Responding to Crisis, the Google way.

The importance of online resources during crises

In waking up to news of heartbreaking disasters, most of the world now turn to online resources and tools to get real time updates and absorb on-the-ground situations. 

The web paves the way for ordinary citizens to report relevant information through online channels.Uploaded videos & photos showing the conditions of affected areas are used as online resources by organizations such as rescue teams & government agencies. 

According to a blogpost of Google.org, the philanthropic arm of Google, online resources are also the most efficient service during these disasters. This underscores the significance of online activity.

The blog said that, "While in some cases internet access is restricted due to infrastructure failures, generally, Internet Service Providers continue to provide connectivity and users take advantage of it. The findings show just how resilient the internet can be in times of crises compared to other infrastructure."

Given this knowledge, fully-charged laptops and devices which have access to the internet should be part of measures for unfortunate events that will hamper our ability to communicate with the rest of the world. In the Philippines, strong typhoons are immediately followed by long power outages. Oftentimes, laptops and mobile phones are the only means of getting updated on current events - demonstrating again how invaluable the Internet is when calamities are projected to occur more times than the recent decades.


Enter Google Crisis Response


Google Crisis Response is a team within Google.org that seeks to make critical information more accessible around natural disasters and humanitarian crises. It assesses the scale and scope of each disaster to determine whether and how it can uniquely contribute tools or content to relief efforts.


According to wikipedia, "It provides engineering tools that enhance communication and collaboration among crisis responders and victims. Such online tools include  Person Finder, Google Maps, Google Earth, Google Fusion Tables, Google Docs, and Google Sites.


Upon activation of Google Crisis response, communities and citizens are given a powerful online venue that provides a variety of options to help the disaster-stricken area in real time.

Google's Person Finder

When Japan was hit by a massive Earthquake and Tsunami last March 2011 that wreaked havoc and killed scores of people, relatives who have family members living in the affected wanted to immediately find out if the latter survived the disaster. 

Rie Kawai, a Japanese living in the United States and Aki Kohata, Rie's cousin living in Japan, communicated about their missing grandfather through Google Person Finder, one of the vital online resource tools of Google's Crisis Response.

Rie found out through Google Person Finder that her grandfather survived the onslaught as showed in Google.org's YouTube video.

Google Person Finder is described in the website of Google.org as "an important tool that helps with the process of reconnecting people in the wake of major disasters by providing an open platform for individuals and organizations to let people know who they’re looking for and to enter updates about missing persons."

The Google Crisis Response Japan page

Google Crisis Response entry page

Problem Solvers

From a small team that formed to help victims of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the Google Crisis Response team is progressively scaling its tools and resources. It has constantly responded to the disasters that struck the world. For 2011, it was an Internet lifeline for such events as the Turkey Earthquake, Australian Floods & Thailand Floods.

Here in the Philippines, Google established a Crisis Map and Person Finder for the recent Typhoon Sendong. This typhoon has currently claimed 1,500 lives. The Crisis map below displays information about the typhoon-affected areas for which the Google Crisis Response team has collected geographic information, such as the location of shelters and hospitals. The YouTube logo on the Crisis Map screen, when clicked, will display videos related to the crisis. The data comes from a variety of sources, including official information sources and user-generated content. 

Typhoon Sendong Crisis Map

Person Finder for Typhoon Sendong

Person Finder Data entry point for Typhoon Sendong

Institutionalizing online aid

By enabling citizens to share information about disaster-stricken areas from any location through online collaboration is a great service to humanity. The actions taken by Google and other organizations in past disasters have enabled the Internet to be a huge helping hand that facilitates more timely responses and better communication in tough situations.


Like its other technologies, Google is constantly improving its Crisis Response as lessons from past efforts are incorporated. God forbid the need to activate it again, we will see this technology evolve into a more responsive and organized effort.


The Google Crisis Response is a very valuable program being fostered online by Google. It is one of the organizations that can significantly reach a critical mass and mobilize it to participate in humanitarian efforts through technology.

