The number of students

The number of students in higher education has risen sharply in recent years, and an increasing proportion of students combine paid employment with university life. In a review of studies which have investigated the relationship between ‘earning and learning’, it is noted that the overall focus to date has been on the negative impact of combining these roles. This suggests that term-time employment leads to poorer adjustment to university life in terms of academic performance, social inclusion and psychological well-being. However, we suggest that methodological problems are evident which make it difficult to draw firm and generalizable conclusions regarding the interrelationship between university life and part-time employment roles. The paper suggests that a psychological transactional approach focusing on both positive and negative outcomes of role interrelationships could be adopted to more accurately inform universities, student bodies and employers of optimal ways of combining study and employment.

Read More

mallee blue media

Being able to write and earn money online can be very rewarding. You can choose to work with the clients or websites that interest you most. You also get to enjoy working at your own pace, setting your own price (as demand for your writing grows) and you get to enjoy a steady income. However, for some, the idea of writing for others is not so satisfying. A career in journalism or writing articles is not for everybody. If you want to earn money by writing online for others, here are 10 sites where you can get paid to write your own articles. get paid to writeWow Women on Writing: $50-100 Wow Women on Writing does one thing really well: They look after female writers, encourage them and genuinely seek to offer opportunities to budding freelancers. Their audience is diverse and all focused on providing excellent content for women. Wow Women focus on innovative business, freelancing and training. The articles are generally detailed and designed to help writers improve their skills and showcase their work. You have an option of either asking for a payment by Paypal or, if in the USA, by Check. How to get started Start by reading other Wow Articles. You will want to have an idea of the tone of the site. The site is informative, relaxed and excited about showcasing good writers. Ensure that you are not just duplicating their content and re-editing an old idea. Be creative. Wow will pay up to $150.00 for a 3,000 word feature article. Focus on being useful. How will your post help readers? Practical, actionable advice is what readers want with easy to follow steps. Wow Women focuses on women, writers and a monthly theme. I am not sure what they offer in terms of a link back to your own content in the articles but they do link back to your site from your Author profile. Please note that they do not open attachments. Your article or pitch needs to be presented in plain text in the body of the email. Sending a Bio or a link to other published work is a good idea and will improve your chances of getting published. web business ideaStrong Whispers: $50 – $150 Strong Whispers offers readers a range of articles about lifestyle, environment and other social issues. The range is wide. Your contribution is not limited. Articles can range from corporate greed, to education reform or change in world leadership to letting the people govern and make decisions on the way we treat the environment and exploitation of the resources . How to get started Article earnings are negotiable, but they typically pay $50-$150 per published article. They are willing to pay more for the right article and website aims to publish 2-3 guest posts per month. Step 1: Send them your best outline for an article you’d would like to write along with your fee expectation. Topics need to be unique and high impact. They also ask that you send your current blog URL or a URL to published work so they can understand your writing style. They will tell you if the topic is of interest to them and if your sample meets their review criteria. Step 2: After you have been invited to write for them, go ahead, write your article and submit it for review. They won’t publish simply mediocre or just okay guest posts. Each article must be well written, accurate, grammatically correct and original content. You will get to view their guidelines so you can be sure to tick all the boxes. Step 3: After you submit your article online, it will be reviewed. After review you will receive one of 3 emails: Rejected – Poor quality. Requires minor changes Approved. If approved, it will be set to publish either immediately or at a future date. Once set to publish, you will be paid via PayPal. find a freelancerCollege Humour: $25 – $150 College Humor Media, is an online entertainment company targeting a core audience of people ages 18-49. Founded by two high school friends, College Humour Media delivers daily comedic content, including videos, pictures, articles and jokes, created and/or curated by the College Humour staff. They