Sachin Tendulkar

Sachin Tendulkar

Early years and personal life


Tendulkar was born in Bombay (now Mumbai). His father, Ramesh Tendulkar, a Marathi novelist, named Tendulkar after his favourite music director, Sachin Dev Burman. Tendulkar's elder brother Ajit encouraged him to play cricket. Tendulkar has two other siblings: a brother Nitin, and sister Savita.



Tendulkar attended Sharadashram Vidyamandir (High School),[1] where he began his cricketing career under the guidance of his coach and mentor, Ramakant Achrekar. During his school days he attended the MRF Pace Foundation to train as a fast bowler, but Australian fast bowler Dennis Lillee, who took a world record 355 Test wickets, was unimpressed, suggesting that Tendulkar focus on his batting instead.[20]



When he was young, Tendulkar would practice for hours on end in the nets. If he became exhausted, Achrekar would put a one-Rupee-coin on the top of the stumps, and the bowler who dismissed Tendulkar would get the coin. If Tendulkar passed the whole session without getting dismissed, the coach would give him the coin. Tendulkar now considers the 13 coins he won then as some of his most prized possessions.[21]



While at school, he developed a reputation as a child prodigy. He had become a common conversation point in Mumbai circles, where there were suggestions already that he would become one of the greats. His season in 1988 was extraordinary, with Tendulkar scoring a century in every innings he played. He was involved in an unbroken 664-run partnership in a Lord Harris Shield inter-school game in 1988 with friend and team mate Vinod Kambli, who would also go on to represent India. The destructive pair reduced one bowler to tears and made the rest of the opposition unwilling to continue the game. Tendulkar scored 326* in this innings and scored over a thousand runs in the tournament.[22] This was a record partnership in any form of cricket until 2006, when it was broken by two under-13 batsmen in a match held at Hyderabad in India.



When he was 14, Indian batting legend Sunil Gavaskar gave him a pair of his own ultra light pads. "It was the greatest source of encouragement for me," he said nearly 20 years later after surpassing Gavaskar's world record of 34 Test centuries.[23] On 24 May 1995,[24] Sachin Tendulkar married Anjali, a paediatrician and daughter of Gujarati industrialist Anand Mehta. They have two children, Sara (born 12 October 1997), and Arjun (born 24 September 1999).[25]



Tendulkar sponsors 200 underprivileged children every year through Apnalaya, a Mumbai-based NGO associated with his mother-in-law, Annabel Mehta.[26]



Early domestic career

On 11 December 1988, aged just 15 years and 232 days, Tendulkar scored 100 not out in his debut first-class match for Bombay against Gujarat, making him the youngest Indian to score a century on first-class debut. He followed this by scoring a century in his first Deodhar and Duleep Trophy.[27] He was picked by the Mumbai captain Dilip Vengsarkar after seeing him negotiate Kapil Dev in the nets,[1] and finished the season as Bombay's highest run-scorer.[28][29] He also made an unbeaten century in the Irani Trophy final,[30] and was selected for the tour of Pakistan next year, after just one first class season.[31]



His first double century was for Mumbai while playing against the visiting Australian team at the Brabourne Stadium in 1998.[1] He is the only player to score a century in all three of his Ranji Trophy, Duleep Trophy and Irani Trophy debuts.[32]



In 1992, at the age of 19, Tendulkar became the first overseas born player to represent Yorkshire[1][33] Tendulkar played 16 first-class matches for the county and scored 1070 runs at an average of 46.52.[34]



International career

Early career

Tendulkar played his first Test match against Pakistan in Karachi in 1989 aged just 16. He made just 15 runs, being bowled by Waqar Younis, who also made his debut in that match, but was noted for how he handled numerous blows to his body at the hands of the Pakistani pace attack.[35] In the final test in Sialkot, he was hit on the nose by a bouncer, but he declined medical assistance and continued to bat even as he gushed blood from it.[36] In a 20 over exhibition game in Peshawar, Tendulkar made 53 runs off 18 balls, including an over in which he scored 28 runs off Abdul Qadir.[37] This was later called "one of the best innings I have seen" by the then Indian captain Kris Srikkanth.[38] In all, he scored 215 runs at an average of 35.83 in the Test series, and was dismissed without scoring a run in the only One Day International he played.[39][40]



The series was followed by a tour of New Zealand in which he scored 117 runs at an average of 29.25 in, Tests including an innings of 88 in the Second Test.[41] He was dismissed without scoring in one the two one-day games he played, and scored 36 in the other.[42] On his next tour, to England in 1990, he became the second youngest cricketer to score a Test century as he made 119* at Old Trafford.[36] Wisden described his innings as "a disciplined display of immense maturity" and also wrote:[43]



"He looked the embodiment of India's famous opener, Gavaskar, and indeed was wearing a pair of his pads. While he displayed a full repertoire of strokes in compiling his maiden Test hundred, most remarkable were his off-side shots from the back foot. Though only 5ft 5in tall, he was still able to control without difficulty short deliveries from the English paceman."

Tendulkar further enhanced his development during the 1991–1992 tour of Australia, that included an unbeaten 148 in Sydney and a century on a fast, bouncing pitch at Perth. Merv Hughes commented to Allan Border at the time that "This little prick's going to get more runs than you, AB."[44]



Rise through the ranks



Tendulkar waits at the bowler's end.Tendulkar's performance through the years 1994–1999 coincided with his physical peak, in his early twenties. On the day of the Hindu festival Holi, Tendulkar was told to open the batting at Auckland against New Zealand in 1994.[45] He went on to make 82 runs off 49 balls. He scored his first ODI century on 9 September 1994 against Australia in Sri Lanka at Colombo. It had taken him 79 ODIs to score a century.



In 1996 against Pakistan in Sharjah, Indian captain Mohammed Azharuddin was going through a lean patch. Tendulkar and Navjot Singh Sidhu both made centuries to set a record partnership for the second wicket. After getting out, Tendulkar found Azharuddin in two minds about whether he should bat. Tendulkar convinced Azharuddin to bat and Azharuddin subsequently unleashed 29 runs in mere 10 balls. It enabled India post a score in excess of 300 runs for the first time in an ODI. India went on to win that match.



Tendulkar's rise continued when he was the leading run scorer at the 1996 Cricket World Cup, scoring two centuries.[46] He was the only Indian batsman to perform in the infamous semi-final against Sri Lanka. Tendulkar fell amid a batting collapse and the match referee awarded Sri Lanka the match after the crowd began rioting and set fire to the stadium.



This was the beginning of a period at the top of the batting world, culminating in the Australian tour of India in early 1998, with Tendulkar scoring three consecutive centuries. These were characterized by a premeditated plan to target Australian spinners Shane Warne and Gavin Robertson, to whom he regularly charged down the pitch to drive over the infield. This technique worked as India beat Australia. The test match success was followed by two scintillating knocks in Sharjah where he scored two consecutive centuries in a must-win game and then in finals against Australia tormenting Shane Warne once again. Following the series Warne ruefully joked that he was having nightmares about his Indian nemesis.[47] He also had a role with the ball in that series, including a five wicket haul in an ODI. Set 310 runs to win, Australia were cruising comfortably at 3 for 203 in the 31st over when Tendulkar turned the match for India taking wickets of Michael Bevan, Steve Waugh, Darren Lehmann, Tom Moody and Damien Martyn for just 32 runs in 10 overs.[48]



Tendulkar single-handedly won the ICC 1998 quarterfinal at Dhaka to pave way for India's entry into the semifinals, when he took four Australian wickets after scoring 141 runs in just 128 balls.



A chronic back problem flared up when Pakistan toured India in 1999, with India losing the historic Test at Chepauk despite a gritty century from Tendulkar himself. The worst was yet to come as Professor Ramesh Tendulkar, Tendulkar's father, died in the middle of the 1999 Cricket World Cup. Tendulkar flew back to India to attend the final rituals of his father, missing the match against Zimbabwe. However, he returned with a bang to the World cup scoring a century (unbeaten 140 off 101 balls) in his very next match against Kenya in Bristol. He dedicated this century to his father.[49]



Captaincy

Tendulkar's two tenures as captain of the Indian cricket team were not very successful. When Tendulkar took over as Captain in 1996, it was with huge hopes and expectations. However, by 1997 the team was performing poorly. Azharuddin was credited with saying "Nahin jeetega! Chote ki naseeb main jeet nahin hai!",[50] which translates into: "He won't win! It's not in the small one's destiny!".[51]



Tendulkar, succeeding Azharuddin as captain for his second term, then led India on a tour of Australia, where the visitors were comprehensively beaten 3–0 by the newly crowned world champions.[52] Tendulkar, however, was at his usual best and won the player of the tournament award as well as player of the match in one of the games. After another Test series defeat, this time by a 0–2 margin at home against South Africa, Tendulkar resigned, and Sourav Ganguly took over as captain in 2000.



Tendulkar remains an integral part of the Indian team's strategic processes. He is often seen in discussion with the captain, at times actively involved in building strategies. Former captain Rahul Dravid publicly acknowledged that Tendulkar had been suggesting moves such as the promotion of Irfan Pathan up the batting order which, although only temporary, had an immediate effect on the team's fortunes. In 2007, Tendulkar was appointed vice-captain to captain Rahul Dravid.[53] During the Indian team's 2007 tour of England, Dravid's desire to resign from the captaincy became known. The BCCI President Sharad Pawar personally offered the captaincy to Tendulkar.[54] However, Tendulkar asked Pawar not to appoint him captain, instead recommending Mahendra Singh Dhoni, to take-over the reigns.[55] Pawar later revealed this conversation, crediting Tendulkar for first forwarding Dhoni's name, who since achieved much success as captain.[56]









Injuries and apparent decline

Tendulkar continued performing well in Test cricket in 2001 and 2002, with some pivotal performances with both bat and ball. Tendulkar took three wickets on the final day of the famous Kolkata Test against Australia in 2001. Tendulkar took the key wickets of Matthew Hayden and Adam Gilchrist, centurions in the previous test.



In the 2002 series in the West Indies, Tendulkar started well, scoring 79 in the first test, and 117 in the first innings of the second. Then, in a hitherto unprecedented sequence, he scored 0, 0, 8 and 0 in the next four innings, getting out to technical "defects" and uncharacteristically poor strokes. He returned to form in the last test scoring 41 and 86. However, India lost the series. This might have been the beginning of the "decline" phase in his career which lasted till 2006.



Tendulkar made 673 runs in 11 matches in the 2003 Cricket World Cup, helping India reach the final. While Australia retained the trophy that they had won in 1999, Tendulkar was given the Man of the Tournament award.



He continued to score heavily in ODI cricket that year, with two hundreds in a tri series involving New Zealand and Australia.



The drawn series as India toured Australia in 2003/04 saw Tendulkar making his mark in the last Test of the series, with 241* in Sydney, putting India in a virtually unbeatable position. He followed up the innings with an unbeaten 60 in the second innings of the test. Prior to this test match, he had had an unusually horrible run of form, failing in all six innings in the preceding three tests. It was no aberration that 2003 was his worst year in test cricket, with an average of 17.25 and just one fifty.



He scored an unbeaten 194 against Pakistan at Multan in the following series. The 194 was controversial as he was stranded prior to reaching his double century as a result of a declaration by Rahul Dravid. In meeting with the press that evening, Tendulkar responded to a question on missing 200 against Pakistan by stating that he was disappointed and that the declaration had taken him by surprise.[57] Many former cricketers commented that Dravid's declaration was in bad taste.[58][59] The media noted at the time that the decision had apparently been made by Sourav Ganguly,[60] and Ganguly himself later admitted that it had been a mistake.[61] The controversy was put to rest when Rahul Dravid, Sachin Tendulkar and coach John Wright spoke to the media after the team's victory and stated that the matter was spoken internally and put to rest.[62]



Tennis elbow then took its toll on Tendulkar, leaving him out of the side for most of the year, coming back only for the last two tests when Australia toured India in 2004. He played a part in India's victory in Mumbai in that series with a fast 55, though Australia took the series 2–1.



On 10 December 2005 at Feroz Shah Kotla, Tendulkar scored his record-breaking 35th Test century, against the Sri Lankans.



In the test series in Pakistan in 2006, Sachin failed to get going in all three innings despite the pitches being flat tracks. In the third of those three innings, he was bowled comprehensively after making 26, and ended up on all fours. This prompted The Times of India to publish an article entitled "Endulkar" in which TOI opined that Tendulkar's batting prowess had declined and his career had slid permanently.



On 6 February 2006, he scored his 39th ODI hundred, in a match against Pakistan. He followed with a run-a-ball 42 in the second one-day international against Pakistan on 11 February 2006, and then a 95 in hostile, seaming conditions on 13 February 2006 in Lahore, which set up an Indian victory.



On 19 March 2006, after scoring an unconvincing 1 off 21 balls against England in the first innings of the third Test in his home ground, Wankhede, Tendulkar was booed off the ground by a section of the crowd,[63][64] the first time that he had ever faced such flak. Tendulkar was to end the three-Test series without a single half-century to his credit, and news of a shoulder operation raised more questions about his longevity. Tendulkar was operated upon for his injured shoulder. In July 2006, the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) announced that Tendulkar had overcome his injury problem following a rehabilitation programme and was available for selection, and he was eventually selected for the next series.



Tendulkar's comeback came in the DLF cup in Malaysia and he was the only Indian batsman to shine. In his comeback match, against West Indies on 14 September 2006, Tendulkar responded to his critics who believed that his career was inexorably sliding with his 40th ODI century. Though he scored 141*, West Indies won the rain-affected match by the D/L method.



In the preparation for the 2007 Cricket World Cup, Tendulkar was criticized by Greg Chappell on his attitude.[65] As per the report, Chappell felt that Tendulkar would be more useful down the order, while the latter felt that he would be better off opening the innings, the role he had played for most of his career. Chappell also believed that Tendulkar's repeated failures were hurting the team's chances. In a rare show of emotion, Tendulkar hit out at the comments attributed to Chappell by pointing out that no coach has ever suggested his attitude towards cricket is incorrect. On 7 April 2007, the Board of Control for Cricket in India issued a notice to Tendulkar asking for an explanation for his comments made to the media.[66]



At the Cricket World Cup 2007 in the West Indies, Tendulkar and the Indian cricket team, led by Rahul Dravid had a dismal campaign. Tendulkar, who was pushed to bat lower down the order by the Greg Chappell had scores of 7 (Bangladesh), 57* (Bermuda) and 0 (Sri Lanka). As a result, former Australian captain Ian Chappell, brother of the then Indian coach Greg, called for Tendulkar to retire in his column for Mumbai's Mid Day newspaper.[67]



During this period from about 2002 to 2006–7, Tendulkar's batting often seemed to be a shadow of its former self. He was inconsistent, and his big knocks mostly came in sedate, accumulative, uncharacteristic fashion. He seemed to have either cut out or lost the ability to play many shots, including the hook and pull and many other aerial strokes. He also developed a tendency to go without scoring much for long periods and become overtly defensive. While players such as Ponting and Kallis were at the peak of their careers, Sachin's seemed to be in terminal decline. There were several calls from him to retire too.



However after the 2007 World Cup, his career had a second wind and his consistency and form have returned.



Return to old form and consistency

In the subsequent series against Bangladesh, Tendulkar returned to his opening slot and was Man of the Series. He continued by scoring two consecutive scores of over 90 in the Future Cup against South Africa. He was the leading run scorer and was adjudged the Man of the Series.[68]





Tendulkar celebrates upon reaching his 38th Test century against Australia in the 2nd Test at the SCG in 2008, where he finished not out on 154On the second day of the Nottingham Test (28 July 2007) Tendulkar became the third cricketer to complete 11,000 Test runs.[69] In the subsequent One day series against England, Tendulkar was the leading run scorer from India[70] with an average of 53.42. In the ODI Series against Australia in October 2007 Tendulkar was the leading Indian run scorer with 278 runs.[71]



Tendulkar was dismissed seven times in 2007 between 90 and 100, including three times at 99, leading some to suggest that he struggles to cope with nerves in this phase of his career. Tendulkar has got out 23 times between 90 and 100 in his international career. On 8 November 2007 he got out on 99 against Pakistan in an ODI at Mohali to the bowling of Umar Gul caught by Kamran Akmal. In the fourth ODI, he got out on 97 (off 102 balls with 16 fours) after dragging a delivery from Umar Gul on to his stumps, falling short of another century in ODIs in 2007.



2007/08 tour of Australia

In the Border-Gavaskar Trophy, 2007–08, Tendulkar showed exceptional form, becoming the leading run scorer with 493 runs in four Tests, despite consistently failing in the second innings. Sachin scored 62 runs in the first innings of the first Test at the MCG in Melbourne, but couldn't prevent a heavy 337-run win for Australia. In the controversial New Years Test at Sydney, Tendulkar scored an unbeaten 154 as India lost the Test. This was his third century at the SCG, earning him an average of 221.33 at the ground. In the third Test at the WACA in Perth, Sachin was instrumental in India's first innings score of 330, scoring a well compiled 71, as India went on to record a historic triumph at the WACA. In the fourth Test at Adelaide, which ended in a draw, he scored 153 in the first innings, involving in a crucial 126 run stand with V.V.S. Laxman for the fifth wicket to lead India to a score of 282 for 5 from 156 for 4. He secured the Player of the Match award.



In the One-Day International Commonwealth Bank Tri-Series involving Sri Lanka and Australia, Tendulkar became the first and only batsman to complete 16,000 runs in ODIs. He achieved this feat against Sri Lanka on 5 February 2008 at Brisbane. He started the CB series well notching up scores of 10, 35, 44 and 32, but could not convert the starts into bigger scores. His form dipped a bit in the middle of the tournament, but Tendulkar came back strongly in India's must-win game against Sri Lanka at Hobart, scoring 63 off 54 balls. He finished the series with a match winning 117 not out off 120 balls in the first final,[72] and 91 runs in the second final.[73]



Home series against South Africa

In the first test of a three-test series against South Africa at home, Tendulkar made a duck in the first innings. He missed the rest of the series, which was drawn 1–1, with an injury.



Sri Lanka Series

Before the three-Test series in Sri Lanka in mid-2008, Tendulkar needed just 177 runs to go past Brian Lara's record of 11,953 runs in test cricket. However, he failed in all six innings, scoring a total of just 95 runs. India lost 1–2.



Return to form and breaking the record

In the following ODI series against Sri Lanka, Tendulkar was sidelined due to injury. However, during the following Australia tour of India, he returned to fitness and form, scoring 13 and 49 in the first test before making 88 in the first innings of the second test, thus breaking the record for most number of Test runs held by Brian Lara. He also reached the 12,000 run mark when he was on 61. He made a fifty in the third test and 109 in the fourth, as India won the series 2–0 and regained the Border-Gavaskar Trophy.



ODI and Test Series against England

Tendulkar was again out due to injury from the first three ODIs of a 7-match ODI series at home against England, but he made 11 in the fourth ODI and 50 in the fifth, before the ODI series was called off due to the Mumbai terror attacks, the scoreline being 5–0 to India.



England returned for a 2-match test series in December 2008, and in the first test in Chennai, chasing 387 for victory, Tendulkar made 103 not out in a 163-run unbroken fifth wicket stand with Yuvraj Singh. This was his third century in a fourth match innings, and the first which resulted in a win. This was redemption for the Chennai Test of 1999 when chasing 271 against Pakistan, Sachin had made 136 with severe back pain and was out 17 runs short of the target, precipitating a collapse and a loss by 12 runs. He dedicated this century to the victims of the Mumbai terror attacks. Tendulkar failed in both innings in the second test, India won the series 1–0.



Sri Lanka ODIs

In early 2009, India revisited Sri Lanka for five ODIs, as the Pakistan series had been cancelled due to the security situation in Pakistan and the attacks in Mumbai. In the first three ODIs, Sachin made 5, 6 and 7. Then he was injured again.



New Zealand Series

India's next assignment was the away series against New Zealand. It consisted of three Tests and five ODIs. In the ODI series, Tendulkar started off with 20 in the first match followed by 61 in the second. Then he made a 163 not out in the third ODI, an innings ended by stomach cramps that forced him to retire hurt. India made 392 and won easily. Sachin was out of the next two ODIs due to injury but India won the series 3–1 with one game washed out. Tendulkar made 160 in the first test, his 42nd Test century, and India won. He made 49 and 64 in the second test and 62 and 9 in the third, in which India were prevented from winning by rain on the last day. India won the series 1–0.



Compaq Cup in Sri Lanka

Tendulkar rested himself for the ODI tour of West Indies, but was back for the Compaq Cup (Tri Series) between India, SL and New Zealand in early September 2009. He made 46 and 27 in the league matches before notching up 138 in the final, as India made 319 and won by 46 runs. This was Tendulkar's 6th century in ODI finals and his third consecutive score of over 50 in such finals. India has won all six times that Tendulkar has made a hundred in an ODI final.



ICC Champions Trophy 2009

Tendulkar played just one innings in the ICC Champions trophy in South Africa, scoring 8 against Pakistan as India lost. The next match against Australia was washed out and he was out with food poisoning in the third match against the Windies, as India were eliminated after beating the Windies and finishing third in their group.



India-Australia ODI Series

Australia returned for a seven-match ODI series in India in October, and Tendulkar made 14, 4, 32 and 40 in the first four games.



In the fifth match, with the series tied at 2–2, Australia amassed 350/4 in 50 overs. Tendulkar made his 45th ODI hundred, a 175 off just 141 balls. Just when it seemed that he would steer India to the large victory target, he paddle-scooped debutant bowler Clint McKay straight to short fine leg, with India needing 19 from 18 balls with four wickets left. The Indian tail collapsed, and they lost by 3 runs, being all out for 347.



During this match, Tendulkar also became the first player to reach 17,000 ODI runs, and achieved his personal best against Australia, as well as the third highest score in a defeat. He described it as one of his best innings but said it could have been better had India won the match.



Sri Lanka Series

In the ODIs against Sri Lanka in 2009–10, Tendulkar scored 69, 43, 96 not out and 8, as India won 3–1.



In the Test Series, he scored a 100 no out in the first test, which was drawn, and a fifty in the second. India won the series 2–0.



Bangladesh Test Series

Sachin rested himself for the ODI tri series in Bangladesh in 2010. In the Tests against Bangladesh, he made 105 not out and 16 in the first test, and 143 in the second. India won 2–0.



Series against South Africa in 2010

In the 2-Test Series against South Africa, Tendulkar made seven and 100 in the first test and 106 in the first innings of the second test. In the course of the second 100 (his 47th Test Hundred) he achieved several landmarks, in that he had scored four hundreds in his last four matches and that the hundred against South Africa in the first Test was the first at home against South Africa. The century was also his hundredth score over 50 in International Test cricket, moving him to 92 international hundreds (Tests and ODIs combined). In the subsequent ODI series, Tendulkar was run out in the first ODI for four runs, but made a strong comeback in the second match, scoring a brisk hundred off just 90 balls. This also took his tally of hundreds to 46 in ODIs and 93 in tests and ODIs combined. He finished the match on 200*, thus becoming the first batsman in the history of ODI cricket to score a double century, eclipsing Saeed Anwar's 194 against India and Charles Coventry's 194* versus Bangladesh.[74][75]



Indian Premier League

Tendulkar was made the icon player and captain for his home side, the Mumbai Indians in the inaugural Indian Premier League Twenty20 competition in 2008.[76] As an icon player, he was signed for a sum of US$1,121,250, 15% more than the second-highest paid player in the team, Sanath Jayasuriya.[77]



In 2010 edition of Indian Premier League, Mumbai Indians reached the final of the tournament. Tendulkar made 618 runs in 14 innings during the tournament, breaking Shaun Marsh's record of most runs in an IPL season. He was declared player of the tournament for his performance during the season. He also won Best Batsman and Best Captain awards at 2010 IPL Awards ceremony.



Style of play



Tendulkar plays a wristy leg-side flickTendulkar is cross-dominant: He bats, bowls and throws with his right hand, but writes with his left hand.[78] He also practices left-handed throws at the nets on a regular basis. Cricinfo columnist Sambit Bal has described him as the "most wholesome batsman of his time".[1] His batting is based on complete balance and poise while limiting unnecessary movements and flourishes. He appears to show little preference for the slow and low wickets which are typical in India, and has scored many centuries on the hard, bouncy pitches in South Africa and Australia.[1] He is known for his unique punch style of hitting the ball over square. He is also renowned for his picture-perfect straight drive, often completed with no follow-through. Recently, legendary Indian batsman Sunil Gavaskar, in an article he wrote in the AFP, remarked that "it is hard to imagine any player in the history of the game who combines classical technique with raw aggression like the little champion does".[5]



Sir Donald Bradman, considered by many as the greatest batsman of all time, considered Tendulkar to have a batting style similar to his. In his biography, it is stated that "Bradman was most taken by Tendulkar's technique, compactness and shot production, and had asked his wife to have a look at Tendulkar, having felt that Tendulkar played like him. Bradman's wife, Jessie, agreed that they did appear similar."[79][80]





Tendulkar at the crease, getting ready to face a deliveryFormer Australian cricket team coach John Buchanan voiced his opinion that Tendulkar had become susceptible to the short ball early in his innings because of a lack of footwork.[81] Buchanan also believes Tendulkar has a weakness while playing left-arm pace.[81] He was affected by a series of injuries since 2004. Since then Tendulkar's batting has tended to be less attacking. Explaining this change in his batting style, he has acknowledged that he is batting differently due to that fact that, firstly, no batsman can bat the same way for the entire length of a long career and, secondly, he is a senior member of the team now and thus has more responsibility. During the early part of his career he was a more attacking batsman and frequently scored centuries at close to a run a ball. Ian Chappell, former Australian player, recently remarked that "Tendulkar now, is nothing like the player he was when he was a young bloke".[82]



Tendulkar has incorporated several modern and unorthodox strokes into his repertoire in recent times, including the paddle sweep, the scoop over short fine leg and the slash to third man over the slips' heads, over the last seven or eight years. This has enabled him to remain scoring consistently in spite of the physical toll of injuries and a lean period in the mid-2000s. By his own admission, he does not bat as aggressively as he did in the 90s and early 2000s, because his body has undergone changes and cannot sustain aggressive shotmaking over a long period. He is often praised for his ability to adapt to the needs of his body and yet keep scoring consistently.



