monetization? How about hiring the right people? How about raising money? Is business development important to the business this year?
Most entrepreneurs I speak to can’t name their priorities right away. And if they can, they aren’t written down anywhere and they haven’t been communicated to the rest of their organization.
If an entrepreneur can’t name their top 3 priorities without hesitation, how will the rest of the company know? It’s bad enough for an founder to work on the wrong projects. But if the entire company is not focusing in the right areas, game over!
Without focus, young companies can FEEL like they are accomplishing a lot while in reality accomplishing nothing. They solve problems that never existed in the first place. And launch products with no market.
With the right focus, entrepreneurs can change the world. I’ve seen it so many times, upclose and personal.
If Mark Zuckerberg had not focused on the photo-tagging feature years ago, Facebook would not be the world-changing company it is. If Twitter had not focused on 140 character messaging, it would never have survived. Where would Apple be if it decided to focus on watches instead of phones? Or if it focused on selling the most number of units rather than designing the best products and profitability? You get the idea.
The single most focused entrepreneur I have ever met is Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce. He has an epic and well-documented process and tool called the V2Mom that has helped him build Salesforce into Forbes’ most innovative company in the world (two years in a row!).
In one of my first meetings with Marc, he told me that everything he has written down over the past 14 years has come true. Does he have a secret genie granting him wishes? No. But he has been able to get his entire company focused on core priorities over and over again.
I encourage all leaders (of companies, of divisions and of small teams) to write down the top 3 areas of focus somewhere visible in the organization and communicate them to the entire team.
By doing so, you are not only able to focus on what is most important, but you are also able to eliminate distractions, which is the biggest gift you can give as a leader.
(PHOTO: Flickr, Chris Fore)

I'll be writing about how to be a successful founder and more. Follow me at http://www.linkedin.com/in/lazerow.

10 words never to use in your resume

Creative is the most overused buzzword in LinkedIn profiles followed by effective, motivated and extensive experience, the social networking site has said.

According to career expert David Schwarz, using buzzwords not only makes your CV generic but it can give the impression that you are trying to mislead your prospective employer.

"They create almost a sense of misleading because they gloss over the detail," News.com.auquoted Schwarz, a principal consultant at career management firm Board Portfolio, as saying.

Schwarz said that everything you put in a resume needs to be backed up with proof.

"If you can't put a metric or a statistic next to that statement shouldn't have it in your CV," he said.

He added that candidates should never include aspiration statements in their resume.

"'I want to be, or my goal is, or in the future I want', they're all massive red flags because they all basically say you're not qualified to do the job you're doing now," he added.

The top 10 buzzwords that appear most in profiles are:

1. Creative
2. Effective
3. Motivated
4. Extensive experience
5. Track record
6. Innovative
7. Responsible
8. Analytical
9. Communication skills
10. Positive

7 ways to email heavy files

Rather than attach & send a large batch of individual files, it's more convienient for the recipient if you just zip them into one file. 
Ever wanted to send a large file but were held back by the email providers' attachment limits? Here we show you how to quickly share larger files using various services.

Bayfile has no limit on the number of downloads for your uploaded files and supports file sizes up to 5GB. The interface shows upload speed & time remaining but does not support multiple file upload. The site removes your stored files after 30 days of inactivity. Once the file is uploaded, you can send the sharing and delete links to your email from the site itself to keep them handy.

This one has a clean and easy-to-use interface — it's one of the best free services for file sharing. There is no sign-up required and you can upload files as big as 5GB. Unlike other services, your files are not deleted if they are not being downloaded on a regular basis — they are deleted only after it stays on their server for 30 days. Here again, you can only upload one file at a time.

Gmail is well integrated with Google Drive. Just sign in to your email account and click 'Drive' on the top bar. Select the files you want to share (multiples possible), add email addresses and click send.

outlook skydrive

Sign in to Outlook.com or SkyDrive with your Windows Live or Hotmail ID. Then you can easily share a single file or a complete folder. Just select a file/folder, click on share and the receipient gets emailed.

sling file

This relatively unknown file hosting service lets you upload files as big as 50GB. Plus, it also lets you upload multiple files at once. Files are only deleted after 180 days of inactivity. Once uploaded, you can send the download and delete links to your email and also share the download link via email with three other people. There are no limits on the number of file downloads per month.

yahoo yousend

Sign in to Yahoo Mail and on the left pane you'll see 'Applications' — expand it and click on Attach Large Files. Then you can attach a file as large as 100MB to your email & it will be available to download for 30 days.

yourfilelink

This is another file sharing site that does not require a sign-up. You can upload files up to 5GB in size with unlimited downloads. However, unlike the other three sites mentioned here, Yourfilelink deletes the file if it has not been downloaded in 15 days. It also shows multiple advertisements, giving it a cluttered look. However, uploads did seem to move along a bit faster than the others.