attract more than 15 million monthly unique visitors online and more than 100 million video views per month with popular sketches such as “Jake and Amir,” “Very Mary Kate” and “Troopers.” How to get started Make a College Humour account. Go to the article submission page. Put in your funny article and hit “submit.” Wait for the editors to review your article. If they like it, they will send you an email They will pay you $25 if they put your article on the Articles page, $50 if they put it on the homepage, and an additional $50 if it gets more than 100,000 views. making money online Cracked.com: $100 – $200 Cracked.com is basically a humour site. If you are a funny/smart/creative person, Cracked.com offers a good opportunity to earn some extra cash with article writing. No experience necessary. They will pay you if it’s good. You get to talk directly to the editors. Their content includes articles, photoshops, infographics and videos. Take your pick. How to get started Register for the site, click on the writer’s workshop, which leads you to the message board where everyone pitches their articles. You pitch an article idea by writing the article idea, along with the five subtopics under the idea, a full column, and the information. At the time of writing you get $100 per article. If you get up to five published articles, it goes up to $200 per article. If your article finishes in the top ten articles of the month (rated on website traffic.) you get a $100 bonus. You also get $100 for coming first in the Photoshop competitions of which I think they run two a week. There is a bonus that runs in the design section also from time to time. It includes $500 for designing a winning T-Shirt, and a thread where you post (presumably humorous) infographics and they’ll pay you $100 if it’s featured on the site. writing onlineWatch Culture: $25 – $500 Watch Culture offers its news, opinion and entertainment coverage to millions of users world-wide each month. As an online magazine based in the UK it covers the popular zeitgeist. Each day dozens of writers are earning money by publishing articles on Film, Music, Gaming, Sports, Television and much more to their ever expanding five-million a month strong audience. Several hundred articles are posted every single week from contributors, some of which you will see from time to time on Sky News, Metro Radio, BBC Radio, Dublin FM and in the national newspapers. How to get started What Culture have begun rolling out a system entitling all writers to earn money from every article they contribute. In the Beta testing phase some of the contributors have earned as much as £700 from one individual article. The system is based on a per views basis, rewarding the very best writers whose content matches what their audience wants to read. Typically, writers who could come up with original concepts and execute them well have really reaped the big benefits. If writing isn’t your thing, they are also planning to set up a larger video presence and are looking for talented filmmakers and YouTubers to produce high quality content for the site. So if you think you’ve got what it takes to write interesting articles or create popular videos and make money while doing it, get in touch with them at editor@whatculture.com for more details. If you’d prefer to chat on Skype, the address is ‘whatculture’. Or if you live anywhere near Newcastle in the UK, they can arrange a face-to-face meeting. write web tutorialsDeveloper Tutorials: $30 – $50 Developer Tutorial provides its users with a regular supply of programming and design guides keeping them up-to-date on new and emerging technologies and techniques. To help fuel this effort they utilise freelance writers to produce unique, high quality tutorials in the following categories: AJAX Flash JavaScript PHP ASP Illustrator Linux Photoshop CSS Java MySQL Python They are also looking for articles referencing cool and useful lists that users would both be interested in and benefit from reading. An example of this might be, “30 Cool Web Tools to Make Your Development Easier” or “30 Awesome Photoshop Movie Poster Tutorials”. They pay cash for your tutorials and list based articles so not only are you helping out fellow coders and designers but you are making more of a name for yourself as a freelance writer. How to get started Pay rates depend on factors such as the quality of the tutorial/article and the demand for the topic it covers. Pay rates for published list articles currently range between $30-$50. Payment is sent via PayPal immediately after your article is published. List based articles must target web developers or designers. Tutorials are required to be a minimum of 1000 words and should include illustrations (screenshots etc) if needed to more effectively portray your message. write online and get paidB. Michelle Pippin: $50 – $150 Michelle Pippin is looking for articles aimed at helping small businesses increase their profits, influence, or impact. Michelle Pippin provides sharp and high quality business and marketing content to a wide audience. If you have some original work, a great idea or a hack for the business, marketing niche, this could be a site to consider. While the site focuses on women in business, it provides an even handed mix of articles on profit, entrepreneurial resources, marketing and case study articles as well as relevant news on the business world. The site has a large audience and a wide mix of business and marketing related material. Your articles don’t need to be too technical, as though they were being prepared for a peer-reviewed journal, but they should go beyond the basics. Michelle will expect you to do the research and if it reaches her members only audience (which is a print edition) you will likely receive a bigger pay cheque. Word count on the site for your average business or marketing article is about 800 words. How to get started Obviously, your work must be original work. If your work gets published in my members only (print) newsletter, you’ll get paid more money, but you will not be able to republish your article elsewhere. Payment is on a per article basis and will be paid via Paypal on the 1st of the month following the month it is posted. Don’t send over full articles. Just complete the form and tell them your areas of expertise. A short pitch should be fine but keep your offer short and sweet. write about kids and get paidMetro Parent: $50 – $75 Metro Parent Publishing Group is open to experienced freelance writers to help build the content of their magazine and website. Their general goal is to have a good mix of fun and substantive local stories of interest to local parents. Here are a few factors to consider before sending your pitch. Make it local. They are looking for stories and sources that reflect the communities they cover: Livingston, Macomb, Oakland, Washtenaw and Wayne counties. Therefore, southeast Michigan ideas and sources are preferred. Pitch early. Content for Metro Parent is determined months in advance. Story ideas should be pitched a good two to three months before the month it would run. This is particularly important for seasonally-anchored stories. How to get started If your article submission is accepted or you have been assigned a story, you should submit an invoice (within an email is fine) that includes name, address, phone number, Social Security Number, name of story and payment amount. The invoice should be submitted within a week of submitting story. Features 1,000-2,500 words: $150-$350, depending on complexity of topic and number of sources required. Department columns: $50-75 Parent Pipeline pieces: $35-50 Reprints: $35 The finished story should be single-spaced with a hard return at each new paragraph. Do not indent for new paragraphs. And include only one space after punctuation marks. Include your byline plus preferred tagline Font should be Times New Roman, 14-point Include a suggested headline and/or dek Subheads (i.e., within the body copy) are strongly encouraged for stories 1,000 words or more. Metro Parent prefer stories to be sent as a Microsoft Word attachment. For those who don’t have Word, send the story within the body of an email. Be sure to include the name and phone number of sources at the end of story, in case they have follow-up questions. online teachingSitepoint: Visit Link for Pricing Sitepoint writers are generally web professionals with a passion for development and design. Site Point are specifically looking for content that is technical, instructive, well-written and innovative. Based in Melbourne, Australia, Site Point works with article writers from all over the world. The editors are web developers and designers at the top of the industry. They claim to pay above-industry rates for quality articles. How to get started Site Point cover the following topics: CSS, JavaScript, PHP Ruby, Mobile development, UX Design, HTML :- You will have to enquire using the link above for rates and process. write about designUxbooth: $100 Uxbooth is in to design. I figured that much out. The rest of their site is gibberish. For example, their “About us” page begins with these words, “The UX Booth is a publication by and for the user experience community. Our readership consists mostly of beginning-to-intermediate user experience and interaction designers..” What that means is anybodies guess. it might be good for the user-experience but it’s nigh useless if you were looking for a reading experience. Never-the-less, they offer you money to join them in the art of gibberish. How to get started Uxbooth do not accept fully written drafts outright. Instead, they pair authors with editors in order to collaborate throughout the writing process. It works like this: You pitch a topic or idea that you’d like to share. Don’t be shy! If accepted, a development editor is assigned to you in order to help you develop your narrative in accordance with their style guide. The two of you discuss and evolve the idea until it’s ready to share. That’s it! Articles are usually published four-to-eight weeks after they’re initially pitched. They pay $100 per article.

