Techwipe: Google Glass & Yahoo ‘bans’ working from home
Weekly column – every Thursday
Jay McGregor takes you through the best (and worst) of the news, right here every Thursday. Viewer discretion advised.
Google on your face
Google have announced that their latest scam project, Google Glass, is now open to a select number of developers to try out.
To be one of the privileged few, developers have to publicly tweet their business idea with the hashtag #ifihadglass and pay $1500 to Google.
Then they need to convince 10 more developers to do the same, and they’ll move up one echelon closer in the pyramid to receiving a pair of Google Glasses.
The Glass project has fad written all over it, just like the Sinclair C5, Mini Discs and David Cameron.
Most technology is invented to solve a problem or simplify something. Google have apparently measured the discontent amongst android users and worked around the clock to solve the hardship of picking your phone out of your pocket, and looking at it.
Now your calls, texts and browsing is beamed directly into your eye – leaving your hands free to change the TV channel. I really don’t see what the point of Glass is. You might as well just gaffer tape an iPhone to your forehead – you’d look just as much like a bell-end.
I’ve actually been walking around with my own version of Glass, which consists mostly cardboard I’ve fashioned from an old box of Nesquick, and started to freak people out by sitting opposite them on the tube and saying – really slowly with a perverted smirk – ‘Glass, turn on video’.
Yahoo! wants you at your desk
Despite their zany ideas, the Google team are still faring better than their ‘rivals’ Yahoo!, who’s new CEO has announced that all working from home is now banned.
In a desperately misjudged effort to raise staff morale and cut costs, Marissa Mayer, has decided to force remote working employees to get back to work, doubling their energy and property costs. Against orders, disgruntled employees have forwarded the decree, which came via HR, to news organisations around the country.
The gargantuan Yahoo! PR machine kicked into force and sought to pour cold water on the situation by releasing the following statement “we don’t comment on internal issues”. Well, that’s that sorted then.
Forced to make a further statement beyond her six word press release, Ms Mayer said that the company is missing out on good ideas that are born from water cooler chats and impromptu team meetings. To summarise, staff are being bought in from hundreds of miles away to chat in the kitchen and have impromptu games of Wii tennis. Just like working from home.
As the Yahoo! staff migrate to one place, Tech City start-ups could be going in the other direction and becoming the World’s first tech diaspora. Proposed changes in planning laws will make it easier for property developers to convert buildings across Shoreditch into residential properties, forcing out start-ups in the process.
Homeless hipsters
The tech start-ups, hipsters and trendies who recently took over Shoreditch are absolutely aghast at the prospect of having to move on so soon after forcing out local residents. The Government has said that empty luxury flats, owned by oil rich Qatari families, are the future of our economy and tech start-ups shouldn’t stand in the way of progress.
Eric Pickles has promised that tech start-ups will be offered the choice of relocating to Stoke, where undeveloped wasteland, despair and hopelessness are in abundance.