While Tendulkar is not a regular bowler, he is adept at bowling medium pace, leg spin, and off spin with equal ease. He often bowls when two batsmen of the opposite team have been batting together for a long period, as he can often be a useful partnership breaker. With his bowling, he has helped secure an Indian victory on more than one occasion.[83] He has taken 44 test match wickets and is the ninth highest wicket taker for India in ODIs.[84]



Controversies

Mike Denness incident

Main article: Mike Denness and Indian cricket team incident

In the second test of India's 2001 tour of South Africa, match referee Mike Denness fined four Indian players for excessive appealing as well as the Indian captain Sourav Ganguly for not controlling his team.[85] Tendulkar was given a suspended ban of one game in light of alleged ball tampering. Television cameras picked up images that suggested Tendulkar may have been involved in cleaning the seam of the cricket ball in the second test match between India and South Africa at St George's Park, Port Elizabeth.[86] This can, under some conditions, amount to altering the condition of the ball. The match referee Mike Denness found Sachin Tendulkar guilty of ball tampering charges and handed him a one Test match ban.[87] The incident escalated to include allegations of racism,[88] and led to Mike Denness being barred from entering the venue of the third test match. After a thorough investigation, the International Cricket Council revoked the official status of the match and the ban on Tendulkar was lifted. Tendulkar's ball tampering charges and Sehwag's ban for excessive appealing triggered a massive backlash from the Indian public and even the Indian parliament.[89]



Controversy over Ferrari customs waiver

In commemorating Tendulkar's feat of equalling Don Bradman's 29 centuries in Test Cricket, automotive giant Ferrari invited Tendulkar to its paddock in Silverstone on the eve of the British Grand Prix (23 July 2002) to receive a Ferrari 360 Modena from the F1 world champion Michael Schumacher.[90] On 4 September 2002 India's then finance minister Jaswant Singh wrote to Tendulkar telling him that the government will waive customs duty imposed on the car as a measure to applaud his feat.[91] However the rules at the time stated that the customs duty can be waived only when receiving an automobile as a prize and not as a gift. It is claimed that the proposals to change the law (Customs Act) was put forth in Financial Bill in February 2003 and amended was passed as a law in May 2003. Subsequently the Ferrari was allowed to be brought to India without payment of the customs duty (Rs 1.13 Crores or 120% on the car value of Rs 75 Lakhs).[92] When the move to waive customs duty became public in July 2003, political and social activists protested the waiver[93] and filed PIL in the Delhi High Court. With the controversy snowballing, Tendulkar offered to pay the customs duty, which was finally picked up by Ferrari.[94] Tendulkar has been seen taking his Ferrari 360 Modena for late-night drives in Mumbai.



In popular culture

Fan following



Sudhir Kumar Chaudhary, a die hard fan of Tendulkar who earned the privilege to get tickets to all home games of India for lifetimeTendulkar's entry into world cricket was very much hyped up by former Indian stars and those who had seen him play. By scoring his first half-century in his second match and his first century aged 17, Tendulkar's consistent performances earned him a fan following across the globe, including amongst Australian crowds, where Tendulkar has consistently scored centuries.[44] One of the most popular sayings by his fans is "Cricket is my religion and Sachin is my God".[95] Cricinfo mentions in his profile that "... Tendulkar remains, by a distance, the most worshipped cricketer in the world."[96] During the Australian tour of India in 1998 Matthew Hayden said "I have seen God. He bats at no. 4 in India in Tests." [97]



At home in Mumbai, Tendulkar's fan following is so great that he is unable to lead a normal life. Ian Chappell has said that he would be unable to cope with the lifestyle Tendulkar was forced to lead, having to "wear a wig and go out and watch a movie only at night".[82] In an interview with Tim Sheridan, Tendulkar admitted that he sometimes went for quiet drives in the streets of Mumbai late at night when he would be able to enjoy some peace and silence.[98]



Business interests

Tendulkar's immense popularity has led him to numerous profitable business dealings in the past. He currently has the most sponsorships out of all players in world cricket. Sachin Tendulkar was an early pioneer in India on cricket business dealings when he signed a then record sports management deal with Worldtel in 1995, the value of the deal being 30 crore rupees over five years.[99] His next contract with WorldTel in 2001 was valued at 80 crores over five years.[100] In 2006, he signed a contract with Saatchi and Saatchi's ICONIX values at 180 crores over three years.[101] He is the highest earning cricketer in the world.



Making use of his popularity, Tendulkar has opened two restaurants: 'Tendulkar's'[102] (Colaba, Mumbai) and 'Sachin's'[103] (Mulund, Mumbai). Sachin owns these restaurants in partnership with Sanjay Narang of Mars Restaurants. He has also got a new restaurant in Bangalore called Sachin's.



In 2007, Tendulkar also announced a JV with the Future Group and Manipal Group to launch healthcare and sports fitness products under the brand name 'S Drive and Sach'.[104] A series of comic books by Virgin Comics is also due to be published featuring him as a superhero.[105]

Tom & Jerry

Tom and Jerry

This article is about the fictional cartoon cat and mouse duo. For other uses, see Tom and Jerry (disambiguation).

Rare Tom and Jerry title card, used on three shorts directed by William Hanna and Joseph Barbera in 1942. Only The Night Before Christmas keeps a similar version of this title card on television airings and home medias.

Tom and Jerry is an American animated series of theatrical shorts, television shows and specials, feature film, home films created by William Hanna and Joseph Barbera for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer that centered on a never-ending rivalry between a cat (Tom) and a mouse (Jerry) whose chases and battles often involved comic violence.

Hanna and Barbera ultimately wrote and directed one hundred and fourteen Tom and Jerry cartoons at the MGM cartoon studio in Hollywood, California between 1940 and 1958, when the animation unit was closed. The original series is notable for having won the Academy Award for Animated Short Film seven times, tying it with Walt Disney's Silly Symphonies as the theatrical animated series with the most Oscars. Tom and Jerry has a worldwide audience that consists of children, teenagers and adults, and has also been recognized as one of the most famous and longest-lived rivalries in American cinema. In 2000, TIME named the series one of the greatest television shows of all time.

Beginning in 1960, in addition to the original 114 H-B cartoons MGM had new shorts produced by Rembrandt Films, led by Gene Deitch in Eastern Europe. Production of Tom and Jerry shorts returned to Hollywood under Chuck Jones's Sib-Tower 12 Productions in 1963; this series lasted until 1967, making it a total of 161 shorts. The cat and mouse stars later resurfaced in television cartoons produced by Hanna-Barbera and Filmation Studios during the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s; a feature film, Tom and Jerry: The Movie, in 1992 (released domestically in 1993); and in 2000, their first made-for TV short, Tom and Jerry: The Mansion Cat for Cartoon Network. The most recent Tom and Jerry theatrical short, The Karate Guard, was written and co-directed by co-creator Joe Barbera and debuted in Los Angeles cinemas on September 27, 2005.

Today, Time Warner (via its Turner Entertainment division) owns the rights to Tom and Jerry (with Warner Bros. handling distribution). Since the merger, Turner has produced the series, Tom and Jerry Tales for The CW's Saturday morning "The CW4Kids" lineup, as well as the recent Tom and Jerry short, The Karate Guard, in 2005 and a string of Tom and Jerry direct-to-video films - all in collaboration with Warner Bros. Animation.

In February 2010, the show celebrated its 70th aniversery and a DVD collection of 30 shorts, Tom and Jerry Deluxe Anniversary Collection, was released in late June 2010 to celebrate the cartoon duo's seventh decade.


The popular series features comedic fights between an iconic set of enemies, a house cat and mouse. The plots of each short usually center on Tom's numerous attempts to capture Jerry and the mayhem and destruction that ensues. Since Tom rarely attempts to eat Jerry and because the pair actually seem to get along in some cartoon shorts, it is sometimes unclear why Tom chases Jerry so much. Some reasons given may include normal feline/murine enmity, duty according to his owner, Jerry's attempt at ruining a task that Tom is entrusted with, Jerry eating Tom's master's food which Tom has been entrusted with safeguarding, revenge, Jerry saving other potential prey (such as ducks, canaries, or goldfish) from being eaten by Tom, competition with another cat, and Jerry ruining Tom's attempts to seduce feline femme fatales of which Jerry does either out of disgust, jealousy, or just to be mean. Despite the sometimes heavy amount of fantasy violence, most Tom and Jerry episodes now carry a TV-G rating, although it was originally rated TV-Y. Tom rarely succeeds in catching Jerry, mainly because of Jerry's cleverness, cunning abilities, and luck. Interestingly enough, many of the title cards show Tom and Jerry smiling at each other which seems to depict a love-hate relationship rather than the extreme annoyance each displays towards the other in each cartoon. There are also several instances within the cartoons where they display genuine friendship ("Springtime for Thomas") and concern for each other's well-being (such as in "Jerry and the Lion" where Jerry in one instance tricks Tom into thinking he has shot Jerry, and Tom comes running with the first aid kit).

The short episodes are famous for some of the most comically violent gags ever devised in theatrical animation: Jerry slicing Tom in half, shutting his head in a window or a door, Tom using everything from axes, firearms, explosives, traps and poison to try to murder Jerry, Jerry stuffing Tom's tail in a waffle iron and a mangle, kicking him into a refrigerator, plugging his tail into an electric socket, pounding him with a mace, club or mallet, causing a tree or an electric pole to drive him into the ground, sticking matches into his feet and lighting them, tying him to a firework and setting it off, and so on.[1] Despite all its popularity, Tom and Jerry has often been criticized as excessively violent.[2]:42[3]:134 Despite the frequent violence, there is no blood or gore in any scenes in the original cartoons, and neither of the pair are ever (seriously) injured. However, in a very rare instance, when Tom gets sliced into pieces in the opening credits of Tom and Jerry:The Movie, blood is clearly visible. A recurring gag involves Jerry hitting Tom when he's preoccupied, with Tom initially oblivious to the pain—and only feeling the effects moments later, and vice versa; and another involves Jerry stopping Tom in midchase (as if calling for a time-out), before he does something, usually putting the hurt on Tom.

The cartoon is also noteworthy for its reliance on stereotypes, such as the blackening of characters following explosions and the use of heavy and enlarged shadows (e.g., Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Mouse). Resemblance to everyday objects and occurrences is arguably the main appeal of visual humor in the series. The characters themselves regularly transform into ridiculous but strongly associative shapes, most of the time involuntarily, in masked but gruesome ways.

Music plays a very important part in the shorts, emphasizing the action, filling in for traditional sound effects, and lending emotion to the scenes. Musical director Scott Bradley created complex scores that combined elements of jazz, classical, and pop music; Bradley often reprised contemporary pop songs, as well as songs from MGM films, including The Wizard of Oz and Meet Me In St. Louis. Generally, there is little dialogue as Tom and Jerry almost never speak, however minor characters are not similarly limited. For example, the character Mammy Two Shoes has lines in every episode in which she appears except The Little Orphan. Most of the dialogue from Tom and Jerry are the high-pitched laughs and gasping screams, which may be provided by a horn or other musical instrument.

Before 1954, all Tom and Jerry cartoons were produced in the standard Academy ratio and format; from late 1954 to 1955, some of the output was dually produced in both Academy format and the widescreen CinemaScope process. From 1956 until the close of the MGM cartoon studio a year later, all Tom and Jerry cartoons were produced in CinemaScope, some even had their soundtracks recorded in Perspecta directional audio. The 1960s Gene Deitch and Chuck Jones shorts were all produced in Academy format, but with compositions that made them compatible to be matted to Academy widescreen format as well. All of the Hanna and Barbera cartoons were produced in three-strip Technicolor; the 1960s entries were done in Metrocolor.

[edit] Characters

Main article: List of Tom and Jerry characters

[edit] Tom Cat and Jerry Mouse

Main articles: Tom Cat and Jerry Mouse

Thomas "Tom" Cat.

