Name	Google Inc.
Logo
Type	Public
Traded as	''NASDAQ-100 ComponentS&P; 500 Component''
Industry	Internet, Computer software
Foundation	Menlo Park, California, U.S.()
Founder	Sergey Brin, Larry Page
Location city	Mountain View, California
Location country	United States
Area served	Worldwide
Key people	Larry Page(Co-Founder & CEO)Eric Schmidt(Executive Chairman)Sergey Brin(Co-Founder)
Products	See list of Google products.
Revenue	US$ 37.905 billion (2011)
Operating income	US$ 11.632 billion (2011)
Net income	US$ 9.737 billion (2011)
Assets	US$ 72.574 billion (2011)
Equity	US$ 58.145 billion (2011)
Num employees	33,077 (2012)
Subsid	AdMob, DoubleClick, On2 Technologies, Picnik, Zagat, YouTube, Motorola Mobility
Homepage
Intl	yes
Footnotes	}}

Google Inc. () is an American multinational Internet and software corporation which hosts and develops Internet-based services and products including Internet search, cloud computing, and advertising technologies. Advertising revenues from AdWords generate almost all of the company's profits .

The company was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin whilst both attended Stanford University. Google was first incorporated as a privately held company on September 4, 1998, and its initial public offering followed on August 19, 2004. The company's mission statement from the outset was "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful", and the company's unofficial slogan is "Don't be evil". In 2006, the company moved to its current headquarters in Mountain View, California.

Rapid growth since incorporation has triggered a chain of products, acquisitions, and partnerships beyond the company's core web search engine. The company offers online productivity software including email, an office suite, and social networking. Google's products extend to the desktop as well, with applications for web browsing, organizing & editing photos, and instant messaging. Google leads the development of the Android mobile operating system, as well as the Google Chrome OS browser-only operating system, found on specialized netbooks called Chromebooks.

Google has been estimated to run over one million servers in data centers around the world, and process over one billion search requests and about twenty-four petabytes of user-generated data every day.

As of September 2009 Alexa listed the main U.S.-focused google.com site as the Internet's most visited website, and numerous international Google sites as being in the top hundred, as well as several other Google-owned sites such as YouTube, Blogger and Orkut. Google also ranks number two in the BrandZ brand equity database. The dominant market position of Google's services has led to criticism of the company over issues including privacy, copyright, and censorship.

History [link]

thumb|left|Google's original homepage had a simple design since its founders were not experienced in HTML, the language for designing web pages.|alt=Google's homepage in 1998 Google began in January 1996 as a research project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin when they were both PhD students at Stanford University in California.

While conventional search engines ranked results by counting how many times the search terms appeared on the page, the two theorized about a better system that analyzed the relationships between websites. They called this new technology PageRank, where a website's relevance was determined by the number of pages, and the importance of those pages, that linked back to the original site.

A small search engine called "RankDex" from IDD Information Services designed by Robin Li was, since 1996, already exploring a similar strategy for site-scoring and page ranking. The technology in RankDex would be patented and used later when Li founded Baidu in China.

Page and Brin originally nicknamed their new search engine "BackRub", because the system checked backlinks to estimate the importance of a site.

Eventually, they changed the name to Google, originating from a misspelling of the word "googol", the number one followed by one hundred zeros, which was picked to signify that the search engine wants to provide large quantities of information for people. Originally, Google ran under the Stanford University website, with the domain ''google.stanford.edu''.

The domain name for Google was registered on September 15, 1997, and the company was incorporated on September 4, 1998. It was based in a friend's (Susan Wojcicki) garage in Menlo Park, California. Craig Silverstein, a fellow PhD student at Stanford, was hired as the first employee.

In May 2011, the number of monthly unique visitors to Google surpassed 1 billion for the first time, an 8.4 percent increase from May 2010 (931 million).

Financing and initial public offering [link]

The first funding for Google was an August 1998 contribution of from Andy Bechtolsheim, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, given before Google was even incorporated. Early in 1999, while still graduate students, Brin and Page decided that the search engine they had developed was taking up too much of their time from academic pursuits. They went to Excite CEO George Bell and offered to sell it to him for $1 million. He rejected the offer, and later criticized Vinod Khosla, one of Excite's venture capitalists, after he had negotiated Brin and Page down to $750,000. On June 7, 1999, a $25 million round of funding was announced, with major investors including the venture capital firms Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Sequoia Capital.

Google's initial public offering (IPO) took place five years later on August 19, 2004. At that time Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Eric Schmidt agreed to work together at Google for 20 years, until the year 2024. The company offered 19,605,052 shares at a price of $85 per share. Shares were sold in a unique online auction format using a system built by Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse, underwriters for the deal. The sale of $1.67 billion gave Google a market capitalization of more than $23 billion. The vast majority of the 271 million shares remained under the control of Google, and many Google employees became instant paper millionaires. Yahoo!, a competitor of Google, also benefited because it owned 8.4 million shares of Google before the IPO took place.

Some people speculated that Google's IPO would inevitably lead to changes in company culture. Reasons ranged from shareholder pressure for employee benefit reductions to the fact that many company executives would become instant paper millionaires. As a reply to this concern, co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page promised in a report to potential investors that the IPO would not change the company's culture. In 2005, however, articles in ''The New York Times'' and other sources began suggesting that Google had lost its anti-corporate, no evil philosophy. In an effort to maintain the company's unique culture, Google designated a Chief Culture Officer, who also serves as the Director of Human Resources. The purpose of the Chief Culture Officer is to develop and maintain the culture and work on ways to keep true to the core values that the company was founded on: a flat organization with a collaborative environment. Google has also faced allegations of sexism and ageism from former employees.

The stock's performance after the IPO went well, with shares hitting $700 for the first time on October 31, 2007, primarily because of strong sales and earnings in the online advertising market. The surge in stock price was fueled mainly by individual investors, as opposed to large institutional investors and mutual funds. The company is now listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange under the ticker symbol GOOG and under the Frankfurt Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol GGQ1.

Growth [link]

In March 1999, the company moved its offices to Palo Alto, California, home to several other noted Silicon Valley technology startups. The next year, against Page and Brin's initial opposition toward an advertising-funded search engine, Google began selling advertisements associated with search keywords. In order to maintain an uncluttered page design and increase speed, advertisements were solely text-based. Keywords were sold based on a combination of price bids and click-throughs, with bidding starting at five cents per click. This model of selling keyword advertising was first pioneered by Goto.com, an Idealab spin-off created by Bill Gross. When the company changed names to Overture Services, it sued Google over alleged infringements of the company's pay-per-click and bidding patents. Overture Services would later be bought by Yahoo! and renamed Yahoo! Search Marketing. The case was then settled out of court, with Google agreeing to issue shares of common stock to Yahoo! in exchange for a perpetual license.

During this time, Google was granted a patent describing its PageRank mechanism. The patent was officially assigned to Stanford University and lists Lawrence Page as the inventor. In 2003, after outgrowing two other locations, the company leased its current office complex from Silicon Graphics at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway in Mountain View, California. The complex has since come to be known as the Googleplex, a play on the word googolplex, the number one followed by a googol zeroes. The Googleplex interiors were designed by Clive Wilkinson Architects. Three years later, Google would buy the property from SGI for $319 million. By that time, the name "Google" had found its way into everyday language, causing the verb "google" to be added to the Merriam Webster Collegiate Dictionary and the Oxford English Dictionary, denoted as "to use the Google search engine to obtain information on the Internet."

Acquisitions and partnerships [link]

Since 2001, Google has acquired many companies, mainly focusing on small venture capital companies. In 2004, Google acquired Keyhole, Inc. The start-up company developed a product called Earth Viewer that gave a three-dimensional view of the Earth. Google renamed the service to Google Earth in 2005. Two years later, Google bought the online video site YouTube for $1.65 billion in stock. On April 13, 2007, Google reached an agreement to acquire DoubleClick for $3.1 billion, giving Google valuable relationships that DoubleClick had with Web publishers and advertising agencies. Later that same year, Google purchased GrandCentral for $50 million. The site would later be changed over to Google Voice. On August 5, 2009, Google bought out its first public company, purchasing video software maker On2 Technologies for $106.5 million. Google also acquired Aardvark, a social network search engine, for $50 million, and commented on its internal blog, "we're looking forward to collaborating to see where we can take it". In April 2010, Google announced it had acquired a hardware startup, Agnilux.

