Google boldly goes for Trekkies

2006-08-18 09:45

San Francisco - Google duplicated the helm of the fictional Starship Enterprise and embarked on a mission in Las Vegas to recruit engineers, at a gathering on Thursday of Star Trek devotees.

More than 10 000 fans of the Star Trek franchise that began with a television series debut in September of 1966 were expected by organisers to make pilgrimages to the official annual convention at the Las Vegas Hilton.

Google Earth chief technologist Michael Jones, who quipped that his job was to make certain Google's mapping service was "the warp drive of computer graphics", commanded a booth modelled after the Enterprise bridge.

"You sit in the captain's chair and the main screen is Google Earth," Jones said. "It is cool. People go to their house, China, Singapore, The Netherlands...it has been fun."

Google deemed the convention a prime place to search for talent because the fans tend to be tech-savvy, passionate, and in tune with the show's theme of expanding the boundaries of human accomplishment, according to Jones.

"It is the spirit of getting to a distant planet, solving a problem and coming home - making the universe a smaller place," Jones said.

Jones, 46, spoke of watching Star Trek as a child and being inspired by the "tricorders" characters "beamed" onto strange planets would use to quickly learn its composition, atmosphere and life forms.

"It was the notion that you could be smart about something you couldn't quite see, but was around the corner," Jones said.

'We are people with passion'

"Through Google Earth, when you land at your Paris hotel you can see the Champs de Lysee and things to do. You get a sense of the planet."

Attending the convention was also depicted by Google as an opportunity to let people meet some of the humans behind the globally renowned internet search engine.

"It is good for us to get out and let people see that we are not insufferably arrogant or unapproachably brilliant," Jones said. "We are people with passion."

The Google clan felt a kindred spirit with Star Trek fans that unabashedly demonstrated devotion by dressing up as favourite characters, stocking up on mementos, and seeking autographs from actors.

In a lighthearted blog entry, Google technical writer Tom Galloway referred to the television show's Captain James T Kirk as an early blogger due to the "captain's log" he narrated in episodes.

The crew's flip-open communicators could be seen as predecessors to popular cellphone models, according to Galloway.

"And the crew was constantly asking the ship's computer for information...sort of like Google," Galloway wrote.

"Scotty and Spock, the engineer and the scientist, certainly were childhood inspirations to many Googlers. Now we've (somewhat) grown up, and often work on things that seem right out of the show."

- AFP