Tom (called "Jasper" in his debut appearance) is a blue and white domestic shorthair cat. He is the main protagonist and also the main antagonist of the story, who usually lives a pampered life, although they usually live in several lifestyles, while Jerry is a small brown house mouse who always lives in close proximity to him and is the second protagonist of the story. "Tom" is a generic name for a male cat (The Warner Bros. cartoon character Sylvester was originally named Thomas). Tom was originally in the very first short, Puss Gets the Boot, and Jerry was seen in the short also, although it was not billed as a Tom and Jerry cartoon. Jerry possesses surprising strength for his size, lifting items such as anvils with relative ease and withstanding considerable impacts with them. Despite the typical cat-eats-mouse scenario, it is surprisingly quite rare for Tom to actually try and consume Jerry. Despite being very energetic and determined, Tom is no match for Jerry's brains and wits. By the final "fade-out" of each cartoon, Jerry usually emerges triumphant, while Tom is shown as the loser. However, other results may be reached; on rare occasions, Tom triumphs, usually when Jerry becomes the aggressor or when he crosses some sort of line (the best example of which occurs in The Million Dollar Cat where, after finding out that Tom's newly acquired wealth will be taken away if he harms any animal, including a mouse, he torments Tom until Tom finally loses his temper and attacks him). Sometimes, usually ironically, they both lose, usually when Jerry's last trap potentially backfires on him after it affects Tom (An example is in Chuck Jones' Filet Meow short where Jerry orders a shark to scare Tom away from eating a goldfish. Afterwards, the shark scares Jerry away as well) or when Jerry overlooks something at the end of the course. Sometimes, they both end up being friends (only for something to happen so that Tom will chase Jerry again). Both characters display sadistic tendencies, in that they are equally likely to take pleasure in tormenting each other. However, depending on the cartoon, whenever one character appears to be in mortal danger (in a dangerous situation or by a third party), the other will develop a conscience and save him. Sometimes, they bond over a mutual sentiment towards an unpleasant experience and their attacking each other is more play than serious attacks. Multiple shorts show the two getting along with minimal difficulty, and they are more than capable of working together when the situation calls for it, usually against a third party who manages to torture and humiliate them both.

Tom changes his love interest many times. The first love interest is Toots who appears in Puss n' Toots, and calls him "Tommy" in The Mouse Comes to Dinner. He is also interested in a cat called Toots in The Zoot Cat although she has a different appearance to the original Toots. The most frequent love interest of Tom's is Toodles Galore, who never has any dialogue in Tom and Jerry cartoons.

Despite five shorts ending with a depiction of Tom's apparent death, his demise is never permanent; he even reads about his own death in a flashback in Jerry's Diary. He appears to die in explosions in Mouse Trouble (after which he is seen in heaven) and in Yankee Doodle Mouse, while in The Two Mouseketeers he is guillotined offscreen.





Jerry Mouse.

Although many supporting and minor characters speak, Tom and Jerry rarely do so themselves. Tom, most famously, sings while wooing female cats; for example, Tom sings Louis Jordan's "Is You Is Or Is You Ain't My Baby" in the 1946 short Solid Serenade. In a couple of shorts, Tom, when romancing a female cat, woos her in a French-accented voice similar to that of screen actor Charles Boyer. At the end of The Million Dollar Cat after beginning to antagonize Jerry he says "Gee I'm throwin away a million dollars... BUT I'M HAPPY‼", he was also seen speaking to a female cat, when he sits on a stove he asks "gee, what's cookin?" where the female replies "your butt." he then replies "Oh, that's silly" then realizes it himself and screams. Co-director William Hanna provided most of the squeaks, gasps, and other vocal effects for the pair, including the most famous sound effects from the series, Tom's leather-lunged scream (created by recording Hanna's scream and eliminating the beginning and ending of the recording, leaving only the strongest part of the scream on the soundtrack) and Jerry's nervous gulp. The only other reasonably common vocalization is made by Tom when some external reference claims a certain scenario or eventuality to be impossible, which inevitably, ironically happens to thwart Tom's plans - at which point, a bedraggled and battered Tom appears and says in a haunting, echoing voice "Don't you believe it!", a reference to some famous World War II propaganda shorts of the 1940s. In the 1946 short Trap Happy, Tom hires a mouse exterminator who, after several failed attempts to dispatch Jerry, changes profession to Cat exterminator by crossing out the "Mouse" on his title and writing "Cat", resulting in Tom spelling out the word out loud before reluctantly pointing at himself. One short, 1956's Blue Cat Blues, is narrated by Jerry in voiceover (voiced by Paul Frees) as they try to win back. Both Tom and Jerry speak more than once in the 1943 short The Lonesome Mouse. Tom and Jerry: The Movie is the first (and so far only) installment of the series where the famous cat-and-mouse duo regularly speak.

[edit] Spike and Tyke

Main articles: Spike (Tom and Jerry) and Tyke (Tom and Jerry)

Spike and his puppy son Tyke. The perfect father and son.

In his attempts to catch Jerry, Tom often has to deal with Spike (also known as "Killer" ), an angry, vicious but extremely dumb guard bulldog who tries to attack Tom for bothering his son Tyke (sometimes called "Junior") while trying to get Jerry. While they are in the cartoons, Tom and Jerry appears always while chasing and bothering his son. Originally Spike was unnamed and mute (aside from howls and biting noises) as well as attacking indiscriminately, not caring whether it was Tom or Jerry though usually attacking Tom. In later cartoons Spike spoke often, using a voice and expressions (performed by Billy Bletcher and later Daws Butler) modeled after comedian Jimmy Durante. Spike's coat has altered throughout the years between grey and creamy tan. The addition of Spike's son Tyke in the late 1940s led to both a slight softening of Spike's character and a short-lived spin-off theatrical series (Spike and Tyke). Most cartoons with Spike in it have a system; usually Spike is trying to accomplish something (such as building a dog house or sleeping) when Tom and Jerry's antics stop him from doing it, Spike then (presumably due to prejudice) singles out Tom as the culprit and threatens him that if it ever happens again he will do "something horrible" to Tom (effectively forcing Tom to take the blame of anyone else) while Jerry overhears, afterwards Jerry usually does anything he can to interrupt whatever Spike is doing while Tom barely manages to stop him (usually getting injured in the process), usually Jerry eventually wrecks whatever Spike is doing in spectacular fashion and leaving Tom to take the blame, forcing him to fight Spike and inevitably lose (usually due to the fact the Tom is usually framed by Jerry and that Spike just doesn't like Tom) off-screen, finally Tom is generally shown injured while Jerry smugly cuddles up to Spike unscathed. At least once however Tom does something that benefits Spike, who promises not to interfere ever again; causing Jerry to frantically leave the house and run into the distance (in Hic-cup Pup). Spike is well known for his famous "Listen pussy cat!" catchphrase when he threatens Tom, his other famous catchphrase is "That's my boy!" normally said when he supports or congratulates his son. Tyke is described as a cute, sweet looking, happy and a loveable puppy. He is Spike's son, but unlike Spike, Tyke does not speak and only communicates (mostly towards his father) by barking, yapping, wagging his tail, whimpering and growling. Tyke's father Spike would always get out of the way to care and comfort his son and make sure that he is safe from Tom. Tyke loves his father and Spike loves his son and they get along like friends, although most of time they would be taking a nap or Spike would teach Tyke the main facts of life of being a dog. Like Spike, Tyke's appearance has altered throughout the years, from grey (with white paws) to creamy tan. When Tom and Jerry Kids first aired, this was the first time that viewers were able to hear Tyke speak.

[edit] Butch and Toodles Galore

Main articles: Butch (Tom and Jerry) and Toodles Galore

Butch and Toodles Galore, in the 1946 Tom and Jerry short Springtime for Thomas.

Butch is a black cat who also wants to eat Jerry. He is the most frequent adversary of Tom. However, for most of the episodes he appears in, he's usually seen rivaling Tom over Toodles. Butch also was Tom's pal or chum as in some cartoons, where Butch is leader of Tom's buddies, who are Meathead and Topsy.

[edit] History and evolution

"Tom and Jerry" was a commonplace phrase for youngsters indulging in riotous behaviour in 19th-century London. The term comes from Life in London, or Days and Nights of Jerry Hawthorne and his elegant friend Corinthian Tom (1823) by Pierce Egan.[4] However Brewer notes no more than an "unconscious" echo of the older original in the naming of the cartoon.[5]

[edit] Hanna-Barbera era (1940–1958)

Tom and Jerry creators/directors William Hanna and Joseph Barbera, with the seven Academy Awards for Best Short Subject (Cartoons) their Tom and Jerry shorts won.

Willliam Hanna and Joseph Barbera were both part of the Rudolf Ising unit at the MGM cartoon studio in the late 1930s. Barbera, a storyman and character designer, was paired with Hanna, an experienced director, to start directing films for the Ising unit; the first of these was a cat-and-mouse cartoon called Puss Gets the Boot. Completed in late 1939, and released to theaters on February 10, 1940, Puss Gets The Boot centers on Jasper, a gray tabby cat trying to catch an unnamed rodent, but after accidentally breaking a houseplant and its stand, the African-American housemaid Mammy (Later Tom's owner) has threatened to throw Jasper out ("O-W-T, out!" as Mammy spells it) if he breaks one more thing in the house. Naturally, the mouse uses this to his advantage, and begins tossing wine glasses, ceramic plates, teapots, and any and everything fragile, so that Jasper will be thrown outside. Puss Gets The Boot was previewed and released without fanfare, and Hanna and Barbera went on to direct other (non-cat-and-mouse related) shorts. "After all," remarked many of the MGM staffers, "haven't there been enough cat-and-mouse cartoons already?"

The pessimistic attitude towards the cat and mouse duo changed when the cartoon became a favorite with theatre owners and with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which nominated the film for the Academy Award for Best Short Subject: Cartoons of 1941. It lost to another MGM cartoon, Rudolph Ising's The Milky Way.

Producer Fred Quimby, who ran the MGM animation studio, quickly pulled Hanna and Barbera off the other one-shot cartoons they were working on, and commissioned a series featuring the cat and mouse. Hanna and Barbera held an intra-studio contest to give the pair a new name by drawing suggested names out of a hat; animator John Carr won $50 with his suggestion of Tom and Jerry.[6] The Tom and Jerry series went into production with The Midnight Snack in 1941, and Hanna and Barbera rarely directed anything but the cat-and-mouse cartoons for the rest of their tenure at MGM.

Tom's physical appearance evolved significantly over the years. During the early 1940s, Tom had an excess of detail—shaggy fur, numerous facial wrinkles, and multiple eyebrow markings—all of which were streamlined into a more workable form by the end of the 1940s- and looked like a realistic cat; in addition from his quadrupedal beginnings Tom became increasingly, and eventually almost exclusively, bipedal. By contrast, Jerry's design remained essentially the same for the duration of the series. By the mid-1940s, the series had developed a quicker, more energetic (and violent) tone, due to the inspiration from the work of the colleague in the MGM cartoon studio, Tex Avery, who joined the studio in 1942.

Even though the theme of each short is virtually the same - cat chases mouse - Hanna and Barbera found endless variations on that theme. Barbera's storyboards and rough layouts and designs, combined with Hanna's timing, resulted in argueably MGM's most popular and successful cartoon series. Thirteen entries in the Tom and Jerry series (including Puss Gets The Boot) were nominated for the Academy Award for Best Short Subject: Cartoons; seven of them went on to win the Academy Award, breaking the Disney studio's winning streak in that category. Tom and Jerry won more Academy Awards than any other character-based theatrical animated series.

Tom and Jerry remained popular throughout their original theatrical run, even when the budgets began to tighten somewhat in the 1950s and the pace of the shorts slowed slightly. However, after television became popular in the 1950s, box office revenues decreased for theatrical films, and short subjects. At first, MGM combated this by going to all-CinemaScope production on the series. After MGM realized that their re-releases of the older shorts brought in just as much revenue as the new films, the studio executives decided, much to the surprise of the staff, to close the animation studio. The MGM cartoon studio was shut down in 1957, and the final of the 114 Hanna and Barbera Tom and Jerry shorts, Tot Watchers, was released on August 1, 1958. Hanna and Barbera established their own television animation studio, Hanna-Barbera Productions, in 1957, which went on to produce famous TV shows and movies.

[edit] Gene Deitch era (1960–1962)

In 1960, MGM contracted a deal with Czech-based production company Rembrandt Films to produce new Tom and Jerry shorts, but aired on CBS, and had producer William L. Snyder arrange with Czech-based animation director Gene Deitch and his studio to make the films overseas in Prague, Czechoslovakia. Deitch states that, being a member of the UPA, he has always had a personal dislike of Tom and Jerry, citing them as the "primary bad example of senseless violence - humor based on pain - attack and revenge - to say nothing of the tasteless use of a headless black woman stereotype house servant."[7] Members of Deitch's newly formed team included William L. Snyder, the producer, Stepán Konícek, composer and musician who studied under Karel Ančerl and was chosen due to his experience as conductor of the Film Symphony Orchestra since 1956, Václav Lídl, assistant composer, Larz Bourne, Chris Jenkyns, and Eli Bauer, who wrote many of the cartoons, and Allen Swift, who played the majority of the characters. This team was contracted to produce thirteen[8] shorts, many of which have a surrealistic quality.

