Given upcoming Facebook IPO and the impressive valuation the company will most probably get, we can obviously make a conclusion that Facebook already knows everything they need about monetization. But yesterday I realized Facebook could be missing a huge extra revenue opportunity that I wanted to discuss here. I am perfectly aware that this revenue source would have been criticized vigorously in the US so it hardly has any chance of implementation but it is still fascinating to even consider the extra dollars.
So I wanted to share this idea – even if jokingly – inspired by a chat with a friend of mine that started with the words ‘Facebook is evil’. Even if you know perfectly well who the real evil is in the IT industry, you will probably agree that my friend had her reasons to say so.
The thing is that she has recently met a guy and was happy to submerge into what looked like a totally charming love affair which could even have bright prospects. But for no obvious reason she felt some sort of apprehension and decided to check his Facebook profile – just in case. And don’t tell me you’ve never done anything like that yourself unless you’ve been happily married at the time of signing up to Facebook and still are!
Her research quickly revealed an ex-wife and two cute children – a lovely family that she could not imagine anyone in their right mind leaving for whatever reason. So she immediately imagined herself involved in the entire picture and decided she did not want to be there at all so the relationship was supposed to be interrupted.
Of course I am not writing this post to contemplate this specific rather complicated situation. It’s just that this conversation got me thinking about millions upon millions of people doing similar research on their new dates and not exactly forgotten exes and realized an enormous advantage Facebook had over one of the most popular Russian social networks Odnoklassniki – on Facebook you can do everything secretly without exposing your research to anyone.
When you browse Odnoklassniki, you may be surprised by lack of ads on its pages. Here they monetize user actions instead of their pageviews: you may pay to give a superior (5+) mark to a photo or to make a virtual gift to a friend. But the most peculiar thing they monetize is user privacy: users are supposed to pay to be able to visit other people’s pages unnoticed.
The thing is that this social network offers a special section named Guests where you can see who has visited your page recently (and start wondering exactly why your ex-boyfriend visits your page every few months but has never added you as a friend). And if you want to do some secret research on private lives of other users, you will have to pay to use hidden mode. The amount is actually moderate which probably makes this an appealing option to many users – and a good revenue source for the social network.
And since Facebook is so much larger than Russian Odnoklassniki, I suspect the demand could be proportionally higher as well – and the extra revenue could very well be a substantial one. The only thing is that in the US people would have started bragging about their privacy the minute Facebook introduced anything similar to Odnoklassniki’s guests. But honestly, who could resist the temptation of seeing your first love photographed with a wife and two lovely kids without him ever suspecting that you still regret your separation?
Russian scientists from Intersoft Eurasia have reported plans to manufacture a device that will enable iOS, Android and Windows 7 mobile devices to measure radiation and inform the user of normal or elevated levels.
Basically the dosimeter is nothing but a sensor based on graphene, the material awarded with Nobel prize in 2010. It will be manufactured as a standalone device that can be connected to a smartphone with a dedicated application installed that enables use of such a device.
The price of the dosimeter will be in the range from $30 to $50 in retail but of course if it could be integrated in the device body by manufacturers, the price could drop (down to $10 as the inventor claims) and every user could have the functionality by default. The company has already negotiated the idea of sensor integration with manufacturers such as Nokia, Sony Ericsson, and Fujitsu but the results have not been disclosed yet.
The project will supposedly be funded by Skolkovo foundation, a widely discussed and heavily supported by the government Russian foundation for innovators that is part of the idea of building a dedicated research and development center near Moscow that will be very similar to the Silicon Valley in the US.
The device will offer quite a number of features via the apps installed on the smartphones. In addition to providing instant data regarding radiation, the apps can also deliver information on accumulated radiation that has influenced the smartphone owner during a day, a week, a month or a year. What’s more, it can even recommend some actions to the smartphone owner based on the exposure dose, including how to properly leave the dangerous area.
