LovelyCompanies.com » Google http://LovelyCompanies.com A blog about sustainability, customer service, corporate social responsibility, venture philanthropy and more... Tue, 20 Apr 2010 14:54:13 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.4 en hourly 1 Four Lovely Halloween Celebrations http://LovelyCompanies.com/2008/11/03/lovely-halloween-celebrations/ http://LovelyCompanies.com/2008/11/03/lovely-halloween-celebrations/#comments Mon, 03 Nov 2008 12:59:51 +0000 David Haywood Smith http://LovelyCompanies.com/?p=140 Historically there isn’t anything lovely about Halloween.  However in recent years, for most people, it has become a fun festival to celebrate with food, fancy dress, friends and family.

Many companies celebrate Halloween too.  Here’s our pick of this year’s bunch.

1. Google often update their homepage logo for Halloween and this year was no exception!

Google also added a couple of important lines to their robots.txt file:

User-agent: zombies
Disallow: /brains

2. Twitter.  There are already lots of special characters available on Twitter.  However they added some new ones specially for Halloween. Try: >o< and `O !

3. TED ran a special TED Pumpkin Prize competition this year, a parody of the TED prize .  The web team at TED have recently been re-encoding a load of TED talks for the website and this year’s winner of the TED Pumpkin Prize was ‘Joe the Encoder’.

3. Presence Multimedia celebrated Halloween with the release of a Flash game.  Try your hand at ‘Witches Brew’ here or on Facebook .

4. And finally… a photo from the offices of UK startup fav.or.it where it appears they take their fancy dress very seriously:

(Photo from Flickr , used with permission.)

Check out more halloween company logos over on TechCrunch and on Flickr .

]]> http://LovelyCompanies.com/2008/11/03/lovely-halloween-celebrations/feed/ 1 Innovation Time Off at Google http://LovelyCompanies.com/2008/10/03/innovation-time-off-at-google/ http://LovelyCompanies.com/2008/10/03/innovation-time-off-at-google/#comments Fri, 03 Oct 2008 10:27:21 +0000 David Haywood Smith http://LovelyCompanies.com/?p=29 It’s well known amongst web developers that one of the perks of working for Google is that you get to spend 20% of your time on whatever interests you (a concept called ‘Innovation Time Off‘).  This freedom to experiment keeps developers happy and has yielded some innovative (not to mention profitable) new products for the company including Gmail , Google News , Orkut , and AdSense!

]]> http://LovelyCompanies.com/2008/10/03/innovation-time-off-at-google/feed/ 0 Options Millionaires at Google http://LovelyCompanies.com/2008/02/15/google-options/ http://LovelyCompanies.com/2008/02/15/google-options/#comments Fri, 15 Feb 2008 21:24:58 +0000 David Haywood Smith http://lovelycompanies.com/2008/02/15/google-options/ Issuing options to staff is a lovely thing that companies can do to build loyalty and reward hard workers. It is reckoned that there are now over 1000 Google employees with options worth more than $5m!

One of these mutimillionaire Googlers is the company masseuse who started her job when there were just 40 employees and has recently retired with a small fortune.

Read more in the NYTimes.
See also: our post about Google.org.

]]> http://LovelyCompanies.com/2008/02/15/google-options/feed/ 0 Google.org http://LovelyCompanies.com/2008/02/14/googleorg/ http://LovelyCompanies.com/2008/02/14/googleorg/#comments Thu, 14 Feb 2008 03:25:31 +0000 David Haywood Smith http://thrace.asmallorange.com/~lovelyco/2008/02/14/googleorg/ Google.org is the non-profit arm of Google established to “use the power of information and technology to address the global challenges of our age: climate change, poverty and emerging disease.”

They are involved in various fascinating projects including a drive to invest in small and medium-sized enterprises across the developing world and developing renewable energy sources that can produce electricity more cheaply than coal-fired power stations (Renewable Energy cheaper than Coal or RE<C).

In the following video, the Google founders discuss the work of Google.org:

]]> http://LovelyCompanies.com/2008/02/14/googleorg/feed/ 1