Wednesday, December 9, 2009

Googland

Googland

[G] Join this group: Google Groups joins Google Apps

Posted: 08 Dec 2009 10:23 PM PST

Official Google Blog: Join this group: Google Groups joins Google Apps

Blogs, wikis, social networks, YouTube and Twitter are changing how many of us connect with others. Yet within most businesses, especially large corporations, the software hasn't evolved much over the last decade. While traditional business technologies give companies the necessary security and controls, they do so at the expense of rapid innovation. Businesses shouldn't have to make this compromise.

This is one reason why customers are so enthusiastic about Google Apps. It offers enterprise-grade security and control while letting businesses instantly tap into a swift stream of innovation, based on services tested by hundreds of millions of people around the world. We've launched over 100 improvements to Google Apps in the last year, and the pace of innovation continues to increase.

Today, we're happy to announce the launch of Google Groups to Google Apps Premier and Education Edition users. Google Groups is one of our most widely used applications, enabling everyone from the local hiking club to the family next door to create mailing lists and discussion forums. Now employees within a company can create groups for their departments, their teams or their projects. Employees can use these groups as mailing lists, but they can also share documents, spreadsheets, presentations, calendars, videos and sites with groups, instead of many individual recipients. They can choose to receive communications directly to their email inbox, in a digest format, or in the Groups forum view, and can access all the information in the groups archive, without the intervention of an IT administrator.




Google Groups is a boon for IT administrators too. After enabling the new service from the administrative control panel (add "user-managed groups"), users can start managing their own groups without burdening administrators for support. Administrators can still set group policies and manage other group settings. If you want to learn more, check out our post on the Enterprise Blog.

Google Groups is just one of the many consumer features that we've tailored for the enterprise since we launched Google Apps for businesses nearly three years ago, and we're looking forward to bringing more innovation to our customers in the months and years ahead.

Posted by Rajen Sheth, Senior Product Manager, Google Apps
URL: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/join-this-group-google-groups-joins.html

[G] Communication and collaboration just got easier with Google Groups

Posted: 08 Dec 2009 09:46 PM PST

Official Google Enterprise Blog: Communication and collaboration just got easier with Google Groups

Picture this: you're working on a new project with your team. You ask your IT admin to create a new group that includes all of your team members, keeping in mind that you must ask them to update the group every time people join or leave the group. Maybe you're even wishing that (a) you had a secure, central place to manage this group and communicate with it, and (b) you could easily search group archives for information somewhere other than your inbox.

That's when your admin gives you the good news: creating, managing and sharing with groups just got a whole lot easier. Today, Google Apps is giving admins the ability to let users create, manage and collaborate in groups without needing IT help. This launch is a major expansion to the mailing list functionality and content sharing we released earlier this year.

The following features are now included in Google Groups:
  • Fast set-up. Employees and students can now create collaborative groups instantly without burdening IT, and manage the group settings to fit their needs.
  • Searchable archives. Group discussions are archived by default, allowing users to easily search and view past and present discussions via the web.
  • Sharing with a group. Once a group is set up, employees and students can easily share a document, spreadsheet, presentation, shared folder, site, calendar, or video with that group. No need to type in individual email address manually, or remember who joined or left the group. Plus, the shared items will only be accessible by the appropriate people, even as people join and leave the group.
  • Reply on behalf of a group. In addition to communicating via email or the web interface, the new functionality lets group managers send a message on behalf of a group.
  • IT capabilities. IT administrators still manage if and how users can create groups from the administrative control panel.


Google Apps Premier and Education Edition administrators can now enable the new groups functionality from the control panel by enabling the "user-managed groups" service. You can read more about this announcement on the Official Google Blog. Google Groups will be rolling out to Google Apps Premier and Education Edition domains over the next day, so if you don't notice these features right now, you should see them soon.

We're always developing new features to help you get your job done faster and more efficiently with Google Apps. Stay tuned to this blog for the latest updates as new features continue to come your way, or subscribe to our Google Apps update feed and get the news as it happens.

Posted by Shimrit Ben-Yair, Product Manager
URL: http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2009/12/communication-and-collaboration-just.html

[G] Faster apps for a faster web: introducing Speed Tracer

Posted: 08 Dec 2009 08:48 PM PST

Official Google Blog: Faster apps for a faster web: introducing Speed Tracer

Do you ever wonder what's going on inside the browser when a webpage doesn't load or respond as quickly as it should? Many developers do, especially when trying to build powerful web applications for their users.

