By Karsten Lemm

On a day in late August, 1998, two Stanford Phd. students managed to make $100,000 with a few mouse clicks by showing their new search technology to Cisco co-founder Andy von Bechtolsheim. The seasoned Silicon Valley executive was so taken with what he saw that he dashed to his Porsche, pulled his check book from the glove compartment and wrote check number 4642 in the name of a company that did not yet exist: Google, Inc.

The two students, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, officially founded their start-up on September 7, 1998. Ten years later, the little search engine that could has become one of the most prominent players on the Internet, dominating its industry like few other companies anywhere. In the U.S., according to comScore, Google enjoys a search market share of over 60 percent – three times as much as its closest competitor, Yahoo. In some countries, like Portugal, Finland and Spain, Google servers handle more than 9 search queries out of 10. Financial success has been equally impressive, with annual sales skyrocketing from a mere $1.5 billion in 2003 to $16.6 billion last year.

As Google is celebrating its tenth birthday, now a company of almost 20,000 people, branching out into ever more services to become a part of every aspect of our digital lives, Ubergizmo is looking back at one of the first interviews the founders ever gave. Back in January of 1999, Ubergizmo contributor Karsten Lemm, a correspondent for the German newsmagazine Stern, knocked on the door of an apartment house in Menlo Park to interview Brin and Page for an article about Silicon Valley and its start-up culture. Next to the doorbell, a sign caught his eyes. In handwritten letters it said, “Google World Headquarters”. Inside, a handful of twenty-somethings were working on their PCs – mostly in the kitchen. The garage, Silicon Valley’s perennial symbol of entrepreneurship, was overflowing with mountain bikes, knick-knack, and empty computer boxes.

In-between low-level programming, schmoozing their investors, and taking out the garbage, the Google founders took some time out to talk about providing a service to the world, making money with helpful advertising, and wanting to be on par with Yahoo and Amazon. What follows are edited excerpts of their conversation with Karsten, who stopped smiling about the grandiose sign by the doorbell years ago.

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Nokia blames a weak global economy for the revision to their third-quarter outlook. The news sent Nokia shares tumbling 11% (as of 1443 GMT), leaving the world’s largest cellphone manufacturer trading at a three-year low.

On the upside, Nokia says that it expects to see its full-year 2008 market share increasing ever so slightly. At the end of the day, it’s all about how a company fairs in the long-term. Quarterly financial wobbles can be indicators of underlying corporate problems, but in Nokia’s case, we’ll see the Finns pull through.

[Via: Forbes]

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Related Articles at IntoMobile:

• Gartner: LG overtakes Sony Ericsson in global handset market share
• Nokia owns 79% of the GSM market share in India
• Nokia posts Q2 2008 profit increase, takes 40% market share
• Palm Centro boosts Palm marketshare, RIM sees BlackBerry market share rise, Apple loses in iPhone market
• Nokia confident it will maintain market share in China

Long story short: "In many of the patients, one neuron responded every time they saw a particular video," wrote Emma Byrne in yesterday's Financial Times about a new study published online today in the journal Science.

To get you warmed up for the heavy stuff to come, here's Benedict Carey's September 4, 2008 New York Times front page story on the findings.

For the Brain, Remembering Is Like Reliving

Scientists have for the first time recorded individual brain cells in the act of summoning a spontaneous memory, revealing not only where a remembered experience is registered but also, in part, how the brain is able to recreate it.

The recordings, taken from the brains of epilepsy patients being prepared for surgery, demonstrate that these spontaneous memories reside in some of the same neurons that fired most furiously when the recalled event had been experienced. Researchers had long theorized as much but until now had only indirect evidence.

Experts said the study had all but closed the case: For the brain, remembering is a lot like doing (at least in the short term, as the research says nothing about more distant memories).

The experiment, being reported Friday in the journal Science, is likely to open a new avenue in the investigation of Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia, some experts said, as well as help explain how some memories seemingly come out of nowhere. The researchers were even able to identify specific memories in subjects a second or two before the people themselves reported having them.

“This is what I would call a foundational finding,” said Michael J. Kahana, a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, who was not involved in the research. “I cannot think of any recent study that’s comparable.

“It’s a really central piece of the memory puzzle and an important step in helping us fill in the detail of what exactly is happening when the brain performs this mental time travel” of summoning past experiences.