In addition to the many companies Google has purchased, the company has partnered with other organizations for everything from research to advertising. In 2005, Google partnered with NASA Ames Research Center to build of offices. The offices would be used for research projects involving large-scale data management, nanotechnology, distributed computing, and the entrepreneurial space industry. Google entered into a partnership with Sun Microsystems in October 2005 to help share and distribute each other's technologies. The company also partnered with AOL of Time Warner, to enhance each other's video search services. Google's 2005 partnerships also included financing the new .mobi top-level domain for mobile devices, along with other companies including Microsoft, Nokia, and Ericsson. Google would later launch "Adsense for Mobile", taking advantage of the emerging mobile advertising market. Increasing its advertising reach even further, Google and Fox Interactive Media of News Corporation entered into a $900 million agreement to provide search and advertising on popular social networking site MySpace.

In October 2006, Google announced that it had acquired the video-sharing site YouTube for US$1.65 billion in Google stock, and the deal was finalized on November 13, 2006. Google does not provide detailed figures for YouTube's running costs, and YouTube's revenues in 2007 were noted as "not material" in a regulatory filing. In June 2008, a ''Forbes'' magazine article projected the 2008 YouTube revenue at US$200 million, noting progress in advertising sales. In 2007, Google began sponsoring NORAD Tracks Santa, a service that follows Santa Claus' progress on Christmas Eve, using Google Earth to "track Santa" in 3-D for the first time, and displacing former sponsor AOL. Google-owned YouTube gave NORAD Tracks Santa its own channel.

In 2008, Google developed a partnership with GeoEye to launch a satellite providing Google with high-resolution (0.41 m monochrome, 1.65 m color) imagery for Google Earth. The satellite was launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base on September 6, 2008. Google also announced in 2008 that it was hosting an archive of Life Magazine's photographs as part of its latest partnership. Some of the images in the archive were never published in the magazine. The photos were watermarked and originally had copyright notices posted on all photos, regardless of public domain status.

In 2010, Google Energy made its first investment in a renewable energy project, putting $38.8 million into two wind farms in North Dakota. The company announced the two locations will generate 169.5 megawatts of power, or enough to supply 55,000 homes. The farms, which were developed by NextEra Energy Resources, will reduce fossil fuel use in the region and return profits. NextEra Energy Resources sold Google a twenty percent stake in the project to get funding for its development. Also in 2010, Google purchased Global IP Solutions, a Norway-based company that provides web-based teleconferencing and other related services. This acquisition will enable Google to add telephone-style services to its list of products. On May 27, 2010, Google announced it had also closed the acquisition of the mobile ad network AdMob. This purchase occurred days after the Federal Trade Commission closed its investigation into the purchase. Google acquired the company for an undisclosed amount. In July 2010, Google signed an agreement with an Iowa wind farm to buy 114 megawatts of energy for 20 years.

On April 4, 2011, ''The Globe and Mail'' reported that Google bid $900 million for six thousand Nortel Networks patents.

On August 15, 2011, Google announced that it would acquire Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion subject to approval from regulators in the United States and Europe. In a post on Google's blog, Google Chief Executive and co-founder Larry Page revealed that Google's acquisition of Motorola Mobility is a strategic move to strengthen Google's patent portfolio. The company's Android operating system has come under fire in an industry-wide patent battle, as Apple and Microsoft have taken to court Android device makers such as HTC, Samsung and Motorola. This purchase was made in part to help Google gain Motorola's considerable patent portfolio on mobile phones and wireless technologies to help protect it in its ongoing patent disputes with other companies, mainly Apple and Microsoft and to allow it to continue to freely offer Android.

Google Data Centers [link]

Google Inc. currently owns and operates 6 data centers across the U.S., plus one in Finland and another in Belgium. On September 28, 2011 the company has announced to build three data centers at a cost of more than $200 million in Asia (Singapore, Hong Kong and Taiwan) and has already purchased the land for them. Google said they will be operational in one to two years.

Products and services [link]

Advertising [link]

Ninety-nine percent of Google's revenue is derived from its advertising programs. For the 2006 fiscal year, the company reported $10.492 billion in total advertising revenues and only $112 million in licensing and other revenues. Google has implemented various innovations in the online advertising market that helped make it one of the biggest brokers in the market. Using technology from the company DoubleClick, Google can determine user interests and target advertisements so they are relevant to their context and the user that is viewing them. Google Analytics allows website owners to track where and how people use their website, for example by examining click rates for all the links on a page. Google advertisements can be placed on third-party websites in a two-part program. Google's AdWords allows advertisers to display their advertisements in the Google content network, through either a cost-per-click or cost-per-view scheme. The sister service, Google AdSense, allows website owners to display these advertisements on their website, and earn money every time ads are clicked.

One of the disadvantages and criticisms of this program is Google's inability to combat click fraud, when a person or automated script "clicks" on advertisements without being interested in the product, which causes that advertiser to pay money to Google unduly. Industry reports in 2006 claim that approximately 14 to 20 percent of clicks were in fact fraudulent or invalid. Furthermore, there has been controversy over Google's "search within a search", where a secondary search box enables the user to find what they are looking for within a particular website. It was soon reported that when performing a search within a search for a specific company, advertisements from competing and rival companies often showed up along with those results, drawing users away from the site they were originally searching. Another complaint against Google's advertising is its censorship of advertisers, though many cases concern compliance with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. For example, in February 2003, Google stopped showing the advertisements of Oceana, a non-profit organization protesting a major cruise ship's sewage treatment practices. Google cited its editorial policy at the time, stating "Google does not accept advertising if the ad or site advocates against other individuals, groups, or organizations." The policy was later changed. In June 2008, Google reached an advertising agreement with Yahoo!, which would have allowed Yahoo! to feature Google advertisements on its web pages. The alliance between the two companies was never completely realized due to antitrust concerns by the U.S. Department of Justice. As a result, Google pulled out of the deal in November 2008.

In an attempt to advertise its own products, Google launched a website called Demo Slam, developed to demonstrate technology demos of Google Products. Each week, two teams compete at putting Google's technology into new contexts. Search Engine Journal said Demo Slam is "a place where creative and tech-savvy people can create videos to help the rest of the world understand all the newest and greatest technology out there."

Search engine [link]

Google Search, a web search engine, is the company's most popular service. According to market research published by comScore in November 2009, Google is the dominant search engine in the United States market, with a market share of 65.6%. Google indexes billions of web pages, so that users can search for the information they desire, through the use of keywords and operators. Despite its popularity, it has received criticism from a number of organizations. In 2003, ''The New York Times'' complained about Google's indexing, claiming that Google's caching of content on its site infringed its copyright for the content. In this case, the United States District Court of Nevada ruled in favor of Google in ''Field v. Google'' and ''Parker v. Google''. Furthermore, the publication 2600: The Hacker Quarterly has compiled a list of words that the web giant's new instant search feature will not search. Google Watch has also criticized Google's PageRank algorithms, saying that they discriminate against new websites and favor established sites, and has made allegations about connections between Google and the NSA and the CIA. Despite criticism, the basic search engine has spread to specific services as well, including an image search engine, the Google News search site, Google Maps, and more. In early 2006, the company launched Google Video, which allowed users to upload, search, and watch videos from the Internet. In 2009, however, uploads to Google Video were discontinued so that Google could focus more on the search aspect of the service. The company even developed Google Desktop, a desktop search application used to search for files local to one's computer. Google's most recent development in search is its partnership with the United States Patent and Trademark Office to create Google Patents, which enables free access to information about patents and trademarks.

One of the more controversial search services Google hosts is Google Books. The company began scanning books and uploading limited previews, and full books where allowed, into its new book search engine. The Authors Guild, a group that represents 8,000 U.S. authors, filed a class action suit in a New York City federal court against Google in 2005 over this new service. Google replied that it is in compliance with all existing and historical applications of copyright laws regarding books. Google eventually reached a revised settlement in 2009 to limit its scans to books from the U.S., the UK, Australia and Canada. Furthermore, the Paris Civil Court ruled against Google in late 2009, asking it to remove the works of La Martinière (Éditions du Seuil) from its database. In competition with Amazon.com, Google plans to sell digital versions of new books. On July 21, 2010, in response to newcomer Bing, Google updated its image search to display a streaming sequence of thumbnails that enlarge when pointed at. Though web searches still appear in a batch per page format, on July 23, 2010, dictionary definitions for certain English words began appearing above the linked results for web searches. Google's algorithm was changed in March 2011, giving more weight to high-quality content possibly by the use of n-grams to remove spun content.

