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KitKat's new website

kitkat.com

300 pointsdionyziz150 comments

Nestle is a truly horrible company[1], this hook-up has really re-enforced the notion in my eyes that Google is now just another big multi-national corp in the same vein as the rest. It's sad, because I used to think they could show the world that a big corp didn't have to do things that way. I'm not sure if they changed or if I was just naive.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nestl%C3%A9#Controversy_and_cri...

You arrived at this conclusion as a result of Android's naming convention which uses food names instead of version numbers?

No, I arrived at that conclusion because KitKat and Google have both publicly announced the tie-up, and Google doesn't seem to understand, or more likely doesn't care, what it means to actively promote a company like Nestle. There are plently of other "K" foods they could choose if they wanted to.

To be fair, it's not just this incident that helped me reach the conclusion, its been festering at the back of my mind for a while.

If you avoided every company that has done morally reprehensible things, then you would probably be naked right now and have no way to get to work.

You would be surprised at what you can achieve with a little effort and using mainly smaller companies with an ethical bent (certainly ethical clothing and bicycles are available).

Nevertheless, I agree it is hard, and I'll likely be using some of Googles services for a while yet. My main point is how my view of them has changed, and that will make me seek out alternatives when possible.

I'm not sure I see this as anything more as a co-branding strategy.

But it's a co-branding strategy with a company that is widely condemned as having some horrible (and illegal) practices.

It's trivially easy to find these. I cannot believe that anyone at the largest search engine company in history failed to find or read criticism of Nestle before announcing the co branding.

The only conclusion to draw is that Google knew about, and did not care about, the criticism of Nestle.

Why not go the easy route and find a less obviously evil company?

Another possible conclusion is that they selected a few possibilities, including other K-desserts (Kakao? no, too Cocoa; Kremlin Cake? too sovietic; Kaki jam? Weird, too Chinese; etc) and decided the less bad one was Kitkat.

I'd say the problem is to be too systematic. Same with Ubuntu Zoomy Zoo and Apple iSeries. Would a writer submit himself to such a gimmick for his book's names?

However, my main grip again Kitkat would be that it is the same as all other "chocolate" bar: it is industrial junk-food, making us all obese, and it do not contain chocolate.

> Would a writer submit himself to such a gimmick for his book's names?

You'd be surprised! Some of these are weaker than others.

Stephanie Plum (By Janet Evanovich) start "One for the money", "two for the dough", "three to get deadly", "four to score", etc etc. (https://duckduckgo.com/c/Stephanie_Plum_books)(This is a terrible website)(http://stephanieplum.com/)

Hannah Swenson, 'murder she baked', has food in each title (and a recipe in each book) (admittedly, the titles aren't in any order) (http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_i_0_14?url=search-ali...)

(http://www.amazon.co.uk/Janet-Evanovich/e/B000APXTY4/ref=sr_...)

Women's Murder club. Each title starts with an incremented digit. "1St to die", "2nd chance", "3rd degree", etc. (http://www.jamespatterson.com/books_wmc.php#.Uigpk9KRC0I)

Alex Cross, (By James Patterson) starting to get Children's nursery rhymes in the titles. (http://www.jamespatterson.com/books_alex_cross.php#.UigpyNKR...)

Cal Murphy (by Jack Patterson) uses Cross in the title - "Cross Hairs", "Cross the Line", "Triple Cross". (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Jack-Patterson/e/B0098F2E48/ref=ntt_...) (This last one feels odd - the author name is close to James Paterson, and the series titling uses a word ('cross') that happens to be the name of the James Paterson protagonist.

Google could not have adopted marketing like this without Nestlé's approval. Nestlé are truly vile and "do no evil™" are in some form of partnership with them, at the very least it is cross-promotion.

Jelly Bean was sponsored?

Calling the version "KitKat" was basically product-placement.

Who is sponsoring who?

Nestle paid for product placement of 'kitkat'.