But up until now, it's been difficult for developers to identify problems in a slow-to-respond application. So, tonight at Google Campfire One, we're happy to announce that we're adding a new tool to Google Web Toolkit called Speed Tracer.

Speed Tracer is a Google Chrome extension that enables developers to identify performance problems in their web apps using a "Sluggishness Graph," in combination with many other metrics. In the spirit of clean, simple design, developers need only look at the Y-Axis of their application's Sluggishness Graph to see how they're doing:
  • If the y-axis is close to zero, then the app is fast
  • If the y-axis registers around 100%, then the app is, well, sluggish
And in either case, Speed Tracer provides lots of additional data to help diagnose any particular performance issue.

We think developers will find that Speed Tracer looks under the covers of web applications like never before. In fact, we even used Speed Tracer to optimize the performance of Speed Tracer itself! (It's really an HTML application after all, built with Google Web Toolkit, and deployed as a Google Chrome extension.) If you're a web developer, download and install Speed Tracer on the Google Chrome Developer Channel.



This is one of many other improvements in GWT 2.0 — which we released at this evening's Campfire — that make building web applications fast, and the applications you build run even faster. Check out the Google Code Blog for more information and to watch our Campfire One developer announcement.

Posted by Bruce Johnson, Engineering Director
URL: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/faster-apps-for-faster-web-introducing.html

[G] Google Docs Liberation Update

Posted: 08 Dec 2009 04:22 PM PST

Data Liberation: Google Docs Liberation Update

All your docs at once -- Today the Google Docs team is rolling out an upgrade to the bulk export feature launched in October. You can now export all of your documents (up to a maximum zip file size of 2 gigabytes) without having to scroll down to select them all. See Vijay's blog post for more information, plus some other useful features also being rolled out.

Chrome bookmarks -- We've been meaning to post a link to Kevin Tofel's post of a month ago explaining how to use Google Docs bulk export to share your Chrome bookmarks with other browsers. This was a feature that my colleague JJ Lueck quietly added, and we're thrilled that the world has noticed!

Posted by Luke Blanshard, Data Liberation Front
URL: http://dataliberation.blogspot.com/2009/12/google-docs-liberation-update.html

[G] Search in Google Docs gets more personalized with new relevance, stemming, and synonyms

Posted: 08 Dec 2009 04:22 PM PST

Official Google Enterprise Blog: Search in Google Docs gets more personalized with new relevance, stemming, and synonyms

Finding your business information within Google Docs should be as easy as finding information on google.com. To meet that goal, over the next few days, we will be enabling new search features in Google Docs that provides better relevancy as well support for stemming and synonyms.

Sort by relevance. The first change is the addition of relevance ranking in Docs search results. Until now, when you searched for a document, spreadsheet, or presentation, results were sorted by "last modified" date.

Now, search in Google Docs will look at various "signals", including whether you've authored a document, whether they've been explicitly shared with you, and other factors to present the most relevant items at the top of your results list. This personalization improves search across shared files, and each user gets the results that are most relevant for them.

Adding to this personalized approach, we've also added a new menu on the right side of the toolbar to let you view, and fine-tune, your search results by "Relevance," "Starred," or "Last Modified" results.

Stemming and synonyms. Search in Google Docs now also includes automatic stemming and synonyms, so that your results are good even if your typing is off. If you search for "meeting note," results will include a few variations of those words, including "meeting notes" (which is what you probably meant to type).

Posted by Balazs Racz and Liviu Panait, Software Engineers, Google Apps Search


URL: http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2009/12/search-in-google-docs-gets-more.html

[G] Sort by relevance, export all and more

Posted: 08 Dec 2009 03:11 PM PST

Official Google Docs Blog: Sort by relevance, export all and more

Over the next few days, we will be enabling several new features in your Docs list.

Sort by relevance

The first is the addition of relevance ranking in your Docs list search results. Until now, anytime you searched for a document, the results were sorted by "last modified date".


Now, your search results will display the items most relevant to your search at the top of the list. We also added a new menu on the right side of the toolbar, which lets you decide whether you'd like to sort your Docs list by "Relevance," "Starred" or "Last Modified".