Productivity tools [link]

In addition to its standard web search services, Google has released over the years a number of online productivity tools. Gmail, a free webmail service provided by Google, was launched as an invitation-only beta program on April 1, 2004, and became available to the general public on February 7, 2007. The service was upgraded from beta status on July 7, 2009, at which time it had 146 million users monthly. The service would be the first online email service with one gigabyte of storage, and the first to keep emails from the same conversation together in one thread, similar to an Internet forum. The service currently offers over 7600 MB of free storage with additional storage ranging from 20 GB to 16 TB available for per 1 GB per year. Furthermore, software developers know Gmail for its pioneering use of AJAX, a programming technique that allows web pages to be interactive without refreshing the browser. One criticism of Gmail has been the potential for data disclosure, a risk associated with many online web applications. Steve Ballmer (Microsoft's CEO), Liz Figueroa, Mark Rasch, and the editors of Google Watch believe the processing of email message content goes beyond proper use, but Google claims that mail sent to or from Gmail is never read by a human being beyond the account holder, and is only used to improve relevance of advertisements.

Google Docs, another part of Google's productivity suite, allows users to create, edit, and collaborate on documents in an online environment, not dissimilar to Microsoft Word. The service was originally called Writely, but was obtained by Google on March 9, 2006, where it was released as an invitation-only preview. On June 6 after the acquisition, Google created an experimental spreadsheet editing program, which would be combined with Google Docs on October 10. A program to edit presentations would complete the set on September 17, 2007, before all three services were taken out of beta along with Gmail, Google Calendar and all products from the Google Apps Suite on July 7, 2009.

Enterprise products [link]

Google entered the enterprise market in February 2002 with the launch of its Google Search Appliance, targeted toward providing search technology for larger organizations. Google launched the Mini three years later, which was targeted at smaller organizations. Late in 2006, Google began to sell Custom Search Business Edition, providing customers with an advertising-free window into Google.com's index. The service was renamed Google Site Search in 2008.

Another one of Google's enterprise products is Google Apps Premier Edition. The service, and its accompanying Google Apps Education Edition and Standard Edition, allow companies, schools, and other organizations to bring Google's online applications, such as Gmail and Google Documents, into its own domain. The Premier Edition specifically includes extras over the Standard Edition such as more disk space, API access, and premium support, and it costs $50 per user per year. A large implementation of Google Apps with 38,000 users is at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada. In the same year Google Apps was launched, Google acquired Postini and proceeded to integrate the company's security technologies into Google Apps under the name Google Postini Services.

Other products [link]

Google Translate is a server-side machine translation service, which can translate between 35 different languages. Browser extensions allow for easy access to Google Translate from the browser. The software uses corpus linguistics techniques, where the program "learns" from professionally translated documents, specifically UN and European Parliament proceedings. Furthermore, a "suggest a better translation" feature accompanies the translated text, allowing users to indicate where the current translation is incorrect or otherwise inferior to another translation.

Google launched its Google News service in 2002. The site proclaimed that the company had created a "highly unusual" site that "offers a news service compiled solely by computer algorithms without human intervention. Google employs no editors, managing editors, or executive editors." The site hosted less licensed news content than Yahoo! News, and instead presented topically selected links to news and opinion pieces along with reproductions of their headlines, story leads, and photographs. The photographs are typically reduced to thumbnail size and placed next to headlines from other news sources on the same topic in order to minimize copyright infringement claims. Nevertheless, Agence France Presse sued Google for copyright infringement in federal court in the District of Columbia, a case which Google settled for an undisclosed amount in a pact that included a license of the full text of AFP articles for use on Google News.

In 2006, Google made a bid to offer free wireless broadband access throughout the city of San Francisco along with Internet service provider EarthLink. Large telecommunications companies such as Comcast and Verizon opposed such efforts, claiming it was "unfair competition" and that cities would be violating their commitments to offer local monopolies to these companies. In his testimony before Congress on network neutrality in 2006, Google's Chief Internet Evangelist Vint Cerf blamed such tactics on the fact that nearly half of all consumers lack meaningful choice in broadband providers. Google currently offers free wi-fi access in its hometown of Mountain View, California.

One year later, reports surfaced that Google was planning the release of its own mobile phone, possibly a competitor to Apple's iPhone. The project, called Android, turned out not to be a phone but an operating system for mobile devices, which Google acquired and then released as an open source project under the Apache 2.0 license. Google provides a software development kit for developers so applications can be created to be run on Android-based phone. In September 2008, T-Mobile released the G1, the first Android-based phone. More than a year later on January 5, 2010, Google released an Android phone under its own company name called the Nexus One.

Other projects Google has worked on include a new collaborative communication service, a web browser, and even a mobile operating system. The first of these was first announced on May 27, 2009. Google Wave was described as a product that helps users communicate and collaborate on the web. The service is Google's "email redesigned", with realtime editing, the ability to embed audio, video, and other media, and extensions that further enhance the communication experience. Google Wave was previously in a developer's preview, where interested users had to be invited to test the service, but was released to the general public on May 19, 2010, at Google's I/O keynote. On September 1, 2008, Google pre-announced the upcoming availability of Google Chrome, an open source web browser, which was then released on September 2, 2008. The next year, on July 7, 2009, Google announced Google Chrome OS, an open source Linux-based operating system that includes only a web browser and is designed to log users into their Google account.

In 2011, Google announced that it will unveil Google Wallet, a mobile application for wireless payments.

In late June 2011, Google soft-launched a social networking service called Google+. On July 14, 2011, Google announced that Google+ had reached 10 million users just two weeks after it was launched in this "limited" trial phase. After four weeks in operation, it had reached 25 million users.

Corporate affairs and culture [link]

Google is known for having an informal corporate culture. On ''Fortune'' magazine's list of best companies to work for, Google ranked first in 2007, 2008 and 2012 and fourth in 2009 and 2010. Google was also nominated in 2010 to be the world’s most attractive employer to graduating students in the Universum Communications talent attraction index. Google's corporate philosophy embodies such casual principles as "you can make money without doing evil," "you can be serious without a suit," and "work should be challenging and the challenge should be fun."

Employees [link]

Google's stock performance following its initial public offering has enabled many early employees to be competitively compensated. After the company's IPO, founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page and CEO Eric Schmidt requested that their base salary be cut to $1. Subsequent offers by the company to increase their salaries have been turned down, primarily because their main compensation continues to come from owning stock in Google. Before 2004, Schmidt was making $250,000 per year, and Page and Brin each earned a salary of $150,000.

In 2007 and through early 2008, several top executives left Google. In October 2007, former chief financial officer of YouTube Gideon Yu joined Facebook along with Benjamin Ling, a high-ranking engineer. In March 2008, Sheryl Sandberg, then vice-president of global online sales and operations, began her position as chief operating officer of Facebook while Ash ElDifrawi, formerly head of brand advertising, left to become chief marketing officer of Netshops, an online retail company that was renamed Hayneedle in 2009. On April 4, 2011 Larry Page became CEO and Eric Schmidt became Executive Chairman of Google.

As a motivation technique, Google uses a policy often called Innovation Time Off, where Google engineers are encouraged to spend 20% of their work time on projects that interest them. Some of Google's newer services, such as Gmail, Google News, Orkut, and AdSense originated from these independent endeavors. In a talk at Stanford University, Marissa Mayer, Google's Vice President of Search Products and User Experience, showed that half of all new product launches at the time had originated from the Innovation Time Off.

In March 2011, consulting firm Universum released data that Google ranks the first on list of ideal employers by nearly 25 percent chosen from more than 10,000 young professionals asked. ''Fortune'' magazine ranked Google as number one on its 100 Best Companies To Work For list for 2012.

Googleplex [link]

Google's headquarters in Mountain View, California is referred to as "the Googleplex", a play on words on the number googolplex and the headquarters itself being a ''complex'' of buildings. The lobby is decorated with a piano, lava lamps, old server clusters, and a projection of search queries on the wall. The hallways are full of exercise balls and bicycles. Each employee has access to the corporate recreation center. Recreational amenities are scattered throughout the campus and include a workout room with weights and rowing machines, locker rooms, washers and dryers, a massage room, assorted video games, table football, a baby grand piano, a billiard table, and ping pong. In addition to the rec room, there are snack rooms stocked with various foods and drinks, with special emphasis placed on nutrition. Free food is available to employees 24/7, with paid vending machines prorated favoring nutritional value.