Nestle have given press releases describing their 'collaboration', and even set up this website. Its inconceivable that Google did not demand payment; Google could have called it something generic like all their previous versions.

Google of course probably approached Nestle. They created a new revenue generating angle on creating an OS.

Debian ought to go get money from other brands through similar version naming.

Seriously, why isn't the next Ubuntu called "Head&Shoulders"?

> Nestle paid for product placement of 'kitkat'.

I haven't seen that anywhere. All reports thus far have said that neither side is paying for this.

There was an article on The Verge yesterday about the Google/Nestlé thing. They said no money changed hands.

Right. Why does Google need to paid for this? Any dollar figure would be insignificant, not scaleable and not part of their core business. Selling naming rights to their SDKs?! Are these baseball stadiums?

Might become a thing. Of course, Android is more famous than Ubuntu (to the masses)

They never used branded or trademarked food names. It's cute and attention getting though.

You realize your smartphone almost certainly has metals mined or processed by children in dangerous and unhealthy work environments ?

Yes. Next time I upgrade, I've got my eye on fairphone.com, for what it's worth.

Not quite sure what that argument has to do with my preposition though. I had no such illusions about my phone manufacturer (Samsung). Google set out on a different path ("Do No Evil"), but turns out they're not much different to Samsung et. al. now, and that was my argument. Many still see them as working in a different way, but they don't.

The argument is that there were previous "hook-up"s between Google and vile companies before Nestle, namely Samsung.

Those associations, while not by any means ideal, are somewhat necessary. As inferred by the argument it's hard to find ethical phone companies at that scale.

There is absolutely no need (at least technologically) for this link up. Its purely brand marketing, and they picked the wrong brand.

Yikes, and also probably your computer, and possibly your car. And I was having such a nice morning.

Now I feel like I need to work out how much money I need to give to an effective charity or something to offset the bad that I'm doing when I buy my next phone or computer.

Keep in mind that as long as you're driving the economy (by production or consumption), you're enabling whatever pre-existing incentive-structures the economy supports. $5 of vegan bread gives the grocery store five more dollars, which it will then use to pay that loss-leader butchery that brings in the saturday shoppers, etc. Putting $1.50 in a vending machine to buy a Nestle-competitor's product, results in the vending machine company renewing Nestle's contract either way (because they're the draw), that competitor paying Nestle $0.40 for pre-processed milk-chocolate product, and Nestle spending $0.40 more not to market their products to you (they assume you a lost cause), but rather to your children directly.

...Or, in micro-econ terms, if you pay me $5 for vegan bread, I'll spend that $5 on several kit-kats (I am, after all, craving them now), and put some away to save up for a new phone. You've effectively multiplied the harm you're doing!

It's the same general argument as "a portion of every tax dollar goes to killing brown people", but escaping the economy entirely is actually harder than plain-old tax evasion. Basically, voting with your wallet only sways sole proprietors; anything larger may be externally capitalist, but is internally more socialist/syndicalist, driven by long-term contracts, quotas, "consumer confidence" ratings, futures, government certifications, and insurance-risk-purchases more than hard revenue. All that is opaque to you as a consumer, so there's really no way to influence any entrenched player by purposefully tugging on money-strings. They've purchased entire portfolios to hedge against precisely that effect!

Those are good points, but I disagree that individuals cannot influence entrenched players by changing their purchasing decisions. Here's how it can happen:

1. A large chunk of people buy the Fairphone. Let's pretend it's 500,000.

2. Samsung notices this. Of course they don't care about that tiny amount of competition, but they do care about competing with Apple.

3. Samsung commissions a study. They find that of the respondents, 0.5% answer "yes" to "Have you bought, or do you plan to buy a Fairphone or other specialty phone which uses conflict-free materials". When asked "If not, which of the following reasons describes why?", 25% answer "I don't want to take a chance with an unknown manufacturer."

