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Larry Page on Regulation, Maps and Google\'s Social Mission

Google welcomes regulatory scrutiny but is worried that too much regulation could hurt its business and the prospects for Internet innovation, Larry Page, Google's chief executive, said Tuesday.

Mr. Page, speaking publicly for the first time since Google said in June that he had lost his voice and would avoid public appearances, was at Google's annual Zeitgeist conference for advertisers and partners in Paradise Valley, Ariz. His voice sounded weak. “I'm still a little hoarse, but I'm here and I'm happy about that,” he said.

Mr. Page responded to questions about investigations by regulators, including the Federal Trade Commission, into both privacy violations and whether Google violates antitrust rules by favoring its own services over others.

“We've had a pretty good debate with the regulators, we've taken an approach to work with them,” Mr. Page said. “I think that's been working, and you know, I'm hopeful that will continue to work well.”< /p>

“I do think overregulation of the Internet and restriction of what people can do is a big risk for us,” he said.

“We don't actually know how the Internet's going to work 10 years from now, so it's kind of, I think, a mistake to start carving out large classes of things that you don't really understand yet,” Mr. Page said. “That's kind of the approach a lot of regulators are taking, which I think is sad.”

It is essential for Google's core business, search, for it to enter some of its customers' businesses, he said, including maps, local search and comparison shopping.

“If you type ‘Sony digital camera,' do you want a list of links to other search engines?” Mr. Page said. “I don't think that's really right. You probably want product information, you want to buy something. So our job is to serve users, to serve all of you, and to do a really good job doing that, and a lot of times that requires us really answering the question and und erstanding deeply the underlying information.”

Mr. Page spoke at a resort in the shadow of Camelback Mountain, along with speakers like Sean Penn, the celebrity economist Austan Goolsbee, the presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin and Bill Clinton, who joined virtually via Google Plus Hangout.

Mr. Page addressed other controversial issues for Google, including the recent uproar over maps after Apple removed Google's maps from the iPhone and replaced them with its own version, which many people said was inferior.

He did not say when Google would release a maps app for the iPhone, but subtly goaded Apple when he said, “We're excited that other people have started to notice that we've worked hard on that for seven years.”

Mr. Page also spent a lot of time talking about Google's social mission, beyond making money, a new theme for him to discuss publicly as chief executive. He said it affects everything from YouTube's controversial decision to selectively block the anti-Islam video that provoked riots to Google's generous employee benefits.

“We have somewhat of a social mission, and most other companies do not,” Mr. Page said. “I think that's why people like working for us, and using our services.”

Companies' goals, he said, should be to make their employees so wealthy that they do not need to work, but choose to because they believe in the company.

“My grandfather was an auto worker, and I still have a lead hammer that he would carry to work everyday to protect himself from the company that he worked for,” Mr. Page said.

“Hopefully, I believe in a world of abundance, and in that world, many of our employees don't have to work, they're pretty wealthy, they could probably go years without working,” he said. “Why are they working? They're working because they like doing something, they believe in what they're doing.”



On Twitter, Videos and Photos of the Aftermath of the Beirut Bombing

A video by Hasan Shabaan from the scene of the bombing in central Beirut published by The Daily Star in Lebanon.

As our correspondent Anne Barnard reports from Beirut, a large bomb exploded in a mostly Christian area in the central part of the city, killing at least eight people and wounding many others, according to witnesses and civil defense officials in Lebanon.

Panic spread across the city as the bombing and neighboring conflict in Syria reminded people of sectarian violence from Lebanon's civil war. It is not yet confirmed if a political figure or a group was the target of the blast or connected to the growing violence in Syria.

Yorgo El-Bittar, a Lebanese journalist, was one of the first people at the scene and shared updates and photos on Twitter.

A reporter on the scene for Al Jazeera said in this video that the blast was so large that it might not have been a car bomb.

< div class="w480">A news report from Al Jazeera on the Friday bombing in Beirut.