In 2006, Google moved into of office space in New York City, at 111 Eighth Avenue in Manhattan. The office was specially designed and built for Google, and it now houses its largest advertising sales team, which has been instrumental in securing large partnerships. In 2003, they added an engineering staff in New York City, which has been responsible for more than 100 engineering projects, including Google Maps, Google Spreadsheets, and others. It is estimated that the building costs Google $10 million per year to rent and is similar in design and functionality to its Mountain View headquarters, including table football, air hockey, and ping-pong tables, as well as a video game area. In November 2006, Google opened offices on Carnegie Mellon's campus in Pittsburgh, focusing on shopping related advertisement coding and smartphone applications and programs. By late 2006, Google also established a new headquarters for its AdWords division in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Furthermore, Google has offices all around the world, and in the United States, including Atlanta, Austin, Boulder, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington DC.

Google is taking steps to ensure that its operations are environmentally sound. In October 2006, the company announced plans to install thousands of solar panels to provide up to 1.6 megawatts of electricity, enough to satisfy approximately 30% of the campus' energy needs. The system will be the largest solar power system constructed on a U.S. corporate campus and one of the largest on any corporate site in the world. In addition, Google announced in 2009 that it was deploying herds of goats to keep grassland around the Googleplex short, helping to prevent the threat from seasonal bush fires while also reducing the carbon footprint of mowing the extensive grounds. The idea of trimming lawns using goats originated from R. J. Widlar, an engineer who worked for National Semiconductor. Despite this, Google has faced accusations in ''Harper's Magazine'' of being an "energy glutton", and was accused of employing its "Don't be evil" motto as well as its very public energy-saving campaigns as an attempt to cover up or make up for the massive amounts of energy its servers actually require.

Easter eggs and April Fools' Day jokes [link]

Google has a tradition of creating April Fools' Day jokes. For example, Google MentalPlex allegedly featured the use of mental power to search the web. In 2007, Google announced a free Internet service called TiSP, or Toilet Internet Service Provider, where one obtained a connection by flushing one end of a fiber-optic cable down their toilet. Also in 2007, Google's Gmail page displayed an announcement for Gmail Paper, allowing users to have email messages printed and shipped to them. In 2008 Google announced Gmail Custom time where users could change the time that the email was sent. In 2010, Google jokingly changed its company name to Topeka in honor of Topeka, Kansas, whose mayor actually changed the city's name to Google for a short amount of time in an attempt to sway Google's decision in its new Google Fiber Project. In 2011, Google announced Gmail Motion, an interactive way of controlling Gmail and the computer with body movements via the user's webcam.

In addition to April Fools' Day jokes, Google's services contain a number of Easter eggs. For instance, Google included the Swedish Chef's "Bork bork bork," Pig Latin, "Hacker" or leetspeak, Elmer Fudd, Pirate, and Klingon as language selections for its search engine. In addition, the search engine calculator provides the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything from Douglas Adams' ''The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy''. Furthermore, when searching the word "recursion", the spell-checker's result for the properly spelled word is exactly the same word, creating a recursive link. Likewise, when searching for the word "anagram," meaning a rearrangement of letters from one word to form other valid words, Google's suggestion feature displays "Did you mean: nag a ram?" In Google Maps, searching for directions between places separated by large bodies of water, such as Los Angeles and Tokyo, results in instructions to "kayak across the Pacific Ocean." During FIFA World Cup 2010, search queries like "World Cup", "FIFA", etc. caused the "Goooo...gle" page indicator at the bottom of every result page to read "Goooo...al!" instead. Typing in 'Do a barrel roll' in the search engine will make the page do a 360° rotation.

Philanthropy [link]

In 2004, Google formed the not-for-profit philanthropic Google.org, with a start-up fund of $1 billion. The mission of the organization is to create awareness about climate change, global public health, and global poverty. One of its first projects was to develop a viable plug-in hybrid electric vehicle that can attain 100 miles per gallon. Google hired Dr. Larry Brilliant as the program's executive director in 2004 and the current director is Megan Smith.

In 2008 Google announced its "project 10¹⁰⁰" which accepted ideas for how to help the community and then allowed Google users to vote on their favorites. After two years of silence, during which many wondered what had happened to the program, Google revealed the winners of the project, giving a total of ten million dollars to various ideas ranging from non-profit organizations that promote education to a website that intends to make all legal documents public and online.

In 2011, Google donated 1 million euros to International Mathematical Olympiad to support the next five annual International Mathematical Olympiads (2011–2015).

Network neutrality [link]

Google is a noted supporter of network neutrality. According to Google's ''Guide to Net Neutrality'':

Network neutrality is the principle that Internet users should be in control of what content they view and what applications they use on the Internet. The Internet has operated according to this neutrality principle since its earliest days... Fundamentally, net neutrality is about equal access to the Internet. In our view, the broadband carriers should not be permitted to use their market power to discriminate against competing applications or content. Just as telephone companies are not permitted to tell consumers who they can call or what they can say, broadband carriers should not be allowed to use their market power to control activity online.

On February 7, 2006, Vint Cerf, a co-inventor of the Internet Protocol (IP), and current Vice President and "Chief Internet Evangelist" at Google, in testimony before Congress, said, "allowing broadband carriers to control what people see and do online would fundamentally undermine the principles that have made the Internet such a success."

Privacy [link]

Eric Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, said in a 2007 interview with the Financial Times: "The goal is to enable Google users to be able to ask the question such as ‘What shall I do tomorrow?’ and ‘What job shall I take?'". Schmidt reaffirmed this 2010 in an interview with the Wall Street Journal: "I actually think most people don't want Google to answer their questions, they want Google to tell them what they should be doing next."

On December 2009, Google's CEO, Eric Schmidt, declared after privacy concerns: "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place. If you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines – including Google – do retain this information for some time and it's important, for example, that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act and it is possible that all that information could be made available to the authorities." Privacy International ranked Google as "Hostile to Privacy", its lowest rating on its report, making Google the only company in the list to receive that ranking.

At the Techonomy conference in 2010 Eric Schmidt predicted that "true transparency and no anonymity" is the way forward for the internet: "In a world of asynchronous threats it is too dangerous for there not to be some way to identify you. We need a [verified] name service for people. Governments will demand it." He also said that "If I look at enough of your messaging and your location, and use artificial intelligence, we can predict where you are going to go. Show us 14 photos of yourself and we can identify who you are. You think you don't have 14 photos of yourself on the internet? You've got Facebook photos!"

The non-profit group Public Information Research launched Google Watch, a website advertised as "a look at Google's monopoly, algorithms, and privacy issues." The site raised questions relating to Google's storage of cookies, which in 2007 had a life span of more than 32 years and incorporated a unique ID that enabled creation of a user data log. Google has also faced criticism with its release of Google Buzz, Google's version of social networking, where Gmail users had their contact lists automatically made public unless they opted out. Google has been criticized for its censorship of certain sites in specific countries and regions. Until March 2010, Google adhered to the Internet censorship policies of China by removing certain search results, arguing that providing no service to Chinese users at all was "more inconsistent with our mission". There were reports in 2010 from leaked diplomatic cables that the Chinese Politburo had hacked into Google's computers as part of a worldwide coordinated campaign of computer sabotage carried out by "government operatives, private security experts and Internet outlaws recruited by the Chinese government."

Despite being highly influential in local and national public policy, Google does not disclose its political spending online. In August 2010, New York City Public Advocate Bill de Blasio launched a national campaign urging the corporation to disclose all of its political spending.

During 2006–2010 Google Streetview camera cars collected about 600 gigabytes of data from users of unencrypted public and private Wi-Fi networks in more than 30 countries. No disclosures nor privacy policy was given to those affected, nor to the owners of the Wi-Fi stations. A Google representative claimed that the company was not aware of its own data collection activities until an inquiry from German regulators was received, and that none of this data was used in Google's search engine or other services. A representative of Consumer Watchdog replied, "Once again, Google has demonstrated a lack of concern for privacy. Its computer engineers run amok, push the envelope and gather whatever data they can until their fingers are caught in the cookie jar." In a sign that legal penalties may result, Google said it will not destroy the data until permitted by regulators.

