Protocol Buffers are a compact way of encoding data in a binary format. A programmer can write a simple description of a protocol or structured data and Google’s code will auto-generate a class in C++, Java, or Python to read, write, and parse the protocol.

Somehow it feels like, after spending $410 million on Symbian, its new corporate masters are pinching pennies precisely at a time when they shouldn’t be.

Can Google show a new way – who needs models when you have Petabytes of data? They didn’t know anything about the culture and conventions of advertising — it just assumed that better data, with better analytical tools, would win the day.