Since the Deitch/Snyder team had seen only a handful of the original Tom and Jerry shorts, and since Deitch and Snyder produced their cartoons on a tighter budget of $10,000, the resulting films were considered unusual, and, in many ways, bizarre.[7][8] The characters' gestures were often performed at high speed, frequently causing heavy motion blur. As a result, the animation of the characters looked choppy and sickly. The soundtracks featured sparse music, futuristic sound effects, dialogue that was mumbled rather than spoken, and heavy use of reverb. The first of the Gene Deitch shorts, Switchin' Kitten, contains frequent disturbing, high-pitched, hypnotic music and sound effects, while one of the last Deitch shorts, Buddies Thicker Than Water, contains Martian-like and echoed sound effects, heavily synthesized music, and choppy, strange animation, most notably during the climactic scene where Jerry disguises himself as a ghost to seek revenge on Tom.[9]

Fans that typically rooted for Tom criticized Deitch's cartoons for having Tom never become a threat to Jerry. Most of the time, Tom only attempts to hurt him when he gets in his way. Tom's new owner, a corpulent and grumpy middle-aged white man (with serious temper problems, often going red in the face similar to Deitch's earlier "Clint Clobber"[10] character at Terrytoons), was also more graphically brutal in punishing Tom's mistakes as compared to Mammy Two-Shoes, such as beating and thrashing Tom repeatedly, searing his face with a grill and forcing Tom to drink an entire carbonated beverage. However, despite these criticisms, the Gene Deitch Tom and Jerry cartoons are still rerun today on Cartoon Network on a semi-regular basis.[7]

These shorts are among the few Tom and Jerry cartoons not to carry the "Made In Hollywood, U.S.A." phrase at the end.[7] Due to Deitch's studio being behind the Iron Curtain, the production studio's location is omitted entirely on it.[7] In the midst of production, Joe Vogel, the head of production, was fired from MGM, who ordered Deitch and his team to finish the shorts and rush them out to release, producing the quality effect demonstrated in the shorts themselves.[7] By contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer had expired,[7] and the final of the thirteen shorts, Carmen Get It!, was released on December 1, 1962.[8]

Deitch's Tom and Jerry shorts have seen limited release outside of Europe and Asia; all thirteen shorts are currently available in Japan, where they have been ported to the Tom and Jerry and Droopy laserdisc and VHS, and the United Kingdom, where the shorts are available on the B-side of the Tom and Jerry: Classic Collection - Volume 5 DVD. The only short to have seen DVD release in the United States is The Tom and Jerry Cartoon Kit, where it is included on the Paws for a Holiday DVD.

The episodes created by Deitch have generally been less favorably received by the general audience than the rest of the series. In his review for Tom and Jerry: The Chuck Jones Collection, Paul Kupperberg of Comicmix called the shorts "perfectly dreadful" and "too often released", as well as a result of "cheap labor".[11] However, Deitch himself considers his shorts superior to those produced by Chuck Jones later on, while others hold an affinity for the shorts' surrealistic quality.[7] Another criticism of the Gene Deitch series was that all other major characters in Tom and Jerry were omitted, this included, Spike, Tyke, Toodles and Butch.

[edit] Chuck Jones era (1963–1967)

After the last of the Deitch cartoons were released, Jones, who had been fired from his thirty-plus year tenure at Warner Bros. Cartoons, started his own animation studio, Sib Tower 12 Productions, with partner Les Goldman. Beginning in 1963, Jones and Goldman went on to produce 34 more Tom and Jerry shorts, all of which carried Jones' distinctive style (and a slight psychedelic influence). However, despite being animated by essentially the same artists who worked with Jones at Warners, these new shorts had varying degrees of critical success.

Jones had trouble adapting his style to Tom and Jerry's brand of humor, and a number of the cartoons favored personality and style over storyline. The characters underwent a slight change of appearance: Tom was given thicker eyebrows (resembling Jones' Grinch or Count Blood Count), a less complex look (including the color of his fur becoming gray), sharper ears, and furrier cheeks, while Jerry was given larger eyes and ears, a lighter brown color, and a sweeter, Porky Pig-like expression.

Some of Jones' Tom and Jerry cartoons are reminiscent of his work with Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner, included the uses of blackout gags and gags involving characters falling from high places. Jones co-directed the majority of the shorts with layout artist Maurice Noble. The remaining shorts were directed by Abe Levitow and Ben Washam, with Tom Ray directing two shorts built around footage from earlier Tom and Jerry cartoons directed by Hanna and Barbera. Various vocal characteristics were made by Mel Blanc and June Foray. Jones' efforts are considered superior to the previous Deitch efforts, and contain the memorable opening theme, in which Tom is trapped inside the "O" of his name.[12]

Though Jones managed to recapture some of the magic from the original Hanna-Barbera efforts, MGM ended production on Tom and Jerry in 1967, by which time Sib Tower 12 had become MGM Animation/Visual Arts. Jones had moved on television specials and the feature film, The Phantom Tollbooth.[12]

[edit] Tom and Jerry hit television

Mammy Two Shoes in Saturday Evening Puss was rotoscoped and replaced with a thin white teenager.

Beginning in 1965, the Hanna and Barbera Tom and Jerry cartoons began to appear on television in heavily edited form. The Jones team was required to take the cartoons featuring Mammy Two-Shoes and rotoscope her out. Most of the time, she was replaced with a similarly fat White Irish woman; occasionally, as in Saturday Evening Puss, a thin white teenager took her place instead, with both characters voiced by June Foray. However, in more recent local telecasts of the cartoons, and in the versions shown on Boomerang, Mammy could once again be seen; more recently[year needed] with a new, less stereotypical black voice supplied, which is done by Thea Vidale.[citation needed].

Debuting on CBS' Saturday morning schedule on September 25, 1965, Tom and Jerry moved to CBS Sundays two years later and remained there until September 17, 1972.

The intros of each episode shown on TV and DVD today are re-issues from the 1950s-1960s, with the exception of Puss Gets The Boot and The night before Christmas, which still retain their original opening and closing credits from the early 1940s.

[edit] Tom and Jerry's new owners

In 1986, MGM was purchased by WTBS founder Ted Turner. Turner sold the company a short while later, but retained MGM's pre-1986 film library, thus Tom and Jerry became the property of Turner Entertainment (where the rights stand today via Warner Bros.), and have in subsequent years appeared on Turner-run stations, such as TBS, TNT, Cartoon Network, Boomerang, and Turner Classic Movies.

[edit] Tom and Jerry outside the United States

When shown on terrestrial television in the United Kingdom (from 1967 to 2000, usually on the BBC) Tom and Jerry cartoons were not cut for violence and Mammy was retained. As well as having regular slots (mainly after the evening BBC News with around 2 epsidoes shown every evening and occasionly shown on children's network CBBC in the morning), Tom and Jerry served the BBC in another way. When faced with disruption to the schedules (such as those occurring when live broadcasts overrun), the BBC would invariably turn to Tom and Jerry to fill any gaps, confident that it would retain much of an audience that might otherwise channel hop. This proved particularly helpful in 1993, when Noel's House Party had to be canceled due to an IRA bomb scare at BBC Television Centre - Tom and Jerry was shown instead, bridging the gap until the next programme. Recently, a mother has complained to OFCOM of the smoking scenes shown in the cartoons, since Tom often attempts to impress love interests with the habit, resulting in reports that the smoking scenes in Tom and Jerry films may be subject to censorship.[13]

Due to its lack of dialogue, Tom and Jerry was easily translated into various foreign languages. Tom and Jerry began broadcast in Japan in 1964. A 2005 nationwide survey taken in Japan by TV Asahi, sampling age groups from teenagers to adults in their sixties, ranked Tom and Jerry #85 in a list of the top 100 "anime" of all time; while their web poll taken after the airing of the list ranked it at #58 - the only non-Japanese animation on the list, and beating anime classics like Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle, A Little Princess Sara, and the ultra-classics Macross and Ghost in the Shell (it should be noted that in Japan, the word "anime" refers to all animation regardless of origin, not just Japanese animation).[14]

Tom and Jerry have long been popular in Germany. However, the cartoons are overdubbed with rhyming German language verse that describes what is happening onscreen and provides additional funny content. The different episodes are usually embedded in the episode Jerry's Diary (1949), in which Tom reads about past adventures.

In India, South East Asia, the Middle East, Egypt, Kazakhstan, Pakistan, Lebanon, Argentina, Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, Venezuela, other Latin American countries, and in eastern European countries (such as Romania), Cartoon Network still airs Tom and Jerry cartoons every day. In Russia, local channels also air the show in their daytime programming slot. Tom and Jerry was one of the few cartoons of western origin broadcast in Czechoslovakia (1988) and Romania (until 1989) before the fall of Communism in 1989.

[edit] Controversy





The scenes featuring Tom, Jerry or other characters in blackface are often edited.But a recorded video uncut on YouTube.Screen capture from The Truce Hurts.

Like a number of other animated cartoons in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, Tom and Jerry was not considered politically correct in later years. Many shorts featured racism, such as characters shown in blackface following an explosion, which are subsequently cut when shown on television today, although The Yankee Doodle Mouse blackface gag as well as another blackface gag at the end of Safety Second,and a short scene from The Dog House remain intact, depending on the country. The black maid, Mammy Two Shoes, is often considered a racist stereotype because she is depicted as a poor black woman who has a rodent problem. Her voice was redubbed by Turner in the mid-1990s in hopes of making the character sound less stereotypical; the resulting accent sounded more Irish. One cartoon in particular, His Mouse Friday, is often completely out of television rotation due to the cannibals being seen as racist stereotypes. If shown, the cannibals' dialogue is edited out, although their mouths can be seen moving. Another, The Lonesome Mouse, is also out of syndication, due to a scene in which Jerry paints a picture of Tom to look like Adolf Hitler.

In 2006, United Kingdom channel Boomerang made plans to edit Tom and Jerry cartoons being aired in the UK where the characters were seen to be smoking in a manner that was "condoned, acceptable or glamorised." This followed a complaint from a viewer that the cartoons were not appropriate for younger viewers, and a subsequent investigation by UK media watchdog OFCOM.[13] It has also taken the U.S. approach by editing out blackface gags, though this seems to be random as not all scenes of this type are cut.

While mid-1990s efforts to update the historic cartoons may be seen as a way to make the cartoons more suitable for the times, editing the original cartoons has become just as controversial in the regard that it diminishes the original artistic piece which made the cartoons popular. While the dialogue of Mammy Two Shoes is viewed as racist and stereotypical by many, it was voiced by Lillian Randolph, one of the few African-American performers at the time who was employed in the entertainment industry. The new voiceovers for Mammy capture much of the dialogue tone of Randolph, but it also erases Randolph's artistic contribution to the series. Redoing the voiceovers also has caught attention, because it draws negative notice to controversy and creates more issues.

[edit] Later shows, specials and shorts

In 1975, Tom and Jerry were reunited with Hanna and Barbera, who produced new Tom and Jerry cartoons for Saturday mornings. These 48 seven-minute short cartoons were paired with The Great Grape Ape and Mumbly cartoons, to create The Tom and Jerry/Grape Ape Show, The Tom and Jerry/Grape Ape/Mumbly Show, and The Tom and Jerry/Mumbly Show, all of which initially ran on ABC Saturday Morning between September 6, 1975 and September 3, 1977. This is the first new Tom and Jerry cartoon series for TV in years, after the theatrical shorts were shown on television. In these cartoons, Tom and Jerry (now with a red bow tie), who had been enemies during their formative years, became nonviolent pals who went on adventures together, as Hanna-Barbera had to meet the stringent rules against violence for children's TV. The Tom and Jerry Show is still airing on the Canadian channel, Teletoon, and its classical counterpart, Teletoon Retro.[12]

Filmation Studios (in association with MGM Television) also tried their hands at producing a Tom and Jerry TV series. Their version, The Tom and Jerry Comedy Show, debuted in 1980, and also featured new cartoons starring Droopy, Spike (another bulldog created by Tex Avery), and Barney Bear, not seen since the original MGM shorts. The Filmation Tom and Jerry cartoons were noticeably different from Hanna-Barbera's efforts, as they returned Tom and Jerry to the original chase formula, with a somewhat more "slapstick" humor format. This incarnation, much like the 1975 version, was not as well received by audiences as the originals, and lasted on CBS Saturday Morning from September 6, 1980 to September 4, 1982.[12] Its animation style bore a strong resemblance to that of The New Adventures of Mighty Mouse and Heckle & Jeckle.

One of the biggest trends for Saturday morning television in the 1980s and 1990s was the "babyfication" of older, classic cartoon stars, and on September 8, 1990, Tom and Jerry Kids, co-produced by Turner Entertainment and Hanna-Barbera Productions (which would be sold to Turner in 1991) debuted on Fox Kids and for a couple of years, aired on British children's show, CBBC. It featured a youthful version of the famous cat-and-mouse duo chasing each other. As with the 1975 H-B series, Jerry wears his red bowtie, while Tom now wears a red cap. Spike and his son Tyke (who now had talking dialogue) and Droopy and his son Dripple, appeared in back-up segments for the show, which ran until October 2, 1993.

In 2000, a new television special entitled Tom and Jerry: The Mansion Cat premiered on Cartoon Network. It featured Joe Barbera (who was also a creative consultant) as the voice of Tom's owner, whose face is never seen. In this cartoon, Jerry, housed in a habitrail, is as much of a house pet as Tom is, and their owner has to remind Tom to not "blame everything on the mouse".

In 2005, a new Tom and Jerry theatrical short, entitled The Karate Guard, which had been written and directed by Barbera and Spike Brandt, storyboarded by Joseph Barbera and Iwao Takamoto and produced by Joseph Barbera, Spike Brandt and Tony Cervone premiered in Los Angeles cinemas on December 16, 2005. As part of the celebration of Tom and Jerry's sixty-fifth anniversary, this marked Barbera's first return as a writer, director and storyboard artist on the series since his and Hanna's original MGM cartoon shorts. Director/animator, Spike Brandt was nominated for an Annie award for best character animation. The short debuted on Cartoon Network on January 27, 2006.

