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Take a look behind Google's corporate curtain with a former employee's critical comics
Yeah, we're definitely saving a few of these for Android Police headers
Recently a Googler who went on to better (if not bigger) things shared a massive collection of comics and doodles that he'd created during his time at the Googleplex. His art has the feel of political cartoons, even if they're only ever on one broad topic. Taking a look at them can give us some humorous insight into the culture that's brewing just under Google's corporate surface. Manu Cornet worked for Google for over a decade as a software engineer on Search and Gmail. He quit earlier this year, telling The Information that Google's continuing slide into moral ambiguity left him feeling disillusioned with the company famous for its early "do no evil" years. During his tenure at Google, Cornet's frequent cartoons lampooning the company's culture and decisions became a notable part of his fellow employee's work lives, a sort of private in-joke in an employee population of more than 100,000.Several of Cornet's comics made their way out into the internet at large, including his most famous doodle comparing the corporate structures of Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Oracle, Apple, and Facebook. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella even credited Cornet's cartoon on the first page of his book, crediting him with shifting up the CEO's thinking into a phenomenally successful restructure.Cornet self-published a series of his comics as a book in 2018 as Goomics, with a second volume going out last month. You can buy both volumes on Amazon, or look at all of them for free on his site Goomics.net. They're an interesting look at the inside of one of the world's most powerful tech companies, albeit limited to a single critical perspective.Cornet accepted a job at Twitter. He's now starting up a new round of internal company comics, "Twittoons."
Super-practical pop-out selfie camera drones are absolutely, definitely coming to a phone near you
A recent VIVO patent shows off the wildest phone design we've seen in a while
The long war of the notch has come to an end. No longer need we argue about teardrops versus hole punches, or look for half-hearted solutions like pop-up cameras or cams hidden beneath the screen. Nope, I have seen the future, and the future flies around your face like a little plastic mosquito. Say hello to Vivo's latest international patent published at WIPO (and spotted by a Danish site), the "Electronic Device." It's a phone with a little camera drone inside. I could go into more detail, but the design illustrations seem to be pretty self-explanatory: the tiny, ultra-thin drone pops out of the top of the phone on its little tray, takes off with diminutive rotors, flies around to take photos or videos, and then docks again for charging and safekeeping.
'Hey Google, piss off the neighbors'
A mad genius built a 'TallyWhacker' that noisily activates via Google Assistant command
Do you recall when you were a kid, and there was nothing quite so fascinating as an old-fashioned spring doorstop? You know, the kind that goes "sproi-oi-oi-oing" with any errant tap? A Reddit apartment dweller, having presumably endured one late-night Riverdance rehearsal too many, decided to weaponize this experience.
This app will count literally anything you show it
'CountThings from Photos' is an industrial analysis tool that counts all the things
Humans aren't especially good at counting things. That's why we invented math to make it easier and harder at the same time, then we invented computers to do math for us. Thousands of years of societal achievement have now reached their natural conclusion in the CountThings from Photos app. We're all done here, everybody can climb back into the trees.
Google I/O features the triumphant return of 2020's hottest blob-based music act
Blob Opera returns, backed up by some boring humans
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Don't call it a comeback ... actually, yeah, it's a comeback. Google's Blob Opera digital experiment, a curiosity that became a brief sensation last December, will be back for tomorrow's Google I/O keynote speech. Google took to Twitter to make the announcement: