How teenagers consume Media

Have a business that targets teens? Then read this:

An interesting article in The Guardian – one which caused quite a stir at Morgan Stanley, and no doubt for others in the City.

Not business as usual at Google?

I like Google. Like millions of googlers around the world, I am a big fan of this company. They deliver great functional utilities, most of which are now an intrinsic part of my daily life, and they do it without making too much of a fuss about it. So this news about Google in The Times caught my eye.

Google Street View camera car snapping pictures in British villages and towns has raised a few concerns with the Britishers. I understand their concerns: if someone was standing outside my house looking at it for any longer than two minutes, I believe I would be suspicious too. Let alone them picturing the street and my house on it. It’s interesting reading this piece of news and the hundreds of responses to it. The Americans (from what I can make out by the responses) can’t understand what all this complaining is about. Are we just being paranoid? Or perhaps this shows how reserved and cautious the Europeans (in general) are as compared to the Americans. I am an immigrant in Britain and from what I see and understand, and can compare with the American culture, I think it’s the latter. Surely Google should understand such cultural differences too and approach the matter with more subtlety in the UK?

For example, I do not like the comment by Google’s spokesman according to whom Google will respond “within hours” for picture removal requests. It seems to me they have missed the point completely! Shouldn’t the nicer thing be for Google to request before taking pictures rather than people now having to specially put in requests for removal? And this from a company who is famous for it’s “you can make money without doing evil” philosophy?

I suspect the Google car’s 360 degree camera doesn’t help the matter at all: a tall hovering camera conspiciously turning 360 degrees and picturing everything is perhaps a design for such controversy. And it raises the question once again: how much should we trust Google with our data? We don’t trust our own governments thesedays. And mind you the government and it’s most secret and special agencies are known to bugger up with our confidential data, so can we and should we trust a for-profit corporate?

I guess having a business philosophy of do no evil is not enough. Winning trust is never easy; in fact it’s a never ending job. Google needs to get more serious about its own philosophy and perpahs start thinking local?