This improvement to search within Docs also includes automatic stemming and synonyms. So if you search for "check account", we'll also include results for a few variations of those words, including "checking account" (which is what you probably meant to type). Or if you search for "mac book", we'll also include results for "macbook".

Export all your files

There's also more good news from the Data Liberation Front. A few weeks ago we launched the new "Export..." functionality. Today, we added an "Export all" option, which lets you export all your docs (up to 2GB at a time) with one click. This is the equivalent of almost 100,000 Google Docs.


You can also export a single file and email it to anyone you'd like in a single step. Once you select an item, click "Share" and select "Email as attachment...". Then pick which format (PDF, MS Office, etc.) you want to use to send the item, compose your email, and hit send.


Sunsetting Email-In Your Documents and Files

Lastly, a change that we aren't excited about. We're removing the existing "email-in" feature. As you may know, it's been a bit buggy recently and only supports a small subset of document types compared to the Docs list. In order to address this, we'll be taking down the feature and working on a bringing it back in the future with more functionality and better integration.

In the meantime, you can use the multi-file upload in your Docs list or the GData API to programatically upload docs. You can also take attachments from GMail and open them in Google Docs.

If you have any questions, please let us know over on the forum.

Posted by: Vijay Bangaru, Product Manager, Google Docs
URL: http://googledocs.blogspot.com/2009/12/sort-by-relevance-export-all-and-more.html

[G] Picasa 3.6: Now with collaborative albums

Posted: 08 Dec 2009 03:11 PM PST

Google Photos Blog: Picasa 3.6: Now with collaborative albums

Posted by Susanna Leng, Software Engineer

In August, 2009, we released collaborative albums for Picasa Web Albums, making it possible for multiple people to add pictures to the same album. Since the easiest way to upload to Picasa Web Albums is using the Picasa software, we're happy to announce that in Picasa 3.6 you can upload photos and videos directly to friends' collaborative albums. Just select your photos, click the 'Upload' button, and select 'Contribute to a friend's album.' Type the name of your friend and Picasa will show you the albums to which you have permission to contribute.


You can also add contributors to your collaborative albums, right from Picasa. You can add contributors when you're uploading photos or when you're sharing photos.


We've also made some improvements to the name tags feature that launched in September. In Picasa 3.6 you'll now see suggested name tags in the "People" pane when viewing a folder or album. You can also control which photos are scanned for faces – just click "Tools" and then "Folder Manager" and toggle face detection for any folder.

We've implemented a few additional features that make it easier to share, organize, and customize your photos. Sharing with groups is now an optional part of uploading to Picasa Web Albums, so you can upload and share photos in one step. In the import room, you can save photos by date taken, today's date, or a custom folder name; if "date taken" is selected, photos will be automatically organized and saved to separate folders by date. And you can now create and save custom crop sizes, expanding your photo size possibilities beyond the standard presets. Finally, we've added an option to preserve original JPG compression quality when uploading to Picasa Web Albums. This will take up more online storage space, but upgrade plans are now much more affordable. You can download Picasa 3.6 at picasa.google.com.
URL: http://googlephotos.blogspot.com/2009/12/picasa-36-now-with-collaborative-albums.html

[G] Update your skills - take the Google Advertising Fundamentals exam

Posted: 08 Dec 2009 03:11 PM PST

Inside AdWords: Update your skills - take the Google Advertising Fundamentals exam

As part of our ongoing efforts to improve training materials and the Google Advertising Professionals program we have updated the certification exam and learning center.

We've created a new Google Advertising Fundamentals exam designed to be more rigorous and strategy-oriented. Our teams have developed the new curriculum and exam to equip you with useful, relevant training to manage AdWords campaigns.

We've noted some questions since we introduced the new exam so we wanted want to tell you a little bit more:
  • We're testing a wider range of knowledge and the passing score is higher than the previous exam - 85% vs 75% on the previous test.
  • You can access the new exam through your Google Advertising Professionals account. Navigate to the My Exams tab where you can pick up your candidate ID to use on the testing site and follow the links to either the Learning Center or the Exam Testing Site.
  • The new exam is currently only available in English, but will be released in 20 additional languages in January.
Our goal was to bring the materials and exam up to date to ensure they cover all current products and best practices to help run and manage AdWords campaigns. We'll be introducing new advanced exams in 2010, so you may hear about some of them being tested now. At this time, however, you only need to hold a valid passing score in the previous exam or, if you're new to the program, the new Advertising Fundamentals exam.

