Google Opens U.K. Cybercafe and Testing Lab

sebFlyte writes "Google has launched a new venture in England to go with its London offices. They've set up a free Web cafe style affair at London's Heathrow airport to help travelers claw back some of the many hours they spend aimlessly wandering round airport lounges. They're not doing it entirely selflessly though: they admit the main reason they're doing it is to get as wide and as large a cross section of people through the centre as they can so that they can then watch them interact with Google's Web applications. ZDNet has photos, too."

Comments

another good community minded move

[know1]

It's ideas like this that make people not mind when google wants a lot of information about you. All those people who will cry "If this was microsoft you would hate it" - microsoft collates it's data surrepticiously, every webpage you visit or email you write. offereing a free web cafe and saying "but we will watch you" in public no less, is a good thing. I can hardly see anyone looking up anything they wouldn't want anybody to know about anyway at a public terminal

Re:another good community minded move

[zeridon]

You have a valid point, but this will give google much more valuable information about the way their services are used. For example it could determine that 75% of the people preffer personalised home and 98% of that are using page history as a sort of a bookmarking tool. So after that is noted google video will lose couple of servers which will be transfered for the sake of personalised home and page history.

they are just profiling the usage of their systems, and of course gaining some image :)

Re:Hmm... Noticed something...

[Pichu0102]

If they switch Operating Systems altogether, they'll probably lose a ton of users, seeing as most associate Windows with computers. If average users see Firefox, most likely they'll feel like it's unfamiliar and feel a bit edgy about it, but to use a different OS altogether? That in itself would put off a lot of people in one move.

Attractive Assistants

[ethzer0]

The 10 Samsung laptops in the temporary installation will be manned from 0700 to 1900 by Google employees from across the organisation, with some flown in especially to help out.

Take a look at this photo and all the sudden it makes sense...

Terminal blues

[FishandChips]

This is just a temporary booth that will run for only two months with only ten computers. Any one of dozens of other companies could have done something similar promoting music, cars, books, mobiles, even candy bars, etc, etc., instead of the internet. This Google venture comes over as a rather tacky and ephermeral trade/marketing stand and the Slashdot headline is completely misleading, imho.

The place is awash with stories about Google taking over the world and putting the fear of god into corporate behemoths everywhere. But take a hard look at what Google is actually doing rather than what analysts are saying. Google is a not very large company which runs the world's best search/advertising engine and has a number of frankly rather modest beta projects going. And that is all. In many ways, Google has yet to prove itself. Sooner or later, the Google boys and girls are going to have to come out with some aggressive killer moves or folks might just conclude that the story is a soap opera about California cool with, alas, little more substance than a completely crazy stock price.