The new study moved beyond most previous memory research in that it focused not on recognition or recollection of specific symbols but on free recall — whatever popped into people’s heads when, in this case, they were asked to remember short film clips they had just seen.

This ability to richly reconstitute past experience often quickly deteriorates in people with Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia, and it is fundamental to so-called episodic memory — the catalog of vignettes that together form our remembered past.

In the study, a team of American and Israeli researchers threaded tiny electrodes into the brains of 13 people with severe epilepsy. The electrode implants are standard procedure in such cases, allowing doctors to pinpoint the location of the mini-storms of brain activity that cause epileptic seizures.

The patients watched a series of 5- to 10-second film clips, some from popular television shows like “Seinfeld” and others depicting animals or landmarks like the Eiffel Tower. The researchers recorded the firing activity of about 100 neurons per person; the recorded neurons were concentrated in and around the hippocampus, a sliver of tissue deep in the brain known to be critical to forming memories.

In each person, the researchers identified single cells that became highly active during some videos and quiet during others. More than half the recorded cells hummed with activity in response to at least one film clip; many of them also responded weakly to others.

After briefly distracting the patients, the researchers then asked them to think about the clips for a minute and to report “what comes to mind.” The patients remembered almost all of the clips. And when they recalled a specific one — say, a clip of Homer Simpson — the same cells that had been active during the Homer clip reignited. In fact, the cells became active a second or two before people were conscious of the memory, which signaled to researchers the memory to come.

“It’s astounding to see this in a single trial; the phenomenon is strong, and we were listening in the right place,” said the senior author, Dr. Itzhak Fried, a professor of neurosurgery at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the University of Tel Aviv.

His co-authors were Hagar Gelbard-Sagiv, Michal Harel and Rafael Malach of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, and Roy Mukamel, of U.C.L.A.

Dr. Fried said in a phone interview that the single neurons recorded firing most furiously during the film clips were not acting on their own; they were, like all such cells, part of a circuit responding to the videos, including thousands, perhaps millions, of other cells.

In studies of rodents, including a paper that will also appear Friday in the journal Science, neuroscientists have shown that special cells in the hippocampus are sensitive to location, activating when the animal passes a certain spot in a maze. The firing pattern of these cells forms the animals’ spatial memory and can predict which way the animal will turn, even if it makes a wrong move.

Some scientists argue that as humans evolved, these same cells adapted to register a longer list of elements — including possibly sounds, smells, time of day and chronology — when an experience occurred in relation to others.

Single-cell recordings cannot capture the entire array of circuitry involved in memory, which may be widely distributed beyond the hippocampus area, experts said. And as time passes, memories are consolidated, submerged, perhaps retooled and often entirely reshaped when retrieved later.

Though it did not address this longer-term process, the new study suggests that at least some of the neurons that fire when a distant memory comes to mind are those that were most active back when it happened, however long ago that was.

“The exciting thing about this,” said Dr. Kahana, the University of Pennsylvania professor, “is that it gives us direct biological evidence of what before was almost entirely theoretical.”

Here's the abstract of the original report by Fried et al, as published September 5, 2008 in the journal Science.

Internally Generated Reactivation of Single Neurons in Human Hippocampus During Free Recall

The emergence of memory, a trace of things past, into human consciousness is one of the greatest mysteries of the human mind. Whereas the neuronal basis of recognition memory can be probed experimentally in human and nonhuman primates, the study of free recall requires that the mind declare the occurrence of a recalled memory (an event intrinsic to the organism and invisible to an observer). Here, we report the activity of single neurons in the human hippocampus and surrounding areas when subjects first view television episodes consisting of audiovisual sequences and again later when they freely recall these episodes. A subset of these neurons exhibited selective firing, which often persisted throughout and following specific episodes for as long as 12 seconds. Verbal reports of memories of these specific episodes at the time of free recall were preceded by selective reactivation of the same hippocampal and entorhinal cortex neurons. We suggest that this reactivation is an internally generated neuronal correlate of the subjective experience of spontaneous emergence of human recollection.

The abstract of the Science paper (cited above) reporting findings in rodent brains follows.

