YouTube will eventually train visitors to think of YouTube as an entertainment destination with a programmable channel guide to make finding premium content easier. “We learned from TV,” added Kyncl said. “You can press a button and relax.

Peter C. Wendell, the founder of Sierra Ventures, has been teaching Entrepreneurship and Venture Capital part time at the school for the past 21 years. He invites 16 venture capitalists to his class to work with his students including Google chairman Eric Schmidt and Intuit co-founder Scott Cook.

Stanford’s Office of Technology Licensing has licensed 8,000 campus-inspired inventions and generated $1.3 billion in royalties for Stanford. There are five thousand companies that “trace their origins to Stanford ideas or to Stanford faculty and students” including EA, Intuit, eBay, Sun, HP, Netflix, Google, Yahoo! and E*Trade.

The article written by Auletta also pointed out that Stanford was close to opening a branch in New York City, but ended up changing their minds. He wrote: “This was not to be a satellite campus. It would be solely an engineering and applied-science school. Hennessy proposed that each department base three-quarters of its faculty in Palo Alto and a quarter on Roosevelt Island. Nor was it to be solely a research facility. (Stanford has one at Peking University, in Beijing.) Faculty members across the country would share videoconference screens, and students in New York would be able to take online classes based in Palo Alto.”

In December 2011, Stanford withdrew their bid to expand because the city had changed the terms of the deal. They wanted a fully operational campus with a complement of faculty sooner than Stanford thought was feasible. Demands from New York City would result in millions of dollars in fines if they project was delayed. The demands came from city lawyers instead of the office of Mayor Bloomberg.

Other companies that have a nonvoting class of shares include Discovery Communications, Viacom, and Comcast. Comcast CEO Brian Roberts controls about one-third of the shareholder voting power while owning a small fraction of its shares. Cable maker Molex, Brown-Forman (known for making Jack Daniels whiskey and other liquors), and home-builder company Lennar have a similar structure.

“Investors need to come to this with their eyes open,” stated Stanford professor Joseph Grundfest. “It’s not a surprise to anyone that when you invest in Google you’re investing in Larry and Sergey. And any good investor also knows that if you’re investing in [soon-to-be public] Facebook you’re investing in [CEO] Mark Zuckerberg, and if you invested in Zynga you invested in [CEO] Mark Pincus,”

If NASA agrees, then NASA would replace the outer panels of Hangar One. The outer panels have been removed since it was discovered that they contained lead paint and asbestos. NASA would remain the owner of the building and they would have the right to rent out areas of Hangar One that was not being used. Google would be able to use two-thirds of Hangar One’s floor space to park their 8 jets.

Hangar One was built in the 1930′s. Hangar One covers 8 acres and the height of the building is 198 feet. The Hangar was intended to house military airships. The building is so tall that fog is known to form in the upper levels of the facility.

[Mercury News]

As an alternative to the proposed legislation, Schmidt recommends regulations based on tracing payments spent at websites that offers illegal materials. Facebook, Google, Yahoo!, Twitter, AOL, eBay and a few other technology companies have sent a letter to lawmakers opposing the bills.

“We are concerned that these measures pose a serious risk to our industry’s continued track record of innovation and job creation, as well as to our nation’s cybersecurity,” stated the companies.

[Reuters]

Support includes information sharing, industry expertise, and access to Google patents for legal purposes. Google is already providing support to Samsung Electronics and HTC Corp. Both of these companies are involved in patent disputes with Apple Inc. Analysts believe that these lawsuits are Apple’s way of attacking Android directly. This belief was supported by a quote in Steve Jobs’ authorized biography that said he wanted to “destroy” Android to become the most popular smartphone platform.

Back in September 2010, Schmidt denied that Apple and Facebook were competitive threats to their business. “My statement was clearly wrong,” said Schmidt. “Apple’s Siri is a significant development—a voice-activated means of accessing answers through iPhones that demonstrates the innovations in search.”

“Google has many strong competitors and we sometimes fail to anticipate the competitive threat posed by new methods of accessing information,” added Schmidt. He pointed out that Google competes against search engines like Bing, Yahoo!, Kayak, Amazon.com, WebMD, eBay, Facebook, Twitter, Apple, and Microsoft.

Interestingly Android chief Andy Rubin dismissed Siri last month. Rubin said that he does not believe that phones should be assistants. Schmidt denied that Google has a dominant position in the smartphone market. He pointed out a study by comScore that Android operates only 34.1% while Apple iOS runs on 43.1%.

“It’s certainly the best performance of a CEO in 50 years,” said Schmidt referring to Jobs. “We’ve all benefited from the tremendous innovation at Apple. And I say this as a very proud former board member at Apple.” Schmidt was on the Apple board of directors when he was CEO of Google, but ended up stepping down in August 2009 as the company’s rivalry intensified.

[Bloomberg]

DoNanza, a platform that helps freelancers easily organize their businesses, has raised $1 million in investments. Investors include AfterDox and Google chairman Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors fund. The funding will help the startup develop their current platform and add a new service for freelance promotion. [TechCrunch]