See also [link]

Comparison of web search engines

Criticism of Google

Gayglers – LGBT employee group

Google China

Google logo

Google platform

Google Ventures – venture capital fund

Googlebot – web crawler

List of Google domains

Google Doodle

References [link]

External links [link]

Corporate homepage

Corporate history and timeline

Google Research

Google website from November 11, 1998 at the Internet Archive

Category:1998 establishments in the United States Category:Article Feedback 5 Additional Articles Category:Cloud computing providers Category:Companies based in Mountain View, California Category:Companies established in 1998 Category:Human–computer interaction Category:Internet companies of the United States Category:Internet properties established in 1998 Category:Multinational companies headquartered in the United States Category:Publicly traded companies of the United States Category:Warrants issued in Hong Kong Stock Exchange Category:Web service providers Category:Websites by company Category:World Wide Web

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name	Robert Pattinson
birth name	Robert Thomas Pattinson
birth date	May 13, 1986
birth place	London, England, UK
other names	Rob, R-Pattz, Spunk Ransom (nicknames)
occupation	Actor, model, musician, producer
yearsactive	2004–present
relatives	Lizzy Pattinson (sister)
signature	Robert Pattinson signature.svg }}

Robert Thomas Pattinson (born 13 May 1986) is an English actor, model, musician, and producer. Born and raised in London, Pattinson started out his career by playing the role of Cedric Diggory in ''Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire''. Later, he landed the leading role of Edward Cullen in the film adaptations of the ''Twilight'' novels by Stephenie Meyer, and came to worldwide fame, thus establishing himself among the highest paid and most bankable actors in Hollywood. In 2010, Pattinson was named one of ''TIME'' magazine's 100 Most Influential People in The World, and also in the same year ''Forbes'' ranked him as one of the most powerful celebrities in the world in the Forbes Celebrity 100.

Early life[link]

Pattinson was born in London, England. His mother, Clare, worked for a modelling agency, and his father, Richard, imported vintage cars from the U.S. Pattinson has two elder sisters, singer Lizzy Pattinson, and Victoria Pattinson. Growing up in the Barnes suburb of London, he attended Tower House School until he was 12, and then The Harrodian School. He became involved in amateur theatre at the Barnes Theatre Company. He auditioned and was cast in a small role in ''Guys and Dolls''. He next auditioned for Thornton Wilder's ''Our Town'' and was cast as George Gibbs. He also played in ''Anything Goes'' and ''Macbeth''. He caught the attention of an acting agent in a production of ''Tess of the d'Urbervilles'' and began looking for professional roles.

Career[link]

Modelling

Pattinson began modelling when he was twelve years old, but the number of jobs began to decrease only four years later. In December 2008 he blamed the lack of work as a model on his masculine appearance: "When I first started I was quite tall and looked like a girl, so I got lots of jobs, because it was during that period where the androgynous look was cool. Then, I guess, I became too much of a guy, so I never got any more jobs. I had the most unsuccessful modelling career." Pattinson appeared in the advertising campaign for Hackett's autumn 2007 collection.

Acting[link]

Early career[link]

Pattinson had supporting roles in the made for television film ''Ring of the Nibelungs'' in 2004 and in director Mira Nair’s ''Vanity Fair'', although his scenes in the latter were deleted and only appear on the DVD version. In May 2005, he was slated to appear in the UK premiere of ''The Woman Before'' at the Royal Court Theatre, but was fired shortly before the opening night and was replaced by Tom Riley. Later that year he played Cedric Diggory in ''Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire''. For this role he was named that year's ''British Star of Tomorrow'' by ''The Times'' and had more than once been touted as the next Jude Law.

2008-present[link]

In 2008 Pattinson landed the coveted role of Edward Cullen in the film ''Twilight'', based on Stephenie Meyer's best-selling novel of the same name. According to ''TV Guide'', Pattinson was initially apprehensive about auditioning for the role of Edward Cullen, fearful that he would not be able to live up to the "perfection" expected from the character. The film was released on November 21, 2008 and turned Pattinson into an instant overnight moviestar. Though the film received mixed reviews, critics praised his and co-star Kristen Stewart's chemisty in the film. The ''New York Times'' called Pattinson a "capable and exotically beautiful" actor and Roger Ebert of the ''Chicago Sun-Times'' said he was "well-chosen" for the role.

After ''Twilight'' Pattinson starred in the independent films ''Little Ashes'' (in which he plays Salvador Dalí), ''How to Be'' (a British comedy), and''The Summer House''.

He reprised his role as Edward Cullen in the ''Twilight'' sequel ''The Twilight Saga: New Moon'' which was released on November 20, 2009. The film earned a record breaking $142,839,137 opening weekend and an overall run of $709,827,462 worldwide. Though the film received negative reviews, film critic Michael Phillips from the ''Chicago Tribune'' said Pattinson was still "interesting to watch" despite the bad makeup. Bill GoodyKoontz from the ''Arizona Republic'' said, "Pattinson's actually not in the film that much, but he does his best when he's around" and Michael O'Sullivan of the ''Washington Post'' noted that his acting was "uniformly strong".

In 2009 Pattinson presented at the 81st Academy Awards. On November 10, Revolver Entertainment released the DVD ''Robsessed'', a documentary which details Pattinson's life and popularity.

On May 13, 2010, Pattinson appeared on ''The Oprah Winfrey Show'' and on May 18, ''The Ellen DeGeneres Show'' for his film, ''The Twilight Saga: Eclipse''. He attended the official worldwide red carpet premiere for ''The Twilight Saga: Eclipse'' on June 24, 2010, at the Los Angeles Nokia Theatre and the film was released on June 30, 2010, earning $698,491,347 worldwide.

In 2010, Pattinson executively produced and starred in the film ''Remember Me'', which was released on March 12, 2010.

In 2011, he starred as Jacob Jankowski in ''Water for Elephants'', a film adaptation of the Sara Gruen novel of the same name, with Christoph Waltz and Reese Witherspoon. The film received mixed reviews but Pattinson's performance was praised. Film critic Richard Corliss from ''Time'' praised Pattinson for being "shy and watchful" and said he "radiates a slow magnetism that locks the viewer’s eyes on him", ultimately calling him "star quality". Mick LaSalle from the ''San Francisco Chronicle'' stated that Pattinson succeeded at holding his own at the center of a major feature and was "endlessly watchable". Peter Travers of the ''Rolling Stone'' said Pattinson "smolders" in the film and Todd McCarthy of ''The Hollywood Reporter'' said, "Pattinson is entirely convincing as Jacob".

Pattinson reappeared as Edward Cullen in ''The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1'', which was released on November 18, 2011, and earned $705,058,657 at the box office.

He played Georges Duroy in a film adaptation of the 1885 novel ''Bel Ami'', with Uma Thurman, Christina Ricci, and Kristin Scott Thomas. The film had a world premiere at the 62nd Berlin International Film Festival and was released on February 12, 2012.

Pattinson will be starring in the upcoming film adaptation of Don Delillo's ''Cosmopolis'', directed by David Cronenberg in 2012. The film has been selected to compete for the Palme d'Or at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival.

Music[link]

Pattinson plays guitar and piano, and composes his own music. He also appears as the singer of two songs on the ''Twilight'' soundtrack: "Never Think", which he co-wrote with Sam Bradley, and "Let Me Sign", which was written by Marcus Foster and Bobby Long. The songs were included in the film after director Catherine Hardwicke added Pattinson's recordings into an early cut without his knowledge, and he agreed that "one of them specifically, it really made the scene better. It was like it was supposed to be there." The soundtrack for the film ''How to Be'' features three original songs performed by Pattinson and written by composer Joe Hastings.

Aside from recording for the soundtracks, Pattinson has said, "I've never really recorded anything – I just played in pubs and stuff", and when asked about a professional music career, he said, "Music is my back-up plan if acting fails." In 2010, Pattinson was awarded the 'Hollywood's Most Influential Top Unexpected Musicians' award.

In the media[link]

Pattinson was named one of the "Sexiest Men Alive" in 2008 and 2009 by ''People'' magazine. In 2009, he was also named the "Sexiest Man Alive" by ''Glamour''. ''Ask Men'' named Pattinson as one of the top 49 most influential men of 2009. In 2009, ''Vanity Fair'' named Pattinson "the most handsome man in the world" along with Angelina Jolie as the most beautiful woman in the world.

He was named one of ''Vanity Fair'''s "Top Hollywood Earners of 2009" with estimated earnings of $18 million in 2009.

In December 2009, Pattinson autographed a guitar to be auctioned off for charity. He also volunteered for the ''Hope for Haiti Now: A Global Benefit for Earthquake Relief'' in January 2010.

''GQ'' and ''Glamour'' both named him the "Best Dressed Man" of 2010, with ''GQ'' stating, "Extremely elegant and inspiring, the true essence of a contemporary man." In 2010, ''People'' also listed Pattinson in their "World's Most Beautiful" issue.

In 2010, Pattinson politely turned down a $2 million fashion campaign with ''Burberry''.