--Hitesh Raj Bhagat, Karan Bajaj, ET Bureau

Cross Site Scripting Attack

 cross-site scripting attack is one of the top 5 security attacks carried out on a daily basis across the Internet, and your PHP scripts may not be immune.

Also known as XSS, the attack is basically a type of code injection attack which is made possible by incorrectly validating user data, which usually gets inserted into the page through a web form or using an altered hyperlink. The code injected can be any malicious client-side code, such as JavaScript, VBScript, HTML, CSS, Flash, and others. The code is used to save harmful data on the server or perform a malicious action within the user’s browser.

Unfortunately, cross-site scripting attacks occurs mostly, because developers are failing to deliver secure code. Every PHP programmer has the responsibility to understand how attacks can be carried out against their PHP scripts to exploit possible security vulnerabilities. Reading this article, you’ll find out more about cross-site scripting attacks and how to prevent them in your code.

Learning by Example

Let’s take the following code snippet.

1	<form action="post.php" method="post">

2	<input type="text" name="comment" value="">

3	<input type="submit" name="submit" value="Submit">

4

</form>

Here we have a simple form in which there is a text box for data input and a submit button. Once the form is submitted, it will submit the data to post.php for processing. Let’s say all post.phpdoes is output the data like so:

1

<?php

2	echo $_POST["comment"];

Without any filtering, a hacker could submit the following through the form which will generates a popup in the browser with the message “hacked”.

<script>alert("hacked")</script>

This example, despite its being malicious in nature, does not seem to do much harm. But think about what could happen in the JavaScript code was written to steal a user’s cookie and extract sensitive information from it? There are far worse XSS attacks than a simple alert() call.

Cross-site scripting attacks can be grouped in two major categories, based on how they deliver the malicious payload: non-persistent XSS, and persistent XSS. Allow me to discuss each type in detail.

Non-persistent XSS

Also known as reflected XSS attack, meaning that the actual malicious code is not stored on the server but rather gets passed through it and presented to the victim, is the more popular XSS strategy of the two delivery methods. The attack is launched from an external source, such as from an e-mail message or a third-party website.

Here’s an example of a portion of a simple search result script:

1

<?php

2	// Get search results based on the query

3	echo "You searched for: " . $_GET["query"];

4

5	// List search results

6

...

The example can be a very unsecure results page where the search query is displayed back to the user. The problem here is that the $_GET["query"] variable isn’t validated or escaped, therefore an attacker could send the following link to the victim:

http://example.com/search.php?query=<script>alert("hacked")</script>

Without validation, the page would contain:

1	You searched for: <script>alert("hacked")</script>

Persistent XSS

This type of attack happens when the malicious code has already slipped through the validation process and it is stored in a data store. This could be a comment, log file, notification message, or any other section on the website which required user input at one time. Later, when this particular information is presented on the website, the malicious code gets executed.

Let’s use the following example for a rudimentary file-based comment system. Assuming the same form I presented earlier, let’s say the receiving script simply appends the comment to a data file.

1

<?php

2	file_put_contents("comments.txt", $_POST["comment"], FILE_APPEND);

Elsewhere the contents of comments.txt is shown to visitors:

1

<?php

2	echo file_get_contents("comments.txt");

When a user submit a comment it gets saved to the data file. Then the entire file (thus the entire series of comments) is displayed to the readership. If malicious code is submitted then it will be saved and displayed as is without any validation or escaping.

Preventing Cross-Site Scripting Attacks

Fortunately, as easily as an XSS attack can carried out against an unprotected website, protecting against them are just as easy. Prevention must always be in your thoughts, though, even before you write a single line of code.

The first rule which needs to be “enforced” in any web environment (be it development, staging, or production) is never trust data coming from the user or from any other third party sources. This can’t be emphasized enough. Every bit of data must be validated on input and escaped on output. This is the golden rule of preventing XSS.