Immortalizing Apple's Doctrine

Immortalizing Apple

To institutionalize the valuable knowledge on how Apple worked its way to become the world's most valuable tech company, Apple established an educational system within its halls called Apple University.


This was a priority project of its late founder, Steve Jobs, especially when he took his second medical leave in 2008. 

Little is known about Apple University and its inner workings but according to reports, Apple University started last 2008 and can be described as an educational system exclusive within Apple using case studies on significant decisions in Apple's recent history to teach Apple executives and presumably its new hires.


Among the corporate universities currently existing in the USA include McDonald's University and Pixar University, in which Jobs was also the former CEO.

Apple's Headquarters in Cupertino, California

According to Fortune, "Apple's Top executives teach the cases, which have covered subjects including the decision to consolidate iPhone manufacturing around a single factory in China and the establishment of Apple's retail stores. The goal of the program is to expose the next layer of management to the executive team's thought process."

The article by LA Times stated that apart from learning the executive team's thought process, The program would also help Apple internalize the thoughts of its visionary founder to prepare for the day when he's not around anymore. 


It also interviewed people with links to Apple & stated that "One of the things that Steve Jobs understood very well is that Apple is like no other company on the planet," said longtime Apple analyst Tim Bajarin. It became pretty clear that Apple needed a set of educational materials so that Apple employees could learn to think and make decisions as if they were Steve Jobs. Though the curriculum is still under wraps, Jobs himself oversaw the creation of the "university-caliber courses."

The period from Jobs' return to Apple in 1997 up to the present is Apple's Renaissance.  
From near bankruptcy, Apple roared its way back to the top, churning out one innovative product after another, in both hardware and software. 

Apple co-founder Steve Jobs showing the iPhone

During this time, among the wildly successful products that Apple launched were:

• The iPod, a digital music player showcasing an elegant pinwheel design combined with a large storage capacity for its time.

iPod Classic

• iTunes, the online music store that revolutionized the music industry. 

• The iPhone, a new breed of smartphone that changed the landscape of the telecommunications industry, with its touch screen capabilities and powerful operating system, the iOS. 

iPhone

• The iPad, which single handedly created the tablet industry while dominating it at the same time and also disrupted the ways of the publishing industry.

iPad

• The highly successful Apple retail stores that are now currently generating more sales per square foot than any other U.S. retailer.

The Apple Retail Store

Also showed here are some of the Apple Executives who were instrumental in Apple's success. They were part of the executive team that collaborated with Jobs in various stages of the Apple products during this Renaissance. They now form the leadership in Apple, carrying the torch handed over by Jobs. Their collaborations at work will form part of what will be studied by the future leaders of Apple in Apple University.

Tim Cook

CEO

The erstwhile COO is credited with streamlining and making Apple's supply chain and logistics the best in the industry.

Jonathan Ive

Senior Vice President
Industrial Design

Jonathan Ive led the design team that gave us the iPhone, iPad & the iMac among others.

Scott Forstall

Senior Vice President
iOS Software

Scott Forstall is credited in paring down the Mac OS X  to create the iOS, the software used by Apple in its most successful products namely the iPhone, iPad & iPod Touch.

  Eddy Cue

Senior Vice President

Internet Software and Services

Eddy Cue played a major role in creating the Apple online store in 1998, the iTunes Music Store in 2003 and the App Store in 2008.

Product and Leadership images courtesy of Apple 

Apple University is headed by Joel Podolny, the former Dean of the Yale school of management who was said to be personally recruited by Jobs' himself. Highly respected in the academic community, Podolny is credited with developing the Yale integrated MBA Curriculum in an amazingly short span of time, in response to the increasingly complex and cross-functional global environment in which businesses and their executives operate. He is also the author of the book Status Signals: A Sociological Study of Market Competition and co author of the book Strategic Management.


According to LA Times, the importance of Podolny's position at Apple was apparent from the first day as he moved into an office in between Jobs and Cook, he confided in former colleagues.


Aside from being the Dean of Apple University, Podolny is also Apple's Vice President for Human Resources.

Apple has been silent on Apple University and never commented on the subject. 