Zappos Remakes the Seedy Parts of Las Vegas

What Happens in Brooklyn Moves to Vegas

Brian Finke for The New York Times

Tony Hsieh, the chief executive of Zappos, on Fremont Street in downtown Las Vegas.

The mountain-lodge gathering felt like an annual shareholders' meeting, with department heads offering optimistic forecasts backed by charts, graphs and photos. Except that the 50 or so attendees wore jeans and sneakers and sat at round tables in a faux log cabin 7,700 feet above sea level and at least 20 degrees cooler than the Nevada desert below. And what they were discussing was not a corporation but a very unusual project.

Fremont Street in downtown Las Vegas.

Tony Hsieh, the 38-year-old chief executive of Zappos, had called the 24-hour retreat as a debriefing of sorts. It was almost a year into the Downtown Project, his $350 million urban experiment to build “the most community-focused large city in the world” in downtown Las Vegas - an area dominated by bare lots and check-cashing stores about an hour's drive away. An icebreaker kicked off the event with whoops and hollers as each attendee stood up to share personal anecdotes or facts, like “I've tried chicken-fried steak in more than 30 states.” One woman announced that she had been a salsa dancing champion. Hsieh (pronounced shay) shared how to write his last name in Morse code.

A jammed schedule was handed out, with most of the dozen or so presentations lasting less than 10 minutes. The schedule featured updates from a number of Hsieh's deputies on how they were spending the project's money, including: Andrew Donner, a veteran of the 1990s Vegas real estate boom, on the $200 million that the project is investing in land and buildings; Don Welch, a former Citigroup banker, on the $50 million the project is spending on small businesses; and Andy White, a former start-up founder, on the $50 million going to tech companies. Hsieh's cousin Connie was scheduled to discuss the remaining $50 million, which is to be used for education. A woman sat off to the side with a digital timer, ready to yank anyone offstage who went over his or her allotted time.

The Downtown Project got its unofficial start several years ago when Hsieh realized that Zappos, the online shoe-and-apparel company that he built to $1 billion in annual sales in less than a decade, would soon outgrow its offices in nearby Henderson, Nev. Though Amazon bought Zappos in 2009 for $1.2 billion, Hsieh still runs the company, and he has endeavored to keep alive its zany corporate culture. This includes a workplace where everyone sits in the same open space and employees switch desks every few months in order to get to know one another better. “I first thought I would buy a piece of land and build our own Disneyland,” he told the group. But he worried that the company would be too cut off from the outside world and ultimately decided “it was better to interact with the community.”

Around the same time, the Las Vegas city government was also about to move, and Hsieh saw his opportunity. He leased the former City Hall - smack in the middle of downtown Vegas - for 15 years. Then he got to thinking: If he was going to move at least 1,200 employees, why not make it possible for them to live nearby? And if they could live nearby, why not create an urban community aligned with the culture of Zappos, which encourages the kind of “serendipitous interactions” that happen in offices without walls? As Zach Ware, Hsieh's right-hand man in the move, put it, “We wanted the new campus to benefit from interaction with downtown, and downtown to benefit from interaction with Zappos.” The only hitch was that it would require transforming the derelict core of a major city.

For Hsieh, though, this was part of the appeal. Transforming downtown Vegas would “ultimately help us attract and retain more employees for Zappos.” For the city itself, it would “help revitalize the economy.” More important, it would “inspire,” a word Hsieh uses often. Hsieh closed his presentation at the faux log cabin high above the desert with the sort of fact he seems to always have on hand: up to 75 percent of the world's population will call cities home in our lifetime. “So,” he concluded, “if you fix cities, you kind of fix the world.”

Timothy Pratt is a reporter and writer who lives in Henderson, Nev.

Editor: Jon Kelly

A version of this article appeared in print on October 21, 2012, on page MM22 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: ‘If You Fix Cities, You Kind of Fix the World'.

A $40 Tablet Tries to Compete

A $40 tablet, by selling in places Silicon Valley barely notices, may change the competitive landscape.