During the first half of 2006, a new series called Tom and Jerry Tales was produced at Warner Bros. Animation. Thirteen half-hour episodes (each consisting of three shorts) were produced, with only markets outside of the United States and United Kingdom signed up. The show then came to the UK in February 2006 on Boomerang, and it went to the U.S. on The CW4Kids on The CW.[15]. Tales is the first Tom and Jerry TV series that utilizes the original style of the classic shorts, along with the violence. This recently is the last notable Tom and Jerry-based cartoon show for television, as the show ended on March 22, 2008.

[edit] Reception

In January 2009, IGN named Tom and Jerry as the 66th best in the Top 100 Animated TV Shows.[16] In an interview found on the DVD releases, several MADtv cast members stated that Tom and Jerry is one of their biggest influences for slapstick comedy.

[edit] Feature films

October 1, 1992 saw the first international release of Tom and Jerry: The Movie when the film was released overseas to theaters in Europe of that year and then domestically by Miramax Films in July 30, 1993. Joseph Barbera, co-creator of the characters served as creative consultant for the picture, which was produced and directed by Phil Roman. A musical film with a structure similar to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's blockbusters, The Wizard of Oz and Singin' in the Rain, the movie was criticized by reviewers and audiences alike for being predictable and for giving the pair dialogue (and songs) through the entire movie. As a result, it failed at the box office.

In 2001, Warner Bros. (which had, by then, merged with Turner and assumed its properties) released the duo's first direct-to-video movie, Tom and Jerry: The Magic Ring, in which Tom covets a ring which grants mystical powers to the wearer, and has become accidentally stuck on Jerry's head. It would mark the last time Hanna and Barbera co-produced a Tom and Jerry film, as William Hanna died shortly after The Magic Ring was released.

Four years later, Bill Kopp scripted and directed two more cat and mouse features for the studio, Tom and Jerry: Blast Off to Mars and Tom and Jerry: The Fast and the Furry, the latter one based on a story by Barbera. Both were released on DVD in 2005, marking the celebration of Tom and Jerry's 65th anniversary. In 2006, another direct-to-video film, Tom and Jerry: Shiver Me Whiskers, tells the story about the pair having to work together to find the treasure. Joe came up with the storyline for the next feature, Tom and Jerry: A Nutcracker Tale, as well as the initial idea of synchronizing the on-screen actions to music from Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker Suite. This DTV, directed by Spike Brandt and Tony Cervone, would be Joe Barbera's last Tom and Jerry project due to his passing in December 2006. The holiday-set animated film was released on DVD in late 2007, and dedicated to Barbera.

A new direct-to-video film, Tom and Jerry Meet Sherlock Holmes, is slated for release on August 24, 2010. It will be the first made-for-video Tom and Jerry film to be produced without its original creators Hanna and Barbera.

Warner Bros. has plans for a theatrically-released film starring Tom and Jerry, slated for an 2011 release. The film will be, according to Variety, "an origin story that reveals how Tom and Jerry first meet and form their rivalry before getting lost in Chicago and reluctantly working together during an arduous journey home". So far Dan Lin will be producing the film, while screenwriter Eric Gravning is also hired on the project. Warner Bros., in their Variety review, replied they are using Tom and Jerry to create their own "Alvin and the Chipmunks family franchise".[17] [18]

[edit] Other formats

Tom and Jerry began appearing in comic books in 1942, as one of the features in Our Gang Comics. In 1949, with MGM's live-action Our Gang shorts having ceased production five years earlier, the series was renamed Tom and Jerry Comics. The pair continued to appear in various books for the rest of the 20th century.[19]

The pair have also appeared in a number of video games as well, spanning titles for systems from the Nintendo Entertainment System and Super NES and Nintendo 64 to more recent entries for PlayStation 2, Xbox, and Nintendo GameCube.

Main article: Tom and Jerry video games

[edit] Cultural influences

Throughout the years, the term and title Tom and Jerry became practically synonymous with never-ending rivalry, as much as the related "cat and mouse fight" metaphor has. Yet in Tom and Jerry it wasn't the more powerful (Tom) that usually came out on top. Palestinian President Yassar Arafat noted this fact and loved the cartoon show because "the little guy--the mouse and not the cat--always won"[20]

Author Steven Millhauser wrote a short story called Cat 'n' Mouse which pits the duo against one another as antagonist and protagonist in literary form. Millhauser allows his reader access to the thoughts and emotions of the two characters in a way that wasn't done in the cartoon.

[edit] In popular culture

The Simpsons characters, Itchy & Scratchy, the featured cartoon on the Krusty the Clown Show, are spoofs of Tom and Jerry – a "cartoon within a cartoon."[1] The cartoon violence of Tom and Jerry is parodied and intensified, as Itchy (the mouse) dispatches Scratchy in a variety of gratuitous, gory methods. In the Simpsons episode, Itchy and Scratchy and Marge, Marge gets violence banned from TV and Itchy and Scratchy became friends; their whacking intro is replaced by gift-exchanging. This causes the downfall of the series. It was later changed back to the way it used to be because Marge decided that art shouldn't be censored; she didn't want Michelangelo's David's nudity to be covered up.

In another episode, "Krusty Gets Kancelled", the short cartoon "Worker and Parasite", is a reference to the Eastern European Tom and Jerry cartoons directed by Gene Deitch.[21] To produce the animation, director David Silverman photocopied several drawings and made the animation very jerky.[22]





Jerry and Gene Kelly in the 1945 musical film Anchors Aweigh.

In 1945, Jerry made an appearance in the live-action MGM musical feature film Anchors Aweigh, in which, through the use of special effects, he performs a dance routine with Gene Kelly. In this sequence, Gene Kelly is telling a class of school kids a fictional tale of how he earned his Medal of Honor: Jerry is the king of a magical world populated with cartoon animals, whom he has forbidden to dance as he himself does not know how. Gene Kelly's character then comes along and guides Jerry through an elaborate dance routine, resulting in Jerry awarding him with a medal. Jerry speaks and sings in this short film; his voice is performed by Sara Berner. Tom has a cameo in the sequence as one of Jerry's servants.





Tom and Jerry and Esther Williams in the 1953 musical film Dangerous When Wet.

Both Tom and Jerry appear with Esther Williams in a dream sequence in another big-screen musical, Dangerous When Wet. In the film, Tom and Jerry are chasing each other underwater, when they run into Esther Williams, with whom they perform an extended synchronized swimming routine. Tom and Jerry have to save Williams from a lecherous octopus, who tries to lure and woo her into his (many) arms.

In 1988, the duo were lined up to appear in the Oscar-winning Touchstone/Amblin Entertainment film, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, a homage to classic American animation, but their inclusion in the film was scrapped due to legal complications.[23]

During the Coolio song "Ghetto Cartoon" from the 1994 album It Takes A Thief, Tom and Jerry are mentioned: "Donald got the word that his nephews was snitchin'. So Tom and Jerry stuck em on they way to the kitchen."

Google

Company Overview

Our name



Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin named the search engine they built "Google," a play on the word "googol," the mathematical term for a 1 followed by 100 zeros. The name reflects the immense volume of information that exists, and the scope of Google's mission: to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.



Search



When you visit www.google.com or one of more than 150 other Google domains, you can find information in many different languages (and translate between them), check stock quotes and sports scores, find news headlines and look up the address of your local post office or grocery store. You can also find images, videos, maps, patents and much more. With universal search technology, you can often find all of these things combined in one query.



Of course, there is a lot of information in the world that is not yet online, so we're also working to get more of it digitized, such as in Google Books or the Google News Archive. We also know that whenever you search the web you want it to be as fast as possible, with all your favorite websites at your fingertips, so we offer software like Google Toolbar and Google Chrome to help you browse the web quickly and easily.



Search is how Google began, and it's at the heart of what we do today. We devote more engineering time to search than to any other product at Google, because we believe that search can always be improved. We are constantly working to provide you with more relevant results so that you find what you're looking for faster. To that end, we've added services such as personalized search, which tailors results for you if you are signed in to your Google account.



Ads



As a business, Google generates the majority of its revenue by offering advertisers measurable, cost-effective and highly relevant advertising, so that the ads are useful to the people who see them as well as to the advertisers who run them.



Hundreds of thousands of advertisers worldwide use our Google AdWords program to promote their products and services on the web. Advertisers bid in an open and competitive auction to have their ads appear alongside the search results for particular keywords. They can specify the geographic location and time of day for their ads to appear. As a result, people see ads that are so useful and relevant that they become a valuable form of information in their own right.



Since we believe you should know when someone has paid to put a message in front of you, we distinguish ads from search results or other content on a page by labeling them as "sponsored links" or "Ads by Google". We don't sell ad placement in our search results, nor do we allow people to pay for a higher ranking there.



In addition, hundreds of thousands of partners, from bloggers to major online publishers, participate in our Google AdSense program. This program delivers ads from our AdWords advertisers that are relevant to the content or search results on partner sites. The AdSense program enables advertisers to extend the reach of their ad campaigns, improves partners' ability to generate revenue from their content, and delivers relevant ads for their users.



In addition to our core AdWords and AdSense programs, we offer a number of other services to advertisers, including various advertising formats on YouTube, Google TV Ads, as well as online ad serving and management services through DoubleClick. Finally, we aim to make advertising more measurable and efficient with free tools for advertisers such as Google Analytics, Website Optimizer, Insights for Searchand Ad Planner. These tools help advertisers to analyze their campaigns, test them, and make them more efficient and effective.



Apps



We build web applications, or "apps", to make it simpler for people to share information and get things done together. Gmail, Google Calendar, Blogger and Google Docs help people communicate and collaborate more easily, whether planning a wedding, building a business itinerary or just keeping friends and family up to date. The information is stored securely online, accessible from any device with a web connection. And because it lives online, it's easy to share with a group of collaborators. Everyone in the group can work on the same material at the same time, even if they're working in different buildings, countries or continents.



Today people want the same ease of use on their work computers that they have on their increasingly powerful personal computers. This is why we offer businesses a suite called Google Apps. It's powerful enough for large enterprises (we use it across all of Google, in fact) but simple enough for mom-and-pop businesses too. We're continually improving Google Apps, so you always have the latest version without worrying about maintenance or upgrades. And it's much less expensive than most traditional software. Google Apps is designed to fit the way people naturally live, work and socialize, so they can focus on what they're doing rather than worrying about maintaining the software.



We built Google Apps from the ground up for today's connected world. Our infrastructure is designed to keep our users' data safe and secure and to make our apps fast and responsive. We firmly believe that on the web, your data belongs to you, and should be portable: when you use Google Apps, you can export your mail, documents, photos or calendar entries whenever you like.



Mobile



You should be able to access all of Google's services wherever you are – even if you don't have a computer nearby. We make it easy for you to use your favorite Google products, from Google Maps to YouTube, right from your phone. As mobile devices become increasingly central to people's lives, we work hard to find new and better ways to help you get the information you need when you are on the go.



We're also focused on enabling others to innovate in the mobile space. Working closely with the Open Handset Alliance, we developed Android, the world's first fully open platform that any mobile developer can use and any hardware manufacturer can install on a device. Android was built with the web in mind, and we believe that it will help drive innovation so that more people can use better and cheaper mobile devices to access the Internet.



The road ahead



A lot has changed since the first Google search engine appeared. We have grown and expanded our offerings from a single service to dozens, often in as many languages. We now have thousands of employees and offices around the world. But some things haven't changed: our dedication to our users and our belief in the possibilities of the Internet itself.

Google

Google Inc.

Type:  Public (NASDAQ: GOOG, FWB: GGQ1)

Industry:  Internet, Computer software

Founded:  Menlo Park, California (September 4, 1998 (1998-09-04))[1]

Founder(s):  Sergey M. Brin
Lawrence E. Page

Headquarters:  Mountain View, California, United States

Area served:  Worldwide

Key people:

 Eric E. Schmidt

(Chairman & CEO)

Sergey M. Brin

(Technology President)

Lawrence E. Page

(Products President)


Products:  See list of Google products.

Revenue:  ▲US$23.651 billion (2009)[2][3]

Operating income:  ▲US$8.312 billion (2009)[2][3]

Profit:  ▲US$6.520 billion (2009)[2][3]

Total assets:  ▲US$40.497 billion (2009)[2][3]

Total equity:  ▲US$36.004 billion (2009)[3]

Employees:  21,805 (2010)[4]

Subsidiaries:  YouTube, DoubleClick, On2 Technologies, GrandCentral, Picnik, Aardvark, AdMob

Website Google.com



Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG, FWB: GGQ1) is a multinational public cloud computing, Internet search, and advertising technologies corporation. Google hosts and develops a number of Internet-based services and products,[5] and generates profit primarily from advertising through its AdWords program.[2][6] The company was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, often dubbed the "Google Guys",[7][8][9][10] while the two were attending Stanford University as Ph.D. candidates. It was first incorporated as a privately held company on September 4, 1998, with its initial public offering to follow on August 19, 2004. The company's stated mission from the outset was "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful",[11] and the company's unofficial slogan – coined by Google engineer Paul Buchheit – is Don't be evil.[12][13] In 2006, the company moved to their current headquarters in Mountain View, California.