The applications will also automatically send the data received to some central storage for processing in order to generate global data on radiation environment. This data will eventually be delivered back to the device owners so that they could understand the environment in the areas where they live or travel.
Overall I think it could be a useful idea for those who would want to check safety of food and make sure they live and spend their time in safe areas only. And given that you cannot always fully trust your environment and third parties that are supposed to validate safety, this invention may be a good idea to ensure your own personal safety – just in case. Or maybe I just sound paranoid and watched too many Fukushima related news stories on TV. But that’s just a matter of personal approach to life and of course no one will make you use such a device/app anyway.
But when it comes to adoption, there is always a question of feasibility. While I personally would want to use such an application, I can hardly imagine myself actually buying a standalone gadget on purpose – let alone carry it in my purse to check fish in a supermarket. So for me the only way to adoption is having Apple actually integrating it in some future models of iPhone. But does that mean that many users will really want to measure radiation bad enough for the manufacturers to want to integrate the sensor in their gadgets? Even $10 will push any gadget’s price a little higher so it should be appealing enough for users to want to pay this extra. Though I guess there are enough countries (and I am not surprised to see that the company’s website is only available in English and Japanese in addition to the native Russian) where this extra feature for a smartphone will have enough user demand.
I have almost made a very spontaneous purchase today. I have stopped moments before buying an iPhone 4S that claims to be officially intended for the Russian market for an unbelievably low price of less than $700 for a 16GB model. But since I hate to make purchases on spur of a moment and will be able to make the same purchase of an unlocked device in the US officially from Apple, the voice of reason stopped me. But it has not stopped thousands of other people today.
One of the most popular (and trusted – I have used it without problems numerous times myself) deals website in Russia named BigBuzzy announced an extraordinary promotion (content in Russian): users are offered to buy coupons entitling them to receive an unlocked iPhone 4S on the 25th of November for a price of $640 for the 16GB model. And since a price for an Apple product comparable to that in the US is something unheard of in Russia, it is no wonder that the deal is heavily discussed today.
The irony is that no one in Russia has already announced official date when the iPhone 4S will be available or the price it will sell for – but BigBuzzy somehow calculated their 51% discount from an amount (which actually looks rather realistic at about $1,300 for the basic model) that no one can confirm yet. They don’t disclose their official provider and the mobile carriers that are entitled to sell iPhones refuse to be in any manner connected to BigBuzzy.
In general there are plenty of dubious things in the deal that make people question its credibility in addition to lack of understanding of the source of a rather large lot of ‘officially imported’ phones. For example, one of such things is that the deal started tonight with only 200 phones (i.e. coupons), then proceeded to 300 and currently it shows more than 4000 devices already.
So at the very least it looks like they have first tested the demand and then started to increase the number of available phones seeing how enthusiastic people are buying. Therefore it makes me think that they probably don’t even have any contract with any of the official suppliers of iPhones in Russia – or at least no contract with a specific number of devices to be delivered. So of course one can’t help but begin guessing if they will be able to actually import the number of devices that they manage to presell by then.
Another question that’s difficult to ignore is how it happens that no one ever sold iPhones officially in Russia for a price so close to that in the US – normally the price for Apple products in Russia is at least double that in the US – and only this specific website has managed to offer this lucrative deal to Russian users. In fact, I think that if any of the big three carriers could negotiate with Apple the conditions that would have allowed them to offer reasonable prices, they would have done that already and people would have queued to them instead of trying to figure out if miracles do happen on BigBuzzy or still not.
Whatever it is, people discuss various scenarios here. First of all, the website could actually have a contract with one of the official suppliers (not numerous – only 3 largest mobile carriers are entitled by Apple to sell iPhones in Russia along with some of their direct retail partners) so they will actually be able to deliver the phones once they are imported to everyone who has bought the coupons. It will probably happen with some delays because it’s pretty difficult to imagine an office distributing 3,000 devices to all coupon owners on the 25th of November. But it will still happen.
Some predict that there could also be a totally different scenario: BigBuzzy will be unable to offer the buyers the gadgets (at all or at the specified unbelievably low price) so they will have to admit just that and refund all the money. In this case a delay will be totally understandable but the funny part is that they will still be using a free credit for an amount of at least $2.5 million (with the current number of devices available) from their users for more than a month and given how expensive credits tend to be in Russia, this is also a nice benefit.
But the simplest and most obvious explanation seems to be like this: what BigBuzzy launches is simply a preorder for a gadget that is destined to be popular. And where no official Apple partner is entitled to engage in any such activities, BigBuzzy simply has a secret deal with one of them to be able to buy the exact number of phones they sell. And even if they don’t make a lot of money off it due to a moderate price, they will obviously get thousands of new users to the website that offers deals for everything – from movie tickets and potato directly from Russian farmers to Audi cars for half the price. And this buzz is obviously the most valuable asset for BigBuzzy, after all. Provided that Apple does not stop such a promotion for whatever reason Apple may choose and the buzz will be all negative.
Personally I have never met a certified blogger with a diploma proving their blogging skills and abilities. Not even at geeky parties in the Silicon Valley or meetups in NYC. Probably I have just never asked for a diploma but I suspect that most of my fellow bloggers are self-educated in addition to frequently being self-employed.
Now it looks like I’m in for a chance of actually meeting a properly educated blogger on another side of the ocean as the Russian city of Chelyabinsk (which is way closer to my home Novosibirsk than San Francisco or New York) announces opening of the first blogging school in Russia.
The school will offer 3-months course covering various aspects of blogging, including psychology of internet-based work, text and media content generation, technical aspects of blogging. Full-time and distance online courses will be taught by local bloggers and journalists as well as experts from Moscow and Saint Petersburg with loader voices.
An interesting aspect here is that the school actually happens to be funded by the regional authorities: for some reason they have decided that they need educated bloggers for some of their goals (the goals are not explained – only some declarations of importance of blogging for today’s society are offered). The first group that has already started their studies in the blogging school consists of students and active members of local public organizations for youth. And the education will be free of charge for all of them.
This state-funded not-for-profit nature of the school is particularly interesting because it looks like the authorities in Russia have not only realized the power of social media but have decided to influence it by teaching people to blog properly. And I can’t help but suspect that at least some of the graduates will be invited by those very authorities to blog in public on behalf of some institutions that might need improvement of their image in the eyes of the general public – and in Russia you will hardly find any federal or local government authorities that don’t need exactly that.
I’m not sure if I personally like the idea because it just sounds like journalism disguised under a trendy word and reduced in quality due to time limits and focus on online publishing only. But given that there are plenty of companies in Russia willing to pay people for blogging and other types of generating social media presence on their behalf, it will probably be easier to offer a certificate proving that you have an idea of how to do that instead of quoting the number of personal blog subscribers or Twitter followers – the usual metrics we have relied on and considered valid enough to determine a person’s skills in the online communities. However, it is still hard to grasp how citizen journalism now needs training to be practiced.
I have discussed here quitea few times how limited PayPal is for users in the country I happen to live in, Russia. For those of you who are not aware of the problem, Russia for PayPal is on the list of countries with limitations where users are allowed to send money using their credit cards but they are unable to receive payments or even upload money to their PayPal balance. Obviously, it makes PayPal extremely one-sided and rather impossible to use. This has been a reason for many complaints from users but has never resulted in a change of PayPal’s policy.
If you ask me as someone who knows what internet-based business is and what business in Russia is, I fully understand exactly why PayPal does not hurry to get into Russia. There are so many problems with corruption, legislation and lack of reasonable financial regulations for online businesses that I can easily foresee problems for PayPal which might be discouraging even despite of the booming online business in the country. Which is exactly why despite of all my complaints I never really expected to see PayPal here fully functional any time soon.