The inexpensive device is called a Ubislate 7Ci, made by a London company called Datawind. Its initial market is schools in India. After a rocky start, Datawind's newest device is a fully functioning 7-inch tablet, with a touch screen, Wi-Fi capability, a microphone and camera, a headphone jack and a USB port. In other words, pretty much everything you need to be fully functional on the Internet.

In a test, it sent e-mails, downloaded two books and a first-aid guide, took and sent pictures, and offered several games without difficulty. There is a video that shows it in action, and another that lists its internal specifications.

Every criticism a Western reviewer might have with this tablet (the keyboard is small for big American fingers, the camera resolution is low, the software has lots of ads) must also meet with the riposte, “Yeah, but…it's only $40.” For people who can't dream of owning even a first-generation iPad, it's more than enough.

“The biggest problem we have with this device is that none of the decision makers, the reviewers, or the trend setters are our customer,” said Suneet Singh Tuli, the Canadian-born chief executive of Datawind. “Personal computers caught on in the U.S. when the price got to about 25 percent of the average person's monthly income. In India, where people make $200 a month, that is about $50.”

In truth, that may not be the biggest problem Datawind faces. An early version of the product was of lesser quality. Datawind accepted more than 2.5 million orders to buy the device when it was announced, and had no capacity to manufacture at that scale. It even took money from some customers and then delayed shipment to them by up to 12 weeks, owing to manufacturing problems. The company was criticized by the media in India.

Mr. Singh says that 80 percent of the prep aid orders have now been delivered, and those customers were given a higher-end unit at no charge. If so, Datawind could regain its credibility. Its next challenge is to meet a government order for 100,000 units, destined for India's schools, by the end of the year. After that, he expects to compete in an order for five million units for schools.

Inexpensive devices are likely to come to the United States and European markets with some of the hardware costs offset by advertising or by content sales through the device. “Google's Nexus 7 tablet is $199 now, but people are saying it will be a $49 device in a year or two,” says Ken Dulaney, an analyst with Gartner. “Content sellers will underwrite hardware costs, so that devices eventually end up being free to consumers.” Stacy Smith, Intel‘s chief financial officer, said his company expected to see such tablets, and will compete for the business.

Mr. Singh says his cost of assembly for a Ubislate is about $37, and he sells it to the Indian government for $40. He keeps the price low by using Google's free Android operating system and cheap semiconductors found in low-end cellphones. In addition, he says, his company figured out how to make its own touch panel to fit behind the liquid crystal display screen. The LCD is still manufactured by an outside company.

Eventually, he says, the government will equip nearly all of India's 220 million students with a tablet, along with low-cost Internet connections, and that other countries will follow. Printing and distributing books costs about $15 a year even in a poor country, so a device like the Ubislate that lasts just three years and offers a bigger range of possibilities can be competitive.

Those prices are significantly less than the One Laptop per Child computer, which as of 2011 had issued more than two million machines, costing about $200 each, mostly to the developing world. Those laptops, called XO, are manufactu red by Quanta Computer of Taiwan.

Big sales to schools can help underwrite the cost of a mass-market product for adults in India and elsewhere, at a slightly higher cost that is offset by ads or possibly things like phone companies offering devices to get people on calling plans.

Mr. Singh is a long way from that level of mass production, but another competitor is likely to flood the rest of the world with cheap tablets soon. That could lead to an explosion of novel applications, similar to the online car sales and recruitment business that are moving into Africa thanks to cloud computing. Datawind has sponsored an applications contest for students, which generated a point-of-sale system for street vendors, who make $100 a month or less.

Any rival would need a cheaper tablet to compete with Mr. Singh, or it could just get used to a lot of ads.



Daily Report: Sean Parker\'s Start-up Struggles

It takes more than two famed entrepreneurs, tens of millions of dollars in the bank, enormous publicity and endorsements from celebrities like Alicia Keys and Jim Carrey to get a start-up going, reports Jenna Wortham of The New York Times.

Airtime, the much-hyped video chat site created by Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning, the two behind the music sharing service Napster, has turned out to be far from a sure thing.(Mr. Parker also helped Facebook in its early days.)