Britain's ''The Sunday Times'' "Rich List" put him on its "list of young millionaires" in the UK, worth £13 million. ''Time'' magazine named him as one of 2010's 100 Most Influential People in The World. In June 2010, Pattinson was named by Forbes magazine the No.50 most powerful celebrity in the world with earnings $17 million. Due to Pattinson's rising fame, a wax statue of him was added to the Madame Tussauds collection in London and New York City. On 14 November 2010, Pattinson received two BBC Radio 1 Teen Awards, Best Dressed and Best Actor.

In 2011, Pattinson was No. 15 on ''Vanity Fair'''s "Hollywood Top 40" with earnings of $27.5 million in 2010. GQ once again named Pattinson the "Best Dressed Man" of 2012.

Personal life[link]

Since meeting on the set of ''Twilight'', Pattinson has been romantically linked to co-star Kristen Stewart. Though they have never explicitly confirmed a relationship, paparazzi photographs and eyewitness accounts have driven intense media and fan speculation and attention making "Robsten" the subject of wide media coverage.

Filmography[link]

! Year	! Title	! Role	Notes
2004		Rawdy Crawley	Only seen on DVD release
2004		Giselher	Television film
2005		Cedric Diggory
2006	''''	Toby Jugg	Television film
2007	''''	Daniel Gale	Television film
2007		Cedric Diggory	Cameo
2008	''How to Be''	Art
2008		Edward Cullen	Hollywood Film Award for New HollywoodMTV Movie Award for Breakthrough Performance MaleMTV Movie Award for Best Kiss MTV Movie Award for Best Fight People's Choice Award for Favourite On-Screen-Team Scream Award for Best Fantasy ActorTeen Choice Award for Choice HottieTeen Choice Award for Choice Movie Actor DramaTeen Choice Award for Movie Liplock Teen Choice Award for Choice Movie Rumble Nominated—Empire Award for Best NewcomerNominated—People's Choice Award for Favourite Movie ActorNominated—Scream Award for Best Ensemble Cast
2009	''Little Ashes''	Salvador Dalí
2009	''''	Edward Cullen	Russia's Georges Award for Best Foreign ActorNational Movie Award for Best PerformanceMTV Movie Award for Best Male PerformanceMTV Movie Award for Global SuperstarMTV Movie Award for Best Kiss Teen Choice Award for Movie Liplock Teen Choice Award for Movie chemistry Nominated—Teen Choice Award for Choice Movie Actor FantasyNominated—Teen Choice Award for Choice HottieNominated—Empire Award for Best ActorNominated—Nickelodeon Kids' Choice Awards for Cutest Couple Nominated—Razzie Award for Worst Supporting ActorNominated—Razzie Award for Worst Screen Couple (with Kristen Stewart)
2010		Tyler Hawkins
2010	''''	Edward Cullen	Teen Choice Award for Choice Summer Movie Star – MaleBrazilian Kids' Choice Award for Couple of the Year Scream Award for Best Fantasy ActorPeople's Choice Award for Favourite On-Screen-Team MTV Movie Award for Best Male PerformanceMTV Movie Award for Best Kiss MTV Movie Award for Best Fight Teen Choice Award for Choice VampireNominated—Nickelodeon Australian Kids' Choice Award for Fave Kiss Nominated—People's Choice Award for Favorite Movie ActorNominated—People's Choice Award for Favorite Movie Star Under 25Nominated—Razzie Award for Worst ActorNominated—Razzie Award for Worst Ensemble
2011		Jacob Jankowski
2011		Edward Cullen	Nominated—References[link] External links[link] [[Category:1986 births">Golden Raspberry Award for Worst Screen Couple/Ensemble
2012		Georges Duroy	Awaiting release
2012		Edward Cullen	Post-production
2012		Eric Packer	Post-production

References[link]

External links[link]

[[Category:1986 births Category:Actors from London Category:English child actors Category:English expatriates in the United States Category:English film actors Category:English guitarists Category:English male models Category:English singer-songwriters Category:English stage actors Category:English television actors Category:Living people Category:People educated at The Harrodian School Category:People educated at Tower House School Category:People from Barnes, London

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playername	Darron Gibson
fullname	Darron Thomas Daniel Gibson
dateofbirth	October 25, 1987
cityofbirth	Derry
countryofbirth	Northern Ireland
height
currentclub	Everton
clubnumber	4
position	Midfielder
youthyears1	2003–2004 |youthclubs1 Institute
youthyears2	2004–2005 |youthclubs2 Manchester United
years1	2005–2012 |clubs1 Manchester United |caps1 31 |goals1 3
years2	2006–2007 |clubs2 → Royal Antwerp (loan) |caps2 31 |goals2 1
years3	2007–2008 |clubs3 → Wolverhampton Wanderers (loan) |caps3 21 |goals3 1
years4	2012– |clubs4 Everton |caps4 10 |goals4 1
nationalyears1	2006 |nationalteam1 Republic of Ireland U21 |nationalcaps1 |nationalgoals1
nationalyears2	2006 |nationalteam2 Republic of Ireland B |nationalcaps2 1 |nationalgoals2 0
nationalyears3	2007– |nationalteam3 Republic of Ireland |nationalcaps3 17 |nationalgoals3 1
pcupdate	match played 28 April 2012
ntupdate	21 November 2011 }}

Darron Thomas Daniel Gibson (born 25 October 1987) is an Irish footballer who plays as a midfielder for Everton and the Republic of Ireland national team. He has also played for Manchester United and on loan for Royal Antwerp and Wolverhampton Wanderers.

In 2007, Gibson, who was born in Derry, Northern Ireland, was at the centre of a dispute between the Football Association of Ireland (FAI) and the Irish Football Association (IFA), after he opted to play for the Republic of Ireland instead of Northern Ireland. The issue was referred to FIFA and was discussed in the Northern Ireland Assembly.

Club career[link]

Manchester United[link]

A former pupil of St Columb's College, Gibson played junior football in the Derry and District League, and then with Institute before joining Manchester United in 2004. He made his senior debut for United on 26 October 2005 in a League Cup game against Barnet, coming on as a substitute for Lee Martin. During the 2005–06 season he played regularly for Manchester United Reserves, helping them win a treble. He made 19 appearances, scoring twice. In May 2006, he won the prestigious Jimmy Murphy Award as United's youth player of the year and then played regularly for the United senior team during their pre-season summer games, together with Dong Fangzhuo, Jonny Evans, Fraizer Campbell and Danny Simpson.

Gibson made his Premier League debut on 15 November 2008, appearing as a second half substitute against Stoke City, before making his UEFA Champions League debut ten days later, coming on as a substitute for Darren Fletcher against Villarreal on 25 November 2008. In December 2008, he travelled with the United squad to the 2008 FIFA Club World Cup in Japan, where, despite not making any appearances, he picked up a winners' medal. On 4 January 2009, Gibson scored his first goal for the club, United's third in a 3–0 victory over Southampton in the FA Cup Third Round. On 1 March 2009, Gibson started in the centre of midfield alongside Paul Scholes against Tottenham Hotspur in the 2009 Football League Cup Final at Wembley Stadium, playing the full initial 90 minutes before being replaced by Ryan Giggs at the start of extra time as Manchester United went on to win 4–1 on penalties. On 24 May, he scored his first league goal for Manchester United in the last game of the 2008–09 Premier League season against Hull City. Gibson was rewarded with a three-year extension to his Manchester United contract, tying him to the club until at least 2012.

Gibson was one of a number of young United players who came under some fire when they lost a four-year unbeaten home record in Europe, losing 1–0 to Beşiktaş at Old Trafford. On 1 December 2009, six days on from the defeat in the Champions League, Gibson responded to the criticism by scoring both of United's goals in a 2–0 win against Tottenham to send United through the semi-finals of the League Cup. Gibson was granted a starting place in the Champions League second leg quarter-final tie against Bayern Munich and scored a long-range shot after only three minutes, his first goal in a UEFA competition, but despite winning the game 3–2, they were knocked out by Bayern on away goals with the aggregate score ending 4–4.

He scored his first goal of the 2010–11 season as he netted the first of United's goals in a 5–2 away win over Scunthorpe United in the League Cup. In February 2011, Gibson's national team manager, Giovanni Trapattoni, told him that he must leave Manchester United in order to further his career. Sunderland agreed a transfer fee with United to sign Gibson in the summer of 2011, but Gibson could not agree personal terms. He subsequently only made two appearances for the club in the 2011-12 season, despite there being a number of midfielders out injured at Old Trafford, and left the club in January 2012.

