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Google Buys Manhattan Office/Telecom Hub
1sockchuck writes "Google will soon own one of the world's choice pieces of Internet real estate. The company has reportedly signed a contract to buy 111 8th Avenue in New York for an estimated $1.9 billion — or about $250 million more than Google spent to buy YouTube. The building serves as Google's main New York sales office, but is also one of the city's main telecom hotels, housing major data center operations for Digital Realty Trust, Equinix, Telx and dozens of network providers. Google currently has about 500,000 square feet of office space at 111 8th Avenue."
Nothing different, it's always location location location
Haven't heard of real estate prices like this since pre-bubble Tokyo. What's going on here? Are a bunch of fiber cables really that valuable?
Black on slightly-less black is so easy to read.
And the deal still left a portion of the ownership in the original investors' hands, so Google only bought about 89% of the building.
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
You must be using Safari. When I view the page in Firefox, it is black text on a white background.
Bigger view of the building built by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey
I haven't read the details about this deal but some of these numbers are big because they buy things with their own Google company shares/stock which I believe are valued considerably above their yield. Google shares/stock are many multiple times higher in value than equivalent stocks with the same dividends/returns. That's why these figures are so massive...maybe? Is it a cash purchase? YouTube wasn't.
Google is hated in that building by the other tenants and has gotten a bad reputation with the management, so buying the building solves both problems. Looks like nobody's going to be saying NO to Google over at the Old Port Authority Building anymore.
So you say, but go buy an apartment in Seoul and see how they measure area there. (Not sq. m)
For those using sensible units: 6800 USD/m2 or 5000 EUR/m2
Well, the rest of the galaxy uses the period and wavelength of the emissions from hydrogen plasma at the critical density to define distance and time, built around a natural logarithm scale. Why don't you get with the times and use an actually universal unit of measure, pitiful human?
[Okay, i have no idea what would be a good basis, nor do I know about critical densities of hydrogen plasmas, but that seems a better standard than "the approximate length of an object that inaccurately measured a portion of a non-spherical planet based on the assumption it was a perfect sphere."]
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
Wait, that's not what the meter is anymore! Now it's:
The distance light travels in some ridiculously bizarre amount of time, assuming very specific stipulations about free space and gravity, which just so happens to coincide with the approximate length of an object that inaccurately measured a portion of a non-spherical planet based on the assumption that it was a perfect sphere.
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
And it's "protecting your freedom" if the government does it.
Funny how quickly English is turning into a language where the actor inflects the verb. And a lot more than in most other languages I know. Depending on the actor, you could even think it comes from a completely different root...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
My first thought was it must involve high frequency trading.
I'll make sure and demand my next purchase of Thai farmland be in square meters, rather than the Government-accepted rai. And I'll make sure and get all dimensions of Japanese rooms only in meters, rather than tatami
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
"actor inflects the verb" -- what does this even mean? Do you understand any of the terms you are using? I still vaguely get your point, but it's a dumb one and so is your faux-linguistic explanation of it.
That's puzzling. Why would Google need high-cost data center space in NYC? They're distributed enough that it doesn't matter. I could see Google buying an office building in Manhattan and filling it with advertising salespeople, but not much hardware needs to be there.
Even for Wall Street, many of the big data centers are elsewhere, usually in New Jersey.
Google bought a building that takes up an entire square city block - 15th - 16th streets, 8th - 9th Ave, in Manhattan. For $1.9B they could probably just write the word GOOGLE in REALLY big letters wrapped around the side of the building (that's only 1 1/2 letters per side) and write it off from their advertising budget.
So I guess that makes the definition of the foot:
A ridiculously bizarre portion of the distance light travels in some ridiculously bizarre amount of time, assuming very specific stipulations about free space and gravity (which just so happens to coincide with the approximate length of an object that inaccurately measured a portion of a non-spherical planet based on the assumption that it was a perfect sphere), which just so happens to approximately coincide with a non-power-of-ten multiple of an unit (the inch) defined by a non-power-of-ten multiple of another unit (the yard) which was previously defined as a ridiculously bizarre multiple of the approximate length travelled by an oscillating object in an inaccurately defined environment at a specific place of a particular planet, whose oscillations are defined as having a period equal to a (moderately bizarre) multiple of an unit (the second) defined at the time as a ridiculously bizarre multiple of the time the same particular planet takes to orbit around its sun.
(yeah, there probably are errors/imprecisions in this, looking that up that was a great lesson on units history though ;) )
Basically the imperial unit system has just become a bad wrapper with multiples to the metric system, so, I think I'll keep the SI units, which are based on definitions with reasonable assumptions given our current knowledge of the universe (except the kg for now, but that will be fixed), are fully compatible with their previous definitions for human-scale tasks (the "ridiculously bizarre" factors), and allow the use of 10^n for a lot of its subunits and aliases (metric tons vs. kg, litre vs. m^3, micron vs. m, etc.).