Read More

Bangladesh

Bangladesh has 32 thrust sectors that have the potential to fetch billions of dollars in investment and export earnings, an analyst said yesterday. But the main challenge will be how the country will exploit the potential, said Joseph DiVanna, managing director of Maris Strategies, UK.He presented a keynote at a session on "the next billion dollar opportunities in Bangladesh" on the sidelines of a daylong conference -- new economic thinking: Bangladesh 2030 and beyond -- organised by Dhaka Chamber of Commerce and Industry at Radisson hotel in the capital. Kazi M Aminul Islam, executive chairman of Bangladesh Investment Development Authority, moderated the session. "All the 32 sectors have the potential to become the next billion dollar investment opportunities in Bangladesh," DiVanna said. The sectors include apparel, agriculture, ICT, light engineering, pharmaceuticals, infrastructure, frozen food, energy, handicrafts, ceramics, tourism and healthcare. DiVanna also identified some actions through which Bangladesh can secure its future: job creation, rethinking commerce, mobilising youth human capital, and reducing lending risk. ICT State Minister Zunaid Ahmed Palak said Bangladesh can be a lucrative investment destination for the entrepreneurs who are looking for new investment opportunities, as there are political commitment, policy support, fiscal incentives, skilled human resources and necessary infrastructure in Bangladesh. He also said ICT will be a billion dollar export earning sector by 2018. Syed Nasim Manzur, managing director of Apex Footwear, stressed the need for innovation and utilisation of the country's young population for the transformation of the economy by 2030. He said per capita footwear use in Bangladesh last year was less than a pair, which indicates that the sector has huge potential. Humayun Rashid, vice-president of DCCI, said the light engineering sector will grow significantly in the next 15 years. Thousands of jobs will be created for skilled and semi-skilled people, he said. He also said the export earnings from the light engineering sector stood at $510 million in FY16, and the export target is $9 billion by 2030 and $15 billion by 2041. Commerce Secretary Hedayetullah Al Mamoon said the government is creating opportunities for entrepreneurs so they can make investment. Bangladesh economy is now growing at more than 7 percent and the government is taking various initiatives to make the growth sustainable, he said. Industries Secretary Md Mosharraf Hossain Bhuiyan said there are many sectors in Bangladesh such as ICT, light engineering, pharmaceuticals, leather and footwear that can bring billion dollar investment and export earnings. Syed S Kaiser, chief executive officer of Renata, Md Shafiul Islam, first vice-president of the Federation of Bangladesh Chambers of Commerce and Industry, and Khurshed Alam, secretary of the foreign affairs ministry, made presentations on pharmaceuticals and active pharmaceutical ingredients, backward linkage of apparel and textile, and blue economy

Read More

Google Makes So Much Money

Bloomberg Facebook Twitter Google Makes So Much Money, It Never Had to Worry About Financial Discipline—Until Now ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: Subscribe Reprints..................... Earlier this year, Astro Teller, a ponytailed scientist and science fiction writer, gave a TED Talk. It was a first for Teller, but not for X, or Google X, as the research lab he runs used to be known. The lab has been a fixture on the conference circuit for years. In 2011, Sebastian Thrun, X’s founder, took the TED stage and predicted that driverless cars would put an end to traffic fatalities. In 2013, Sergey Brin, Google’s co-founder, showed up wearing X’s wearable computer, Google Glass, and argued that face-mounted devices were a natural successor to the smartphone. In 2015, Chris Urmson, the technical lead of X’s autonomous vehicle program, argued that driverless cars should operate with no human oversight at all. By February 2016 it was Teller’s turn. “I have a secret for you,” he began, with a self-assured smile. “The moonshot factory is a messy place.”The comments seemed aimed at a growing sense, among some on Wall Street and within Alphabet, the parent company of Google and X, that Teller was wasting money on crazy experiments. Google spent lavishly to market Glass—the devices were delivered by sky divers at their launch—but the product flopped and was off the market by early 2015. The self-driving car ran into setbacks both literal (fender benders) and figurative (a handful of top Google engineers defected to start their own autonomous vehicle company). Overall, the Other Bets, the belittling term that Alphabet uses to refer to X and other business divisions not named Google, lost about $3.6 billion in 2015, roughly twice what they’d lost the year before. An antenna designed to receive internet service delivered by the Loon balloons. Photographer: Justin Fantl for Bloomberg Businessweek At TED, Teller attempted to reframe X’s failures as part of an overall strategy that would ultimately lead to breakthrough successes. He cataloged a handful of unsuccessful experiments—robotic vertical farms, giant cargo blimps—before moving on to one of the more promising endeavors, Project Loon. “We’re trying to make balloon-powered internet,” he said. Loon has long been a favorite of Google founders Brin and Larry Page, according to several former Alphabet executives. The initial plan, they say, was to send 100,000 balloons into the stratosphere—enormous, house-size weather balloons outfitted with transmitters. That massive fleet, plus blimps, drones, and underground cables, would form an all-encompassing worldwide broadband network surpassing anything offered by the traditional telecom companies. “This could bring online as many as 4 billion people,” Teller said at TED, as a wide-angle video of a balloon floating past snow-capped mountains played behind him. He declared the company’s early tests a success. “We’re going to keep going.” The audience applauded. Six months after Teller’s rousing speech, Loon’s Mike Cassidy stepped down as project leader. Around the same time, Urmson, the self-driving car engineer, left Alphabet, as did David Vos, the head of X’s drone effort, Project Wing. Vos’s top deputy, Sean Mullaney, left the company as well. Other recent departures: Craig Barratt, chief executive officer of Access, its telecom division; Bill Maris, the CEO of its venture capital arm, GV; and Tony Fadell, the CEO of smart-thermostat company Nest, who was also working on a reboot of Google Glass. That project, now called Aura, also lost its leads of user design and engineering. Porat Photographer: Patrick T. Fallon/Bloomberg The architect of this reorganization—known as “Alphabetization” at the ever-sunny Google—was Ruth Porat, the new chief financial officer. Porat, who was born in England but grew up in Palo Alto, led Morgan Stanley’s technology banking division during the first dot-com boom, served as an adviser to the Treasury Department during the bailouts of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and became Morgan Stanley’s CFO in 2010. She joined Google in May 2015 with a mandate to bring discipline and focus to a company so awash in cash that it never needed much of either. She instituted rigorous budgeting and, according to people familiar with Alphabet’s operations, forced the Other Bets to begin paying for the shared Google services they used. Projects hatched with ambiguous timelines of 10 or more years in some cases had to show a path to profit in half the time. At most big companies, such financial controls are standard operating procedure, and Alphabet’s investors are pleased. Its stock is up 35 percent since Porat joined. But within the Other Bets, Porat’s tenure has been controversial, earning her an unflattering nickname: Ruthless Ruth. “She’s a hatchet man,” says a former senior Alphabet executive. “If Larry isn’t excited about something,” the executive continues, referring to CEO Page, “Ruth kills it.” Critics, including more than a dozen former top Google executives who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they signed nondisclosure agreements, describe a company having trouble balancing innovation and its core business, search advertising. Over the 12 months ended in September, Google’s ad business accounted for 89 percent of Alphabet’s revenue, or $76.1 billion. As one ex-executive puts it, “No one wants to face the reality that this is an advertising company with a bunch of hobbies.” Back to Earth: New Rules for Google’s Moonshot Factory “Google is not a conventional company,” Brin and Page wrote in a letter to investors when their company filed to go public in 2004. “We do not intend to become one.” The document, titled “?‘An Owner’s Manual’ for Google Shareholders,” is legendary in Silicon Valley, epitomizing an attitude known at the company’s Mountain View headquarters as “googliness.” In the letter, Page and Brin noted that Google would never focus on short-term profitability and would instead invest in employee perks, such as giving free meals to staff and encouraging employees to spend 20 percent of their working hours on projects of their choosing. The “Owner’s Manual” noted that Page and Brin, who still control Alphabet through a complicated stock structure that gives their shares more voting power than those owned by investors, intended to invest in lines of business well beyond internet search. “Do not be surprised,” they wrote, “if we place smaller bets in areas that seem very speculative or even strange.” The Cash Machine and the Other BetsGoogle Search, Android, Gmail, Maps, YouTube, Cloud, Pixel phone made $26.8b* Nest Smart-home devices: Thermostats, smoke detectors, security cameras Verily Google Glass, but for contact lenses AccessOffers Google Fiber broadband services, now working on wireless internet access Moonshots: Internet balloons, delivery drones, self-driving cars, etc.Sidewalk Labs Wi-Fi kiosks in New York City Jigsaw Tech incubator overseen by former CEO Eric Schmidt DeepMind Artificial intelligence software, including a bot for the board game Go Calico Trying to find a cure for death lost $3.8b* operating income for year ended 9/30/2016 What made all this possible, of course, was money. Behind the quirky, countercultural ethos was a wildly profitable business, with the potential to swallow entire industries. Whereas traditional advertising companies had tried to target audiences based on demographic profiles, Google’s search ads could be aimed at people already interested in a particular product. Its pioneering pay-per-click pricing scheme, AdWords, meant advertisers paid only for ads that worked. The result revolutionized media and advertising, and gave Google a revenue stream that seemed almost limitless. Googlers have a name for its ad business: the “cash machine.” At the time of its IPO, Google was taking in almost $400 million every three months. In its most recent quarter, Alphabet generated $18 billion in revenue and about $5 billion in profit. But Brin and Page were never particularly enamored of any of this—or rather, they were focused on the business only insofar as it made even more ambitious technological efforts possible. A former Google engineer recalls meeting Page in the late 1990s. “Are you interested in—” the engineer started to ask. Yes,” Page said, cutting her off. “We’re interested in everything.” Over the years, Google’s speculative bets have included the purchases of YouTube and Android, as well as forays into software, hardware, entertainment, telecommunications, and media. In the mid-2000s, Page and Brin decided to create a sort of digital Library of Alexandria by scanning every book ever printed. This was the company’s first “moon shot,” as Google Vice President Marissa Mayer (now CEO of Yahoo!) put it to the New Yorker in 2007. Partly by design and partly because Page, who became CEO in 2011, is conflict-averse, these new businesses evolved into fiefdoms. Each was dominated by an inspired executive—almost always an engineer—who’d hatched an idea, won the support of Page or Brin, and been provided with vast resources to pursue it. There was so little oversight at X, an early employee recalls, that CFO Patrick Pichette was once unable to enter the building and had to wait outside in the rain. Teller says this is the Google equivalent of an urban legend but doesn’t dispute that access to X is tightly controlled. “I’m sure someone has had a badge problem at some point,” he says. There was a rationale to this corporate fragmentation. The side projects, known then as “autonomous business units,” often competed directly with Google’s advertising partners, and it seems hard to imagine that a conventionally organized company would have been able to, for instance, start services such as Google Fiber (home broadband) and Project Fi (a cell phone carrier) while also trying to persuade big telecom companies to embed Google software in their devices. But the fragmentation created a lot of overlap. At one point in 2016 the company had two music subscription services, YouTube Red and Google Play Music; two venture capital groups, GV and CapitalG; two mobile operating systems, Chrome OS and Android; and two advanced research labs, X and ATAP, which Page created in 2014 when he hired the former Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency director, Regina Dugan. (Dugan left Google earlier this year for Facebook.) Mock-up of X’s energy-generating Makani kite. Photographer: Justin Fantl for Bloomberg Businessweek All that duplication created tension in part because, former Google employees say, Page tends to ignore employees he’s unhappy with. “Larry’s version of canning someone is to make it as unpleasant as he can,” says a former executive. Eric Schmidt, Google’s former CEO, and Bill Campbell, a board member and mentor to Page, helped smooth out these conflicts. But Schmidt, now executive chairman, started spending more time lobbying for Google in Washington, and Campbell fell gravely ill. (He died of cancer this year.) In addition to causing internal confusion, the lack of structure made Google’s moonshots harder to explain to the world. Many former X employees blame overexuberance on the part of Google’s marketing division for the hostile reception that greeted Google Glass. With the encouragement of Brin, who ran X at the time, Google struck a partnership with Diane von Furstenberg to put Glass on runway models during New York Fashion Week in the fall of 2012. The following year, Glass was featured in a 12-page photo portfolio in Vogue. The hype heightened the sense of disappointment when Glass was released in 2013. It flopped, earning terrible reviews and prompting physical confrontations between early adopters and, for example, fellow bar patrons who didn’t appreciate having a tiny camera trained on