A micromanager, Steve Jobs managed every detail  in creating Apple University and his trademark secrecy is all over it with no detail revealed except that of Podolny's appointment being verified.

With Apple University, Fortune said "Jobs is ensuring that his teachings are being collected, curated, and preserved so that future generations of Apple's leaders can consult and interpret them."

Your facebook life on the line

The Facebook Timeline 

Last September, Facebook unveiled a design overhaul of the user profile, Timeline, at its f8 developers conference in San Francisco, USA.

Until lately, Timeline was only available to facebook app developers and a number of users through a beta activation process. The activation guideline was published by news sites like Mashable and Business Insider and was also spread through one's news feed through social media channels. This was how I activated my Timeline last October and had a chance to tinker with it.

But now, through a simple activation process detailed in this post by facebook, Timeline will become the new landing page for one's Facebook profile, replacing the older profile design. It is a complete redesign that aims to simplify and organize all your facebook activities & stories in a single place. Some may find Timeline as another complicated facebook feature as it presents a new interface and puts design considerations in the user, but a few days of actively using  it can put one at ease with Timeline.

As the name suggests, Timeline is a chronological order of your facebook stories, starting from the day you were born to the day you joined facebook. From there, Timeline will integrate all your facebook activities and display it in alternating rectangular frames, enabling one to see multiple stories at the same time.

In Timeline, the user can choose to highlight an event, a story, a video or a picture and facebook will enlarge it and display it across both frames and more prominently than a regular post, like in the picture I chose to feature in my Timeline.

What the Facebook Timeline aims to achieve is to have the user reminisce their "uploaded life"  and rekindle the individual connections from posts of friends, colleagues & family. This makes the activity more personal as one is brought back in time to old online memories.

For me, this was achieved as I found myself a little nostalgic especially when viewing past pictures & status updates, which Timeline brings to life much easily with just a few clicks on a specific year. After bringing the outline of the years, a simple scroll through highlights the specific year in pictures and activities will be literally brought out before your eyes.  This can also be true from the point of view of a friend or a family member browsing through your profile.

There were some initial bugs present in Timeline like portions of my timeline would suddenly appear and replace the timeline of the one I was viewing. There were also difficulties in loading the entire timeline year but knowing how fast facebook acts and fixes these bugs, these nuances will be brought to function more effectively in the future.

In a blog post, Facebook noted that "When you upgrade to Timeline, you'll have seven days to review everything that appears on your timeline before anyone else can see it. You can also choose to publish your timeline at any time during the review period. If you decide to wait, your Timeline will go live automatically after seven days."


I suggest that you review your past updates and activities as you may have tagged pictures which you don't want others to see or may have forgotten to take down or any past online story that you may want to hide. The seven day review will also serve as a mini time travel throughout your facebook life.


Enjoy the ride.

Japan's tale of two cities

Japan

"You've never seen anything like it." This was how Japan was described to me as my wife and I sat on the plane's coach seats. It's fascinating to think that in just over four hours, we would be transported from our hometown Manila to the whole new world of Japan.

The Kansai International Airport at Osaka was our entry point. After ogling at the large panaflex map showing the train stops, we miraculously figured out which train to catch. We were then whisked away to the center of the city. After a couple of subway transfers, we found ourselves walking the streets of Namba. 

As we walked to our hotel, the occasional smell and sight of food being cooked distracted us, but we were determined to get our hands devoid of any luggage before we explored the neighborhood.

We tidied up and  excitedly ate our first meal: a piping hot bowl of Ramen with a variety of toppings. It had a great kick that came from the crushed black pepper and was certainly a wonderful prelude to Japanese Cuisine. It was at this point that I was thanking the gods that led me to the ad of the discounted airfare that enabled us to travel to this place.

Ramen: Our first meal in Japan

The following day, much to our dismay, we had to leave the adorable neighborhood of Namba on our way to Tokyo. As we again lugged our bags through escalators and flights of stairs, our longing to stay at Osaka was easily replaced by a mix of excitement and confusion as we were again in the face of the panaflex map of the subway.

