| May 13, 2008 A look inside Google's Cambridge offices
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(Peter Howe, NECN) - The 900-pound gorilla of the Internet, Google.com, opened an outpost in Cambridge, Massachusetts last year. Now, the it is ready to say and show, a little about what it is doing in New England.
Google had some employees in Greater Boston over the years. Last year, it finally built a full fledged office in its new Kendall Square office. Now, it has 175 people and 60,000 square feet of space.
Key projects include improving Google's YouTube video site, a mobile computing system called Android, extending work to make millions of old books searchable on the web and Google's version of online social networking.
Brian Schmidt started at Google in Mountain View, California four years ago and asked to relocate to Cambridge in January, where he hires ad sales people.
Schmidt: "we work really hard at creating a consistent culture across our offices....We have our pool table and our foosball table which you find if you are in the Google Beijing office of Mountain View or Boston."
They are also trying to look local with their Green Monster mural.
Local techies will say having a 900-pound gorilla come to town makes some of them a little nervous. Newspapers, magazines and TV stations are worrying about losing more ad revenues to Google. Techies wonder "will Google snarf up all the best talent coming out of MIT and other universities? Or continue a trend of big California tech companies devouring promising startups? While
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