Internally Generated Cell Assembly Sequences in the Rat Hippocampus

A long-standing conjecture in neuroscience is that aspects of cognition depend on the brain's ability to self-generate sequential neuronal activity. We found that reliably and continually changing cell assemblies in the rat hippocampus appeared not only during spatial navigation but also in the absence of changing environmental or body-derived inputs. During the delay period of a memory task, each moment in time was characterized by the activity of a particular assembly of neurons. Identical initial conditions triggered a similar assembly sequence, whereas different conditions gave rise to different sequences, thereby predicting behavioral choices, including errors. Such sequences were not formed in control (nonmemory) tasks. We hypothesize that neuronal representations, evolved for encoding distance in spatial navigation, also support episodic recall and the planning of action sequences.

PANASONIC PREVIEWS LARGER SIZE INTERNET ENABLED VIERA PLASMAS AT 2008 CEDIA CONVENTION

Industry Leader Panasonic Premieres 58-inch And 65-inch VIERA Plasma Displays to Custom Installers

Denver, CO (September 3, 2008) – Panasonic Corporation of North America, the principal U.S. subsidiary of Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd. (NYSE:MC), the industry leader in high definition and Plasma televison, today introduced attendees to the 2008 CEDIA convention to the latest additions in the company’s already acclaimed internet enabled Plasma line, the PZ850 series. Joining the TH-50PZ850 and the TH-46PZ850, the industry’s first internet enabled TVs, are the 58-inch class (58-inches measured diagonally) and the TH-65PZ850 class (64.7-inches measured diagonally), giving Panasonic a wide breadth of screen sizes in the flagship series of high performance Plasma TVs. Building upon the market and critical success of Panasonic’s previous Plasma models, the 2008 PZ850 series includes a number of step-up features that will further strengthen Panasonic’s leadership position.

The introduction of the IP enabled televisions, a technology that provides access to on-line content directly from the televison with VIERA CAST™ technology, is one of many advances found in the PZ850 line. VIERA CAST is a revolutionary new feature that streams web content directly to your VIERA HDTV without the need for an external box or a PC. The consumer can access the unlimited YouTube™ library, share digital photos from Picasa™ Web Albums with friends and family, get local weather updates and gain access to financial data from Bloomberg. There is no fee for VIERA Cast and the feature automatically updates itself as new web content becomes available.

“We’re very excited about the technological advances that have been incorporated into VIERA’s PZ850 series and the bigger screen sizes should prove extremely beneficial to both Panasonic and the CEDIA membership.,” said Bob Perry, Senior Vice President, Panasonic Display Products Company. “The 58-inch and 65-inch now stand beside their smaller brethren to provide the installer with a number of screen size options. IPTV in particular is a technology that by providing access to on-line content directly from the TV, allows the consumer to optimize his or her options and use the VIERA Plasma for more than entertainment. Now the consumer has a large screen TV that is also the source of an endless stream of internet information.”

The state-of-the-art technology that is inherent in the PZ850 series provides the consumer with detailed images, high moving-picture resolution, advanced networking and excellent compatibility with other AV devices. The PZ850 series features a Pro Setting Menu, allowing the user to access professional calibration software; an improved native resolution contrast ratio of 30,000:1 and a dynamic ratio of 1,000,000:1; Digital Cinema Color Re-Mastering; 24p native reproduction; Game Mode; an SD memory Card slot; RS-232C connection; four HDMI connections; increased luminous efficiency; lead free panels; 100,000 hours to half brightness and a PC input. The 850 series further expands the capabilities of the SD Card feature by utilizing the H.264 codec to display high definition video recorded on a HD camcorder equipped with the H.264 codec.

Recognizing the growing use of Plasma HD televisions in the gaming world, Panasonic created the Game Mode, which minimizes the time lag when displaying game images on the Plasma screen. The Mode synchronizes the response of the game image to the player’s operation, thereby producing an extremely clear image with no motion artifacts.

Digital Cinema Color Re-Mastering is a value added technology that creates a wide color gamut covering 120% of the conventional HDTV color standard , enabling VIERA displays to reproduce the essential colors for viewing movies. 24p native reproduction, which negates the need for 3:2 pulldown, resulting in a smoother picture, is another feature that provides the best possible viewing experience.

Also: The quick-glance spec sheet we ran in May still appears to be valid.