The Next Web

Google gets funky with collaborative spreadsheet “art”

Written on November 26, 2008 – 12:25 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

One of the genres in Internet virals I dig is the artsy scene. People painting the Mona Lisa in MS Paint, life-like airbrush pics of celebs on DeviantArt, or a billion-dollar company publishing a video about spreadsheet art. As you might have guessed by the headline, I’d like to share the latter with you.

Google asked Jason, Ethan, Anna, and Gargiulov to work together simultaneously on a single Google Docs spreadsheet. Each cell in the 100 row x 186 col spreadsheet was filled using 18 different colors. The entire process was captured in time-lapse.

When stating that Google gets “funky”, I refer to the process of promoting its products with fun videos. Not to the incredible dull holiday season picture the four Google adorers created. Anyway, if you’re interested in how they did it, here’s some behind the scenes action.

I hope you like that post!

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DeviantArt, google, Google Docs, Mona Lisa, Spreadsheet

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Newscred challenges news selection of Google and Yahoo

Written on August 26, 2008 – 3:36 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

Every once in a while we publish an interview with a start-up. We ask five questions, hoping the answers will give you inspiration and new views.

This time we’re interviewing Shafqat from NewsCred. He works from Geneva, Switzerland. Together with his Sweden-based business partner Iraj, he founded a digital newspaper that aggregates hundreds of news sources. The Newscred community votes on the crediblity of articles, authors and news sources. Iraj and Shafqat then apply their CredRank algorithms to ensure you only get the highest quality news from desired news sources. The quality is even higher than that from Google News or Yahoo News, the Swiss/Swedish company claims. I guess you can never aim high enough.

How did you come up with the idea of NewsCred?

“The idea for NewsCred originated during many late-night, coffee-fueled debates over the future of newspapers and traditional media between my cofounder (Iraj) and myself. It was the summer of 2007, and we spent a lot of time in cafes and bars on the banks of Lake Geneva brainstorming our crazy ideas. It was clear to us that the media industry was broken, and it seemed like the entire news space was one of the few traditions that wasn’t yet disrupted by the latest web technologies. On top of that, every single person we spoke to told us that they were getting fed up of news that was biased or inaccurate or just not transparent. It seemed like a big enough problem to tackle, so we decided to give it a go!” (more…)

five questions for start-ups, Google Docs, google news, index ventures, Lake Geneva, lastfm, Silicon Valley, skype, Start-ups, yahoo

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