My instincts didn't fail me as we found ourselves on the Bullet Train (Shinkansen) to Tokyo. This technological wonder has an average speed of 300 km/h. It was such a comfortable ride. The seats were spacious and the train was spotless.

As rows of houses and glimpses of mountains sped by from the Shinkansen,  I studied one of the best purchases I made for the trip, an app of a lonely planet guide for Tokyo. 

It was everything you needed to know for just $5.99. Places to see, eat, shop, inlcuding detailed descriptions and budget advice were there. The digital map came in very handy too as we worked on our itinerary.

As views of buildings slowly replaced the houses and industrial plants,  I knew we were nearing Tokyo.

Tokyo

The Subway Station is a rightful welcoming spot in Tokyo as one will spend a lot of time on the subway going around the city. 

During rush hour, the Tokyo subway system is frenetic with a constant stream of people coming in and out of the stations and trains.

Inside the trains, though, people are calm and courteous. I learned in an online forum that the standard practice is that one has to put their phone in silent mode and avoid talking while in transit. And looking back, I never did once hear a phone ring while on the train.

The entire subway network of Tokyo is much like an underground city and is an adventure on its own. There are loads of mini stores that sell Japanese delicacies like roe and inari sushi, refreshing milk teas, flavored seaweed, and green tea dumplings for people on-the-go and for tourists like us who get hungry from figuring out the subway system.

I guess the reason why it's difficult to find your way in Japan is the fact that most Japanese don't speak English. The subway stations lack English direction guides. Some local trains don't offer English translations of train routes. 

We oftentimes had to resort to improvised sign language. When saying no, a Japanese would make an X sign by placing his arms in front of his chest, a sign often seen in Japansese game shows. In ordering food, we pointed to the actual items lying on the other person's table.

In finding your hotel, shops or tourist attractions, it would be helpful if you bring a map with an image of the place to show when you need to ask for directions. You could also have someone write down the name of the place in Japanese or take a picture of it on your mobile device.

Eating in Japan is a visual and palatable feast everytime. My wife and I didn't dine in fancy restaurants. Instead, I would scout streets for the eateries where the locals are. A queue outside cozy restaurants was always a good sign. The food was prepared and presented in such a clean, elegant manner.  The tuna, fatty salmon, and mackerel were the freshest I've ever tasted. 

A pair of Mackerel Sushi in Tokyo

We love Yakitori!

Fatty Salmon Sushi

One of the landmarks that will give you a picture of modern day Tokyo is Shibuya Crossing. This is where you can genuinely see and feel the vibe of the city. The glaring neon lights and the sea of people present in the place make it explode with energy.  It is here that one can see the Western influence interlaced with Japanese Culture.

Shibuya Crossing at night

Shibuya is also home to Hachiko, the world famous dog who waited for his master on the same spot 

everyday for 8 years even after he died. In that spot where Hachiko waited is his statue which has now become a meeting place for locals.

Hachiko's statue in Shibuya

We also visited Tokyo Disneyland, wherein majority of the visitors were in costumes dressed as their favorite Disney cartoon character. It was refreshing to see the people enveloped in vivid colors, in direct contrast to the general seriousness of Tokyo . This place showcased Japan's flair for fantasy. 

Coupled with an adrenaline-rushing ride like Space Mountain and the visual spectacle of It's a Small World After All, being in Disneyland rekindled the child in us. 

Some of the people in their favorite costumes

Tokyo is robust. There's no time to stop and think. The city is fast-paced. There's always a train to catch and a spot to check off the list.  The people walk briskly as if to the beat of the pachinko machines (the only allowed gambling machine in Japan). But don't worry, the multicolored lights will shine brightly to keep you from tiring.

Kyoto

Coming from the frenzy of Tokyo, Kyoto was a lovely, serene surprise. Surrounded by mountains and UNESCO world heritage sites, Kyoto is heralded as Japan's cultural capital.