Congratulations to those of you who've taken and passed the new exams and good luck to all test takers.

Posted by Dan Friedman, Inside AdWords crew
URL: http://adwords.blogspot.com/2009/12/update-your-skills-take-google.html

[G] Free Shipping Day Just Around The Corner

Posted: 08 Dec 2009 01:51 PM PST

Google Affiliate Network: Free Shipping Day Just Around The Corner

Consumers are shopping for the holidays earlier than ever, but the shopping season still extends well into December. Of consumers responding to our Google/OTX Consumer Intentions Survey from September, 46% plan to purchase the majority of their gifts in early and late December or wait until the last minute. As of last year, consumers have had a new incentive to finish their last minute shopping online: National Free Shipping Day.

Thursday, December 17, 2009 marks the second annual National Free Shipping Day, in which participating retailers ship products for free and guarantee arrival by Christmas Eve. Looking at 2008, we see that search traffic upticks at the start of December for "free shipping day," well before the actual day as users begin researching participating retailers.


Repost from the Google Retail Blog - View Entire Post
URL: http://googleaffiliatenetwork-blog.blogspot.com/2009/12/free-shipping-day-just-around-corner.html

[G] Exploring a new, more dynamic way of reading news with Living Stories

Posted: 08 Dec 2009 01:51 PM PST

Google News Blog: Exploring a new, more dynamic way of reading news with Living Stories

Posted by Neha Singh, Software Engineer, and Josh Cohen, Senior Business Product Manager
[cross-posted from the Official Google Blog]

There's been no shortage of talk recently about the "future of news." Should publishers charge for news online? How do they replace lost sources of revenue such as classified ads? How will accountability journalism endure? And, even more fundamentally, will news survive in the digital era? These are questions we're deeply interested in, and we've been exploring potential solutions. But what's often overlooked in these debates is the nature of the news story itself and the experience of how it's read online. We believe it's just as important to experiment with how news organizations can take advantage of the web to tell stories in new ways — ways that simply aren't possible offline.

While we have strong ideas about how information is experienced on the web, we're not journalists and we don't create content. So over the last few months we've been talking to a number of people to help develop the concept of something that we and some others in the industry call the "living story." Today, on Google Labs, we're unveiling some of the work we've done in partnership with two world-class news organizations: The News York Times and The Washington Post. The result of that experiment is the Living Stories prototype, which features new ways to interact with news and the quality of reporting you've come to expect from the reporters and editors at The Post and The Times. We're excited to learn from this experiment, and hope to eventually make these tools available to any publisher that wants to use them.

The idea behind Living Stories is to experiment with a different format for presenting news coverage online. News organizations produce a wealth of information that we all value; access to this information should be as great as the online medium allows. A typical newspaper article leads with the most important and interesting news, and follows with additional information of decreasing importance. Information from prior coverage is often repeated with each new online article, and the same article is presented to everyone regardless of whether they already read it. Living Stories try a different approach that plays to certain unique advantages of online publishing. They unify coverage on a single, dynamic page with a consistent URL. They organize information by developments in the story. They call your attention to changes in the story since you last viewed it so you can easily find the new material. Through a succinct summary of the whole story and regular updates, they offer a different online approach to balancing the overview with depth and context.

This project sprang from conversations among senior executives at the three companies. We shared thoughts about how the web can work for storytelling, and the Times and Post shared their core journalistic principles. The Living Stories started taking shape over the summer after our engineering and user interface teams spent time in the newsrooms of both papers. We're providing the technology platform, the Times and Post's journalists are writing and editing the stories, and we're continuously collaborating to make the user interface fit with their editorial vision.

Over the coming months, we'll refine Living Stories based on your feedback. We're also looking to develop openly available tools that could aid news organizations in the creation of these pages or at least in some of the features. If you're a news reader, we'd love to hear your thoughts. If you're a news organization, we want to hear your comments on the Living Story format. If you decide to implement this on your site, we would love to hear about that too. At the very least, we hope this collaboration will kick off debate and encourage innovation in how people interact with news online. To see how Living Stories works, check out the video below.

