End of an era at Google as ex-CEO Schmidt plans to leave board

SAN FRANCISCO — Google’s parent company, Alphabet, said Tuesday that Eric Schmidt, its former chief executive, planned to relinquish his position on the board of directors in June.

His departure will end an era for the internet giant, in a shake-up of one of the coziest and most stable corporate boards in Silicon Valley. Another member, Diane Greene, who gained her seat in 2012 and had been running Google’s cloud computing business until this year, will also not seek re-election.

Schmidt, who was Google’s chief executive for a decade until 2011 and then its executive chairman for 7 years, oversaw the meteoric rise of Google from a useful search engine into an internet powerhouse.

He was brought into the company in 2001 to provide oversight for its young founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin. He helped take Google public and oversaw major acquisitions like YouTube and DoubleClick, which cemented Google as an industry giant.

Schmidt stepped down as executive chairman of Alphabet in January 2018, but kept his board seat. He will not seek re-election when his term expires in June, Alphabet said. On Twitter, Schmidt said he would remain a technical adviser to Alphabet and Google.

Alphabet said it had appointed to the board Robin L. Washington, an executive vice president and chief financial officer of Gilead Sciences, a biopharmaceuticals company. Before the announced changes, seven of Alphabet’s 11 directors had been on the board for more than a decade.

The board has come under scrutiny because of a shareholder lawsuit filed in January that said directors had neglected their fiduciary duties by approving massive exit packages for executives accused of misconduct.

The lawsuit, citing minutes and emails, said board members had rubber-stamped compensation agreements hammered out by Page, Alphabet’s chief executive, who along with Brin owns voting control of the company.


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source: news.abs-cbn.com

Why Google boss says Internet will 'disappear'

DAVOS - Google boss Eric Schmidt predicted on Thursday that the Internet will soon be so pervasive in every facet of our lives that it will effectively "disappear" into the background.

Speaking to the business and political elite at the World Economic Forum at Davos, Schmidt said: "There will be so many sensors, so many devices, that you won't even sense it, it will be all around you."

"It will be part of your presence all the time. Imagine you walk into a room and ... you are interacting with all the things going on in that room."

"A highly personalised, highly interactive and very interesting world emerges."

On the sort of high-level panel only found among the ski slopes of Davos, the heads of Google, Facebook and Microsoft and Vodafone sought to allay fears that the rapid pace of technological advance was killing jobs.

"Everyone's worried about jobs," admitted Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer of Facebook.

With so many changes in the technology world, "the transformation is happening faster than ever before," she acknowledged.

"But tech creates jobs not only in the tech space but outside," she insisted.

Schmidt quoted statistics he said showed that every tech job created between five and seven jobs in a different area of the economy.

"If there were a single digital market in Europe, 400 million new and important new jobs would be created in Europe," which is suffering from stubbornly high levels of unemployment, he said.

The debate about whether technology is destroying jobs "has been around for hundreds of years", said the Google boss. What is different is the speed of change.

"It's the same that happened to the people who lost their farming jobs when the tractor came ... but ultimately a globalised solution means more equality for everyone."

Everyone has a voice

With one of the main topics at this year's World Economic Forum being how to share out the fruits of global growth, the tech barons stressed that the greater connectivity offered by their companies ultimately helps reduce inequalities.

"Are the spoils of tech being evenly spread? That is an issue that we have to tackle head on," said Satya Nadella, chief executive of Microsoft.

"I'm optimistic, there's no question. If you are in the tech business, you have to be optimistic. Ultimately to me, it's about human capital. Tech empowers humans to do great things."

Facebook boss Sandberg said the Internet in its early forms was "all about anonymity", but now everyone was sharing everything and everyone was visible.

"Now everyone has a voice ... now everyone can post, everyone can share and that gives a voice to people who have historically not had it," she said.

Schmidt, who said he had recently come back from the reclusive state of North Korea, added he believed that technology forced potentially despotic and hermetic governments to open up as their citizens acquired more knowledge about the outside world.

"It is no longer possible for a country to step out of basic assumptions in banking, communications, morals and the way people communicate," the Google boss said.

"You cannot isolate yourself any more. It simply doesn't work."

Nevertheless, Sandberg told the assembled elites that even the current pace of change was only the tip of the iceberg.

"Today, only 40 percent of people have Internet access," she said, adding: "If we can do all this with 40 percent, imagine what we can do with 50, 60, 70 percent."

Even two decades into the global spread of the Internet, the potential for opening up and growth was tremendous, she stressed.

"Sixty percent of the Internet is in English. If that doesn't tell you how uninclusive the Internet is, then nothing will," said the tycoon.

The World Economic Forum brings together some 2,500 of the top movers and shakers in the worlds of politics, business and finance for a four-day meeting that ends on Saturday.

source: www.abs-cbnnews.com

Google puts North Korea on the map

Google unveiled a detailed map of North Korea Tuesday, just weeks after Chairman Eric Schmidt visited the secretive country.

The map, created by a group of volunteer "citizen cartographers" using an interface known as Google Map Maker, allowed users to submit data which others could then fact check, The Washington Post reported.

The new map labels everything from Pyongyang's subway stops to the country's several city-sized gulags as well as its monuments, hotels, hospitals and department stores.

Previously, North Korea was a near-total white space on Google Maps with only the capital city of Pyongyang labeled.

Work on the map began in 2009 using information that was already public, much of it available on the Internet, said volunteer mapmaker Hwang Min-woo, 28, of Seoul.

The map is unlikely to have an immediate influence in North Korea because Internet use is restricted to all but a handful of elites.

source: upi.com