Years ago my previous employer had equipment in two different datacenters in the building. Its more than real estate, or a massive datacenter. Its a very dense internet peering hub with datacenters and office space. I can definitely see this move as strategic, as it puts Google in the "middle" of all the different players.
A slip of the foot you may soon recover, but a slip of the tongue you may never get over. -Benjamin Franklin
And I, as an American, will also keep my just-as-patently-absurd arbitrary measurement system for the same reason. Until there is a real universal system (including measurements for time! Why didn't SI fix our idiotic time system?) there's no reason to change to SI.
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
With almost all of its revenue coming from internet ads, what kind of sales team does Google need in Manhattan that warrants $1.9 billion?
They tried (*). It didn't stick. You're welcome to try again, though (but less blood, please).
David Gay
*: not SI, the people who gave you the meter and the kilogram well before SI came along.
Or Hong Kong, London, and Singapore if I recall correctly. While the metric system has many advantages over Imperial, there are many places and industries where Imperial still reigns for borderline logical reasons.
The SI unit of time is the second. Metric time hasn't taken off for a number of reasons, but the one that leaps to mind is that no matter how you define your units of time, the number of days in a year will never be a power of 10.
Actually Wall St.'s computers are also gathered in Brooklyn.
London is done in meters, or it was when I sold my flat there.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
I just stopped working for Barnes&Noble.com and it was on the 9th floor of this building. BN is centralizing even more of the corporate into that building. Armani North America is in this building. Among other fancy upscale tenants. (all design and corporate for Armani, Armani exchange, etc. also freelanced there a while back) There are literally hundreds of big name companies there. its also a really culturally significant building for its New York history.
Content + Container; Content = Container; Content â Container... which is the question?
Why use powers of 10? It's a terrible base! A good system of units should not take convenience for humans into consideration at all.
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
Yes, that does sound much sillier then, say, "the approximate length of an old kings foot".
Why use powers of 10? It's a terrible base! A good system of units should not take convenience for humans into consideration at all.
AI detected. Look, it's slightly harder for you to work on other bases, but for us it's much harder - most people don't even know there are other bases than 10.
I used to work in this building after the World Trade Center 9/11 attack when my company lost their data center and had to rent a co-location space in one of the data centers there. This is a monstrous building that is the size of an entire New York City block. It is build like an ancient Babylonia pyramid with vertical walls and a pyramidal structure on the top floors. It is across the street from the Chelsea Market and one block north of Homestead Steakhouse. The actual entrance for IT geeks to the data center space of this building is in the back on 9th avenue, the office entrance is in the front and I never used that one.
I was bored one day I took a walk down the hallways of some of the floors and saw data center spaces for _all_ of the major telecom and Internet providers that I knew of and many that I didn't know even existed. Strangely some of the doors to these data centers were left open, I'm guessing because work was being performed there and I got a tour of some of these places. Miles and miles of conduits, cables, server cages, telecom equipment racks, server racks, backup units, power distribution units, massive uninterruptable power supplies, glycol-based water cooling pipes, and tons of galvanized steel green field conduits for power lines. This was also the first place where I saw companies replacing the problematic fingerprint based scanners for vain-pattern hand scanners to beef up security. I wish I had more time to check out this amazing building but I was so busy rebuilding our company's servers after WTC that I lived within 4-rows of racks for a few months.
I spent my Christmas and New Years that year rebuilding 250 Compaq ProLiant and ~100 IBM xSeries for my old company to get their infrastructure and application servers back up. I pretty much lived in that building for 3-months and I was lucky to be able to easily walk over to the 14th St & 8th Ave L-train stop to go home late at night or in the morning. It was an interesting experience and I wished that I spent more time there to learn about that goes on in this building.
If there was one place that I know of that is the hidden center of the Internet and Information in New York City I would think that this would be the building. Luckily it was build very solid and it is very nondescript so I think that it is pretty safe. There was a rumor that the FBI had their surveillance office across the street and they had floor space with network taps in that building to be connected to all the important information pathways in NYC.
Data Center Power Off Button Incident
This was also the place where the delivery guy who just finish dropping off more parts was walking out of the data center room and hit the red button on the wall, the door opened, and he walked out. Meanwhile all we heard was a very long and deep "ooooooooooooooooooooooommmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm" sound as every single piece of equipment turned off immedietelly after the Emergency Power Off button was pressed, including the magnetic locks on the door that the guy just walked out of. Surveilence tapes showed us what happened as we stood there in deafening silence and awe unable to comprehend what just happened. The next day there was a plastic box cover over that button.
Who ever though it was a good idea to put the silver door open button next to the red power off button should have been flogged on the spot.
One of the things I don't get about NY is the number of "former X" buildings/spaces. If the Port Authority needed a Bus Terminal (and a huge one at that), doesn't it need one now?
The "former meat-packing district": doesn't meat need to be packed anymore in New York City? Or do people just buy their meat unpacked?
And is everyone in NY just selling ads, suing people, or serving coffee anymore?
Same for all the other "formers".
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
Hyperfine structure of hydrogen?