URL: http://googlenewsblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/exploring-new-more-dynamic-way-of.html

[G] Mattson Technology switches to Google Apps and saves 70%

Posted: 08 Dec 2009 01:51 PM PST

Official Google Enterprise Blog: Mattson Technology switches to Google Apps and saves 70%

Editor's note: Our guest blogger today is Matt Hough, Director of Global IT for Mattson Technology, a company that designs, manufactures, and markets semiconductor wafer processing equipment used in the fabrication of integrated circuits (NAND, RAM and LOGIC). Matt will be speaking on a live webcast this Thursday, December 12, at 2:00 p.m. EST / 11:00 a.m. PST / 7:00 p.m. GMT (registration will occur on a third party site).

Mattson's headquarters are in Fremont, California, but we have offices in Germany, Canada, Korea and Taiwan. Our IT staff supports 600 users with a wide variety of needs, from engineers/designers, to sales, manufacturing and customer support in India.

We wanted to put more power in users' hands and, as an IT team, get away from administering basic functions so we could focus on the business and run a leaner operation. For email, we had Microsoft Exchange and we calculated it was costing us $172 per user per year. The speed internationallywasn't that great because our Exchange servers were in Germany and people had to have VPN access.

We compared Google Apps Premier Edition to messaging solutions from Microsoft (too expensive) and Cisco (also out of our price range). Migration is a distant memory because it was relatively easy and required only a day of training.

Google Apps was a pleasant surprise, if you think about what you get for $50 per user per year ($4.17/month). The security is great and, in addition to email and calendaring, it also provides us with an online knowledge database created using Google Sites. Previously, our engineers and other groups put resolution documents or published articles on network file shares. Today, they use Google Sites to create websites by product to host documents related to new engineering releases and engineering problem-solving documents. We use this information in the field to quickly diagnose issues.

We went from silos of knowledge to a transparent online community that allows everyone to share and contribute information. As another example, we built a site to collaborate on customer issues that features video chat and shared documents. Now we can address customer issues more quickly.

Google Apps has changed the way we do business – we're even looking to extend ERP to the web. We turned off four servers and we're communicating better than ever before. We're more organized. We don't lose emails, and we no longer spend time looking for them. Google translates everything for us in all the languages we operate in, which is huge. The biggest benefit is that our productivity has increased because we're collaborating a lot better.

Our CEO and CFO love Google Apps. In fact, the CEO sent us an email saying, "I'm so glad you're moving our company forward," and our CFO tells me all the time how much he appreciates easy access to what he needs from wherever he's traveling. As an IT person, I feel proud. We have bragging rights now because we've implemented something that helps us work together better – while at the same time cutting our capital expenditures.

I will be speaking on a live webcast on Thursday. I invite you to join us with your questions.

Thursday, December 10, 2009
2:00 p.m. EST / 11:00 a.m. PST / 7:00 PM GMT
(note that you will be directed to a third party registration page)

Posted by Serena Satyasai, Google Apps team

Find customer stories and research product information on our resource sites for current users of Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes/Domino.




URL: http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2009/12/matteson-technology-switches-to-google.html

[G] Where on Earth? Place Pages for Google Earth

Posted: 08 Dec 2009 01:51 PM PST

Google LatLong: Where on Earth? Place Pages for Google Earth


When I'm exploring my neighborhood or planning a trip, I often find places I want to know more about. That's why I love using Place Pages for Google Maps to see lots of great information about a place on a single page. I can browse photos of the Royal Botanic Gardens in Sydney, write a review of a favorite restaurant in my neighborhood, or learn about popular places in Lucerne, Switzerland.

Starting today, you can see the same rich Place Page content in Google Earth, while browsing the world in 3D. You can see a summary whenever you click on a business or place of interest, and then click the View more information » link if you'd like to see more. Today, I explored some of the landmarks in Dubai:

You can also expand individual sections to see more reviews, photos, web pages, or user content. When I noticed a beautiful user-contributed 3D model of the Florence Cathedral, I wanted to see photos of the interior so I browsed through the photos section of the Place Page:


If you're a business owner, you can update your details in our Local Business Center, to ensure we're showing the most accurate information to people searching for your business in both Google Maps and Google Earth. We hope you enjoy exploring the new Place Pages in Google Earth and find them to be a helpful way to learn more about all the interesting places you see during your virtual browsing


Posted by Matt Holden, Associate Product Manager, Google Earth Team
URL: http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2009/12/where-on-earth-place-pages-for-google.html

[G] Free wireless broadband for low-income families in the District

Posted: 08 Dec 2009 12:19 PM PST

Google Public Policy Blog: Free wireless broadband for low-income families in the District

Posted by Sunil Daluvoy, New Business Development

We were at Kramer Middle School in the Anacostia neighborhood of Washington, D.C., this morning for an exciting announcement.