In order to implement solid security measures which prevents XSS attacks, we should be mindful of data validation, data sanitization, and output escaping.

Data Validation

Data validation is the process of ensuring that your application is running with correct data. If your PHP script expects an integer for user input, then any other type of data would be discarded. Every piece of user data must be validated when it is received to ensure it is of the corrected type, and discarded if it doesn’t pass the validation process.

If you wanted to validate a phone number, for example, you would discard any strings containing letters, because a phone number should consist of digits only. You should also take the length of the string into consideration. If you wanted to be more permissive, you could allow a limited set of special characters such as plus, parenthesis, and dashes which are often used in formatting phone numbers specific to your intended locale.

1

<?php

2	// validate a US phone number

3	if (preg_match('/^((1-)?\d{3}-)\d{3}-\d{4}$/', $phone)) {

4	echo $phone . " is valid format.";

5

}

Data Sanitization

Data sanitization focuses on manipulating the data to make sure it is safe by removing any unwanted bits from the data and normalizing it to the correct form. For example, if you are expecting a plain text string as user input, you may want to remove any HTML markup from it.

1

<?php

2	// sanitize HTML from the comment

3	$comment = strip_tags($_POST["comment"]);

Sometimes, data validation and sanitization/normalization can go hand in hand.

1

<?php

2	// normalize and validate a US phone number

3	$phone = preg_replace('/[^\d]/', "", $phone);

4	$len = strlen($phone);

5	if ($len == 7 || $len == 10 || $len == 11) {

6	echo $phone . " is valid format.";

7

}

Output Escaping

In order to protect the integrity of displayed/output data, you should escape the data when presenting it to the user. This prevents the browser from applying any unintended meaning to any special sequence of characters that may be found.

1

<?php

2	// escape output sent to the browser

3	echo "You searched for: " . htmlspecialchars($_GET["query"]);

All Together Now!

To better understand the three aspects of data processing, let’s take another look at the file-based comment system from earlier and modify it to make sure it’s secure. The potential vulnerabilities in the code stem from the fact that $_POST["comment"] is blindly appended to thecomments.txt file which is then displayed directly to the user. To secure it, the$_POST["comment"] value should be validated and sanitized before it is added to the file, and the file’s contents should be escaped when displayed to the user.

01

<?php

02	// validate comment

03	$comment = trim($_POST["comment"]);

04	if (empty($comment)) {

05	exit("must provide a comment");

06

}

07

08	// sanitize comment

09	$comment = strip_tags($comment);

10

11	// comment is now safe for storage

12	file_put_contents("comments.txt", $comment, FILE_APPEND);

13

14	// escape comments before display

15	$comments = file_get_contents("comments.txt");

16	echo htmlspecialchars($comments);

The script first validates the incoming comment to make sure a non-zero length string as been provided by the user. After all, a blank comment isn’t very interesting.

Data validation needs to happen within a well defined context, meaning that if I expect an integer back from the user, then I validate it accordingly by converting the data into an integer and handle it as an integer. If this results in invalid data, then simply discard it and let the user know about it.

Then the script sanitizes the comment by removing any HTML tags it may contain.

And finally, the comments are retrieved, filtered, and displayed.

Generally the htmlspecialchars() function is sufficient for filtering output intended for viewing in a browser. If you’re using a character encoding in your web pages other than ISO-8859-1 or UTF-8, though, then you’ll want to use htmlentities(). For more information on the two functions, read their respective write-ups in the official PHP documentation.

Bear in mind that no single solution exists that is 100% secure on a constantly evolving medium like the Web. Test your validation code thoroughly with the most up to date XSS test vectors. Using the test data from the following sources should reveal if your code is still prone to XSS attacks.

• RSnake XSS cheatsheet (a pretty comprehensive list of XSS vectors you can use to test your code)
• Zend Framework’s XSS test data
• XSS cheatsheet (makes use of HTML5 features)

Summary

Hopefully this article gave you a good explanation of what cross-site scripting attacks are and how you can prevent them from happening to your code. Never trust data coming from the user or from any other third party sources. You can protect yourself by validating the incoming values in a well defined context, sanitizing the data to protect your code, and escaping output to protect your users. After you’ve written your code, be sure your efforts work correctly by testing the code as thoroughly as you can.