With all the thousands of engineers at google, you’d think someone speaks binary. But perhaps not. Attendees of the Google I/O conference today were given t-shirts that, presumably, were supposed to spell GOOGLEIO on the front in binary. Just one problem, the actual message printed spells GOOGLEKO:
G: 01000111
O: 01001111
O: 01001111
G: 01000111
L: 01001100
E: 01000101
K: 01001011
O: 01001111
The “I” that should’ve been in place of the “K” would’ve been 01001001.
If you got one of these, save it. It’s definitely a collector’s item now. I’ll pay $50 for an XL, if anyone’s selling.
Check for yourself here - and remember that upper and lower case letters have different binary spellings. Thanks for the tip Randy.
See, I thought the t-shirt design was a series of bubbles…
Oh tooo funny. I’ll bet that was an intentional goofup as well.
Love geek humor!
Barbara
This sounds like a Web 2.0 business model. Why don’t I sell t-shirts to geeks?
I know: Its been done before, and in fact I am a subscriber to StartUpSwag. My favorite? The Tech Crunch GREEN t-shirt of course!
Contact me at http://OpenAjax.Com if anyone is willing to sell me their shirt
I am such a knurd!
FAIL
(sorry, couldn’t resist)
XL? Haha you’re fat.
Wow!
I would think that Google has a good enough hold on Geekdom that they could put together a shirt like this in their sleep!
Maybe they did put it together in their sleep!
:p
In a similar vein, and just to date myself, going back a while there was a similar mistake on a pin handed out by ComputerWorld magazine at the NCC in ‘76.
They had a design that was supposed to say ‘Spirit of 1001100′ , or the spirit of 76.
Somewhere in the printing process, the last zero was turned into a period. (Remember, very few people were ‘computer savvy’ back then.) So the actual design said ‘The Spirit of 100110.’, or the spirit of 37.
Somewhere, stuffed away in a closet, I still have mine.
_101_ FAIL! HAx0R.
That looks like a bug to me.
KO? Too obscure to be a joke. Unless it is some kind of internal joke. But then, why risk embarrassing press feedback on official PR material for the sake of a internal joke that only a few can understand?
Knock Out? I don’t think so. Google is a humble company. They play the underdog as far as PR goes. I doubt they would brag about knocking out the competition, even in a subliminal way.
Bugs are only natural and all this will probably draw more attention to the t-shirt than it normally would otherwise.
I definitely like my t-shirt better now.
Anyone else noticed that the ‘K’ key is very near to the ‘I’ key?
Simple typo in a text to binary converter maybe?
why dont they go to http://www.shopandsave.com and use there logo and banner.
ITs better to use a website that knows
If anyone has a shirt they are willing to sell email me, chris.pal@gmail.com
Regards.
Intentional goof? I don’t think so. This is clearly a mistake and someone in the new marketing department is surely getting heat.
i’d love to get my hands on a shirt, but frankly am not interested enough.
I have an extra medium IO shirt that I’d be willing to sell. Email me at askedrelic@gmail.com
They were just giving away extras in the last few hours as you were walking out!
hi, these google t-shirts are not availabe in india. are these? i would love to buy one for myself. regards.
As long as you pay for shipping, I’ll send them anywhere.
google-io-shirts@theillustratedlife.com
It’s a Google K.O: Knockout
Google engineers make silly mistakes like that???
Oh dear Google does it again lol. Explains quite a bit though, big is not always definitely better, perhaps the final version was left to the weekend temp to approve? Still a nice design all the same.