Skip to main content

Google Me This. Google Me That.

Today one of the headlines from MSNBC puts this little startup named "23andme.com" into the public eye. The news pundits claim that this little company is actually a "biotech," but I disagree. The apparent business plan for this company is to provide novel and helpful technologies for you, their customer, to understand your personal genome. That's fun, just like in the blockbuster movie "Gattaca," you can share your genomic inequities with your future girlfriend or boyfriend. Although, once they find out that you have a genetic marker for a debilitating disease, they will likely not choose you as a mate. Thus begins the Age of Eugenics.

This company, 23andme, caught my attention because it received $4,000,000 (million) US dollars from our most favorite public company, Google. Apparently this $4M is just pocket change for Google, otherwise why would it fritter it away on such a bad business plan?

What you may not know is that the co-founder of "23andme" is none other than the wife of Sergei, the co-founder of Google. Hey wait. Why would the behemoth Google need to give Sergei's wife $4M to fund a high risk venture when Sergei is worth hundreds of millions himself. Isn't this just pocket change for Sergei? Is there something amiss with Sergei's personal finances that Google shareholders need to know?

Hipocrisy. This is the word that comes to mind when I think of this transaction between "23andme" and Google. Why? Well, you have the former chairman of the WorldBank, Paul Wolfowitz, who recently stepped down because his girlfriend received a pay raise and promotion after he took the chairman post. What you didn't know was that his "girlfriend" had already been marked for promotion BEFORE Mr. Wolfowitz took his post. Did Paul give his girlfriend $4 MILLION DOLLARS to squander away on some movie-inspired business plan? No, he didn't even give his girlfriend a promotion with a big raise. That was already approved by the board before Paul took office. He simply was the victim of bad press pushed by the European agenda to replace Mr. Wolfowitz with a European-sympathetic lap-dog.

When Google went public, they spent a fortune on a 747 as their company jet. It's lavish and cool with the nifty Google logo on it. Why is this necessary for a company that is solely an INTERNET BASED advertising business. Are they going to entertain big ad clients who don't know how to signup for AdWords over the web?

It wasn't enough that Google bought a 747 as a company jet after it went public. Now it's giving pocket spending money to its executive's wives so that they can experiment with premature business plans. This is inappropriate and reckless money management by a public company.

Popular posts from this blog

Clustered Foolishness

I had morning coffee with a well respected friend of mine recently. Aside from chatting about the usual wifery and family, we touched on the subject of clustered indices and SQL Server performance. A common misconception in the software industry is that a clustered index will make your database queries faster. In fact, most cases will demonstrate the polar opposite of this assumption. The reason for this misconception is a misunderstanding of how the clustered index works in any database server. A clustered index is a node clustering of records that share a common index value. When you decide on an index strategy for your data, you must consider the range of data to be indexed. Remember back to your data structures classes and what you were taught about hashtable optimizations. A hashtable, which is another way of saying a database index, is just a table of N values that organizes a set of M records in quickly accessible lists that are of order L, where L is significantly less than M. ...
Read more

Deadly Information

Remember back to 2006 when a young girl killed herself [1] , [4] after being tricked and harassed by a faux boy she found on the Web using MySpace. The trial against the faux boy, an adult woman (Lori Drew), did not result in prosecution for the death of Megan, much to the dismay of many.  Yet, today we read about another trial where someone is being accused of second degree murder because they may have mentioned something slanderous about another person who was later killed by a hit man [2] . In this case, though, the person on trial is a former FBI agent who was working deep cover to infiltrate organized crime. In both cases, someone released information to third parties that resulted in the death of another person.  Neither defendant in either of these cases actually committed the act of murder, though. In the case of the FBI agent, though, the murder charge is being taken seriously. Yet, in the MySpace slander case, the murder charge was not taken seriously. How are t...
Read more

Faster Climate Change

CNN reports that a WWF study has found that global climate change is happening faster than predicted in 2007 and that there will not be any arctic ice by 2013, or 2040. [1] Then it goes on to say that global sea level will increase by 1.08 meters by the end of the century, which is 2100, 92 years from now. Quite honestly, nobody really cares what is going to happen to the planet in 98 years. Why? Because in 98 years we (as humans) will either: (1) Obliterate ourselves because God told us to do it. (2) Eat eachother because there will no longer be any land available to grow crops and sustain living quarters for our 50 billion people. (3) Suffocate because our planet will no longer smell nice thanks to 50 billion people producing lots of solid waste in our oceans. (4) Leave the planet because there will no longer be enough fresh water to sustain our lives. Wait a minute. Consider (4) for a moment. Where can we get an abundance of fresh water TODAY? Anyone? Yeah, the arctic! It's goin...
Read more