Makes sense to me. You run the store on the lower decks, then invite VIPs and clients to the party area on top. You write the entire expense of the barge off on your taxes as "marketing expenses".
The free publicity of "OMG parties going on at the GoogleBoat!" can't hurt either.
Because Maine, of all places, has high-quality and affordable ship-builders with a lot of expertise outfitting these kinds of vessels. Also, it's a banana republic, so it's easier to do things quietly.
Notice that, despite the fact that the local Portland paper (which is admittedly garbage) has tried to cover this in-depth, they haven't been able to get any information whatsoever about what is going on. Indeed, most of what they have reported is basically just ripping things off from SF reporters.
If you want something done and done quietly, it's best to go somewhere you can easily manipulate the local officials.
But why would one barge be in the Treasure Island, while the other one is in Portland ME? If you're targeting SF, Treasure Island makes sense. If you're targeting NYC, a million other places make sense besides Maine, like NJ.
Nobody in Maine is gonna buy a damn Google Glass! :)
It turns out to be relatively cheap (in dollar terms) to move a barge. In time terms, not so much. If you wanted a floating party barge to hit the US coasts, I'd build one on the east coast and one on the west, just to save time going through the canal.
Seems very similar to the Pier 57 container-built floating mall/exhibit space/tourist destination under development in NYC. I wonder if the same developer (Youngwoo & Associates) is involved?
Well, that actually makes more sense to me, I was wondering how exactly they planned to get a datacenter's worth of bandwidth out to a ship. Sure, you could run a cable when you're in port, but the rest of the time your datacenter gets to enjoy satellite networking, yay!
The thing I don't get, is how is a barge a seaworthy vessel? If they are data centers, it doesn't seem like a barge is something that would be seaworthy, sitting out in the ocean for extended periods of time.
> The barges are held under an LLC called By And Large, apparently a reference to Pixar’s “Buy n Large” of WALL·E, which is itself a reference to the phrase “by and large.”
Unless you have a citation for its being used in the East End, to comply with EU labelling requirements you should rather say that it is "Cockney-style rhyme-based language product".
How do you know B has really nothing to do with it in this case? I was assuming that Ars did the research and had some evidence to believe that B was true and thus relevant.
Seems highly unlikely unless the next generation Google Glass is a quantum leap ahead of the existing one.
I'm not a naysayer about the product in general (although I am not a fan of google), but I have used Glass, and it is far from being a usable consumer product.
Iteration will change that. However I have doubt that that have got to that point yet.
If this is article is accurate, then I think the operative words are 'invitation only'. The idea would be to get massive celebrity endorsement to create desire without real consumers actually experiencing the product.
So far Glass has done a great job of making Google not look like a boring copycat. If they can keep this up and launch a great product at some point, it will turn out to be a masterpiece of marketing.
comments like this are probably why it's kept secret. I mean I'm sure you know what it takes to change society as fundamentally as Google glass does/would, and you don't need to wine and dine and woo anyone. Good luck with your approach.
They're at a point where if they need to woo and wine and dine people into accepting their new supposedly revolutionary product on a party boat, then that's just about the biggest sign of a failure ever. Please tell me where the Google Web Search party boat was? The GMail party boat? How about the Android party boat? The Google Chrome party boat? Did they need a YouTube party boat after they bought YouTube or didn't they need a party boat because YouTube party boated before?
If you have a product, make it awesome like any of the above and that should be enough. If the first step to changing society as fundamentally as this is hyped to do, then inviting hipsters and celebrities of the bourgeoisie onto a party boat for some Gatsbying leaves me rather disappointed.
Like someone on Ars Technica said:
> I guess this is what happens when a company has more money than it has uses for and slips into hedonism.
You know what would be cool? If they sailed this thing out to the open sea, and worked together with a company that's laying some transoceanic fibre and tapping into that. And Google might in that way have a data centre in international waters. Would it be useful? Who knows. But it would be a cooler thing to do with a bloody barge than this.
Google search, Gmail, Chrome, and YouTube are all free to use, hence low barrier to adoption. Android devices cost money to buy, but the software is open source and free for OEMs.
Glass, on the other hand, needs to sell buyers on a whole new product category. Also, as a very conspicuous accessory, it needs to make a strong positive fashion statement.
Do I know that a floating expo is the best way to accomplish what Google's setting out to do? No, but I'm not convinced it isn't.
As logicallee was saying, if speculation concerning nautical data centers hadn't percolated, nobody would be upset if/when that proves unfounded.
agreed. things that seem more likely for the barge: sea-steading experiment; offshore incubator for non-citizens; drone testing. but a party barge? i can't see it. just buy some high-floor loft space, no?
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