Loans to Royal Antwerp and Wolves[link]

Gibson was one of several United players who spent the 2006–07 season on loan at Royal Antwerp. In October 2007, he was loaned out again, this time to Wolverhampton Wanderers, where he spent the majority of the 2007–08 season. At Wolves he scored once, against Burnley on 8 December 2007.

Everton[link]

On 13 January 2012, Gibson signed for Everton for an undisclosed fee. He became the fourth ex-United player to sign for Everton under David Moyes, following Phil Neville, Tim Howard and Louis Saha. He made his debut a day later, as he started in a 1–1 draw with Aston Villa. Later that month, Gibson scored his first goal for the club in a 1–0 home win against league leaders Manchester City.

International career[link]

Gibson was at the centre of a dispute between the Irish Football Association (IFA) and the Football Association of Ireland (FAI) over the eligibility of players born within Northern Ireland to represent the Republic of Ireland. The general principle or article 5 of FIFA's Regulations Governing the Application of the Statutes states that "any person holding a permanent nationality that is not dependent on residence in a certain country is eligible to play for the representative teams of the Association of that country". Due to the constitutional position of Northern Ireland, following the signing of the Good Friday Agreement, citizenship of the Republic of Ireland is the undisputed birthright of every person born on the island of Ireland if they so wish. As a result, Gibson was approached to represent both Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland at international level.

Northern Ireland[link]

Gibson initially represented Northern Ireland at Under-16 level and was included in Victory Shield squads. However, he was dropped from the team after attending trials with Manchester United and subsequently switched allegiance to the Republic of Ireland. Before Gibson made his senior international debut for the Republic of Ireland, Nigel Worthington, the Northern Ireland manager, made an unsuccessful attempt to persuade him to switch his allegiances back.

Republic of Ireland[link]

Gibson first represented the Republic of Ireland at under-17 level. Then during the 2005–06 season he captained both the Republic of Ireland under-19 and under-21 squads. On 14 November 2006, he also played for Republic of Ireland B in a 0–0 draw against Scotland B. In 2007, Gibson was included in several senior Republic of Ireland squads for Euro 2008 qualifiers, before he eventually made his debut in a 4–0 win against Denmark. During the away friendly, he came on as half-time substitute, replacing Andy Reid. In the 54th minute, Gibson fired a shot from outside the penalty area that the Danish keeper, Jesper Christiansen, could only palm away, allowing Shane Long to follow up and score the Republic's third goal. Gibson won his second full cap on 8 September 2007 in an away game against Slovakia. The Euro 2008 qualifier, which finished as a 2–2 draw, saw him again used as substitute, this time replacing Aiden McGeady after 61 minutes.

Gibson made his first start for the Republic of Ireland national team in a 1–0 win at home to Cyprus on 15 October 2008. After Steven Reid dropped out of the Irish squad due to injury, Gibson was called up to provide extra physicality in the centre of the Irish midfield. Manager Giovanni Trapattoni also cited Gibson's confidence on the football pitch as the reason for choosing him ahead of Liam Miller and Andy Reid. On 8 February 2011, Gibson scored his first goal for his country, in a 3–0 victory over Wales in the first game of the 2011 Nations Cup.

International goals[link]

Aviva Stadium, Dublin, Republic of Ireland

# !! Date !! Venue !! Opponent !! Score !! Result !! Competition
align="center"	1.	8 February 2011	Ireland ||		1–0	3–0	2011 Nations Cup

Career statistics[link]

Club[link]

0 0 1 0 1 1 2 0 0 1

Club	Season	League	Cup	League Cup	!colspan="2"	Other	Total
!Apps!!Goals!!Apps!!Goals!!Apps!!Goals!!Apps!!Goals!!Apps!!Goals!!Apps!!Goals
rowspan="2"	Manchester United		0	|	0	0	1	0	0	0	0	0	1	0
2006–07 Manchester United F.C. season	2006–07	0	|	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0
rowspan="2"	Royal Antwerp (loan)		31	|	2	0	–		0	0	–		33	1
!Total	!31!!1!!2!!0!!0!!0!!0!!0!!0!!0!!33!!1
Manchester United F.C.	Manchester United		0	|	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0
rowspan="2"	Wolverhampton Wanderers (loan)		21	|	3	0	0	0	–		–		24	1
!Total	!21!!1!!3!!0!!0!!0!!0!!0!!0!!0!!24!!1
rowspan="5"	Manchester United		3	|	3	2	6	0	2	0	0	0	14	3
2009–10 Manchester United F.C. season	2009–10	15	|	1	0	3	2	4	1	0	0	23	5
2010–11 Manchester United F.C. season	2010–11	12	|	3	0	2	1	3	1	0	0	20	2
2011–12 Manchester United F.C. season	2011–12	1	|	0	0	1	0	0	0	0	0	2	0
!Total	!31!!3!!7!!2!!13!!3!!9!!2!!0!!0!!60!!10
rowspan="2"	Everton		10	|	4	0	0	0	–		–		14	1
!Total	!10!!1!!4!!0!!0!!0!!0!!0!!0!!0!!14!!1
Career total	!93!!6!!16!!2!!13!!3!!9!!2!!0!!0!!131!!13

International[link]

National team!!Year!!Apps!!Goals
rowspan="5"	Republic of Ireland	2007	2	0
2008	2
2009	4
2010	5
2011	3
Total!!16!!1

Honours[link]

Club[link]

;Manchester United

Premier League (1): 2010–11

Football League Cup (2): 2008–09, 2009–10

FIFA Club World Cup (1): 2008

Individual[link]

Jimmy Murphy Young Player of the Year (1): 2005–06

FAI Young International Player of the Year (1): 2009

FAI International Goal of the Year (1): 2011 vs. Wales

Notes[link]

References[link]

External links[link]

Profile at ManUtd.com

Category:1987 births Category:Living people Category:People from Derry Category:Association footballers from Northern Ireland Category:Republic of Ireland association footballers Category:Republic of Ireland international footballers Category:Republic of Ireland B international footballers Category:Republic of Ireland under-21 international footballers Category:Manchester United F.C. players Category:Royal Antwerp FC players Category:Wolverhampton Wanderers F.C. players Category:Everton F.C. players Category:Premier League players Category:The Football League players Category:Expatriate footballers in Belgium Category:Institute F.C. players Category:People educated at St Columb's College

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Name	Robert Moog
Birth date	May 23, 1934
Birth place	New York City, New York
Death date	August 21, 2005
Death place	Asheville, North Carolina
Occupation	Electronic music pioneer, inventor of Moog synthesizer
Nationality	American }}

Robert Arthur Moog ( ), commonly called Bob Moog (May 23, 1934 – August 21, 2005) was an American pioneer of electronic music, best known as the inventor of the Moog synthesizer.

Life[link]

A native of New York City, Moog attended the Bronx High School of Science in New York, graduating in 1952. Moog earned a bachelor's degree in physics from Queens College, New York in 1957, another in electrical engineering from Columbia University, and a Ph.D. in engineering physics from Cornell University. Moog's awards include honorary doctorates from Polytechnic Institute of New York University (New York City) and Lycoming College (Williamsport, Pennsylvania)

During his lifetime, Moog founded two companies for manufacturing electronic musical instruments. He also worked as a consultant and vice president for new product research at Kurzweil Music Systems from 1984 to 1988, helping to develop the Kurzweil K2000. He spent the early 1990s as a research professor of music at the University of North Carolina at Asheville.

Moog received a Grammy Trustees Award for lifetime achievement in 1970. In 2002, Moog was honored with a Special Merit/Technical Grammy Award, and an honorary doctorate degree from Berklee College of Music.

He gave an enthusiastically-received lecture at the 2004 New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME-04), held in Hamamatsu, Japan's "City of Musical Instruments", in June, 2004. Moog was the inspiration behind the 2004 film ''Moog''.

Moog's first wife was Shirleigh Moog (''née'' Shirley May Leigh), a grammar school teacher whom he married in 1958. The couple had three daughters (Laura Moog Lanier, Michelle Moog-Koussa, Renee Moog) and one son (Matthew Moog) before their divorce. Moog was married to his second wife Ileana Grams, a philosophy professor, for nine years until his death. Moog's stepdaughter, Miranda Richmond, is Grams's daughter from a previous marriage. Moog also had five grandchildren.

Moog was diagnosed with a glioblastoma multiforme brain tumor on April 28, 2005. Nearly four months later, he died at the age of 71 in Asheville, North Carolina on August 21, 2005. The Bob Moog Foundation was created as a memorial, with the aim of continuing his life's work of developing electronic music.