So you can probably imagine my surprise when last week I saw a little piece of info on a popular Russian tech blog about PayPal changing policy for a few countries, including Russia and Ukraine, and including us in the list of countries with users able to both send and receive money. Effective September 24. Hopes or no hopes, I was obviously glad and could not help but fantasize about how cool it would be to use my Russian account fully instead of relying only on my corporate US account for all the transactions.
I did not really need it badly but I could see some possible uses and I was glad for all those Russian users who were cheering about the new opportunities involved in not making their international customers deal with things like Moneybookers or Western Union any more.
However, today I have noticed a totally different link: to an explanation of PayPal representative to a Russian news website regarding how inclusion of Russia and Ukraine in the list of unlimited countries was nothing but a mistake on their part. And given how happy people were about the initial news, now they are equally unhappy and do not demonstrate any positive feelings or understanding to such ‘mistakes’ made by huge corporations.
Freelancers who have already promised their current customers PayPal is now a payment option for them, are understandably unhappy. Those who were already considering selling famous Russian products on eBay and planning their businesses accordingly, are more than upset because the opportunity is lost again. However, this is way more believable than the initial piece of news was anyway.
There are voices suspecting that the decision of removing Russia and Ukraine from the already published list of countries was not voluntary for eBay and was supported by a lobby of the Russian e-money providers which have rather strong positions (and support in the government) and must be afraid of a powerful competitor entering the Russian market.
Yet while it sounds perfectly reasonable, I think such decisions are made way before their official announcements so PayPal must have made sure everything was ready before modifying their policy so the explanation about a simple mistake sounds more or less reasonable – even though I can hardly imagine an error of such a scale in a huge corporation people have grown accustomed to trust.
Now if you ask me, it could have really been better to maintain the status quo that Russian users have been living in for years and got totally accustomed to instead of showing us the carrot only to take it away a few days later. Now the number of disappointed potential users is extremely huge and the rapidly growing market may forever remain nothing but an opportunity for PayPal.
One of the largest Russian mobile carriers Megafon and the leading Russian search engine Yandex need to explain quite a lot of things to their users today due to an unspeakable data leak as thousands of SMS messages sent via Megafon website got publicly available in Yandex search results.
A lazy person in me who types on the normal keyboard almost as fast as speaks but spends unusually long time typing on a cell (iPhone makes it better but it is still not perfect and I don’t get enough practice to learn how to do that equally fast) does not really like to use cell phones for text messages so I’ve been using various alternatives whenever I could.
Most of the time I use Skype for text messages: a small investment in Skype balance allows me to send text messages quickly and easily typing them on a normal keyboard instead of doing the same on my cell slowly and for a comparable price. But rather frequently people in Russia use websites of carriers to send messages to their subscribers – this is free of charge and very easy to do. But it can also be equally unsafe as it now turns out.
Due to someone’s inexplicable mistake a huge number of text messages leaked to the web and got available to anyone online in the search results of Yandex for everyone to see the text and the recipient’s phone number. Clicking a search result enables the visitor to see the time and date when the message was sent as well. Currently news agencies report approximately 8 thousand messages available cached in Yandex search results.
A rapid investigation in both companies showed that for some reason the file robots.txt that is required for search engines to understand how a website should be indexed was missing from the section intended to send text messages to Megafon subscribers on the carrier’s website. The omission has been corrected now and the section has been closed for robots while removing such results from search will take some extra time. Additionally there are now numerous screenshots on all sorts of blogs and technology discussion forums where the information will most certainly stay visible for a long time even after it gets removed from Yandex.
But while this explanation seems perfectly reasonable, there is still the question of how it happened that it was only Yandex that has managed to index such pages and store them for subsequent search requests while Google did not index such pages so the text messages can’t be found in this manner using the international search giant.
