AOL announced Tuesday that it has appointed former Yahoo executive Brad Garlinghouse, famed for his "Peanut Butter Manifesto" at that company, as the new president of its Internet and Mobile Communications segment.
Garlinghouse also will run AOL's Silicon Valley operations from its Mountain View, Calif., headquarters and serve as the West Coast lead for AOL Ventures, the company's venture capital arm. He will report directly to AOL Chairman and CEO Tim Armstrong, who was named to those posts in April.
Garlinghouse's most recent position was as an in-house senior adviser for Silver Lake Partners.
"In addition to leading our efforts to grow our communications products, Brad will be bringing his global leadership and business experience as a key member of our company's executive leadership team," said Armstrong. "He will also be a major force for AOL in Silicon Valley, working to expand our presence there and in the tech community in general."
A former Google executive, Armstrong faces the daunting task of reviving AOL, a company once nearly synonymous with the Internet for many people but which, in recent years, has strugged with fleeing subscribers and declining sales. AOL's blockbuster marriage with Time Warner never worked out, leading inexorably to the announcement in May that AOL would once again become a separate company.
At his recent 100-days-at-AOL strategy summit, Armstrong identified communications as one of AOL's five key focus areas.
Garlinghouse knows all too well what a lack of focus can to do a business. In his Peanut Butter Manifesto in late 2006, he complained of Yahoo--which has gone through its own series of troubles and reorganizations: "We want to do everything and be everything--to everyone...The result: a thin layer of investment spread across everything we do and thus we focus on nothing in particular."
Starting in 2003 as vice president of communication products for Yahoo, Garlinghouse climbed the ladder to become a senior vice president for two other communications segments. He has also overseen the company's Flickr photo-sharing service and Yahoo Groups.
Garlinghouse left Yahoo in June 2008, at a time when the company was shedding executives at a rapid rate.
It's won't be the epochalypse of 2038, but 3:31 p.m. PST on Friday offers a moment notable enough for some Unix fans to raise a toast.
That's when Unix computer clocks will reach the time of 1234567890--1.2 billion seconds elapsed from January 1, 1970, the official beginning of the Unix epoch. The clock is used not just by Unix, but also by Linux, Java, JavaScript, Mac OS X, and various other technologies.
Various Web sites exist to help mark the occasion. Cool Epoch Countdown, which actually counts up, is the first I saw. 1234567890 Day helpfully includes links to a few parties to honor the occasion.
I'm amused by arbitrary milestones whose significance stems from the mathematical consequences of humans' 10 fingers. At least birthdays are anchored to physical reality--the actual revolution of Earth around the Sun--but when your car odometer passes 100,000 miles, it's only significant psychologically and perhaps in relation to your warranty. All the digits neatly in ascending order on a Unix clock is particularly silly given that the computers marking 1234567890 Day aren't even counting in base 10.
But hey, there's nothing wrong with a good excuse for a party, so you won't hear any complaints from me.
Just so long as those Unix sysadmins get back to work and patch things up so the computer world doesn't grind to a halt in 2038, when today's clocks would run out of positive 32-bit integers.
Update 7:54 a.m. PST: For those unfortunates out there who'll be stuck behind a computer when the moment comes, Chris Rowe teases in the comments below that his Cool Epoch Countdown site will feature some sort of a treat.
(Via The Register)
Places, a new initiative from the Multiverse Network, will offer users the ability to connect through Manhattan's Times Square. Earlier this year, the company first demonstrated the Times Square environment, at the time to showcase its graphics capabilities and to explain how many users it could fit on a single server.
(Credit: Multiverse Network)The Multiverse Network, a developer of virtual world platform software, announced Wednesday that it was unveiling what it calls Places, two related social elements that tie Multiverse users together.
Essentially connective tissue for users of the Multiverse platform, Places has two separate components.
The first is a social networks application that automatically connects people using Multiverse virtual worlds together with others who are also friends in social networks like Facebook.
The second part of Places is a new virtual world centered around a digital representation of Manhattan's Times Square. Now anyone who installs Multiverse's World Browser--the basic Multiverse virtual world software--will be able to enter the Times Square environment and connect and socialize with friends, play games, view interactive entertainment, and meet and greet in personal, private destinations.
This is notable for two reasons, and seems to be a culmination of much of what Multiverse has been working on the last couple of years.
On the one hand, until now, Multiverse has fashioned itself strictly as a platform provider, offering others the ability to build virtual worlds using its software. On the other, Multiverse last year unveiled a prototype of the Times Square environment as a showcase for its ability to host large numbers of people on a single server.
But from the beginning, Multiverse offered the promise of tying users of all the virtual worlds built on top of its platform together. It was never entirely clear how that would work, and to date, there had been no publicly available, completed worlds made using the software.
Now, however, it is clear Multiverse is using the Places model to showcase its technology and demonstrate that its platform is capable of supporting a 3D social virtual world, somewhat along the lines of Second Life.
Disclosure: My wife works for Second Life publisher Linden Lab.
Another interesting piece of Places is that it is, as Multiverse puts it, "an open-source virtual world." This means, the company said, that developers can "access, modify, and add to its user interface, avatar behaviors, menu system, art assets, avatars and--most importantly--its game play or structured interaction capabilities."
This would seem to indicate that Multiverse will be allowing users to make wholesale changes to the Places virtual world along the lines of the kinds of modifications and content creation that is possible in Second Life.
What's not clear is the scope that developers will have with these tools and whether they will be able to make adult content.
This is interesting because one way that Multiverse has tried to position itself to corporate clients wanting to build a virtual world on its platform is that those clients wouldn't have to worry about their own users encountering objectionable content.
In a separate announcement also made Wednesday, Multiverse said that Oscar-winning filmmaker James Cameron--a member of the company's board of directors--plans to use the platform to build a virtual world based on his film, Titanic.
Called Places in Time: Titanic, it will be structured as an educational environment in which users can explore much about the voyage and fate of the doomed ship.
The Titanic virtual world will be a "destination" for users of Places and is clearly meant to demonstrate how third-party developers can expand upon the platform.
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