The site is just four months old, and the staff is tweaking its features to make it more appealing. So far, though, Airtime's traffic appears to be little more than a trickle.

And the latest bits of news about the company - it has lost some important employees and laid off others - do not bode well for its future.

Airtime's still-unfolding story reflects the challenges for any start-up, regardless of pedigree, in winning over users when so many other sites, apps and services are vying for t heir attention. And it shows how hard it can be to spin viral magic out of thin air.

Mr. Parker rejected the idea that Airtime was struggling. He said there was a dedicated core of people who used it regularly, and he pointed out that the company was still getting its bearings.

“This is a ridiculously early stage for a company,” Mr. Parker said in an interview on Monday at his town house in New York. “It takes six to 12 months to get things up and running.”

Some of the criticism lobbed at the company came in response to its over-the-top introduction - a star-studded event at a studio in Manhattan. Mr. Parker said he wanted to grab the attention of those who were not avid technology users and reel in a big group of the curious on the first day. The lingering scrutiny of the company was an “unintended consequence,” he said.

Airtime declined to give specifics about its user numbers other than to say that early traffic was “very compelling. ” AppData, a service that collects data about sites and services that connect with Facebook, indicated that Airtime had just 400 users a day and 10,000 over the course of a month, but Mr. Parker and other executives at the company suggested those figures were off. Nielsen and comScore, two independent analytics firms, both said that traffic to Airtime was so small that it did not yet register on their charts.



Rare Video of Pakistani Taliban\'s \'Radio Mullah,\' Blamed for Attack on Schoolgirl

A 2008 PBS “Frontline” video report on militants in Pakistan's Swat Valley included rare footage of Maulana Fazlullah, a leader of the Pakistani Taliban. (Warning: contains graphic images.)

As my colleague Declan Walsh reports, Pakistani security forces have detained relatives of a Taliban militant accused of shooting Malala Yousafzai, the 15-year-old schoolgirl who became an icon of resistance against Islamist fundamentalism in her native Swat Valley region.

The suspect, identified as a militant named Attaullah, is believed to have fled to eastern Afghanistan, where the leader of the Swat Taliban, Maulana Fazlullah, has be en based since his forces were routed in a Pakistan Army offensive to regain control of the valley. A spokesman for the Swat Taliban in Afghanistan, Sirajuddin Ahmed, told Reuters last week that Mr. Fazlullah had dispatched the two men who stopped Malala's school bus and shot her through the head, to silence her calls for the education of girls.

Although images of Mr. Fazlullah are rare, a few seconds of surreptitiously recorded video showing his face was included in a 2008 PBS report on the Swat Taliban, recorded before the Pakistani military drove the militants out of the valley. Azmat Khan, a Web producer for PBS's “Frontline,” pointed to the archival video in a blog post on Mr. Fazlullah this week.

The video of Mr. Fazlullah, and an example of one of his radio broadcasts, comes near the start of the report by David Montero, who met the militant leader in 2007, when he was reporting on the militants for The Christian Science Monitor.

More video of Mr. Fazlullah appeared in 2010 when a clip of him preaching to a group of men identified as suicide bombers was released to dispel rumors that he had been killed by in the Pakistani military offensive the previous year. That video was included in an Al Jazeera English report from Swat in July 2010.

Video said to show Maulana Fazlullah preaching to his followers was broacast by Al Jazeera English video in July 2010.

As Dana Priest reports in The Washington Post, Mr. Fazlullah “is also known as ‘Mullah Radio' for his use of a roving transmitter to broadcast lyrical rants against the central government in Pakistan, music, education and the polio vaccine.” In 2007, BBC News reported that Mr. Fazlullah helped to spread conspiracy theories about po lio vaccine in his broadcasts, telling listeners that the shot could cause impotency and was part of “a conspiracy of the Jews and Christians to stunt the population growth of Muslims.”

