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.