Google runs over one million servers in data centers around the world,[14] and processes over one billion search requests[15] and twenty petabytes of user-generated data every day.[16][17][18] Google's rapid growth since its incorporation has triggered a chain of products, acquisitions and partnerships beyond the company's core search engine. The company offers online productivity software, such as its Gmail e-mail software, and social networking tools, including Orkut and, more recently, Google Buzz. Google's products extend to the desktop as well, with applications such as the web browser Google Chrome, the Picasa photo organization and editing software, and the Google Talk instant messaging application. More notably, Google leads the development of the Android mobile phone operating system, used on a number of phones such as the Nexus One and Motorola Droid. Because of its popularity and numerous products, Alexa lists Google as the Internet's most visited website.[19] Google is also Fortune Magazine's fourth best place to work,[20] and BrandZ's most powerful brand in the world.[21] The dominant market position of Google's services has led to criticism of the company over issues including privacy, copyright, and censorship.
History

Main article: History of Google



Google's original homepage had a simple design since its founders were not experienced in HTML, the language for designing web pages.[24]Google began in January 1996 as a research project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin when they were both PhD students at Stanford University in California.[25] While conventional search engines ranked results by counting how many times the search terms appeared on the page, the two theorized about a better system that analyzed the relationships between websites.[26] They called this new technology PageRank, where a website's relevance was determined by the number of pages, and the importance of those pages, that linked back to the original site.[27] A small search engine called Rankdex was already exploring a similar strategy.[28] Page and Brin originally nicknamed their new search engine "BackRub", because the system checked backlinks to estimate the importance of a site.[29][30] Eventually, they changed the name to Google, originating from a misspelling of the word "googol",[31][32] the number one followed by one hundred zeros, which was meant to signify the amount of information the search engine was to handle. Originally, Google ran under the Stanford University website, with the domain google.stanford.edu. The domain google.com was registered on September 15, 1997,[33] and the company was incorporated on September 4, 1998, at a friend's garage in Menlo Park, California.



Financing and initial public offering



The first iteration of Google production servers was built with inexpensive hardware.[34]The first funding for Google was an August 1998 contribution of US$100,000 from Andy Bechtolsheim, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, given before Google was even incorporated.[35] On June 7, 1999, a $25 million round of funding was announced,[36] with major investors including the venture capital firms Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Sequoia Capital.[35]



Google's initial public offering (IPO) took place five years later on August 19, 2004. The company offered 19,605,052 shares at a price of $85 per share.[37][38] Shares were sold in a unique online auction format using a system built by Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse, underwriters for the deal.[39][40] The sale of $1.67 billion gave Google a market capitalization of more than $23 billion.[41] The vast majority of the 271 million shares remained under the control of Google, and many Google employees became instant paper millionaires. Yahoo!, a competitor of Google, also benefited because it owned 8.4 million shares of Google before the IPO took place.[42]



Some people speculated that Google's IPO would inevitably lead to changes in company culture. Reasons ranged from shareholder pressure for employee benefit reductions to the fact that many company executives would become instant paper millionaires.[43] As a reply to this concern, co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page promised in a report to potential investors that the IPO would not change the company's culture.[44] In 2005, however, articles in The New York Times and other sources began suggesting that Google had lost its anti-corporate, no evil philosophy.[45][46][47] In an effort to maintain the company's unique culture, Google designated a Chief Culture Officer, who also serves as the Director of Human Resources. The purpose of the Chief Culture Officer is to develop and maintain the culture and work on ways to keep true to the core values that the company was founded on: a flat organization with a collaborative environment.[48] Google has also faced allegations of sexism and ageism from former employees.[49][50]



The stock's performance after the IPO went well, with shares hitting $700 for the first time on October 31, 2007,[51] primarily because of strong sales and earnings in the online advertising market.[52] The surge in stock price was fueled mainly by individual investors, as opposed to large institutional investors and mutual funds.[52] The company is now listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange under the ticker symbol GOOG and under the Frankfurt Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol GGQ1.



Growth

In March 1999, the company moved its offices to Palo Alto, California, home to several other noted Silicon Valley technology startups.[53] The next year, against Page and Brin's initial opposition toward an advertising-funded search engine,[54] Google began selling advertisements associated with search keywords.[25] In order to maintain an uncluttered page design and increase speed, advertisements were solely text-based. Keywords were sold based on a combination of price bids and clickthroughs, with bidding starting at five cents per click.[25] This model of selling keyword advertising was first pioneered by Goto.com, an Idealab spin off created by Bill Gross.[55][56] When the company changed names to Overture Services, it sued Google over alleged infringements of the company's pay-per-click and bidding patents. Overture Services would later be bought by Yahoo! and renamed Yahoo! Search Marketing. The case was then settled out of court, with Google agreeing to issue shares of common stock to Yahoo! in exchange for a perpetual license.[57]



During this time, Google was granted a patent describing their PageRank mechanism.[58] The patent was officially assigned to Stanford University and lists Lawrence Page as the inventor. In 2003, after outgrowing two other locations, the company leased their current office complex from Silicon Graphics at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway in Mountain View, California.[59] The complex has since come to be known as the Googleplex, a play on the word googolplex, the number one followed by a googol zeroes. Three years later, Google would buy the property from SGI for $319 million.[60] By that time, the name "Google" had found its way into everyday language, causing the verb "google" to be added to the Merriam Webster Collegiate Dictionary and the Oxford English Dictionary, denoted as "to use the Google search engine to obtain information on the Internet."[61][62]



Acquisitions and partnerships

See also: List of acquisitions by Google

Since 2001, Google has acquired many companies, mainly focusing on small venture capital companies. In 2004, Google acquired Keyhole, Inc..[63] The start-up company developed a product called Earth Viewer that gave a 3-D view of the Earth. Google renamed the service to Google Earth in 2005. Two years later, Google bought the online video site YouTube for $1.65 billion in stock.[64] On April 13, 2007, Google reached an agreement to acquire DoubleClick for $3.1 billion, giving Google valuable relationships that DoubleClick had with Web publishers and advertising agencies.[65] Later that same year, Google purchased GrandCentral for $50 million.[66] The site would later be changed over to Google Voice. On August 5, 2009, Google bought out its first public company, purchasing video software maker On2 Technologies for $106.5 million.[67] Google also acquired Aardvark, a social network search engine, for $50 million. Google commented in their internal blog, "we're looking forward to collaborating to see where we can take it".[68] And, in April 2010, Google announced it had acquired a hardware startup, Agnilux.[69]



In addition to the numerous companies Google has purchased, the company has partnered with other organizations for everything from research to advertising. In 2005, Google partnered with NASA Ames Research Center to build 1,000,000 square feet (93,000 m2) of offices.[70] The offices would be used for research projects involving large-scale data management, nanotechnology, distributed computing, and the entrepreneurial space industry. Later that year, Google entered into a partnership with Sun Microsystems in October 2005 to help share and distribute each other's technologies.[71] The company also partnered with AOL of Time Warner,[72] to enhance each other's video search services. Google's 2005 partnerships also included financing the new .mobi top-level domain for mobile devices, along with other companies including Microsoft, Nokia, and Ericsson.[73] Google would later launch "Adsense for Mobile", taking advantage of the emerging mobile advertising market.[74] Increasing their advertising reach even further, Google and Fox Interactive Media of News Corp. entered into a $900 million agreement to provide search and advertising on popular social networking site MySpace.[75]



In October 2006, Google announced that it had acquired the video-sharing site YouTube for US$1.65 billion in Google stock, and the deal was finalized on November 13, 2006.[76] Google does not provide detailed figures for YouTube's running costs, and YouTube's revenues in 2007 were noted as "not material" in a regulatory filing.[77] In June 2008, a Forbes magazine article projected the 2008 YouTube revenue at US$200 million, noting progress in advertising sales.[78] In 2007, Google began sponsoring NORAD Tracks Santa, a service that pretends to follow Santa Claus' progress on Christmas Eve,[79] using Google Earth to "track Santa" in 3-D for the first time,[80] and displacing former sponsor AOL. Google-owned YouTube gave NORAD Tracks Santa its own channel.[81]



In 2008, Google developed a partnership with GeoEye to launch a satellite providing Google with high-resolution (0.41 m monochrome, 1.65 m color) imagery for Google Earth. The satellite was launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base on September 6, 2008.[82] Google also announced in 2008 that it was hosting an archive of Life Magazine's photographs as part of its latest partnership. Some of the images in the archive were never published in the magazine.[83] The photos were watermarked and originally had copyright notices posted on all photos, regardless of public domain status.[84]



In 2010, Google made its first investment in a renewable-energy project, putting up $38.8 million into two wind farms in North Dakota. The company announced the two locations will generate 169.5 megawatts of power, or enough to supply 55,000 homes. The farms, which were developed by NextEra Energy Resources, will reduce fossil fuel use in the region and return profits. NextEra Energy Resources sold Google a twenty percent stake in the project in order to get funding for project development.[85] Also in 2010, Google purchased Global IP Solutions, a Norway based company that provides web-based teleconferencing and other related services. This acquisition will enable Google to add telephone-style services to its list of products.[86] On May 27, 2010, Google announced it had also closed the acquisition of the mobile ad network, AdMob. This purchase occurred days after the Federal Trade Commission closed its investigation into the purchase.[87] Google acquired the company for an undisclosed amount.[88]



Products and services

See also: List of Google products

Advertising

Ninety-nine percent of Google's revenue is derived from its advertising programs.[89] For the 2006 fiscal year, the company reported $10.492 billion in total advertising revenues and only $112 million in licensing and other revenues.[90] Google has implemented various innovations in the online advertising market that helped propel them to one of the biggest advertisers in the market. Using technology from the company DoubleClick, Google can determine user interests and target advertisements appropriately so they are relevant to the context they are in and the user that is viewing them.[91][92] Google Analytics allows website owners to track where and how people use their website, allowing for in-depth research into getting users to go where you want them to go.[93]



Google advertisements can be placed on third-party websites in a two-part program. Google's AdWords allows advertisers to display their advertisements in the Google content network, through either a cost-per-click or cost-per-view scheme. The sister service, Google AdSense, allows website owners to display these advertisements on their website, and earn money every time ads are clicked.[94] One of the disadvantages and criticisms of this program is Google's inability to combat click fraud, when a person or automated script "clicks" on advertisements without being interested in the product, just to earn money for the website owner. Industry reports in 2006 claim that approximately 14 to 20 percent of clicks were in fact fraudulent or invalid.[95] In June 2008, Google reached an advertising agreement with Yahoo!, which would have allowed Yahoo! to feature Google advertisements on their web pages. The alliance between the two companies was never completely realized due to antitrust concerns by the U.S. Department of Justice. As a result, Google pulled out of the deal in November 2008.[96][97]



Search engine



In 2010, Google updated its homepage with a new shadow-less logo.[98]The Google web search engine is the company's most popular service. According to market research published by comScore in November 2009, Google is the dominant search engine in the United States market, with a market share of 65.6%.[99] Google indexes trillions of web pages, so that users can search for the information they desire, through the use of keywords and operators. This basic search engine has spread to specific services as well, including an image search engine, the Google News search site, Google Maps, and more. In early 2006, the company launched Google Video, which allowed users to upload, search, and watch videos from the Internet.[100] In 2009, however, uploads to Google Video were discontinued so that Google could focus more on the search aspect of the service.[101] The company even developed Google Desktop, a desktop search application used to search for files local to one's computer.



