In the Plex

In the Plex PDF Author: Steven Levy
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
ISBN: 1416596593
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 464

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Book Description
“The most interesting book ever written about Google” (The Washington Post) delivers the inside story behind the most successful and admired technology company of our time, now updated with a new Afterword. Google is arguably the most important company in the world today, with such pervasive influence that its name is a verb. The company founded by two Stanford graduate students—Larry Page and Sergey Brin—has become a tech giant known the world over. Since starting with its search engine, Google has moved into mobile phones, computer operating systems, power utilities, self-driving cars, all while remaining the most powerful company in the advertising business. Granted unprecedented access to the company, Levy disclosed that the key to Google’s success in all these businesses lay in its engineering mindset and adoption of certain internet values such as speed, openness, experimentation, and risk-taking. Levy discloses details behind Google’s relationship with China, including how Brin disagreed with his colleagues on the China strategy—and why its social networking initiative failed; the first time Google tried chasing a successful competitor. He examines Google’s rocky relationship with government regulators, particularly in the EU, and how it has responded when employees left the company for smaller, nimbler start-ups. In the Plex is the “most authoritative…and in many ways the most entertaining” (James Gleick, The New York Book Review) account of Google to date and offers “an instructive primer on how the minds behind the world’s most influential internet company function” (Richard Waters, The Wall Street Journal).

In the Plex

In the Plex PDF Author: Steven Levy
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
ISBN: 1416596593
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 464

Get Book

Book Description
“The most interesting book ever written about Google” (The Washington Post) delivers the inside story behind the most successful and admired technology company of our time, now updated with a new Afterword. Google is arguably the most important company in the world today, with such pervasive influence that its name is a verb. The company founded by two Stanford graduate students—Larry Page and Sergey Brin—has become a tech giant known the world over. Since starting with its search engine, Google has moved into mobile phones, computer operating systems, power utilities, self-driving cars, all while remaining the most powerful company in the advertising business. Granted unprecedented access to the company, Levy disclosed that the key to Google’s success in all these businesses lay in its engineering mindset and adoption of certain internet values such as speed, openness, experimentation, and risk-taking. Levy discloses details behind Google’s relationship with China, including how Brin disagreed with his colleagues on the China strategy—and why its social networking initiative failed; the first time Google tried chasing a successful competitor. He examines Google’s rocky relationship with government regulators, particularly in the EU, and how it has responded when employees left the company for smaller, nimbler start-ups. In the Plex is the “most authoritative…and in many ways the most entertaining” (James Gleick, The New York Book Review) account of Google to date and offers “an instructive primer on how the minds behind the world’s most influential internet company function” (Richard Waters, The Wall Street Journal).

Facebook

Facebook PDF Author: Steven Levy
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 073521316X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 592

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Book Description
One of the Best Technology Books of 2020—Financial Times “Levy’s all-access Facebook reflects the reputational swan dive of its subject. . . . The result is evenhanded and devastating.”—San Francisco Chronicle “[Levy’s] evenhanded conclusions are still damning.”—Reason “[He] doesn’t shy from asking the tough questions.”—The Washington Post “Reminds you the HBO show Silicon Valley did not have to reach far for its satire.”—NPR.org The definitive history, packed with untold stories, of one of America’s most controversial and powerful companies: Facebook As a college sophomore, Mark Zuckerberg created a simple website to serve as a campus social network. Today, Facebook is nearly unrecognizable from its first, modest iteration. In light of recent controversies surrounding election-influencing “fake news” accounts, the handling of its users’ personal data, and growing discontent with the actions of its founder and CEO—who has enormous power over what the world sees and says—never has a company been more central to the national conversation. Millions of words have been written about Facebook, but no one has told the complete story, documenting its ascendancy and missteps. There is no denying the power and omnipresence of Facebook in American daily life, or the imperative of this book to document the unchecked power and shocking techniques of the company, from growing at all costs to outmaneuvering its biggest rivals to acquire WhatsApp and Instagram, to developing a platform so addictive even some of its own are now beginning to realize its dangers. Based on hundreds of interviews from inside and outside Facebook, Levy’s sweeping narrative of incredible entrepreneurial success and failure digs deep into the whole story of the company that has changed the world and reaped the consequences.

Crypto

Crypto PDF Author: Steven Levy
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101199466
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 571

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Book Description
If you've ever made a secure purchase with your credit card over the Internet, then you have seen cryptography, or "crypto", in action. From Stephen Levy—the author who made "hackers" a household word—comes this account of a revolution that is already affecting every citizen in the twenty-first century. Crypto tells the inside story of how a group of "crypto rebels"—nerds and visionaries turned freedom fighters—teamed up with corporate interests to beat Big Brother and ensure our privacy on the Internet. Levy's history of one of the most controversial and important topics of the digital age reads like the best futuristic fiction.