Google has teamed up with One Economy, Qualcomm, and Cricket Wireless to deliver free wireless broadband cards and Internet service to low-income students and families in Washington, a program we're calling Project Change Access. Today we distributed the first of these wireless broadband cards, along with free computers, to several Kramer Middle School students and local residents. Over the next several weeks, up to 1,000 wireless broadband cards will be distributed through our community partners to low-income families across the District.

Today's announcement grew out of a pilot program launched last year by One Economy and Cricket to provide free wireless broadband to several hundred low-income families in Portland, Oregon. Students who previously lacked Internet access were able to online resources to help them with their homework. Their parents were able to learn English online, access online job resources, research health care information, and more.

The Internet was invented here, but millions of low-income Americans are being left out of the digital revolution. We believe that every American should have access to the immense social and economic benefits of the web. Project Change Access is a small step towards that goal.

Check back soon for photos and video from this morning's event.
URL: http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2009/12/free-wireless-broadband-for-low-income.html

[G] Change owner in a Google spreadsheet

Posted: 08 Dec 2009 12:19 PM PST

Official Google Docs Blog: Change owner in a Google spreadsheet

A month ago, we standardized the look and feel of the Google Docs editors. Consistency across all the editors remains an important goal, which is why we are happy to report that you can now change the owner of a Google spreadsheet. This feature was already available in documents and presentations.

Changing the owner of a document is helpful if you are working in a group and the owner of the document leaves your group or no longer needs to work on that document.


Do you have ideas on how to improve Google Docs spreadsheets? Submit your idea on the Google Docs product ideas page.

Posted by: LB Lincoln and Josh Danziger, Software Engineers, Google Docs
URL: http://googledocs.blogspot.com/2009/12/change-owner-in-google-spreadsheet.html

[G] Exploring a new, more dynamic way of reading news with Living Stories

Posted: 08 Dec 2009 11:20 AM PST

Official Google Blog: Exploring a new, more dynamic way of reading news with Living Stories

There's been no shortage of talk recently about the "future of news." Should publishers charge for news online? How do they replace lost sources of revenue such as classified ads? How will accountability journalism endure? And, even more fundamentally, will news survive in the digital era? These are questions we're deeply interested in, and we've been exploring potential solutions. But what's often overlooked in these debates is the nature of the news story itself and the experience of how it's read online. We believe it's just as important to experiment with how news organizations can take advantage of the web to tell stories in new ways — ways that simply aren't possible offline.

While we have strong ideas about how information is experienced on the web, we're not journalists and we don't create content. So over the last few months we've been talking to a number of people to help develop the concept of something that we and some others in the industry call the "living story." Today, on Google Labs, we're unveiling some of the work we've done in partnership with two world-class news organizations: The News York Times and The Washington Post. The result of that experiment is the Living Stories prototype, which features new ways to interact with news and the quality of reporting you've come to expect from the reporters and editors at The Post and The Times. We're excited to learn from this experiment, and hope to eventually make these tools available to any publisher that wants to use them.

The idea behind Living Stories is to experiment with a different format for presenting news coverage online. News organizations produce a wealth of information that we all value; access to this information should be as great as the online medium allows. A typical newspaper article leads with the most important and interesting news, and follows with additional information of decreasing importance. Information from prior coverage is often repeated with each new online article, and the same article is presented to everyone regardless of whether they already read it. Living Stories try a different approach that plays to certain unique advantages of online publishing. They unify coverage on a single, dynamic page with a consistent URL. They organize information by developments in the story. They call your attention to changes in the story since you last viewed it so you can easily find the new material. Through a succinct summary of the whole story and regular updates, they offer a different online approach to balancing the overview with depth and context.

This project sprang from conversations among senior executives at the three companies. We shared thoughts about how the web can work for storytelling, and the Times and Post shared their core journalistic principles. The Living Stories started taking shape over the summer after our engineering and user interface teams spent time in the newsrooms of both papers. We're providing the technology platform, the Times and Post's journalists are writing and editing the stories, and we're continuously collaborating to make the user interface fit with their editorial vision.

