Chapter 259 A Groundbreaking Masterpiece
Riding a bicycle, I passed the San Francisco Public Library, passed through the Civic Center, passed Union Square, turned onto Fourth Street, and soon arrived at a 9-story office building.
When Andy Rubin arrived at the gate of the office building, a group of people riding bicycles and wearing very casual clothes entered the gate one after another. Many of them greeted him with a smile when they saw him.
Some people say that bicycles are the best means of transportation in San Francisco, and Andy Rubin believes that.
In this 9-story office building, there are a total of 12 Internet companies. This does not include Andy Rubin’s technology company called Ye Ye Technology, which was founded less than half a year ago, and they It directly occupies all the office floors on the fifth and sixth floors.
This is a very bold and ambitious company!
I believe everyone can see this as soon as they walk into Ye Ye Technology, because this company has excellent decoration layout, facilities and benefits, such as renting houses for employees, arranging buses to and from get off work, and We have opened a restaurant that is independent of the office building, hired professional chefs, etc.
People who have worked in Silicon Valley for many years are very good at being able to see the company owner's investment and ambition in the company from the details. For Andy Rubin, a veteran of Silicon Valley, Yee Technology Company also embodies this very well.
Andy Rubin is not a person who has never seen the world. On the contrary, he has worked for two major companies, Microsoft and Apple, and he has also started his own business and achieved outstanding results. Among them, he is most proud of He gave a speech in an engineering class at Stanford University, showing an Internet mobile phone developed by his company.
That was in 2002. The two founders of Google, which was already popular at the time, both attended the speech and praised his Internet mobile phone concept. However, they were busy with the development of Google and did not go further. in-depth conversation.
Andy Rubin has always regarded himself as an engineer and is not good at management. This is why he left the company he founded called Danger. Because the partners generally value performance, the directors cannot accept the dominance of a person who does not know how to operate. The position of CEO affects everyone's fortune.
Later, he tried to develop a digital camera, but failed. So in 2003, when he was at a loss, someone found him, had an in-depth communication with him, and expressed his willingness to provide opportunities and hire him with a high salary. He came to use his strengths and develop an Internet smart phone system.
This mobile phone system has a name that Andy Rubin can't refuse, Android!
Ye Ye Technology is a company that has no reputation in San Francisco or Silicon Valley, but Andy Rubin has learned that the boss behind this technology company is named Ye Qiu, who is from mainland China, and behind Ye Qiu is China. The well-known large consortium Huangtian Group has an initial investment amount of more than 100 million US dollars.
The person who came to communicate with Andy Rubin in person was Chen Zhong, CEO of Huangtian Group, but the Chinese said that he was just relaying some of Ye Qiu's ideas, but those ideas made Andy Rubin... Rubin's blood boiled.
The reason is very simple. Ye Qiu's ambition is so great that it is unimaginable!
I still remember what Chen Zhong said, "If Android succeeds, one day it will appear in every corner of the world. It will appear in all intelligent appliances, and it will change the world!"
Isn't this the dream that Andy Rubin has had since joining Apple and then joining Microsoft?
Ye Qiu gave him a lot of freedom. In addition to controlling the finances and guiding the direction of research and development, everything else was handed over to Andy Rubin. Moreover, Ye Qiu also rapidly developed like crazy in less than half a year. It has been expanding rapidly from only a dozen people before to nearly 600 employees now. This is already considered a medium-sized company in Silicon Valley.
Among these 600 people, they were divided into several different project teams. Among them, Chen Zhong hired a very young college student from his alma mater Harvard University named Mark Zuckerberg to write a social network war. It was officially launched in early 2004. Speaking of which, this kid is quite crazy. I heard that he directly hacked Harvard University's database and put all the students' photos on his website. It is indeed ruthless.
However, this also caused the website called Facebook to become popular overnight and spread widely on the campus of Harvard University. Now the number of registrations is rising rapidly, and the number of employees and investment in this group are also constantly increasing. The prospects are very promising.
In addition, there is a group that is also making social software, but it is called Twitter, a kind of microblog, and there is also a group of people who are making an online video website called Youtube. These two projects and several other projects The game and software development teams are still in preparation and are expected to be launched in the near future.
The Android team seems to be separate from these groups, but there is still some connection and communication in the bones. This makes Andy Rubin easily think that the boss behind the scenes named Ye Qiu seems to be planning a big plan. Bureau.
Just after Christmas in 2003, the company directly sent a CEO, an incredibly beautiful woman, but very capable. After she got familiar with the business, she quickly managed all the big and small things of the company in an orderly manner. Before she came to San Francisco, she had already acquired a small company called Fingerworks at Trinidad and Tobago University and merged all the technical personnel of this company into the Android team.
This company has many patented multi-touch technologies, and they have already made many substantial touch products, such as their touch keyboards, but their influence is obviously not great, so the acquisition price is also very low, but the joining of these talents has solved many of Andy Rubin's previous doubts.