In late 2008, just before the military attack that drove the Taliban out of Swat began, another reporter, Nicholas Schmidle, visited Mr. Fazlullah's compound to “get a sense of what a Taliban-controlled area in Pakistan would be like.” Recounting the trip in an article for The New York Times Magazine, he wrote:

Fazlullah's base was a sprawling mosque and madrassa compound in the village of Imam Dehri, located across the Swat River from the city of Mingora. The entire Swat Valley is surrounded by mountains blanketed with pine forests. The river pours from the Hindu Kush Mountains and meanders through the valley, nourishing apple and persimmon orchards. During the summer, thousands of Pakistanis flock here for a break from the heat and humidity choking the lowlan ds. When I visited Swat in June, for example, still weeks before the Red Mosque assault began in Islamabad, I had trouble getting a room at the exclusive Serena Hotel. By the time I returned in October, I was the only guest. Almost immediately after arriving the second time around, I saw why: at the edge of town, Taliban rode around in flatbed trucks, pointing weapons in the air and ordering motorists to remove the tape decks from their cars. Fazlullah, like his Taliban predecessors in Afghanistan, deemed music - and anything that plays music - un-Islamic.

The following Friday, I went to Imam Dehri, where I met the commander of Fazlullah's militia, a man with glacier-blue eyes named Sirajuddin. (Fazlullah appeared briefly, but didn't stay long; he was observing aitekaaf, a meditation period that lasts 10 days at the end of Ramadan.) To get from Mingora to Imam Dehri, my Pashto interpreter and I boarded a small metal tram attached to a zip-line. Six other people piled i n. We got a light push to get moving, and then soared over the river. Sirajuddin waited on the other side, and he led us through a crowd of Fazlullah's supporters. The P.A. system blasted prerecorded jihadi poems while Taliban walked about with assault rifles slung over their shoulders.

“We are struggling for the enforcement of Shariah,” Sirajuddin told me inside a brick shed that was his office. “Twice, in 1994 and 1999, the government said it was committed to enforcing Shariah in this area, but it never did. The people here want Islam to be a way of life.” He added: “We are Muslims, but our legal system is based on English laws. Our movement wants to replace the English system with an Islamic one.”

Four Taliban sat in the room with us, watching me with dark, intent eyes. I asked one of them, a 32-year-old named Abdul Ghafoor, what he was fighting for. Islam? Revenge? “This is not personal revenge; this is our religious obligation,” he told me, s peaking Pashto through an interpreter. Ghafoor crouched on a low stool, a Kalashnikov resting on his lap. He said he was a recent graduate from the University of Peshawar with a master's degree in Islamic theology, and that he earned his living as a schoolteacher. Every day after school, and on holidays, he grabbed his gun and joined Fazlullah. He wore a long beard, a black turban, an ammunition vest stuffed with extra banana clips and pistols and Reebok high-tops with a Velcro strap. Messages crackled over the walkie-talkie attached to the collar of his vest. The Taliban were coordinating their movements.

Later, Ghafoor took me from Sirajuddin's office to a platform where some supposed criminals were scheduled to be lashed. About 15,000 men and boys, some sitting on picnic blankets, encircled the wooden platform, which was supported on drum barrels and had been erected by Fazlullah's group as a place for public punishments. The Taliban paraded three men, accused of ai ding kidnappers, before the crowd. Fazlullah's mujahedeen had caught the kidnappers as they were shuttling two women out of Swat. The Taliban sent the women back home and arrested everyone involved with the crime. Now the youngest of the criminals, who appeared to be still in his teens, scaled the steps to the platform. He looked as if he might collapse, legs wobbling with fear, as hundreds of heavily armed Taliban spread out around him. I stood among them, waiting to see the boy receive 15 lashings - the appropriate Islamic punishment, according to Fazlullah.

The boy lay face-down on the platform. Taliban held his arms and legs so he wouldn't flop around. Another jihadi, clutching a thick, leather whip, roughly two feet long, wore a camouflage shalwar kameez and a ski mask over his face. Every time the whip crashed on the boy's back, the crowd called out the corresponding number of lashes, as if counting the final seconds of a basketball game. The teenager's body conv ulsed under the crack and thud of each lash; when he finally stood up, he was shaking and drenched in tears.