One theory explaining this is related to a Yandex tool for websites that is intended to count their visitor stats but this theory has not found its confirmation yet. Though in any way I think it won’t be fair to blame any single party for the problem as there must be technical problems on both ends – though we’ll have to wait for official results of the investigation on both sides anyway.
Whatever combination of reasons has actually caused the problem, I think that after this entire situation anyone should be double cautious about sending private SMS messages using any online tool – while there are numerous such free texting tools online, I can’t really trust them now knowing that even the mobile operators receiving text messages for their own subscribers make such ugly mistakes in their online tools. If I can’t even send a text message safely online via the company the recipient trusts, how could I trust any third-party service not to index my private words? And knowing Skype also stores logs for all the conversations and is now owned by a company that is particularly prone to glitches, I think it will now be safer to finally stop being so lazy when it comes to texting and learn to use the cell phone keyboard after all.
I know that it’s not the 1st of April today and we are much closer to May now but I could not help but check the calendar when I’ve read a title in the local news today: a well-known retailer announces availability of iPad 2 in the city where I live.
But the huge (I mean HUUUUGE) irony is that Apple does NOT sell iPad 2 in Russia officially. Only yesterday Russian news agencies reported that official sales of the gadget are further postponed and we should not expect to have them in the country before at least mid-summer.
This means that there is no single officially imported iPad 2 here – only those that have leaked through the border pretending to be intended for personal use. Though everyone understands that the vast majority of those iPads will be sold in various online stores that enjoy the luxury of poor control from the authorities because of the overall immaturity of e-commerce in Russia.
So while we keep on bragging about how Apple’s policy prevents people in Russia from buying gadgets while they are still hot, numerous online stores make profits selling gray iPad 2. I have now checked and the top model (64 GB WiFi + 3G) is offered online for amounts from $1,300 to $2,350 so everyone who is willing to buy a gadget now has enough chances to do so as all the models are offered in tons of online stores.
Yet those stores rarely claim to be fully legal – lack of inspections allows them to do some things that are not acceptable for brick and mortar establishments. But now imagine a large retailer actually launching sales of a gray iPad 2? And even more: advertising on a widely read local news source to drive sales of the gadget!
Now to me it looks like some VIP strip-bar starts advertising services of their dancers as actual prostitutes claiming that they have decided to offer such services despite them being illegal in Russia due to a huge and growing demand from their customers.
Yet this is exactly the explanation from the company’s representatives: they proudly report that availability of iPad 2 in their stores way before it becomes officially available anywhere else in Russia is the result of prompt and efficient actions of their team.
Now exactly what do they mean? That every salesperson gets sent to New York once a month to bring a suitcase of iPads here? Unfortunately I have not heard of any other means of iPad 2 entering Russia other than that otherwise called smuggling. And last time I checked it was a crime here.
Really, Russian love to Apple’s gadgets combined with Apple’s unwillingness to let us use these gadgets here soon after their release can result in the most awkward of situations and I will probably have some more reasons for a good laugh in the middle of an otherwise boring work day.
It is no secret for people living in Russia that waiting for official sales of Apple products to begin in Russia can take too long and really leave you with an outdated version of a gadget once you finally manage to buy it officially – only to realize a few weeks later that a new version is already announced (or shipped) in the US. So you can now either live with what you already have or start longing for a new version right away.
So many people choose a totally different approach: they buy their gadgets abroad when they are still fresh – and far from officially available in Russian stores. I have already mentioned here how awkward the situation is with sales of the most heavily advertised Apple gadgets, including the first iPhone, iPhone 3GS, and the first generation of iPad. Now it is very similar with iPad 2 but this time the crowd of people waiting for them to arrive on the flights from the US is joined by a new group of people that seems to be more agitated than ever before – Russian customs officers.
On Wednesday this week two guys have been stopped in the Moscow airport of Domodedovo smuggling a total of 20 tablet computers. Both of them chose the green corridor claiming they had nothing to declare but for some reason the customs officers decided to check their luggage and cabin baggage as well – and easily found the gadgets.
