Google wins everything, NSA hacks it, Bing Launch of the Week! TWiST News Roundtable

Summary: It's starting to seem like Google wins at everything. (For more on that, see Jason's recent editorial (http://blog.launch.co/blog/googlewinseverything-part-1.html)). They're jumping into the smart watch contest, with a model due to arrive in the next few months, and just revealed that mysterious barges off San Francisco Bay and Portland, Maine are not floating data centers. Instead, they're showrooms for Google X projects. In other words, party barges. The NSA is still trying to spoil the party, however. The latest revelation from the Washington Post, drawing on documents leaked by Edward Snowden, shows the NSA attacked servers that link up data centers owned by Google and Yahoo. That's on top of limited front-door access the agency has negotiated with internet giants. And the Launch of the Week, brought to you by Bing! Motorola teams up with Phonebloks on modular phones. An affordable desktop 3D printer raised $3m on Kickstarter. And aircraft manufacturer Aerion is planning a supersonic business jet. Liz Gannes of AllThingsD and Declan McCullagh of CNET join in on the fun. Last chance to register for LAUNCH Hackathon! Nov 8-10 in San Francisco: hackathon.launch.co (http://hackathon.launch.co) Never miss an episode! Subscribe in iTunes: Audio (http://bit.ly/TwiStA (http://bit.ly/TwiStA)) || Video (http://bit.ly/TwiStV (http://bit.ly/TwiStV)) ============= Thanks to our great partners -- show your love for the show by thanking them on Twitter! http://clicktotweet.com/l2ubR (http://clicktotweet.com/l2ubR) Squarespace (http://squarespace.com/twist) makes it fast and easy to create exceptional-looking website. No credit card required, starts at just $8/month. Try it free, and if you decide to keep it, use the code TWIST11. And to Mandrill, transactional email from the fine folks at MailChimp. What's transactional email? Only crucial to your business: password resets, order confirmations and more. Sign up at mandrill.com (http://mandrill.com). ============= Follow on Twitter: @jason (http://twitter.com/jason)@TWIstartups (http://twitter.com/TWIstartups) (http://twitter.com/jason)@declanm (http://twitter.com/declanm) @lizgannes (http://twitter.com/lizgannes) LAUNCH: Launch Ticker: http://launch.co  (http://launch.co ) Launch Events (Mobile, Hackathon, Festival): http://events.launch.co (http://events.launch.co) Special thanks to the members of the TWiST Backchannel Program! Highlights 4:27: Jason: Is there any company as ambitious as Google right now? 5:01  Which of their projects is most fascinating? 5:09: Liz: unclear whether moon shots will work. self-driving cars cool. Still, no one else is driving around the world taking photographs of every single street. They’ve achieved what seemed like moonshots a few years ago. 6:09 - Declan : Google is looking at big problems. Automobile accidents, etc. In terms of the barge, more interesting when we didn’t know what it was. 7:20: bizarre - floating barge showroom. what is the thinking there when we have Apple stores everywhere? 7:40: Liz: so fun to watch this. people are all over this. harassing barge. 10:00: Jason: Google and Yahoo servers “hacked” by the NSA - quotes on purpose 10:40: Declan: Companies should be outraged. We should be outraged. From the NSA’s perspective. 3 ways to do it: 1. front door. 2. snip the connections between users and Google. 3. Point a parabolic microphone at Google’s windows. That’s what this feels like. 12:25: - 14:05  Thank you http://Squarespace.com (http://squarespace.com). 14:09 Jason: how is this going over, overseas? Will this negatively impact US companies? 15:50: Jason: Slide from NSA MUSCULAR deck looks like a big post-it note by Dilbert. Declan is this real? 16:29 - Declan: Everything leak attributed to Snowden has turned out to be real so far. no reason to assume this isn’t real. We don’t know what percentage of links were already encrypted. The overseas caveat is kind of silly. 18:36 - Bing! Launch of Week