Best of AI-Class 2011

AI-Class was an exciting experience. So many people were supporting the professors Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig with their work. For most of us watching all the lectures, doing the homeworks and taking midterm and final exams was quite a lot besides regular jobs and other spare time projects. I for my self built a house, built 2 smaller websites and went to my full time job doing some overtime. Besides that I still wanted to have some time with my family. Let’s just say a bunch of things besides learning

All the people compiling additional resources helped me a lot, so by listing them below I want to say Thanks !

How to fail keeping your companies talent

Whether it’s a high-profile tech company like Yahoo!, or a more established conglomerate like GE or Home Depot, large companies have a hard time keeping their best and brightest in house. Recently, GigaOM discussed the troubles at Yahoo! with a flat stock price, vested options for some of their best people, and the apparent free flow of VC dollars luring away some of their best people to do the start-up thing again.

Forbes just released their TOP10-List of “FAIL” in the sense of keeping talent:

1. Big Company Bureaucracy

2. Failing to Find a Project for the Talent that Ignites Their Passion

3. Poor Annual Performance Reviews

4. No Discussion around Career Development

5. Shifting Whims/Strategic Priorities

6. Lack of Accountability and/or telling them how to do their Jobs

7. Top Talent likes other Top Talent

8. The Missing Vision Thing

9. Lack of Open-Mindedness.

10. Who’s the Boss?

StereoPill – your party playlist

It is 01:00 am and half of guest are already sleeping with their heads on the bar.. The other half seems to be in still in control of their fingers so they start taping around on the DJs iPAD to choose the songs they like. Unfortunately, they have a very special taste of music let’s say.

You already came across this situation? Next time choose StereoPill beforehand. So all your guests can file their favorite songs and share a”party” – playlist with the DJ.

You simply set up an event, and send it to all your guests.  It’s free to sign up and post your event, but costs money for future events.

Top 50 “Best Places to Work” in Tech industry

Glassdoor, a career community to anonymously rate your company and CEOs,  released its annual Employees’ Choice Awards, listing the top 50 “Best Places to Work,” based on surveys collected from U.S. employees in 2011.

Google, Facebook and Rackspace are the best places to work in 2012 according to the survey. “More than 250,000 employees sounded off on what it’s like to work at more than 65,000 companies during the past year and shared the good, the bad and everything in between.” says the report.

An exerpt: “Smartest and most passionate people I have ever worked with. Company means so much to so many – humbled to be an employee here.” – Facebook Staffing (New York, NY)

Congratulations to all the 2012 Best Places to Work award winners!

What would have Facebook, Youtube and Google+ looked like back in 1997

1997, three brand new websites started their service. Check out the latest technologies used to form a new web. Forget about fireball and yahoo.. just get in touch and stay in-touch with your friends with google plus, facebook and youtube. Make sure that you have all your landline capabilities ready.. you will need 8kb/s data rate..

 

Best viewed with Netscape Navigator 4.03 and a screen resolution of 1024×768 pixels, running under Windows 95. We recommend using a Virtual Machine or appropriate hardware, connected to a CRT monitor. If such an environment unachievable, it should be possible to experience the piece with any browser that still supports HTML Frames. The transfer speed of our server is limited to 8 kB/s («dial-up» speed).

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[Infographic] Google: Behind The Numbers

In 2010, Google had $29.3 billion in revenue. To put things in perspective, this is more than the GDP of the 28 poorest countries… combined! Despite all of Google’s products and services, 97% of Google’s business revenue is still from advertising. Google has made a major push to capitalize on the growing use of mobile phones. $2,500,000,000 of Google’s ad revenue comes from mobile ads, which is supposed to double by the end of 2011.

A large amount of Google’s business comes from selling ads through AdWords that are sometimes from less than legitimate sources targeting shady products and services such as attorneys, insurance, pay day loans and credit cards. In September, Google was fined $500 million for knowingly allowing Canadian pharmacies to advertise prescription drugs to US residents.

What makes Google’s massive revenue’s possible is that they receive over 1 billion unique visitors per month or 1 in 7 people on the entire planet. Collectively, these people spend over 200 billion minutes (380,000 collective

years) on Google’s websites. That’s over 200 minutes per visitors per month. To make all this possible, Google consumes over 260 million Watts of continuous electricity to power its data centers. This amounts to 1/4 of of the average nuclear power plant’s output. In 2010, Google consumed over 2 billion  Kilowatt-hours worth of energy. That’s 50% of what the Hoover Dam generates in an entire year.

Find the infograhpic in its full beauty here.

[Infographic] The good old Internet back in ’96

We absolutely are in web2.0 now. But who of you guys remembers the good old times back in 1996? Just to reflect some of the problems back in th late 90. I remember fighting with image preloaders to optimize my pages for user experience by prefetching every thing for mouse over effects..

Look at this infographic from onlineuniversity.net

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