Development of the Moog synthesizer[link]

The Moog synthesizer was one of the first widely used electronic musical instruments. Early developmental work on the components of the synthesizer occurred at the ''Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center'', now the Computer Music Center. While there, Moog developed the voltage controlled oscillators, ADSR envelope generators, and other synthesizer modules with composer Herbert Deutsch.

Moog created the first voltage-controlled subtractive synthesizer to utilize a keyboard as a controller and demonstrated it at the AES convention in 1964. In 1966, Moog filed a patent application for his unique low-pass filter , which issued in October 1969. He held several dozen patents.

Moog employed his theremin company (R. A. Moog Co., which would later become Moog Music) to manufacture and market his synthesizers. Unlike the few other 1960s synthesizer manufacturers, Moog shipped a piano-style keyboard as the standard user interface to his synthesizers. Moog also established standards for analog synthesizer control interfacing, with a logarithmic one volt-per-octave pitch control and a separate pulse triggering signal.

The first Moog instruments were modular synthesizers. In 1971 Moog Music began production of the Minimoog Model D which was among the first widely available, portable and relatively affordable synthesizers.

One of Moog's earliest musical customers was Wendy Carlos whom he credits with providing feedback that was valuable to the further development of Moog synthesizers. Through his involvement in electronic music, Moog developed close professional relationships with artists such as Don Buchla, Keith Emerson, Rick Wakeman, John Cage, Gershon Kingsley, Clara Rockmore, and Pamelia Kurstin. In a 2000 interview, Moog said "I'm an engineer. I see myself as a toolmaker and the musicians are my customers. They use my tools."

R.A. Moog Co. and Moog Music[link]

right|frame|The Moog Music logo In 1953 at age 19, Moog founded his first company, R.A. Moog Co., to manufacture theremin kits. During the 1950s, composer and electronic music pioneer Raymond Scott approached Moog, asking him to design circuits for him. Moog later acknowledged Scott as an important influence. Later, in the 1960s, the company was employed to build modular synthesizers based on Moog's designs.

In 1972 Moog changed the company's name to Moog Music. Throughout the 1970s, Moog Music went through various changes of ownership, eventually being bought out by musical instrument manufacturer Norlin. Poor management and marketing led to Moog's departure from his own company in 1977.

In 1978 after leaving his namesake firm, Moog started making electronic musical instruments again with a new company, Big Briar. Their first specialty was theremins, but by 1999 the company expanded to produce a line of analog effects pedals called moogerfoogers. In 1999, Moog partnered with Bomb Factory to co-develop the first digital effects based on Moog technology in the form of plugins for Pro Tools software.

Despite Moog Music's closing in 1993, Moog did not have the rights to market products using his own name throughout the 1990s. Big Briar acquired the rights to use the Moog Music name in 2002 after a legal battle with Don Martin who had previously bought the rights to the name Moog Music. At the same time, Moog designed a new version of the Minimoog called the Minimoog Voyager. The Voyager includes nearly all of the features of the original Model D in addition to numerous modern features.

Theremin[link]

Moog constructed his own theremin as early as 1948. Later he described a theremin in the hobbyist magazine ''Electronics World'' and offered a kit of parts for the construction of the ''Electronic World's Theremin'', which became very successful. In the late 1980s Moog repaired the original theremin of Clara Rockmore, an accomplishment which he considered a high point of his professional career. He also produced, in collaboration with first wife Shirleigh Moog, Mrs. Rockmore's album, ''The Art of the Theremin''. Moog was a principal interview subject in the award-winning documentary film, ''Theremin: An Electronic Odyssey'', the success of which led to a revival of interest in the theremin. Moog Music went back to its roots and once again began manufacturing theremins. Thousands have been sold to date and are used by both professional and amateur musicians around the globe. In 1996 he published another do-it-yourself theremin guide. Today, Moog Music is the leading manufacturer of performance-quality theremins.

Pronunciation[link]

The surname Moog is one of the most divergently pronounced names in popular culture. The following interview excerpt reveals Robert Moog's preferred pronunciation:

: — Reviewer: ''First off: Does your name rhyme with "vogue" or is like a cow’s "moo" plus a g at the end?'' : — Dr. Robert Moog: ''It rhymes with "vogue." That is the usual German pronunciation. My father's grandfather came from Marburg, Germany. I like the way that pronunciation sounds better than the way the cow's "moo-g" sounds.''

In a deleted scene from the DVD version of the documentary ''Moog,'' Moog describes the three pronunciations of the name Moog: the Dutch , which he believes would be too demanding of English speakers; the preferred Anglo-German pronunciation, ; and a more anglicized pronunciation, . Moog reveals that some of his family members prefer the anglicized pronunciation, while others, including himself (and his wife) prefer the Anglo-German pronunciation.

See also[link]

Bob Moog Foundation

''Moog'' (film)

Moog Music

Moog synthesizer

List of Moog synthesizer players

Moogfest

Electronic music

Harald Bode

Herbert Deutsch

Gershon Kingsley

Raymond Scott

Léon Theremin

Bruce Haack

List of notable brain tumor patients

Footnotes[link]

References[link]

Pinch, Trevor and Trocco, Frank (2002). ''Analog Days: The Invention and Impact of the Moog Synthesizer''. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. hardcover: ISBN 0-674-00889-8, 2004 paperback: ISBN 0-674-01617-3

External links[link]

Bob Moog — official website

The Bob Moog Memorial Foundation for Electronic Music

Robert Moog discography at Discogs

Inventor of the Synthesizer Documentary ~ Moog at youtube

Moog Music — official website

Moog Archives illustrated history of company and products

MoogFest — festival celebrating Moog

Vintage Synth Explorer

Bob Moog's links at ThereminVox

The Moog Taurus Bass Pedals, the Minimoog and the Moog Prodigy

Pictures of Bob Moog

Sound samples from the Moog Modular at BlueDistortion.com

NIME-04 — International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression

;Interviews and articles

Bob Moog RBMA lecture

Bob Moog Interview at electronicmusic.com

Article of Bob Moog and his relationship with Raymond Scott and the inventions they made in the mid 1950’s (the unaddressed letter and the UJT-Relay sequencer invention)

Radio feature with Bob Moog on Voice Of America (MP3)

Radio feature with Bob Moog on NPR (MP3)

Article about Bob Moog on SynthMuseum.com

Interview with Bob Moog on Amazing Sounds

Article about Robert Moog's career on Salon.com

Robert Moog interview in magazine New Scientist

Radio interview with Moog from 2004 on WNYC (RealAudio) ''(Moog portion begins 30 minutes into program.)''

Article with pictures of Bob Moog and various Moog synthesizers on Obsolete.com

Sweetwater Video Interview with Bob Moog discussing his design philosophy and future of synthesis, on Sweetwater.com

;Patents

Descriptive list of Moog patents by J. Donald Tillman

Electronic High-pass and Low-pass Filters Employing the Base-to-Emitter Resistance of Bipolar Transistors, issued October 1969 Electronic music synthesizer, issued September 1977 Phase shifting sound effects circuit, issued August 1978 Amplifier with multifilter, issued September 1978 Parametric adjustment circuit, issued August 1979 Distortion sound effects circuit, issued December 1979 Compressor-expander for a musical instrument, issued May 1980 Monophonic touch sensitive keyboard, issued July 1980 Frequency following circuit, issued July 1981 Arrays of resistive elements for use in touch panels and for producing electric fields, issued October 1988

;Obituaries

/ in BBC News

in Asheville Citizen-Times

in CNN

in Los Angeles Times

in The New York Times ''(may require free registration to access)''

in The Economist

in Mix magazine

in The Times

;Tributes

Bob Moog Guestbook at CaringBridge

Switched On and Ready To Rumble from The New York Times

''A Tribute To Robert Moog'' — tribute album, entry on Discogs

Waves of Inspiration: The Legacy of Moog, museum exhibition

We Will Miss You, Bob Moog from BlueDistortion.com

Category:1934 births Category:2005 deaths Category:Analog electronics engineers Category:Inventors of musical instruments Category:Moogfest Category:Berklee College of Music alumni Category:The Bronx High School of Science alumni Category:Columbia Engineering alumni Category:Cornell University alumni Category:University of North Carolina at Asheville faculty Category:People from Queens Category:Queens College, City University of New York alumni Category:Deaths from brain cancer Category:Cancer deaths in North Carolina

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