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Larry Page, cofounder and CEO of Google, which has just announced the creation of a brand new £1-billion HQ in London’s King’s Cross, has given a wide-ranging interview to Wired‘s Steven Levy. In it, the billionaire, of whom Levy says, “Some Googlers wonder if Page, clearly at his happiest working on moon shots, is essentially taking one for the team by assuming the sometimes prosaic tasks of a CEO.” Here, in a nutshell, are some of the juiciest tidbits of the piece.

• Incremental improvement will, says Page, become obsolete–especially in technology. He sees his job as “to get people focused on things that are not just incremental.” By that tenet, Google’s launch of Gmail was “a leap… not something that would have happened naturally if we had been focusing on incremental improvements.”
• The commercial aspect of an invention is just as important as the invention itself. “When I was growing up, I wanted to be an inventor. Then I realized there’s a lot of sad stories about inventors like Nikola Tesla, amazing people who didn’t have much impact, because they never turned their inventions into businesses.”
• “A great deal of my effort is spent making sure that we have a great user experience across our core products.”
• “How well is [Steve Jobs‘s thermonuclear war on Android] working?”
• “At the time we bought Android, it was pretty obvious that the existing mobile operating systems were terrible. You couldn’t write software for them. Compare that to what we have now.”
• “We had real issues with how our users shared information, how they expressed their identity and so on. And yeah, [Facebook] is a company that’s strong in that space. But they’re also doing a really bad job on their products.”
• “I do think the Internet’s under much greater attack than it has been in the past. Governments are now afraid of the Internet because of the Middle East stuff, and so they’re a little more willing to listen to what I see as a lot of commercial interests that just want to make money by restricting people’s freedoms. I think that governments fight users’ freedoms at their own peril.”

Finally, a look at the philanthropist in him. Page is paying for free flu shots for kids in the whole Bay Area after he saw epidemiological behavior on Google Search’s flu-tracking service.

[Image by Flickr user Fimoculous]

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via Fast Company http://www.fastcompany.com/3004922/larry-pages-wired-interview-innovation-nothing-without-commercialization?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+fastcompany%2Fheadlines+%28Fast+Company%29

Instagram has released details of its user data for the first time. The photo-sharing site, which was bought by Facebook last year for $715 million, had last week stopped reporting its traffic numbers on AppData. So, what have we learnt? Despite the hoo-ha surrounding the firm after it decided to change its terms of service–rafts of people deserted the site, and it was forced to change tack over its proposals–Instagram is big business. After all, we knew it would be once we saw those Thanksgiving figures last year.

• 90 million people use Instagram on a monthly basis.
• Numbers increased by 10%, month on month, between December 2012 and January 2013.
• A thousand comments are left each second.
• 40 million photos are posted each day.
• There are 8,500 likes per second, although this figure increases to 10,000 per second at peak times.

This is what Kevin Systrom had to say about the figures. “Instagram continues to see very strong growth around the world. With many of the product and internationalization improvements we’ve made, we’ve been excited to see these efforts resonate with users globally.”

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via Fast Company http://www.fastcompany.com/3004921/instagram-reveals-monthly-active-user-data-first-time?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+fastcompany%2Fheadlines+%28Fast+Company%29