4. From this, they conclude that they can expect to sell roughly 20 million additional phones if they (and they alone among major manufacturers) if they switch to conflict-free materials. That is NSFPMS/HB = 20 million, where

  NS = non-Samsung marketshare ~= 75%
  FF = Fairphone sales = 500,000
  MS = % who would buy a mainstream conflict-free phone = 25%
  HB = % who have already bought/will buy a Fairphone = 0.5%

5. Every other major manufacturer does the same calculation, and suddenly conflict-free materials are a standard feature.

Now obviously this is an oversimplification. The numbers are made up, Samsung would also add in some uncertainty about customers doing what they say they will do, I haven't taken into account the cost difference for the materials, those survey questions are atrociously designed, etc. But you get the point.

And that's certainly bad, but Nestle have carried out about 10 other known immoral practises in their history, including the use of child slave labour, so they pretty much 'win' that one hands down.

Its the infant formula marketing one for me that still trumps them all. Knowingly allowing babies to die is pretty much a sure way to get to the top of my "that's a company I don't like" list.

Rather than "truly horrible", it's fairer to say that it's controversial in the UK. For example, on one hand there has been a long standing boycott at university Student Unions, on the other about everybody has a Nescafé tin at home.

I for one don't have any Nescafé tins at home and refuse to purchase any of their chocolate or breakfast cereals, too. I realise you said "about", and I'm only one person, but I think you overestimate their reach; I know others who adopt the same stance. I'd go so far as to say that Nestlé are up there alongside The Sun (british newspaper) and Sky TV when it comes to 'most boycotted' here in the UK. Only time will tell whether Google has made a minor PR error here (granted, it will only be minor because Google is SO pervasive).

> I'd go so far as to say that Nestlé are up there alongside The Sun (british newspaper) and Sky TV when it comes to 'most boycotted' here in the UK

Given that The Sun is the most circulated paper in the UK [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_newspapers_in_the_Unite...] and Sky TV claims to reach 1 in 6 people in the UK [http://corporate.sky.com/media/key_facts_and_figures] I would completely agree with your statement that the Nestlé boycott is as effective as these others.

The name Nestlé is a byword for baby murder for a significant number of people I know. I was surprised to see Google deliberately associating themselves with them.

"Truly Horrible" isn't mutually exclusive with "everybody has a Nescafé tin at home".

Also, it's not just controversial in the UK, it is in many countries, and it's not just Student Unions that have held boycotts against it.

I'm also not saying that it's in anyway alone in being a truly horrible company, there are many others in that category as well.

Interesting aside, it is made by Hersey in the United States: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitkat

I think, if anyone was still labouring under the intention that Google was somehow morally 'above' other companies, this is pretty much the death-knell. If I'm being very optimistic / fair to Google, I'd hope that it was a Google US decision and they don't fully comprehend the feeling towards Nestle in the UK. Maybe this leaves a void for a 'good' technology company to spring up.

in the US, Hersheys controls the branding for KitKat, not Nestle

One would think that Google would be aware of the brand owner though, everyone else around the world seems to be.

Also a good read:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nestlé_boycott

Nestle's CEO insists on his opinion that all the water in the world should be privatized. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEFL8ElXHaU

He's the former CEO (still chairman), and thst's not a fair summary of what he says in that video, about recognizing that water can have a price/cost like food.

Don't let carefully crafted statements fool you.

Also, he was still the CEO at the time this statement was made. source: We feed the world (documentary)

Of course not, understanding nuanced statements is hard, let's just hear whatever we want to hear when somebody who we don't like is making a complex point! Down with The Man!

Given their... let's say controversial history, I find it pretty alarming that he wants control over the world's water supply. Don't you?

Pretty. But do there exist web browsers that display these scroll-to-animate sites correctly? Using either mousewheel or dragging the scrollbar (or worse still, dragging on an iPad), it's never anything but choppy choppiness and I miss important bits of text as they scroll past entirely between the little click stops on my mouse wheel.

