Many may have missed a hidden nod to Google’s fictionalized and absurd brother, “Hooli” from HBO’s Silicon Valley within yesterday’s announcement from Google about Alphabet — a new parent company which will separate its revenue-making search engine business from its other more moonshot projects.
It took eagle eyed Alex Weprin, an editor at POLITICO, to find a link attached to a period in Larry Page’s 1,000 word letter that accompanied the announcement. The link leads to hooli.xyz, a page for the experimental division of the fictional Hooli company. Google’s announcement page: abc.xyz, was a nod in itself, using the “xyz” domain extension to mimick the “HooliXYZ — experimental division.”
Google’s sci-fi like projects will now fall under the remit of “X Lab,” and these include drone delivery, self-driving cars and other stuff that will make you worry for your grandparents’ state of mind. The fictional Hooli’s dream factory also includes these projects, along with a space elevator, a cure for AIDS, and a non-polluting engine that runs on the AIDS virus.
So, Larry Page and Google are the a multi-hundred billion dollar company that can poke fun at themselves, and Silicon Valley gets some great exposure. Win-win. Still, there’s no way you’d get me in a “self-driving” car.