As early as when Chen Zhong communicated with Andy Rubin, he had mentioned that the Android system must be based on full touch design, but Andy Rubin felt that the full touch design market had not yet taken shape. He was targeting keyboard phones such as BlackBerry, adding Internet functions such as receiving emails and browsing web pages.
Because of this controversy, Andy Rubin almost resigned, but now there is a multi-touch team, Andy Rubin can't help but feel ashamed of his previous short-sightedness, because Westerman's multi-touch can realize multi-point control on the touchpad, such as zooming in, zooming out and turning pages, as well as some gesture control.
After obtaining the technology and talents of Fingerworks, the company immediately invested funds for further research and development, preparing to go further on the touchpad and realize the control on the touch screen. According to the technical team, it only takes time to achieve this difficulty, and it is entirely possible to achieve it, and the company is already preparing to apply for patents accordingly.
At the same time, the beautiful CEO named Eliza Moon has been in frequent contact with the two major US telecom operators AT&T and Verizon recently, and it is said that a breakthrough has been made.
Combining all of this, Andy Rubin's extremely smart and bright head flashed a glimmer of enlightenment, that is, Leaf Technology is developing an Internet smartphone that uses multiple technologies such as multi-touch, and if it succeeds, it will undoubtedly be the first smartphone to use such technology.
In less than half a year, the company's scale and projects have been expanding rapidly. Now it is still recruiting all kinds of software and hardware talents every day, and various experimental projects are invested and supported without hesitation. Just to ensure that the antenna can operate efficiently, the company has agreed to spend more than two million US dollars to build a special laboratory.
And there are so many parts and key technologies in the whole mobile phone, and the investment in various research and development is also very amazing.
The CEO named Eliza Moon said before that more than 100 million US dollars is only the initial investment, and it will continue to make additional investments in the future to reassure everyone and strive to produce a prototype in the shortest time.
Thinking of this, standing at the gate of the ground floor of the company's office building, Andy Rubin couldn't help but take a deep breath and walked into the company's door. Like all the employees of the company, he is full of confidence and hope for the future.
Just imagine, with such a large investment, this company is indeed worth the employees' expectations.
Of course, no one knows what the future will be like. The multi-touch full-touch screen smartphone is too advanced, almost unprecedented. Whether it can be accepted is also something that no one knows. If it fails to be developed successfully, who knows what the future prospects of the company will be?
I walked into the gate, passed the security front desk, put my bicycle away, and took the elevator directly to the fifth floor.
Although two floors were reserved, the fifth floor was the office building, and the sixth floor was the laboratory and the company's hardware research and development room.
There was no receptionist. There was only a green leaf specially designed by the company's employees at the entrance of the office, which looked very fashionable and modern. This represents the company's philosophy, environmentally friendly and low-carbon advanced technology.
As the company's largest project, the Android team has the most software and hardware technical talents, with a total of more than 400 people. Andy Rubin is the company's chief engineer, responsible for the overall coordination of research and development matters and talent recruitment. To this end, he used his experience working at Microsoft and Apple to dig up some very outstanding professional talents at high salaries.
"Andy, Miss Moon just came to see you!" As he approached the office, an employee in charge of animation design reminded.
He came from Apple and was good at animation design. According to Ye Qiu's previous requirements, the page turning effect brought by multi-touch and every connection in the mobile phone operating system should be displayed with animation as much as possible to avoid the illusion of jamming and abruptness. This is also one of the reasons why many people think that Android is very stuck in Ye Qiu's previous life.
In fact, there are many reasons why Android is not smooth enough, such as the connection is too abrupt, and the system was originally designed for keyboard phones, which also caused some problems. In addition, Android was widely used in mobile phones with poor hardware in the early stage, such as some copycat phones, which gave people a feeling of not being smooth enough.
In the previous life, some people believed that Android was developed based on JAVA, which caused the Android system to be not smooth. This is also relatively speaking, because the difference of a few tenths of a second does not make any difference in user experience, but the high portability brought by JAVA is irreplaceable. For example, Android can be applied to different hardware mobile phones, and it can also be applied to tablets, flat-screen TVs, etc.
Ye Qiu remembered that there was a technical expert who even installed all the appliances with displays in his home into Android, which showed that this system has unparalleled cross-platform portability.
Another important point is that the C language is a Microsoft patent, so the cost goes without saying. More importantly, JAVA is the most popular design language in the world, the most widely used, and the lowest entry barrier. It may not be as good as C language in terms of energy consumption, but it has huge advantages in many aspects.
For example, it may take half a year or even a year to design a game using C language, but it can be tested within 3 months using JAVA. Moreover, JAVA has more programmers and lower threshold, which is a great convenience. Promotion.
With the improvement of hardware, the impact of JAVA can be ignored, but so many advantages are irreplaceable.
Apple's mobile phone project has not yet started, and Jobs is even preparing to cooperate with Motorola, so Ye Qiu wants to start first, hoping to seize the market before Apple's mobile phone comes out, and he has already obtained the multi-touch patent. There is no doubt that It has already seized the opportunity. If it succeeds, Ye Zi Technology will bring extremely generous returns to Ye Qiu in the future.