Surely it must be possible to actually view these sites, as evidenced by the fact that people keep building them. Is there some web-designer-and-executive-approver-specific build of Chrome that's built specifically for this effect?

It works great on basically any browser on a system with the Apple's Magic Mouse. I'm still wondering why there's no some sort of smoothing polyfill in wide use.

Agh, this should definitely be a design anti-pattern. Don't change my browsers functionality. If I wanted smooth scrolling I would find a way to turn it on.

The Mac doesn't use smooth scrooling, but naturalistic scrolling: It scrolls exactly as you move your fingers. Smooth scrolling is more of a scroll wheel feature.

It's also magical, its operating system is compatible with all forms of beverages, and if Steve jobs were around the magic mouse would of become the magic handjob.

Enough.

I think this is a rage post against something Mac but I'm not following what it is in response to?

It also works fine on my ThinkPad when using the TrackPoint to scroll.

I think the only device that's worked well with them is a Macbook with the smooth scrolling on the trackpad.

True. There are some windows trackpads that have that same smooth scrolling trackpads.. I've used some hp laptops that also have it, for example.

Just click the space bar. There's no need to scroll.

was i the only one that found that the kitkat site performed well, while the android one stuttered?

The Android site uses a lot of (annoying) JS driven CSS opacity changing and also the font-smoothing CSS attribute. My money would be on that.

I noticed and LOL'd.

Works fine for me. I was shocked because I have JS disabled.

Yeah I know, I noticed that yesterday and was impressed that they went through lengths to make it work on browsers that have no javascript

Use the middle click scroll.

Middle click, then drag mouse down a little bit, then sit and watch.

[EDIT] Tested in FF and Chrome, surprisingly FF was smoother on my computer.

Recent version of all browsers have roughly the same performance. But you need relatively new hardware. Old p4 and on-board graphics card won't handle it.

I'm on a six month old maxed out Thinkpad W520. I don't think they have much in the way of newer hardware than that, so I suspect it's more likely that there's a "smooth scrolling" setting somewhere that one could presumably turn on to see this effect.

Somebody else mentioned that it's on by default on Macs, thus confirming my theory about the "web-designer-only" build of Chrome (the same one that renders those extra blurry fonts that designers like to use on their blogs correctly). Chances are nobody with a Windows box ever saw this in action before they pushed it live.

I'm using the latest Firefox on windows 7 and don't seem to have a problem with it. Mind you it's a desktop and I'm using a mouse not a touch-pad to scroll.

The slight choppiness i see is because of how scroll works not the website's fault.

When you scroll there's a minimum increment that gets detected and the equivalent on the website for that is quite large. But reducing that would make you scroll a lot more and would probably be annoying.

If you want the smoothness of a magic mouse use the down arrow on the scroll bar or your keyboard.

Smooth is one part of the problem, the other is getting stuck between two "frames" after scrolling: http://imgur.com/gtJGtsT.png

Scrolling gives you no visual feedback for "content units" like margins around paragraphs or headers. You cannot be sure if a "frame" has all its animation loaded until you scroll down - up - down a little bit. Imho that's not a pleasant experience.

Works smooth for me on Chrome Canary with this extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/smoothscroll/nbokb...

Worked fine on my mobile as static images.

It's working great on my admittedly beefy Win 7 Laptop on Chrome with my mouse wheel or dragging the scroll bar. The mouse scroll is a little choppy in that it jumps in tiny increments rather than elegantly transitions.

It would be nice if they supported the keyboard too though.

It works great on my Win 7 desktop with a C2D and low-level Radeon video in Chrome, with Javascript disabled. Not even slightly choppy at all.

I thought you were joking, but I actually prefer the way this page looks with JavaScript disabled.

It looks and works fine on my ipad.

