SciFoo 08 is one long, mindbending highlight. Picking out individual sessions is tricky. Jenny and Avi have given their faves, and I’ll write up mine shortly. But first, I’d like to take you on a tour of the venue: Google’s Mountain View headquarters known as the Googleplex.
The buildings themselves are not spectacular to the casual eye—simple grey boxes spread around a leafy campus. But inside and out, they are peppered with clever solutions to improve the working environment.
The tour started with a trip up onto the roof. Californians in general, and Google in particular, are big on solar panels. The Googleplex contains something like 9000 panels, producing 1.6 MegaWatts and a third of the company’s energy supply. This makes the Googleplex one of the USA’s largest corporate solar installations. Unfortunately, I wasn’t allowed to take photos on the roof, so here’s one Google made earlier.
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Heading inside, the first thing you notice is food. Everywhere. One source estimates that Google spends some $72 million a year feeding its employees. It’s company policy that employees must be located within a few feet of free food. Kitchens can be found throughout the complex, containing gratis snacks and drinks and each employee can claim two full meals per day at no cost. The only exception is a snack machine filled with high-fat-and sugar goods, where you pay on the basis of calories rather than monetary value. It’s a good job they have a volleyball court to work off all that energy.
Amongst all the office furniture are a few novelties. Knowing Google, you’d expect to find yurt-style meeting rooms and play areas filled with Lego and other creative tools. Pool tables, antique arcade games and massage chairs lurk in quiet corners. All of this I could have predicted. But a London phone box painted in Google livery? Or a full-size replica of SpaceShipOne? At Nature, we’re lucky if we get a few pot plants; Google has giant cacti. But beware of the undergrowth, you never know what might be lurking in there.
A measure of Google’s success is that people love the brand enough to buy merchandise. The company has its own shop on-site, which sells objects as diverse as Google-branded cycling tops, beach towels and baby clothes. Would you buy a Microsoft beanbag or, for that matter, a Nature Network lip balm?
More images over on my Flickr photostream.