The Toronto Star has published a profile of Dennis Hwang, the Google programmer who is also the artist behind Google’s many special logos (aka Google Doodles). Doodling with the Google logo.
Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the company’s founders, had been experimenting with revisions to the Google logo for special events (in 1999, the first time they tried it, they added a “burning man” to the logo to let pals know they’d be at the Burning Man festival in Nevada for a few days). But Page and Brin were unhappy with the quality of the drawings they were getting from a freelancer. On one occasion, they asked Hwang, knowing that he was an art major, to redraw one of the submissions. He did and it was exactly what they were looking for.
Fun fact #1: "Wow, you looked at a lot of pages from my web site. How did you like it?" - people encountering a crawler for the first time. This and other quality snippets pulled from the original paper presenting Google in 1997.
Vic Gundotra, the driving force behind the Google+ platform, has announced he is leaving Google, which has many people pondering the future of Google+. Gundotra, who has been with Google for eight years, is leaving the company effective immediately.
Google has revealed profits for the first quarter of 2014 of $3.45 billion, up from $3.35 billion in the same period last year, but its average cost-per-click income has fallen by 9 percent year-over-year.