Already been covered https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6323572

The differences between the comments posted so far in the two threads seem to illustrate the importance of the submission title.

For those that missed it yesterday, per this[1] BBC article....no money exchanged hands.

[1] - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-23926938

No money, maybe. Free cross-product advertising, definitely.

I'm not sure whether the fact that (allegedly) no money changed hands makes this whole thing any better. I've never been a fan of Android or Google because I'm allergic to advertising and that's basically Google's business model, but blatantly signing cross-promotions deals like this so not one but two companies can leverage a new phone OS release to spam the internet with free advertising doesn't make me feel any more positive about Google and Android. But I guess I'm a lost cause for them anyway...

Trademark infringement -> no money changed hands. Smells like a huge pile of bullshit to me, but I'm certainly no expert.

In my entire HN history I have never seen a sentence and a link posted more than this "no money changed hands" one.

It's one of the most important sentences in the history of HN.

  <!-- Thanks for viewing the source -->

You're welcome, always a pleasure :)

no humans.txt though

Procedurally generated

Adding to my history when I _scroll_ is just a terrible decision.

Their implementation is horrible and completely unnecessary. Pretty as it was, it's one of the worst UX I've seen all year.

It's possible, easy even, to achieve the same page scroll results (and even deep-linking fragments if that's a requirement) without taking over the browser history.

Kind of shameful, really.

Certainly one of those "Just because you can, doesn't mean you should." situations.

Totally concur, had to press back like 6 times (or right click it) just to get back to hacker news.

Anyone noticed how funny it is? Even if it's not perfectly coded? God you guys know how to complain!

I still prefer regular scrolling to "parallax scrolling." Maybe I'm just getting old...

I pretty much hate it by now. It just acts in a unexpected way and breaks my usual reading experience.

There are easter eggs, type "haveabreak" or "up up down down left right left right b a".

Nice find. There are no other possibilities to start this easter egg, though. Yet, there are actually three different images that might be shown:

http://diclr3aci3hzg.cloudfront.net/desktop/images/misc/droi... http://diclr3aci3hzg.cloudfront.net/desktop/images/misc/droi... http://diclr3aci3hzg.cloudfront.net/desktop/images/misc/droi...

How did you find these? Just curious.

Some people try the Konami code with everything. Try it with HN, see what happens.

All the main code is in main.js Take a look at the initEasterEgg() function.

Thanks :)

How did this make it to the top of HN 2nd day in a row?

* new Android OS imminent

* Google teams up with morally bankrupt (IMO) company

* weird scrolling/animation navigation device becoming mainstream

* first ever sponsored OS?

lots to dicsuss

Nestle marketing team.

It's the standard change-background-while-scrolling website that seems to become fashionable. Am I missing something about this post?

You should read the text. It's full of cloud and tech references, because KitKat and Google are promoting the next Android Version (Android 4.4 will be named KitKat).

Also you can win some Google Gadgets with KitKat (at the bottom).

It is preferably referred to as parallax scrolling, which is very common with single page designs these days. Unless otherwise used with the right intention and for the right purpose parallax scrolling technique is becoming the new carousel or from the olden days "skip intro".

I'm not sure that's the right term. Parallax refers to two or more planes moving at different speeds to give the illusion of depth.

This was trending on HN earlier today. I think the reason it's on the front page is because of the parody on Android's new version being named Kit Kat.

Looks to me like this was a joint marketing campaign by Google and Nestle. Seems successful.

http://www.android.com/kitkat/images/android.png

The new android is called kitkat apparently. www.android.com/kitkat

Off topic, but did they get an engineer to write the content? "Thanks to its world-renowned, tri-core, wafer thin CPU with full chocolate coverage." If this is intentional sarcasm it is tasteless (pun intended)

"No matter what kind of break you're looking for, with 2 mega-bites, 4 mega-bites or a chunky-bite option, we've got it covered"

It's full of tech references because they're promoting Android 4.4, which is named KitKat.

