Inside Google Canada

One morning last week, a couple newspapers and my blog were invited to Google.

So flattered and excited; above.

Bright colours, open-concept-fun-atmosphere, the pool table room is where’d I’d be, then oh, let’s have our meeting in this tent.

It was a presentation about their auto division, which is growing fast.

Remember my column about ‘Uber Car Service’? Google just bought them for $250 million.

Learned about how people search and behave while shopping for cars. That’ll be it’s own post, or potentially a ‘Keri on Driving‘ column, still deciding.

See top right? That’s a camera recording our meeting. It was not mentioned, I just happened to notice. Maybe at Google it’s just expected that you’re on camera always.

Best Foursquare checkin ever.

 

 

Favourite Autonet Articles I Recently Wrote

Some of my neater topics of recent news stories. Click through to read the story.

Here’s my Autonet.ca news section, updates with 3 articles/week.

In 1998, LA Magazine predicts what cars will be like today, and they got a lot right.

 

Volvo’s trying to make a car smell like nothing, because that delicious “new car smell” is actually, low level emissions from the materials.

 

Nissan designs robots to behave like schools of fish, then uses them for autonomous car research.

 

Google chooses Volkswagon as its first-ever automotive parnter / collaborator.

 

A Clever Infotainment System

GM just released a new infotainment system, introducing MyLink.

Usually I’m like “infotainment systems, who cares”, but this one is different.

Instead of installing a computer into the car, the car uses the computer we all carry around constantly – cel phone.  Right?!  

The core of the computing is done on your phone. Basically you’re looking at here a screen and a USB connection.  That greatly reduces the amount of electronics in the car, plus price.  An average infotainment system is about $1,500, instead, GM’s BringGo map app is $50.

The key is the software that make your car talk to your phone.

Another neat fact, GM worked with Apple on this software; when was the last time you heard about Apple collaborating.  Change your calendar, text, music, all using Apple’s Siri.

The app is available for both iPhone and Android.

Bottom left: that’s a radio station from the other side of the world.

I interviewed the person who headed the project, meet Sarah LeBlanc.

She was a such a fun interview, we met early morning at the Toronto Auto Show. Thanks for kicking my day off to a great start, Sarah!

Read it on Autonet.ca.

 

I’m Part of the 0.0002%

I kept my last name off the internet for 5 years.

This is my Google+ account – KeriBlog.

It’s been suspended since I got it;
they don’t like my last name, “Blog”.

So I wrote to them saying noooo.

Hours later Google replied I was right.

Now here’s the interesting part.

There is very little information online to guide you, because this issue is so rare.

This article from TechCrunch sums it up:

0.1% of 50 million users submit name appeals,

20% of that is like me.

Let’s do the math on that…

Conclusion:

I’m part of the 0.0002% or 1 / 10,000

It’s not without issue though… because of this rarity, I end up with problems that are not documented and likely few have.

For example: my Picasa photo uploader stopped working for no reason two weeks ago. Which I almost had a meltdown over; that’s like a carpenter’s hammer vanishing. The worst part is there’s nothing I can do about it.

Being a spy is a lot of extra ugh.

Regardless of everything though, ha!

Because if Google says it’s true,
it’s true, right?

 

 

It Was a Great Week!

It was productive, there were a lot of loud laughs, a few rolls of the dice paid off.

Remember to occasionally swing for the fences, and it’s called a dream for a reason.

All my blog photos are here, in these albums, if you’d like to peruse.

That’s my Google+ account, circle me on in.

What the text says.

(Photo by Rannie)

Did you see Casie on eTalk?!?

She spoke about the Royal Family Canadian visit as a Social Media Expert, and she killed it. Click here to watch.

Well done, missy!

I won #CreepTuesday this week!

#CreepTuesday is a game of stealth smart phone using. Taking a secret picture of a poor, unfortunate soul, and posting it online. Karma’s going to be a b-tch to us, but hey, it’s entertaining our friends all over North America – CreepTuesday.wordpress.com

You can play too, send photos to: @Shankell @Kristikenn @Chris_Huey

My winning photo.

I’d like to thank the Academy.

I love this photo of me.

Do you ever visit my other blog?

Posts are mostly a title and one photo.  I think you’d like it.

Examples:

Recent highlights include:

– I kinda want to see inside here, kinda not
– sports teams had funny names in olden times
– we’re getting new $100 bills, Canada
– tactical jewellery
– we’ll all have wallets like this soon #RFID #security

That’s So Meta!

Casie tweeted the one of the left.

That’s the iPad they give you at e11even, it has the wine list on it (600+ wines).

In Notes I found one, someone had written, “I hacked this!“.  No, you didn’t.

Beautiful place, and what you wanna do is order from their $11 menu; that’s the trick.

I’ll leave you with this.

Have a great Saturday night!!