A Perspective on Location Services, Mobile Entrepreneurship & Startup Life

9. You can be serious without a suit.

Google’s founders have often stated that the company is not serious about anything but search. They built a company around the idea that work should be challenging and the challenge should be fun. To that end, Google’s culture is unlike any in corporate America, and it’s not because of the ubiquitous lava lamps and large rubber balls, or the fact that the company’s chef used to cook for the Grateful Dead. In the same way Google puts users first when it comes to our online service, Google Inc. puts employees first when it comes to daily life in our Googleplex headquarters. There is an emphasis on team achievements and pride in individual accomplishments that contribute to the company’s overall success. Ideas are traded, tested and put into practice with an alacrity that can be dizzying. Meetings that would take hours elsewhere are frequently little more than a conversation in line for lunch and few walls separate those who write the code from those who write the checks. This highly communicative environment fosters a productivity and camaraderie fueled by the realization that millions of people rely on Google results. Give the proper tools to a group of people who like to make a difference, and they will.

[Source: Google - Our Philosophy]

Google Mission: To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.

Google Core Values

1) We want to work with great people

• We hire great people and expect a lot from them
• We create an environment where people can flourish and grow
• We treat people with fairness and respect
• We challenge each other’s ideas openly
• We value diversity in people and ideas
• We are a quantitative company that uses data to make decisions

2) Technology innovation is our lifeblood

• Build the world’s best technology and products
• We apply technology and creativity to solve important problems

3) Working at Google is fun

• We expect our people to know and enjoy each other
• We have a challenging/energetic work environment
• We celebrate our successes and each other’s accomplishments – both professional and personal

4) Be actively involved; you are Google

• Honor commitments
• We openly communicate and trust you with a great deal of information and we expect you to honor our confidentiality
• Understand when you are representing Google and act appropriately

5) Don’t take success for granted

• Think and act like an underdog
• Be humble with success; don’t be arrogant
• Be scrappy and resourceful

6) Do the right thing; don’t be evil

• Honesty and integrity in all we do
• Our business practices are beyond reproach
• We make money by doing good things

7) Earn customer and user loyalty and respect every day

• Create, enhance and maintain great products and services

8 ) Sustainable long-term growth and profitability are key to our success

• Think scale and efficiency
• Every dollar is yours
• Do things that matter

9) Google cares about and supports the communities where we work and live

• We encourage and enable our people to support local community involvement and expect them to participate

10) We aspire to improve and change the world

• Aim high; think BIG, take risks
• A healthy disregard for the impossible

[via http://www.askstudent.com/google/list-of-google-core-values/]

More about the Google philsophy.

[Source: C3 Technologies]

Why do I blog this? Exciting to see more and more realistic 3D city models. The next steps are creating digital overlays / digital fabrics / urban tapestries with annotations at each possible place, up to the centimeter accuracy. The Mobile revolution is the enabler for this kind of annotations.