A total of 37 companies converged at Suntec Convention Centre for a 2-day conference, with key exhibitors that included namesake powerhouses like Friendster, Google, Yahoo! SEA. In addition to that, there were SMEs that were making their presence felt - Comwerks Interactive, i-POP, and Acronym Media. However, the real deal was in the keynotes as well as the various SIG speeches that were held during the event.

There were a couple of interesting sessions that were by-invitation only - of which one of them featured Wendy Cheng and Jeff Ooi in a session titled “Blogging Universe - Building Brand Awareness or Losing Control”. There were other head honchos and key decision makers from various conglomerates that were present at the convention to present their nuggets of valuable insight into a market that has gotten people spending US$25-billion dollars worldwide just on online advertising alone in 2007 (according to statistics revealed by PricewaterhouseCooper’s 7th annual Global Etertainment and Media Outlook report).
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From CNET,

Stephen Shankland writes about Google’s Datacenter Infrastructure and what runs the search/advertisement giant. You have to read it for yourself! Its pretty amazing to finally read about Google and how they operate on the backend.

Here are some quotes,

Google doesn’t reveal exactly how many servers it has, but I’d estimate it’s easily in the hundreds of thousands. It puts 40 servers in each rack, Dean said, and by one reckoning, Google has 36 data centers across the globe. With 150 racks per data center, that would mean Google has more than 200,000 servers, and I’d guess it’s far beyond that and growing every day.

In each cluster’s first year, it’s typical that 1,000 individual machine failures will occur; thousands of hard drive failures will occur; one power distribution unit will fail, bringing down 500 to 1,000 machines for about 6 hours; 20 racks will fail, each time causing 40 to 80 machines to vanish from the network; 5 racks will “go wonky,” with half their network packets missing in action; and the cluster will have to be rewired once, affecting 5 percent of the machines at any given moment over a 2-day span, Dean said. And there’s about a 50 percent chance that the cluster will overheat, taking down most of the servers in less than 5 minutes and taking 1 to 2 days to recover.

The MapReduce reliability was severely tested once during a maintenance operation on one cluster with 1,800 servers. Workers unplugged groups of 80 machines at a time, during which the other 1,720 machines would pick up the slack. “It ran a little slowly, but it all completed,” Dean said.

And in a 2004 presentation, Dean said, one system withstood a failure of 1,600 servers in a 1,800-unit cluster.

Well, if that isn’t amazing, I don’t know what is.

Tim Johnson, a Product Marketing Manager at Google, had recently introduced a new application called the Google Web Security for Enterprise. Powered by Postini and featuring a jem or two from Scansafe, this software is supposedly able to cater to businesses of all sizes, irregardless of their needs.

Google Web Security for Enterprise protects organizations of all sizes against web malware attacks in real time and enables the safe, productive use of the web, without incurring hardware, upfront capital, or IT management costs. The product enables organizations to control how employees use the Internet, and provides easy-to-use tools to create, enforce, and monitor the right web policy for your organization. Now, through a new add-on feature, we’re extending that security to users wherever they may be working.

Protecting off-network users used to require them to connect via a VPN when they were out of the office — often with mixed results. With this new feature, all off-network users’ web traffic is automatically directed to scanning infrastructure to enforce your policies and protect their computers, requiring no action on the part of individuals. It’s easy to deploy and users can’t tamper with it, ensuring your security and appropriate use policies are always in place.

Here are a few screenshots to pique your curisiousity:

On a hindsight, it will be worthy to note that Postini was snapped up by Google back in Q3 2007 for US$625-million. Here’s the welcome note written by David Girouard on the arrival of Portini aboard the Google vessel.

In all, Elliot Schrage’s impeding departure as Google’s Vice President of Global Communications and Public Affairs has sent ripples throughout coffee tables at the Silicon Valley. After all, it isn’t the first time that Facebook has managed to coerce Google’s elite to hop over.

So far, the slew of prolific Google employees that moved over to Facebook works out in a list of top flyers that included the likes of:

• Sheryl Sandberg, Google’s ex-Vice President of Global Online Sales and Operations
• Gideon Yu, Youtube’s ex-CFO
• Benjamin Ling, Google’s ex-1337 Engineer
• Justin Rosenstein, Google’s ex-Product Manager of Google Pages and ex-GDrive 1337 Developer
• Ethan Beard, Google’s ex-Director of Social Media

Well, the idea of having someone like Elliot Schrage coming aboard with a team of ex-Google seems like a cause for a celebration. That would have been too much excitement to hold back. The following is a leaked memo that Mark Zuckerberg had sent out to the peons at Facebook:

Hey Everyone –

I’m writing from India to share with you the good news that Elliot Schrage will be joining our management team as VP Communications and Public Policy. In this role, he will be responsible for developing the key messages we want people to understand about our products, our business and the growing global importance of social networking and what we do. The goal here is to help people understand how the internet can strengthen people’s relationships. Elliot will direct our efforts to work with users, media, governments and other entities around the world to ensure that Facebook’s policies are transparent, responsive, effective and are recognized as being those things.

Elliot is joining us from Google where he has been their VP Global Communications and Public Affairs since 2005. At Google, he broadened the company’s messaging from a focus on only product PR to include all aspects of corporate, financial, policy, philanthropic and internal communications. Before that, he served as a Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, a public policy think tank, as a professor at Columbia Business School and as SVP at Gap. Early on, he began his career as a Harvard-trained lawyer.

This is a really important role for us and one that we’ve been trying to find the right person for a while. Elliot’s role will be critical to helping us scale based on our culture that values transparency, openness, and honest internal communications.

Elliot will be starting on May 14, although you may see him around the office before then.

Nick Gonzalez noted that this ongoing phenomenon have been dubbed as the “Facebook problem”, a term coined by Google’s management at the undeniable exodus of top-ranking executives and engineers leaving for Facebook. It is not surprising to note, however, that Microsoft had once faced a similar situation as Google now did, for which Google had once poached the cream of the crop from Microsoft with the lure of a promising and satisfactory pay job that Microsoft can’t beat.

Could it be the same that Facebook is offering something a million times better than what Google has to offer? Or could it be that the taste of pre-IPO explosion is too much for anybody to miss out on? We all know how awesome the working environment at Google can be but do Facebook have something else that is by far the best ever?

When Erick Schonfeld inquired Ethan Beard about his departure from Google for Facebook, this was the message that he had received (via Facebook):

Yes, I can confirm that I have resigned from Google and will be going to work for Facebook.

I think Facebook is great for a variety of reasons: the company has an innovative product with amazing growth, the team they have assembled is first rate, and the business is at a very exciting time in its development. I am excited to join Facebook at a time and in a role where I can have a significant impact on its core business and bottom line.

Maybe the work environment at Google isn’t “sociable” after all. And that could be the reason why they are moving over.

Or maybe it is the pre-IPO carrot-on-a-stick offer that is too tasty to miss out on.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7290322.stm

Google’s Zurich Office. Slidesssss. Yum.