The total price of goods that can be brought to Russia undeclared should be under EUR 1,500 and this limit has obviously been exceeded by the smugglers. But the surprise is not the fact of someone importing iPads illegally – it is the fact that they are actually caught.
In the days of the first iPad the situation almost got crazy – tickets on the planes from the US to Russia were incredibly hard to get: as soon as the shipping date was announced, many tickets were booked by the guys willing to buy one for $500 and sell it in Moscow for at least $1,000 (though the price of $2,000 did not sound scary at the days either). They were reported to bring 10-30 gadgets each in their suitcases.
The customs officer were eager to meet them at the time as well – they were perfectly aware of the date when Apple began selling the gadget as well so they expected such visitors. However, smuggling was not reported at the time – a share of brand new gadgets or a good amount of money helped solve the problem. But for some reason it stopped working now that people want iPad 2 in Russia way before it is officially available here – which will not happen until at least summer as the retailers claim.
Speaking of my own experience, I have never had to deal with customs in Russia. True, I have never attempted smuggling anything that was not intended for personal use or as gifts. But every time I go abroad I invariably end by bringing a new laptop, a phone or some other gadget – not to mention a pile of clothes that seems to be dirt-cheep in the US compared to Russia. In fact, on flights from the US Russian citizens often look like suitcase traders retailers on flights from Beijing with huge packages of clothes.
Once we had four laptops for the two of us with my husband (we bought 2 of them as replacements for the two that we had with us but obviously we intended to carry out the entire migration process back home). On another occasion on the flight from New York we brought three huge LCD displays (there were three of us at the time) that were not exactly intended for personal use – instead they were for our office. But even in that situation with a huge box for every one of us we still did not attract customs’ attention for some reason.
Also sales of initial iPhone model were a very interesting example – over the long months it took Apple to negotiate the conditions for official sales in Russia, half a million phones reportedly made it to Russia without any special permission from the Cupertino giant. And while everyone knew that, the customs did not seem to report smuggling attempts for some reason.
I don’t know what happened this time or what exactly the guys involved this week did to attract attention from customs officers but if such situations do happen frequently, the flow of illegal gadgets may eventually stop and more people will wait for the official sales to replace their existing iPads with the new model – which is obviously something that Apple retailers should want a lot.
Russian celebrities are not really that different from every other celebrity in the world in their hunt for PR. Logically, many of them quickly jumped on the Twitter bandwagon when they realized the PR power of it. Tina Kandelaki, a TV personality, is one of the most active Twitter users among Russian celebrities as she reports quite a number of her daily events to more than 50 thousand of followers. And today she has had her account hacked.
The irony of the entire story is that the account has not even been stolen by some clever hacker (and we are supposed to have plenty of them in Russia) – it was just a journalist. Allegedly he wanted to get a comment from Tina on a now revived political issue she was involved with a few years ago but when he got none (because of her busy schedule or unwillingness to comment – does not matter), he decided to attract her attention in this pretty unusual manner.
The account is told to have been controlled by the journalist-hacker for a few hours. After managing to log in under the celebrity’s account, he has promptly changed the password to lock the owner out of her account. The only problem was that he has not changed the email linked to the account so Tina has managed to gain control of the account a few hours later. Over the hours, the journalist has allegedly posted 3 updates there regarding her unwillingness to provide a comment.
I personally do not think there is anything specifically extraordinary about someone hacking someone else’s account on a social network but still this issue poses a serious question given Twitter popularity today. It is pretty obvious that whoever manages to hack an account of a person with a significant number of followers will be able to broadcast messages that will be retweeted and eventually reach many-many eyes of the people who trust the person who seems to be their author. And it could have nothing to do with truth at the same time!
