Business Coaching

What would you decide:

In 2006, some school students in Turin bullied a schoolmate, suffering from autism, and even worse, the incident was recorded and uploaded to YouTube. The Italian police became involved, and notified Google officially about the offending clip–it was taken “down within hours.” Google’s team then cooperated with the police to identify the perpetrators, and the data was subsequently key in convicting the female uploader, who received 10 months community service as a penalty, along with other involved male students.

That’s normally where Google’s involvement would end, right? Except not in this instance. Italy’s legal system finds Google execs to be at fault.

Google’s blog clearly presents the poor victim at the heart of the affair as suffering from autism, but Reuters reported that the the youth concerned had Down syndrome, and that the legal case was brought at the request of the victim’s father and an Italian advocacy group for Down syndrome sufferers, Vivi Down.

Read more about this case here. Who knows how this will turn out, but it sounds like a tricky situation. How do you think this will turn out for Google?

The Internet just had its 40th birthday.

What do you get the international public computer network that has everything for its birthday?

The Internet turned 40 on October 29. And like most parents, the Internet’s father, professor Leonard Kleinrock, is very proud of what it has accomplished in all its 40 years.

Some things it never saw coming – Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, blogging – and there are some things he’s excited about accomplishing.

“The net is penetrating every aspect of our lives,” Kleinrock said to a room of about 200 people at UCLA to mark the birthday, and an equal number watching online. “The next step is to move it into the real world. The Internet will be present everywhere. I will walk into a room and it will know I am there. It will talk back to me.”

That’s quite a stretch from 1969, when Kleinrock led a team at UCLA and got one computer to “talk” to another.

Has your business evolved and accomplished almost as much as the Internet? On your company’s birthdays, what do you remember from “the good ‘ol days”?