google

Democratic presidential contender Barack Obama made an impressive showing at the Googleplex on Wednesday, joking about the casual attire of the audience and correctly answering a standard Google engineering interview question.

Asked by Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt what the most efficient way to sort a million 32-bit integers is, Obama said the wrong way would be the "bubble sort method," which is a basic but inefficient method for sorting numbers. "You answered the question correctly," Schmidt said.

"He's fresh, he's new, there's something about him that's Google-like," Nicole Resz, … Read more

Paula Abdul doesn't have anything on Marissa Mayer.

Mayer, Google's vice president of search products and user experience, will be on a panel of expert judges for YouBeTheVC.com, where people vie for venture capital funding though an online contest. The contest is something like American Idol meets The Apprentice.

Would-be entrepreneurs submit their business ideas online and the judges give them report cards. Members of the public then choose the winners from semifinalists picked by the judges.

"We're really excited about this contest because we really like the idea of being able to see what'… Read more

Update: I added comment from Google.

Painful flashbacks are beginning to torment those of us who lived through the Java wars between Sun Microsystems and Microsoft that began 10 years ago.

Earlier this week, Google released programming tools for its Android mobile-phone software project that shun the existing Java standard-setting process in favor of a Google-specific variety. Sun responded on Wednesday by expressing concern that Google's Android project could fragment Java into incompatible versions.

"Anything that creates a more diverse or fractured platform is not in (developers') best interests," said Rich Green, executive vice president of Sun'… Read more

The technology world has been turned on its head. As Tom Krazit notes in his blog, today's hardware and software industry is increasingly focused on consumer IT, not enterprise IT:

Not so long ago, if you were technology-oriented and wanted to do something innovative and cool that would make you rich, you wrote a new piece of enterprise software. Or you came up with a new design for a server. Or you figured out a way to link businesspeople with their offices while on the road. Of course, there are always exceptions, but enterprise computing, most believed, was where the real innovation occurred. Those innovations paved the way for the computing industry as we know it today....… Read more

In this interview, Mozilla's technology strategist Mike Shaver responds to and rejects recent claims that Firefox and Google are getting a bit too close for comfort. Mozilla is independent, he says, with or without Google's $56 million.

I received a fair bit of criticism for a blog post that I wrote last week describing what I believe is the extremely close relationship between Google and Mozilla. Mozilla's PR people complained, Firefox developers left critical comments in the blog post itself, and I received a number of e-mails from upset individuals. All had concerns with the claims and … Read more

The New York Times is reporting that iGoogle and Yahoo Mail could be at the core of social-networking plans for the two search companies.

"Web-based e-mail systems already contain much of what Facebook calls the social graph--the connections between people," Saul Hansell writes in his blog posting. "Yahoo and Google realize that they have this information and can use it to build their own services that connect people to their contacts."

Hansell says he's heard from several Google executives that that's their plan. "We believe there are opportunities with iGoogle to make it … Read more

Smartphone sales are on fire, according to a new report from market research firm In-Stat.

In a new report published Tuesday, In-Stat predicted that smartphone sales will grow at a rate of more than 30 percent a year for the next five years. This is much faster than the overall cell phone market, which is growing in the single digits. The report also said that smartphone sales are outpacing the sale of laptops, as more corporate customers use their phones on the road.

"Because of the value users are finding, organizations are slowly taking ownership of smartphones and data … Read more