Over the coming months, we'll refine Living Stories based on your feedback. We're also looking to develop openly available tools that could aid news organizations in the creation of these pages or at least in some of the features. If you're a news reader, we'd love to hear your thoughts. If you're a news organization, we want to hear your comments on the Living Story format. If you decide to implement this on your site, we would love to hear about that too. At the very least, we hope this collaboration will kick off debate and encourage innovation in how people interact with news online. To learn more about Living Stories, check out the video below.



Posted by Neha Singh, software engineer, and Josh Cohen, senior business product manager
URL: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/exploring-new-more-dynamic-way-of.html

[G] Take your Reader wherever Google Chrome goes

Posted: 08 Dec 2009 11:20 AM PST

Official Google Reader Blog: Take your Reader wherever Google Chrome goes


Google Reader Notifier
The Google Chrome team is launching beta support for extensions today, and we thought we'd take a shot at writing a Reader extension. The Google Reader Notifier displays the number of unread items in your Reader account in Google Chrome's toolbar. When clicked, the toolbar icon displays a popup preview of the latest items in your account. This way, you can keep an eye on your Reader account wherever on the web you are.



Let us know how you like the extension (and what other features you'd like to see in it) by adding a review on its page in the extension gallery.



Note that extensions are currently available only for the beta channel of Google Chrome for Windows and Linux, so you'll want to make sure you're running one of those browsers before you install the extension.



RSS subscribe extension
Reader users may want to try the RSS subscription extension too. It adds previewing and one-click subscribe support for any RSS or Atom feed that you happen to come across. And feel free to browse or search for other handy extensions.



And if you're a developer itching to write your own extension, you'll want to check out the extensive documentation and code samples.

URL: http://googlereader.blogspot.com/2009/12/take-your-reader-wherever-google-chrome.html

[G] Google Chrome for the holidays: Mac, Linux and extensions in beta

Posted: 08 Dec 2009 11:20 AM PST

Official Google Blog: Google Chrome for the holidays: Mac, Linux and extensions in beta

There was nothing more excruciating for me as a kid than seeing the presents pile up under the Christmas tree but knowing that I couldn't open them until Christmas morning. On the Google Chrome team, we've had the same feeling as we've been working to get betas ready for Mac, Linux and extensions. It's been a long time coming, but today we can check the top three items off our users' wish lists.

Google Chrome for Mac (Beta)
We've been working hard to deliver a first-class browser for the Mac — it took longer than we expected, but we hope the wait was worth it! We wanted Google Chrome to feel at home on the Mac, so we've focused on uniting our clean, simple design with subtle animations and effects to create a snappy and satisfying browsing experience on OS X. As you might expect, the speed of Google Chrome for Mac is something we're very proud of. If you have a Mac, try installing the beta and see how fast it launches — there's hardly even time for the icon in the dock to bounce!

For more details on this beta release of Google Chrome for Mac, read on in the Google Mac blog or watch this video from one of our engineers, Mike Pinkerton:



Google Chrome for Linux (Beta)
At Google, most engineers use Linux machines, so we certainly heard loud and clear how much they wanted Google Chrome for Linux. Just like Google Chrome for Windows and Mac, we focused on speed, stability and security, but we also wanted a high-performance browser that integrated well with the Linux ecosystem. This includes tight integration with native GTK themes, updates that are managed by the standard system package manager, and many other features that fit in natively with the operating system where possible.

Google Chrome for Linux in various GTK themes

Just as important, we've had quite a bit of help from the open source community. More than 50 open source contributors have worked on Chromium and they've been especially helpful on delivering our Linux version of Google Chrome. For more details on the beta release of Google Chrome for Linux, check out the Chromium blog.

Extensions in Google Chrome for Windows and Linux (Beta)
When we first launched Google Chrome in September 2008, we knew that we wanted to make it easy for you to customize the browser with extensions. We also wanted to make extensions easy to create and maintain, while preserving Google Chrome's speed and stability. Extensions on Google Chrome accomplishes all these goals: they are as easy to create as web pages, easy to install, and each extension runs in its own process to avoid crashing or significantly slowing down the browser.