One of the more controversial search services Google hosts is Google Books. The company began scanning books and uploading limited previews, and full books where allowed, into their new book search engine. However, a number of copyright disputes arose, and Google reached a revised settlement in 2009 to limit its scans to books from the U.S., the U.K., Australia and Canada.[102] Furthermore, the Paris Civil Court ruled against Google in late 2009, asking them to remove the works of La Martinière (Éditions du Seuil) from their database.[103] In competition with Amazon.com, Google plans to sell digital versions of new books.[104]



Productivity tools

In addition to its standard web search services, Google has released over the years a number of online productivity tools. Gmail, a free webmail service provided by Google, was launched as an invitation-only beta program on April 1, 2004,[105] and became available to the general public on February 7, 2007.[106] The service was upgraded from beta status on July 7, 2009,[107] at which time it had 146 million users monthly.[108] The service would be the first online email service with one gigabyte of storage, and the first to keep emails from the same conversation together in one thread, similar to an Internet forum.[105] The service currently offers over 7400 MB of free storage with additional storage ranging from 20 GB to 16 TB available for US$0.25 per 1 GB per year.[109] Furthermore, software developers know Gmail for its pioneering use of AJAX, a programming technique that allows web pages to be interactive without refreshing the browser.[110]



Google Docs, another part of Google's productivity suite, allows users to create, edit, and collaborate on documents in an online environment, not dissimilar to Microsoft Word. The service was originally called Writely, but was obtained by Google on March 9, 2006, where it was released as an invitation-only preview.[111] On June 6 after the acquisition, Google created an experimental spreadsheet editing program,[112] which would be combined with Google Docs on October 10.[113] A program to edit presentations would complete the set on September 17, 2007,[114] before all three services were taken out of beta along with Gmail on July 7, 2009.[107] Google Calendar, a calendar program closely integrated with Gmail,[115] was also taken out of beta that day after its beta release on April 12, 2006.[116]



Enterprise products



Google's search appliance at the 2008 RSA ConferenceGoogle entered the enterprise market in February 2002 with the launch of its Google Search Appliance, targeted toward providing search technology for larger organizations.[25] Google launched the Mini three years later, which was targeted at smaller organizations. Late in 2006, Google began to sell Custom Search Business Edition, providing customers with an advertising-free window into Google.com's index. The service was renamed Google Site Search in 2008.[117]



Another one of Google's enterprise products is Google Apps Premier Edition. The service, and its accompanying Google Apps Education Edition and Standard Edition, allow companies, schools, and other organizations to bring Google's online applications, such as Gmail and Google Documents, into their own domain. The Premier Edition specifically includes extras over the Standard Edition such as more disk space, API access, and premium support, and it costs $50 per user per year. A large implementation of Google Apps with 38,000 users is at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada. In the same year Google Apps was launched, Google acquired Postini[118] and proceeded to integrate the company's security technologies into Google Apps[119] under the name Google Postini Services.[120]



Other products

Google Translate is a server-side machine translation service, which can translate between 35 different languages. Browser extensions allow for easy access to Google Translate from the browser. The software uses corpus linguistics techniques, where the program "learns" from professionally translated documents, specifically United Nations and European Parliament proceedings.[121] Furthermore, a "suggest a better translation" feature accompanies the translated text, allowing users to indicate where the current translation is incorrect or otherwise inferior to another translation.



Google launched its Google News service in 2002. The site proclaimed that the company had created a "highly unusual" site that "offers a news service compiled solely by computer algorithms without human intervention. Google employs no editors, managing editors, or executive editors."[122] The site hosted less licensed news content than Yahoo! News, and instead presented topically-selected links to news and opinion pieces along with reproductions of their headlines, story leads, and photographs.[123] The photographs are typically reduced to thumbnail size and placed next to headlines from other news sources on the same topic in order to minimize copyright infringement claims. Nevertheless, Agence France Presse sued Google for copyright infringement in federal court in the District of Columbia, a case which Google settled for an undisclosed amount in a pact that included a license of the full text of AFP articles for use on Google News.[124]



In 2006, Google made a bid to offer free wireless broadband access throughout the city of San Francisco in conjunction with Internet service provider Earthlink. Large telecommunications companies such as Comcast and Verizon opposed such efforts, claiming it was "unfair competition" and that cities would be violating their commitments to offer local monopolies to these companies. In his testimony before Congress on Net Neutrality in 2006, Google's Chief Internet Evangelist Vint Cerf blamed such tactics on the fact that nearly half of all consumers lack meaningful choice in broadband providers.[125] Google currently offers free wi-fi access in its hometown of Mountain View, California.[126]



One year later, reports surfaced that Google was planning the release of its own mobile phone, possibly a competitor to Apple's iPhone.[127][128][129] The project, called Android, turned out not to be a phone but an operating system for mobile devices, which Google acquired and then released as an open-source project under the Apache 2.0 license.[130] Google provides a software development kit for developers so applications can be created to be run on Android-based phone. In September 2008, T-Mobile released the G1, the first Android-based phone.[131] More than a year later on January 5, 2010, Google released an Android phone under its own company name called the Nexus One.[132]



Other projects Google has worked on include a new collaborative communication service, a web browser, and even a mobile operating system. The first of these was first announced on May 27, 2009. Google Wave was described as a product that helps users communicate and collaborate on the web. The service is Google's "email redesigned", with realtime editing, the ability to embed audio, video, and other media, and extensions that further enhance the communication experience. Google Wave was previously in a developer's preview, where interested users had to be invited to test the service, but was released to the general public on May 19, 2010, at Google's I/O keynote. On September 1, 2008, Google pre-announced the upcoming availability of Google Chrome, an open-source web browser,[133] which was then released on September 2, 2008. The next year, on 7 July 2009, Google announced Google Chrome OS, an open-source Linux-based operating system that includes only a web browser and is designed to log users into their Google account.[134][135]



Corporate affairs and culture



Google CEO Eric E. Schmidt with Sergey Brin and Larry Page (left to right)Google is known for having an informal corporate culture. On Fortune Magazine's list of best companies to work for, Google ranked first in 2007 and 2008[20][136] and fourth in 2009 and 2010.[137][138] Google's corporate philosophy embodies such casual principles as "you can make money without doing evil," "you can be serious without a suit," and "work should be challenging and the challenge should be fun."[139]



Employees

Google's stock performance following its IPO has enabled many early employees to be competitively compensated.[140] After the company's IPO, founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page and CEO Eric Schmidt requested that their base salary be cut to $1. Subsequent offers by the company to increase their salaries have been turned down, primarily because their primary compensation continues to come from returns stock in Google. Prior to 2004, Schmidt was making $250,000 per year, and Page and Brin each earned a salary of $150,000.[141]



In 2007 and through early 2008, Google has seen the departure of several top executives. In October 2007, former chief financial officer of YouTube Gideon Yu joined Facebook[142] along with Benjamin Ling, a high-ranking engineer.[143] In March 2008, Sheryl Sandburg, then vice-president of global online sales and operations, began her position as chief operating officer of Facebook[144] while Ash ElDifrawi, formerly head of brand advertising, left to become chief marketing officer of Netshops, an online retail company that was renamed Hayneedle in 2009.[145]



As a motivation technique, Google uses a policy often called Innovation Time Off, where Google engineers are encouraged to spend twenty percent of their work time on projects that interest them. Some of Google's newer services, such as Gmail, Google News, Orkut, and AdSense originated from these independent endeavors.[146] In a talk at Stanford University, Marissa Mayer, Google's Vice President of Search Products and User Experience, showed that half of all new product launches at the time had originated from the Innovation Time Off.[147]



Googleplex



The Googleplex, Google's original and largest corporate campusMain article: Googleplex

Google's headquarters in Mountain View, California is referred to as "the Googleplex", a play of words on the number googolplex and the headquarters itself being a complex of buildings. The lobby is decorated with a piano, lava lamps, old server clusters, and a projection of search queries on the wall. The hallways are full of exercise balls and bicycles. Each employee has access to the corporate recreation center. Recreational amenities are scattered throughout the campus and include a workout room with weights and rowing machines, locker rooms, washers and dryers, a massage room, assorted video games, foosball, a baby grand piano, a pool table, and ping pong. In addition to the rec room, there are snack rooms stocked with various foods and drinks.[148] In 2006, Google moved into 311,000 square feet (28,900 m2) of office space in New York City, at 111 Eighth Ave. in Manhattan.[149] The office was specially designed and built for Google, and it now houses its largest advertising sales team, which has been instrumental in securing large partnerships.[149] In 2003, they added an engineering staff in New York City, which has been responsible for more than 100 engineering projects, including Google Maps, Google Spreadsheets, and others. It is estimated that the building costs Google $10 million per year to rent and is similar in design and functionality to its Mountain View headquarters, including foosball, air hockey, and ping-pong tables, as well as a video game area. In November 2006, Google opened offices on Carnegie Mellon's campus in Pittsburgh.[150] By late 2006, Google also established a new headquarters for its AdWords division in Ann Arbor, Michigan.[151] Furthermore, Google has offices all around the world, and in the United States, including Atlanta, Austin, Boulder, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington DC.





Google's NYC office building houses their largest advertising sales team.[149]Google is taking steps to ensure that their operations are environmentally sound. In October 2006, the company announced plans to install thousands of solar panels to provide up to 1.6 megawatts of electricity, enough to satisfy approximately 30% of the campus' energy needs.[152] The system will be the largest solar power system constructed on a U.S. corporate campus and one of the largest on any corporate site in the world.[152] In addition, Google announced in 2009 that it was deploying herds of goats to keep grassland around the Googleplex short, helping to prevent the threat from seasonal bush fires while also reducing the carbon footprint of mowing the extensive grounds.[153][154] The idea of trimming lawns using goats originated from R. J. Widlar, an engineer who worked for National Semiconductor.[155] Despite this, Google has faced accusations in Harper's Magazine of being extremely excessive with their energy usage, and were accused of employing their "Don't be evil" motto as well as their very public energy saving campaigns as means of trying to cover up or make up for the massive amounts of energy their servers actually require.[156]



Easter eggs and April Fool's Day jokes

Main article: Google's hoaxes

Google has a tradition of creating April Fool's Day jokes. For example, Google MentalPlex allegedly featured the use of mental power to search the web.[157] In 2007, Google announced a free Internet service called TiSP, or Toilet Internet Service Provider, where one obtained a connection by flushing one end of a fiber-optic cable down their toilet.[158] Also in 2007, Google's Gmail page displayed an announcement for Gmail Paper, allowing users to have email messages printed and shipped to them.[159] In 2010, Google jokingly changed its company name to Topeka in honor of Topeka, Kansas, whose mayor actually changed the city's name to Google for a short amount of time in an attempt to sway Google's decision in its new Google Fiber Project.[160][161]



In addition to April Fool's Day jokes, Google's services contain a number of Easter eggs. For instance, Google included the Swedish Chef's "Bork bork bork," Pig Latin, "Hacker" or leetspeak, Elmer Fudd, and Klingon as language selections for its search engine.[162] In addition, the search engine calculator provides the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything from Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.[163] Furthemore, when searching the word "recursion", the spell-checker's result for the properly spelled word is exactly the same word, creating a recursive link.[164] In Google Maps, searching for directions between places separated by large bodies of water, such as Los Angeles and Tokyo, results in instructions to "kayak across the Pacific Ocean." During FIFA World Cup 2010, search queries like 'world cup', 'fifa', etc. will cause the Goooo...gle page indicator at the bottom of every result page to read Goooo...al! instead.



Philanthropy

Main article: Google.org

In 2004, Google formed the not-for-profit philanthropic Google.org, with a start-up fund of $1 billion.[165] The mission of the organization is to create awareness about climate change, global public health, and global poverty. One of its first projects was to develop a viable plug-in hybrid electric vehicle that can attain 100 miles per gallon. Google hired Dr. Larry Brilliant as the program's executive director in 2004[166] and the current director is Megan Smith.[167]



In 2008 Google announced its "project 10100" which accepted ideas for how to help the community and then allowed Google users to vote on their favorites.[168]



Network neutrality

Google is a noted supporter of network neutrality. According to Google's Guide to Net Neutrality:



Network neutrality is the principle that Internet users should be in control of what content they view and what applications they use on the Internet. The Internet has operated according to this neutrality principle since its earliest days... Fundamentally, net neutrality is about equal access to the Internet. In our view, the broadband carriers should not be permitted to use their market power to discriminate against competing applications or content. Just as telephone companies are not permitted to tell consumers who they can call or what they can say, broadband carriers should not be allowed to use their market power to control activity online.[169]



On February 7, 2006, Vinton Cerf, a co-inventor of the Internet Protocol (IP), and current Vice President and "Chief Internet Evangelist" at Google, in testimony before Congress, said, "allowing broadband carriers to control what people see and do online would fundamentally undermine the principles that have made the Internet such a success."[170]



Criticism

Main article: Criticism of Google

Google has stated that its goal is "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful", but has faced criticism on a range of issues.[11] Areas of criticism have included copyright, privacy, and censorship. In 2003, The New York Times complained that Google's caching of content on their site infringed on their copyright for the content.[171] In this case, the United States District Court of Nevada ruled in favor of Google in Field v. Google and Parker v. Google.[172][173] The Authors Guild, a group that represents 8,000 U.S. authors, filed a class action suit in a Manhattan federal court against Google in 2005 over its scanning and copying of books through its Google Library program. Google replied that it is in compliance with all existing and historical applications of copyright laws regarding books.[174]



On December 2009, Google's CEO, Eric Schmidt, declared after privacy concerns: "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place. If you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines — including Google — do retain this information for some time and it's important, for example, that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act and it is possible that all that information could be made available to the authorities."[175] Privacy International ranked Google as "Hostile to Privacy", its lowest rating on their report, making Google the only company in the list to receive that ranking.[176][177]



The non-profit group Public Information Research launched Google Watch, a website advertised as "a look at Google's monopoly, algorithms, and privacy issues."[178][179] The site raised questions relating to Google's storage of cookies, which in 2007 had a life span of more than 32 years and incorporated a unique ID that enabled creation of a user data log.[180] Google Watch has also criticized Google's PageRank algorithms, saying that they discriminate against new websites and favor established sites,[181] and has made allegations about connections between Google and the NSA and the CIA.[182] Google's has also faced criticism with its release of Google Buzz, Google's version of social networking, where Gmail users had their contact lists automatically made public unless they opted out.[183]



Google has been criticized for its censorship of certain sites in specific countries and regions. Until March 2010, Google adhered to the Internet censorship policies of China, enforced by means of filters known colloquially as "The Great Firewall of China".[184]