The benefits may be out-of-this-world, but employees don’t last long at the tech giants

According to Business Insider, employees at the 10 biggest companies in tech stay for an average of 1.76 years. Most interesting points:

  • Uber has the worst record. Their average employee stays only 1.23 years.
  • Facebook has the best out of the 10. Their average is 2.02 years.
  • The 9th largest tech company is Snap Inc. Am I the only one who doesn’t even know what that is?!?

Forbes is weighing in on this topic, too. Apparently, government is the industry in which keep people their jobs the longest, at an average of 18.6 months. Still surprising, right? Apparently, the average time anyone in the U.S. stays in any job is 15 months! The top five:

  1. Government (18.6 months)
  2. Aerospace and defense (17.3 months)
  3. Media (16.9 months)
  4. Information technology (16.8 months)
  5. Telecommunications (16.5 months)

Software programmers / computer engineers don’t make the top 21 industries on the list.

Amazon’s ‘1-Click’ checkout was patented, and it’s about to expire

Key points:

  • The “1-Click” was patented by Amazon in 1997. So the rights run out on Sept. 11, 2017.
  • The code isn’t special. But Amazon beat everyone to the patent office, so no one else has been able to use it.
  • Amazon didn’t share well. They only licensed the “1-Click” to one company: Apple. No one seems to know what they paid, but the patent was valued at $2.4 billion.
  • Other companies are ready to pounce. Google, for one.

 

Is ‘Google’ just a company or is it a verb

This is a weird story about a guy who operates adult websites buying up 763 domain names that included the word “google” back in 2012. Google didn’t like that, so they filed a cybersquatting complaint.

The counter-argument? “Google” is a generic word for searching. And therefore, no copyright infringement was committed.

Google won in two courts, but the guy appealed to the US high court. It could take several months for the Supreme Court to rule on whether or not “google” is indeed common enough to be unworthy of its trademark protection.

This has happened to other well-known brands, like thermos, aspirin, and videotape. It will be interesting to see if we can start legally using little-g google…

And just for your entertainment…

One-thousand-sixty-nine robots named Dobi broke a Guinness World Record for the “most robots dancing simultaneously” in China.

The robots lined up to perform the dance, but a few fell over and weren’t included in the final count.

The robots cost $230 each.