No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.

So kitkat bought the new android OS release name for themselves, and released a coordinated marketing campaign. Is there any insider story on how that happened somewhere?. Maybe is a bit too early for that.

here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-23926938

"However, Google told the BBC that it had come up with the idea and that neither side was paying the other."

Nice looking site. But why associate your product with junk food?

Android Jelly Bean? Android Ice Cream Sandwich? Android Honeycomb (ok that's not necessarily junk food). Android Eclair, Donut and Cupcake? It's been "junk food" since 1.5.

True, though so far it was less obvious, as in they're non "processed" snacks and deserts, and not brand names (as far as I can tell, maybe for North Americans it is more obvious?)

Android releases are named after some sweet, and going alphabetically. They just reached letter K. I'm not sure I can think of some other sweet starting with K?

Depends on your definition of junk food. Chocolate covered biscuits were considered a delicacy and a snack before it was called junk.

afaic chocolate covered biscuits fall quite neatly into most any definition of junk food...

Because it matches their demographic.

KitKat just re-defined what a "tablet" means for me.

they break back :( But otherwise, lovely.

To think its only going to be people like us that 'get it'

i did not realized how back button is important for me until i see me clicking madly ten times to get back to HN

Ugh, read the small print section. Horrible, designed by committee to attempt to sound like their audience. I sometimes find these quite revealing, although irritating. It shows how they perceive the people they are targeting with a product. In this case we are flighty, feckless, caught up in a culture full of meaningless catch phrases. They have mistaken the irreverence and playfulness of the y,z gen for low brow incoherence.

I just read it and I actually found it funny. Come to think of it, I like the whole idea of the site. Slightly nerdy and, that's the important part, not taking itself too seriously.

There's definitely worse examples of trying to adhere to this new lifestyle/fun-centric culture thing (I hope you know what I mean by that, since I don't know a better word for it)

I thoroughly enjoyed it. So maybe I'm the target audience? Although honestly how anyone could not already be in love with the peanut butter Kit Kat chunky is frankly beyond my ability to comprehend.

I loved the overall site. I'm talking specifically about the text at the very bottom of the page, the small print section.

Previous discussion - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6323572

I enjoyed it. It appears I'm in the minority.

Yeah, those whiney commenters should take a break!

No GPU? Not worth buying if I can't play Crysis on it.

It would melt.

The next version of Android is going to be called Lipitor.

Oh no, does that mean that meta keywords are relevant for Google search again?

Those KitKats are not as tasty as they used to be, but the video at the bottom of the page is really awesome.

One question I have is why Google (If this website is Google's) is hosting their stuff on Amazon?

Why would Google own kitkat.com?

Actually, this was just fun to see, didn't expected this when i navigated to their site :P

Nice page. I wish I didn't need to hit the back button as many times as I did to escape.

I don't think there's nearly enough under the hood. This site needs more code.

#GrannyEyed. I'm sure I've heard that before somewhere on the inner net.

Wow. Just wow. It feels like it's my birthday, except it's not.

(My birthday is April 1st.)

I think along with Tesla's marketing - this is one of the top, ever.

I hope this is not going to be a trend because I find it ridiculous.

4.4mb downloaded for this 1 page, Some bandwidth being used there!

It's Android 4.4 after all. Makes sense.

I think I'll go get a kit kat out of the vending machine...

i am utterly amazed. 124 comments for a fucking advertisement site? What's wrong with this society? And worst, it doesn't work with lynx.

Sweet site but a loading bar.. REALLY?

I think the entire thing is meant to be a bit of a parody.

Oh makes sense. It's just so annoying with the amount of sites now that seem to have loading bars

It's just a line on my iPad.

Well, marketing works it seems.

That sweet 404

They were doing so well until the flash video at the end. :(

The video was the best part. It poked fun at tech videos: "With adjustable orientation, it works perfect in portrait or landscape". Genius.

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