How Google Unified Its Products With A Humble Index Card

“We’ve actually tapped into one of the oldest pieces of graphic and information design around—business cards, calling cards, greeting cards, playing cards.”

“The restraints of the card actually made it easier to do the rest of the [Google Now] design,” Duarte recounts. “It forced us to focus. It forced us to realize [things like], you can’t have a card that feeds two or three images at once, that just gets messy.”

Here’s the full story.

After Apple booted Google Maps from iOS last year, Daniel Graf led the development of a beautiful, refreshed mapping experience that shot to number one in the iTunes store and kicked Apple’s ass on its own turf. Here’s how Graf made it happen—in his own words:

“We have a very successful Android version of Google Maps, so the easiest thing to do was to say, this is super-successful, users love it, so why don’t we just port it over to iOS? But I wanted to challenge the team. While the Android version is a great product, you can also tell it’s been around for a while. You have to access everything via menus—it’s not really best-use-case driven anymore. I said, let’s take a step back—what if we could start from scratch and forget anything we’ve ever done? We have the foundation—the Google data, the mapping data, the local business data, the imagery, the navigation algorithms—it’s a dream to start with.”

More…

“I’m 10 and pregnant.” “I’m 17 and a virgin.” “I’m 85 and tired.” 

Google auto-complete reveals our deepest fears. Watch.

Here’s A Google Perk Any Company Can Imitate: Employee-To-Employee Learning

Google taps its own ranks to teach valuable career-building classes as well as “extracurriculars” like kickboxing and social skills for engineers. 

“Googler to Googler” places employees from across departments into teaching roles that would otherwise be filled by the HR department (or rather, as Google calls it, “People Operations”). The Google core curriculum includes courses on management, orientation, and skills such as public speaking. Other classes taught Googler to Googler—everything from kickboxing to parenting—were initiated and designed by an employee.

It’s not about money. Google feeds 37,000 employees three gourmet meals a day. It can certainly afford to hire teachers. The company thinks it’s a good business idea to have employees teach employees.

Here’s why:

• Promoting A Culture Of Learning
• Putting Employees In Teaching Mode
• In-House Teachers Get An “A”

Read the full story here.

[Pencils Image: Flickr user Bernard Walker]

Last week, Audi announced that it became the first automaker—and second company, after Google— to get an autonomous vehicle license in Nevada.

When the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) wanted to fight animal poachers—illegal hunters of wildlife—they decided to bring in an unorthodox weapon: Drones. But these drones were different from the killer Predators of public imagination. Instead, they were unarmed, superlightweight, and users launch them by throwing them into the air—in fact, they are heavily modified model aircraft. After negotiations, Nepal was chosen as a pilot site for the wildlife drones. First launched in mid-2012, the WWF drones offered a new, experimental method of stopping poachers.

Now, wildlife-protecting drones are coming to the rest of the world. Last week, Google announced they would help the WWF purchase African and Asian poacher-seeking UAVs. As part of Google’s 2012 Global Impact Awards program, the WWF received $5 million to buy similar unarmed drones to watch and track African wildlife poachers.

Photo: WWF

For the past decade or so, NORAD has used Google Maps as the brains behind its Santa Tracker. But this year, Google has been replaced by Bing.