them. The term “glasshole” entered the Silicon Valley lexicon. teller hesitates when asked what to make of Glass’s failure. “I think we were right to try,” he says, after a long pause. “It wasn’t obvious at that time whether something like Glass should be attached to Google from a brand perspective or not. That’s something we learned.” He notes that although Glass was marketed to the public as the Explorer Edition, many people assumed it was a finished product. Teller Teller Source: Google Teller established procedures to avoid similar debacles, including a formal process by which aspiring project leaders would be required to have a credible business case as well as a working prototype in order to continue. “It was a primordial soup where there was all this stuff bubbling, but it was extremely unstructured,” says Obi Felten, whose business card identifies her as “head of getting moonshots ready for contact with the real world.” (Titles at X tend to be extremely googley.) X began paying bonuses to executives who killed their projects before expenses spiraled out of control, and it halted development on at least one that had already been greenlighted. The effort, known internally as Tableau and championed by Brin, had been a plan to create gigantic TV screens. As X retrenched, Page went into an exploratory mode of his own. Starting in 2014, he began handing off day-to-day responsibilities at Google to Sundar Pichai, a longtime product executive, and assembled a small, internal think tank. The group operated in secrecy—staff members at X who caught wind of it began calling the unit, derisively, Google Y. Page called it Javelin. The Javelin team kicked around ideas, including a plan to mass-produce skyscrapers and another to create a “smart city,” which became Sidewalk Labs, a startup run by Dan Doctoroff, the former CEO of Bloomberg LP. But a secondary purpose of Javelin, according to two people who worked on the unit, was to solve the fiefdom problem once and for all. Page’s idea was to establish “a federation of Googles,” one of the people says. He wanted standalone companies so that budgets, business models, and branding could be planned and executed independent of Mother Google. Without any warning, on the afternoon of Monday, Aug. 10, 2015, Page released a letter to investors and the public. He introduced Alphabet, a new holding company. Google and the Other Bets would be subsidiaries, each with its own CEO. “Alphabet is about businesses prospering through strong leaders and independence,” he wrote. “The whole point is that Alphabet companies should have independence and develop their own brands.” Alphabet would also begin reporting Google’s earnings separately each quarter, meaning that investors would finally know how much money X and the Other Bets were losing and exactly how profitable the Google cash machine was. At the end of the letter, Page attempted a joke. “Don’t worry,” he wrote, “we’re still getting used to the name too!” Alphabet’s earnings reports have laid bare just how healthy Google was under Pichai. In addition to double-digit revenue growth in its ad business over the past year, Google has unveiled a promising new assistant to compete with Amazon’s Echo and has beefed up its cloud-services division. “More information is always better for investors, because you hate to invest in black boxes,” says Dan Niles, founding partner of AlphaOne Capital Partners, an investment management firm that holds Alphabet stock. But, Niles adds, “the real key is that they brought in Ruth Porat.” Liquid fuel made from seawater. The fuel was too expensive to produce, and X canceled the project. Photographer: Justin Fantl for Bloomberg Businessweek Almost no one saw the change coming. Most senior executives found out that morning. “It was mind-blowing,” says Rich DeVaul, who serves as “director of rapid evaluation and mad science” at X. He’d helped start Loon and, by 2015, was in charge of vetting moonshots, which means he has the Google equivalent of top-secret security clearance. He talked with Brin and Page most weeks. And yet, he says, “I had no idea they were going to do that.” At many of the Other Bets, the change was seen as a violation of googliness. Two years earlier, for instance, Google had spent $3.2 billion to buy Nest, explaining the acquisition as part of a plan to create an ambitious hardware division led by Fadell, the former Apple engineer known for building the original iPod prototype. According to two people close to Nest, the company was initially promised wide latitude to create products, as well as a budget that would allow it to lose as much as $500 million for each of the next five years. Fadell told Bloomberg News when he departed in June that he’d begun thinking of leaving at the end of 2015, shortly after Alphabet’s formation. People familiar with his thinking say he blames budget constraints imposed by Porat that limited Nest’s scope. Another person close to Nest disputed the $500 million figure.

Read More