On our first day, while looking for a place to dine, out of nowhere, beautiful quaint shops that featured one-of-a-kind items sprung one by one. There were norens (Japanese curtains) in various sizes and colors with pictures of bamboo trees, cherry blossoms, and the omnipresent owls. There were little fabrics of such beautiful colors and prints. They can be used for anything - as handkerchiefs, as runners, table napkins, or when framed, become instant art pieces. Home accessories also abounded. Curtains, cabinet- covers, baskets, wall decors - they all carried the daintiness of Japanese taste (even if some items were made in China). 

My wife, Angel loved the rows of quaint shops in Kyoto and what they offered.

Kyoto is a relatively simple city to navigate compared to Tokyo. The subway system is patterned like a grid as opposed to the ramen-like map of Tokyo's Subway.  

You won't be needing a map when you're in Kyoto. Walking aimlessly is actually the best way to discover the city. One may see a beautiful wooden Buddhist temple just around a backstreet corner, discover a restaurant that serves a great ramen by the creekside, or find himself in a row of European-style coffee shops.


Another way to discover Kyoto is to join Johnnie Hillwalker's walking tour. 

http://web.kyoto-inet.or.jp/people/h-s-love/

With 49 years of experience as a tour guide, Johnnie's walking tour takes you to the back alleys of Kyoto and gives a peek into its home industries ranging from a family making fans for the last 400 years, pottery artists, beancurd shops, buddhist prayer beads, and tea containers made of copper. 

A renowned Japanese pottery artist at work in his studio

Johnnie also showed us inside Higashi-Honganji, the biggest Buddhist temple in Kyoto and the world's biggest wooden structure. There was even a buddhist ceremony when we went inside and sat in the ceremonial area to join.

I was also pleasantly surprised in the tour as Johnnie brought us to the place where electronic gaming giant Nintendo started out as a playing card manufacturer.  I was a Nintendo nut during my childhood and it brought back memories.

Johnnie Hillwalker showing us the playing cards made by Nintendo

Johnnie also took us to a once thriving Geisha district and an abandoned Geisha house, which for me was the most interesting part as my wife and I saw Geishas roaming around later that same night at Pontocho.


When we spotted a geisha, we really didn't know what to do. Should we bow to them? Should we steal a picture - paparazzi-style? Or should we ask for permission to take their picture? Smile? Or keep a poker-face? But we just stood there - awed, amazed, glued to the floor. What mystical creatures.

A once thriving Geisha house in Kyoto

The walking tour ended at the most famous temple in Kyoto, the breathtaking Kiyomizu-dera, a wooden temple supported by pillars off the slope of a mountain.  It had a magnificent view of the city and a fountain with promises of better health and passing test scores to those who believe and drink from it. 

The Kiyomizu Dera

We visited Kinkaku-ji, (Temple of the Golden Pavilion). I became familiar with this temple as Apple has its image as a background for its MacBook Pro and I also learned that it was one of the late Steve Jobs favorite places in Kyoto. The Golden Pavilion was a sight to behold as it shined elegantly in the middle of the pond.  

For foodies, a must visit in Kyoto is the Nishiki-Koji Food Market. It displays all the freshness and uniqueness of the Japanese menu - pickled veggies, sashimi on sticks, octopus and cabbage dumplings among others.

Fushima Inari is a most memorable and frequented temple for it symbolized prosperity.  It had giant, bright-red orange wooden pillars with Japanese writings on them.  What makes this temple memorable are the never-ending steps we had to climb to get to the top. We didn't actually know what the top of the stairs held for us, but the sight of seventy to eighty year-old ladies walking faster than us motivated us to keep on going. So we climbed, panted, drank lemon sodas, and climbed, and climbed some more. On top was a cemetery. Without saying a word, we climbed back down.

The red wooden pillars of the Fushima Inari 

In contrast to Tokyo, Kyoto encourages thought and reflection. I don't know which it was - the zen philosophies, seeing such graceful landmarks like the Golden Pavilion, or the way Johnnie explained the history of Buddhism and Shintoism (most Japanese are both), or the sound of the water flowing along the cleanest creek I've ever seen - Japan made me appreciate the world, with all its diversity.


There's no place in the world like Japan. And there never will be.