“This punishment is permitted in Islam,” announced one of Fazlullah's deputies over a P.A. system fixed to a flatbed truck parked beside the platform. Along with the three accused men, who were lashed in turn, a dozen militants also stood on the platform, holding Kalashnikovs and rocket launchers. Another lay on his stomach on the roof of a nearby shed, his eyes lined up behind the sights of an automatic machine gun. Everyone knew that Fazlullah's decision to take the law into his own hands was in blatant defiance of the government's writ: the militants' job was to repel any sudden ambush by the Pakistani Army or paramilitary forces; the deputy on the P.A. system, meanwhile, had to persuade the people that the lashings accorded with Islamic law. “Even if there is no central Islamic government, these punishments are permitted in parts of the country if it c ontributes to maintaining peace,” the deputy explained, speaking in Pashto. “We have no intention to occupy the government or for any political authority. This is only for peace and security.”

Although Mr. Fazlullah is reportedly now a target for American and NATO troops in Afghanistan, Pakistani officials have accused the Afghan intelligence services of quietly supporting him, to retaliate for Pakistan's refusal to crack down on members of the Afghan Taliban who take refuge on its side of the porous border between the two countries.



For Dell, Consolidation Is Innovation

Dell announced Thursday a combination server, data storage and networking device, Active System 800. Dell hopes the glossy black rack, fast and flashy, will fare well against similar products from Cisco, Hewlett-Packard, Oracle and I.B.M. While the market sorts out which company wins, take a minute to admire what this trend says about tech.

For one thing, as cloud computing really starts to catch on, it is getting hard to tell the difference between innovation and consolidation. Dell's “Active Infrastructure Family” of computers is a result of acquisitions the company has made in the past few years in storage, networking and software. Many of those companies would have been purchased by Dell's competitors if Dell hadn't got there first. Moving into the new era of cloud computing also involves rolling up the old era of separate computer businesses.

That is not necessarily a bad thing. Speaking at an event in San Francisco, Dell executives noted that coming into the business with newly acquired companies means it doesn't have legacy businesses to sustain, which means it can focus research and development dollars on new products and services.

For another, everybody is headed for the cloud, and pronto. Dell aims this product mostly at small and medium-size businesses, or what the tech industry calls S.M.B.'s. What they get in this consolidated system acts in many ways like a larger cloud system, and offers access to cloud computing as needed. Longer term, Dell expects to move more S.M.B. computing to its own big cloud and sell computing as a service.

Which raises another issue: How quickly companies like Dell have to move now. Servers, networking and storage brought in just $2 billion of Dell's $15.7 billion in revenue last quarter. Personal computers were over $8 billion, and that business is under extreme pressure, as people turn to smartphones and tablets.

Marius Haas, a well-regarded executive who came to D ell six weeks ago after stints at Hewlett-Packard and private equity firms, says Dell is moving fast to “a transformation to higher-margin products, and selling solutions rather than point products.” In other words, things that aren't like PCs. Where he talked about the PC of the future, it was in the context of a cheap “thin client” device that is connected to the cloud.

Mr. Haas said that Dell would continue to focus on S.M.B.'s, which generally produce higher profit margins for Dell than the consumer or giant corporation sectors. But the things Dell is putting together and learning in those businesses, he said, would also go into proving itself in the largest and most demanding commercial computing environments, for example, on Wall Street.

While Dell seems to know what time it is, part of its challenge may involve educating its S.M.B. customers. “A significant part of the market doesn't understand why this matters yet,” said Matt Eastwood, an anal yst with IDC. “Dell is trying to show more hardware capability, and increase software and services,” he says, but at a scale that isn't yet facing most of its customers.

The bet seems to be that the flood of computing everywhere, thanks to cloud computing and cloud-connected devices, will soon force those customers to buy more computers to keep up with the world. It seems like a smart bet.



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