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Andy Rubin walked into Eliza Moon's office and saw this stunning beauty who usually looked as cold and arrogant as an iceberg. At this moment, she was having an affair with a young black-haired man with yellow skin. He was sitting there talking and laughing, which surprised him because he didn't know who the other person was.
"You're here, Andy!" Eliza stood up and said with a smile, "Let me introduce you to Ye Qiu, the boss of Ye Zi Technology!"
Andy Rubin was a little surprised. He was too young, really too young, and Ye Qiu felt familiar to him, as if he had seen him somewhere before, but he couldn't remember it for the moment.
"Hello, Andy!" Ye Qiu smiled and stretched out his hand.
"Hello, boss!" Andy Rubin was a little reserved. Like all technical geeks, he was not good at speaking and relied on his hands to express his opinions.
"How's it going? I heard that you still think you should add a keyboard, right?" Ye Qiu knew something about him and went straight to the point.
Andy Rubin nodded, "Yes, although I have seen Westerman's multi-touch demonstration, and I admit that this is indeed an excellent innovation, I am still worried that customers will not be able to adapt to such changes. , and you know, we've always been concerned about touch screen materials."
Ye Qiu smiled after hearing this. The importance of touch screen materials to a touch screen mobile phone is self-evident, so he does not doubt Andy Rubin's stubbornness at all. And it is obvious that Andy Rubin will always treat BlackBerry It's not good to think of yourself as your imaginary enemy.
"Andy, regarding the material issue of the touch screen, I believe you can rest assured, because I have contacted Corning Company in New York yesterday. They will provide us with gorilla glass within six months. This glass is very strong and durable. and seems to be born for touch.”
"Currently, this glass Corning Company has discontinued production, because it was a product in the 1960s and there is not much market for it, but they promised to make samples as soon as possible to help us develop." Eliza Moon smiled and said the latest results.
After Eliza finished speaking, Ye Qiu continued: "One of the important reasons why I have always requested full touch is that I feel that physical keyboards will limit the applications of smartphones. Full touch can maximize the use of smartphones." Unleash innovation to the maximum extent, think about it, you can control the phone with your fingers, this will make users love it!"
"But how to solve many controls? For example, when dialing, how to solve the numeric keyboard, and when you want to send messages or write things, how to solve the typing keyboard?" Andy Rubin couldn't turn around for a while.
Ye Qiu explained with a smile, "It's very simple. We specially designed a dialing icon on the screen. If you want to make a call, just click on the icon and the dialing interface will pop up to display the dialing number keys. As for sending messages and writing things, this is also Simple, the system is set to bring up the typing keyboard at this time.”
"The so-called intelligence means that when the user performs each specific activity, there are corresponding functions and buttons to meet the user's needs. When the user does not need it, these buttons and keyboards will automatically disappear, such as watching videos on a mobile phone. Video, then all the buttons can be made disappear so as not to affect the user’s use.”
After Andy Rubin listened, he took a few minutes to digest it, and then asked some questions. For example, he was worried about putting his cell phone in his pocket and holding it in his hand, and he would accidentally operate it by mistake. Ye Qiu gave him the countermeasures. It adopts a sliding unlock function similar to that of previous Android or Ai Feng, as well as a one-click screen lock function.
And when the phone is not needed, it can also be put into sleep mode to save energy consumption.
In addition, Ye Qiu also gave many of his own ideas, such as adding sensors near the microphone of the mobile phone to prevent users from accidentally operating the touch screen when answering calls, etc.
Ye Qiu gave answers to Andy Rubin's doubts one by one.
In his previous life, Ye Qiu had used many Android phones and had refreshed them countless times. He knew everything about the Android system. He also had more than a year of experience using Apple phones, so he was familiar with the use of both phones. and details are very clear.
This time, Ye Qiu planned to develop a smart phone by himself. He spent a lot of money. In Silicon Valley, where talents are everywhere, he could recruit so many software and hardware, as well as various professional talents in such a short time. It would be impossible to do it in other places.
Andy Rubin had many doubts, and Ye Qiu's answers were very detailed. From the icon design of the phone, to the appearance design of the phone, to the various functions of the phone, and the open source model open to third parties, Ye Qiu gave the most detailed answers, almost wanting to tell Andy Rubin everything he knew.
The latter has signed a work contract with Yezi Technology. Ye Qiu is not worried that he will leave the company, and he can't always monitor the progress of the company. Therefore, he needs someone who is familiar with and understands his ideas. Andy Rubin is undoubtedly the most suitable candidate.
The final result was that Ye Qiu took out a lot of Android and Apple phones that he had studied and understood in his previous life, as well as tablet computers, smart TVs, and a lot of other high-tech smart products that are not yet available. This greatly shocked Andy Rubin.
When dealing with such professional top students, you have to act more talented than them, so that you can shock them.