It is not clear yet what the reason for the hack was – a terrifically simple password for Tina’s account or some vulnerability of Twitter. I am inclined to blame Tina and her lack of attention in choosing a password because the suspect does not seem to be a hacker experienced in breaking into websites – he is a journalist who could probably only try a few meaningful and simple passwords to get in – and succeeded.
Or of course he could also hire someone way more professional – and in this case it could probably not be Tina’s fault but this scenario at the same time poses interesting questions regarding Twitter security. In fact, I would expect Tina to be pretty careful with her online presence given her obsession with the latest and greatest in technology. For example, she was the first among the Russian people I follow on Twitter to get her hands on an iPad of her own a few days after it became available in the US and sounded extremely excited expecting the flight from New York bringing the gadget to her. I would expect someone with this interest in technology to know what a secure password is and how to use it.
Anyway, the celebrity is now planning to appeal to the police for them to deal with the incident. And whoever actually hacked the account or whatever the reason, it will probably be the first trial about stealing Twitter accounts in Russia (there has already been some on local social networks) and it will be interesting to see if Twitter team chooses to cooperate with Russian law enforcement authorities now.
We in Russia are pretty much different from the rest of the world when it comes to our holidays. For example, we celebrate Christmas on the 7th of January and New Year is way more respected here than Christmas. And I don’t even want to mention the Old New Year that we still celebrate based on the Julian calendar!
In late winter and early spring we have two holidays that have grown into our tradition of congratulating all men and all women – without celebrating the Mother’s and Father’s Day as everyone else seems to be doing. Both our traditions come from the recent Soviet past: the men’s day (February 23) was initially the Soviet Army Day and is now referred to as the Defender of the Fatherland Day while the women’s day on the 8th of March is still known as International Women’s Day though I have not seen any nation outside of the countries of the former Soviet Union even remotely aware of the holiday, let alone celebrating it.
But whatever the names, we do celebrate the holidays enthusiastically congratulating everyone belonging to the appropriate gender and even the boys in kindergartens get their holiday cards from girls though I suspect they could not even theoretically defend our Fatherland if an enemy invaded tomorrow.
Now it is no wonder that corporate environments also serve as places for celebrations as men give flowers to women in March and women cook something special for their colleagues in February. I remember what a nightmare it was working in an IT company where I was the only girl with a dozen guys who I was supposed to make a party for on the 23rd of February every year – it was really a challenge.
I can imagine it must be somewhat similar for the girls in the majority of IT companies in Russia given the proportions of male versus female employees. But of course on the 8th of March those very girls get fully immersed in attention from their male colleagues – as something of a compensation for all the pain in February. Now Google seems to want to slightly change the situation, at least in the company’s own office in Moscow.
To celebrate the Women’s Day, on the 9th of March Moscow Google office will be holding a party for all female programmers who might choose to arrive from Russia or abroad to visit the legendary office (it obviously follows the Google tradition of being far from a usual boring office) and have some fun in the process.
Ladies are invited to fill in a dedicated form specifying various work details and programming language to be accepted. The most ironic thing about the idea is that Google actually describes the plans as ‘gather all the Russian girls who care about programming’. So there are now two questions: do Russian Google HR people overestimate the size of their office or instead underestimate the number of female developers in Russia?
Anyway, since Google chose its own official blog and the most popular multi-author blog for geeks in Russia as a platform to announce the news, it is no wonder that most people to get to know about it were also male – and in the comments they mostly demanded a similar party after the 23rd of February for men as well. And given that in the comments no Google employee even tries to react to negative objections hinting that it all sound far from politically correct, it really looks slightly like discrimination of men and gender-based head hunting.
Yet there are also opposite opinions claiming it is not discrimination but instead a huge favour. Some people joke that Google is making yet another step to make the environment better and improve the team spirit in their office: the predominantly male employees will have some good time communicating to women for a change – and women who share at least some of their interests and even profession. And knowing how secluded life of a programmer can easily get, it is no wonder guys at Google might think that some female voices might be helpful.
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