–
–
Will you offer us a hand? Every gift, regardless of size, fuels our future.
Your critical contribution enables us to maintain our independence from shareholders or wealthy owners, allowing us to keep up reporting without bias. It means we can continue to make Jewish Business News available to everyone.
You can support us for as little as $1 via PayPal at [email protected].
Thank you.
People around the world were shocked this week to discover a graphic of the Google Android robot peeing on an Apple logo in Google maps this week. This happened as the company reported strong revenues for Q1 2015 which led to a rise in its share price.
If you did a search on Google Maps for the northern Pakistani town of Rawalpindi then you would have seen the above image. Was this a prank played by some playful Google workers? Or was it done by a hacker?
In either case the American company may have caused an international incident. Pakistanis are already angry at America for using their country as a base of operations against their co-religionists. Then there are all of those drone strikes, some of which were carried out in Pakistan’s own territory.
Google later claimed that the graphic must have been added by a mischievous user of its Mapmaker tool. The company says that it is working to fix the problem. A spokesman told Mashable, “Even though edits are moderated, occasionally the odd inaccurate or cheeky edit may slip through our system. We’ve been made aware of the issue and are working on getting it removed.”
Meanwhile Google reported revenue of $17.3 billion for the first quarter of 2015, up 12% from $15.4 billion a year earlier. Its advertising revenue also jumped 14%, to $13.9 billion and its earnings per share was $6.57.
The company’s Net income rose to $3.59 billion ($5.20 per share) from $3.45 billion ($5.04 per share).
Wall Street analysts, however, had expected even higher earnings. But Google cited the weakened Euro as a reason for lower than expected earnings in Dollars.
“Excluding the net impact of foreign currency headwinds, revenue grew a healthy 17 percent year on year, ” Google Chief Financial Officer Patrick Pichette said in a statement.