Insanely Great

Insanely Great PDF Author: Steven Levy
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0140291776
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
The creation of the Mac in 1984 catapulted America into the digital millennium, captured a fanatic cult audience, and transformed the computer industry into an unprecedented mix of technology, economics, and show business. Now veteran technology writer and Newsweek senior editor Steven Levy zooms in on the great machine and the fortunes of the unique company responsible for its evolution. Loaded with anecdote and insight, and peppered with sharp commentary, Insanely Great is the definitive book on the most important computer ever made. It is a must-have for anyone curious about how we got to the interactive age.

The Perfect Thing

The Perfect Thing PDF Author: Steven Levy
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 0743293916
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 395

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Book Description
On October 23, 2001, Apple Computer, a company known for its chic, cutting-edge technology -- if not necessarily for its dominant market share -- launched a product with an enticing promise: You can carry an entire music collection in your pocket. It was called the iPod. What happened next exceeded the company's wildest dreams. Over 50 million people have inserted the device's distinctive white buds into their ears, and the iPod has become a global obsession. The Perfect Thing is the definitive account, from design and marketing to startling impact, of Apple's iPod, the signature device of our young century. Besides being one of the most successful consumer products in decades, the iPod has changed our behavior and even our society. It has transformed Apple from a computer company into a consumer electronics giant. It has remolded the music business, altering not only the means of distribution but even the ways in which people enjoy and think about music. Its ubiquity and its universally acknowledged coolness have made it a symbol for the digital age itself, with commentators remarking on "the iPod generation." Now the iPod is beginning to transform the broadcast industry, too, as podcasting becomes a way to access radio and television programming. Meanwhile millions of Podheads obsess about their gizmo, reveling in the personal soundtrack it offers them, basking in the social cachet it lends them, even wondering whether the device itself has its own musical preferences. Steven Levy, the chief technology correspondent for Newsweek magazine and a longtime Apple watcher, is the ideal writer to tell the iPod's tale. He has had access to all the key players in the iPod story, including Steve Jobs, Apple's charismatic cofounder and CEO, whom Levy has known for over twenty years. Detailing for the first time the complete story of the creation of the iPod, Levy explains why Apple succeeded brilliantly with its version of the MP3 player when other companies didn't get it right, and how Jobs was able to convince the bosses at the big record labels to license their music for Apple's groundbreaking iTunes Store. (We even learn why the iPod is white.) Besides his inside view of Apple, Levy draws on his experiences covering Napster and attending Supreme Court arguments on copyright (as well as his own travels on the iPod's click wheel) to address all of the fascinating issues -- technical, legal, social, and musical -- that the iPod raises. Borrowing one of the definitive qualities of the iPod itself, The Perfect Thing shuffles the book format. Each chapter of this book was written to stand on its own, a deeply researched, wittily observed take on a different aspect of the iPod. The sequence of the chapters in the book has been shuffled in different copies, with only the opening and concluding sections excepted. "Shuffle" is a hallmark of the digital age -- and The Perfect Thing, via sharp, insightful reporting, is the perfect guide to the deceptively diminutive gadget embodying our era.

Hackers

Hackers PDF Author: Steven Levy
Publisher: "O'Reilly Media, Inc."
ISBN: 1449393748
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 432

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Book Description
This 25th anniversary edition of Steven Levy's classic book traces the exploits of the computer revolution's original hackers -- those brilliant and eccentric nerds from the late 1950s through the early '80s who took risks, bent the rules, and pushed the world in a radical new direction. With updated material from noteworthy hackers such as Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Richard Stallman, and Steve Wozniak, Hackers is a fascinating story that begins in early computer research labs and leads to the first home computers. Levy profiles the imaginative brainiacs who found clever and unorthodox solutions to computer engineering problems. They had a shared sense of values, known as "the hacker ethic," that still thrives today. Hackers captures a seminal period in recent history when underground activities blazed a trail for today's digital world, from MIT students finagling access to clunky computer-card machines to the DIY culture that spawned the Altair and the Apple II.

The Unicorn's Secret

The Unicorn's Secret PDF Author: Steven Levy
Publisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 1504042131
Category : True Crime
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
The true story of Ira Einhorn, the Philadelphia antiwar crusader, environmental activist, and New Age guru with a murderous dark side. During the cultural shockwaves of the 1960s and ’70s, Ira Einhorn—nicknamed the “Unicorn”—was the leading radical voice for the antiwar movement at the University of Pennsylvania. At his side were such noted activists as Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin. A brilliantly articulate advocate for peace in a turbulent era, he rallied followers toward the growing antiestablishment causes of free love, drugs, and radical ecological reform. In 1979, when the mummified remains of his girlfriend, Holly Maddux, a Bryn Mawr flower child from Tyler, Texas, were found in a trunk in his apartment, Einhorn claimed a CIA frame-up. Incredibly, the network of influential friends, socialites, and powerful politicians he’d charmed and manipulated over the years supported him. Represented by renowned district attorney and future senator Arlen Specter, Einhorn was released on bail. But before trial, he fled the country to an idyllic town in the French wine region and disappeared. It would take more than twenty years—and two trials—to finally bring Einhorn to justice. Based on more than two years of research and 250 interviews, as well as the chilling private journals of Einhorn and Maddux, prize-winning journalist Steven Levy paints an astonishing and complicated portrait of a man motivated by both genius and rage. The basis for 1998 NBC television miniseries The Hunt for the Unicorn Killer, The Unicorn’s Secret is a “spellbinding sociological/true crime study,” revealing the dark and tragic dimensions of a man who defined an era, only to shatter its ideals (Publishers Weekly).

Artificial Life

Artificial Life PDF Author: Steven Levy
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780140231052
Category : Artificial intelligence
Languages : en
Pages : 390

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Book Description
This book looks at artificial life science - A-Life, an important new area of scientific research involving the disciplines of microbiology, evolutionary theory, physics, chemistry and computer science. In the 1940s a mathematician named John von Neumann, a man with a claim to being the father of the modern computer, invented a hypothetical mathematical entity called a cellular automaton. His aim was to construct a machine that could reproduce itself. In the years since, with the development of hugely more sophisticated and complex computers, von Neumann's insights have gradually led to a point where scientists have created, within the wiring of these machines, something that so closely simulates life that it may, arguably, be called life. This machine reproduces itself, mutates, evolves through generations and dies.

Google It

Google It PDF Author: Anna Crowley Redding
Publisher: Feiwel & Friends
ISBN: 1250148219
Category : Young Adult Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 195

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Book Description
Think. Invent. Organize. Share. Don't be evil. And change the world. Larry Page and Sergey Brin started out as two Stanford college students with a wild idea: They were going to organize the world's information. From that one deceptively simple goal, they created one of the most influential and innovative companies in the world. The word “google” has even entered our vocabulary as a verb. Now, find out the true history of Google—from its humble beginnings as a thesis project made out of “borrowed” hardware and discount toys through its revolution of the world's relationship with technology to a brief glimpse of where they might take us next. In Google It, award-winning investigative reporter Anna Crowley Redding shares an inspiring story of innovation, personal and intellectual bravery, and most importantly, of shooting for the moon in order to change the world.

I'm Feeling Lucky

I'm Feeling Lucky PDF Author: Douglas Edwards
Publisher: HMH
ISBN: 0547549032
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 437

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Book Description
A marketing director’s story of working at a startup called Google in the early days of the tech boom: “Vivid inside stories . . . Engrossing” (Ken Auletta). Douglas Edwards wasn’t an engineer or a twentysomething fresh out of school when he received a job offer from a small but growing search engine company at the tail end of the 1990s. But founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin needed staff to develop the brand identity of their brainchild, and Edwards fit the bill with his journalistic background at the San Jose Mercury News, the newspaper of Silicon Valley. It was a change of pace for Edwards, to say the least, and put him in a unique position to interact with and observe the staff as Google began its rocket ride to the top. In entertaining, self-deprecating style, he tells his story of participating in this moment of business and technology history, giving readers a chance to fully experience the bizarre mix of camaraderie and competition at this phenomenal company. Edwards, Google’s first director of marketing and brand management, describes the idiosyncratic Page and Brin, the evolution of the famously nonhierarchical structure in which every employee finds a problem to tackle and works independently, the races to develop and implement each new feature, and the many ideas that never came to pass. I’m Feeling Lucky reveals what it’s like to be “indeed lucky, sort of an accidental millionaire, a reluctant bystander in a sea of computer geniuses who changed the world. This is a rare look at what happened inside the building of the most important company of our time” (Seth Godin, author of Linchpin). “An affectionate, compulsively readable recounting of the early years (1999–2005) of Google . . . This lively, thoughtful business memoir is more entertaining than it really has any right to be, and should be required reading for startup aficionados.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review “Edwards recounts Google’s stumbles and rise with verve and humor and a generosity of spirit. He kept me turning the pages of this engrossing tale.” —Ken Auletta, author of Greed and Glory on Wall Street “Funny, revealing, and instructive, with an insider’s perspective I hadn’t seen anywhere before. I thought I had followed the Google story closely, but I realized how much I’d missed after reading—and enjoying—this book.” —James Fallows, author of China Airborne