If you're on a PC or a Linux machine, you can check out more than 300 extensions in the gallery, including a few cool, useful and cute extensions. Extensions aren't quite beta-quality on Mac yet, but you will be able to preview them on a developer channel soon. And if you're a web developer, you can learn more about writing extensions for Google Chrome on the Chromium blog.

Extensions installed on Google Chrome (for PC or Linux)

We hope the betas for Mac, Linux and extensions were some of the things on your wish list this year. We'd like to say thanks to Mac and Linux users who gave our early developer versions of Google Chrome a test drive on these platforms, as well as developers who wrote great extensions for Google Chrome. And in case you're wondering what we'd like for the holidays, we're always eager for feedback — and I wouldn't mind a brand new extension that makes it snow on demand!

Posted by Brian Rakowski, Product Manager
URL: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/google-chrome-for-holidays-mac-linux.html

[G] Google Chrome for Mac goes beta!

Posted: 08 Dec 2009 09:43 AM PST

Official Google Mac Blog: Google Chrome for Mac goes beta!

73,804 lines of Mac-specific code and 29 developer builds later, we're excited to finally release Google Chrome for Mac in beta. We took a hefty dose of goodness from the Windows version to build a fast, polished browser for Mac -- with features such as the Omnibox (where you can both search and type in addresses), themes from artists, and most importantly, speed. Try downloading Google Chrome for Mac and see what you think.

We also took great care to make Google Chrome a native application for Mac. For example, we integrated the Keychain into Google Chrome for Mac, and incorporated Mac-style animations when you open the Bookmarks bar.

For more details on today's beta release of Google Chrome for Mac, check out the video below.



To our early users who tried the weekly developer channel builds and provided excellent feedback, we thank you. In bringing the Mac version of Google Chrome from its developer stages to a beta standard, we returned to the core principles of the Chromium project and focused on delivering rock-solid depth in a few critical areas for the browser, rather than a breadth of features that are rough around the edges. This first beta release for Mac does not yet incorporate extensions, bookmark sync, bookmark manager, and cookie manager. However, we focused on features such as sandboxing our renderer process to help provide a safer web experience for our users. We look forward to future releases of Google Chrome for Mac, which will fill in the gaps and provide a fast, clean browser for your enjoyment on Mac OS X.

Can't wait for more info? Read our frequently-updated detailed status, or keep an eye on some Mac-specific sections of the source code. Don't forget to give Google Chrome for Mac a try, and let us know what you think.

Google Chrome for Mac, on the New Tab page


Google Chrome for Mac, with an artist theme


Posted by John Grabowski and Mike Pinkerton, Software Engineers, Google Chrome
URL: http://googlemac.blogspot.com/2009/12/google-chrome-for-mac-goes-beta.html

[G] Machine Learning with Quantum Algorithms

Posted: 08 Dec 2009 09:43 AM PST

Official Google Research Blog: Machine Learning with Quantum Algorithms

Posted by Hartmut Neven, Technical Lead Manager Image Recognition

Many Google services we offer depend on sophisticated artificial intelligence technologies such as machine learning or pattern recognition. If one takes a closer look at such capabilities one realizes that they often require the solution of what mathematicians call hard combinatorial optimization problems. It turns out that solving the hardest of such problems requires server farms so large that they can never be built.

A new type of machine, a so-called quantum computer, can help here. Quantum computers take advantage of the laws of quantum physics to provide new computational capabilities. While quantum mechanics has been foundational to the theories of physics for about a hundred years the picture of reality it paints remains enigmatic. This is largely because at the scale of our every day experience quantum effects are vanishingly small and can usually not be observed directly. Consequently, quantum computers astonish us with their abilities. Let's take unstructured search as an example. Assume I hide a ball in a cabinet with a million drawers. How many drawers do you have to open to find the ball? Sometimes you may get lucky and find the ball in the first few drawers but at other times you have to inspect almost all of them. So on average it will take you 500,000 peeks to find the ball. Now a quantum computer can perform such a search looking only into 1000 drawers. This mind boggling feat is known as Grover's algorithm.

Over the past three years a team at Google has studied how problems such as recognizing an object in an image or learning to make an optimal decision based on example data can be made amenable to solution by quantum algorithms. The algorithms we employ are the quantum adiabatic algorithms discovered by Edward Farhi and collaborators at MIT. These algorithms promise to find higher quality solutions for optimization problems than obtainable with classical solvers.

On the hardware side we are collaborating with D-Wave in Vancouver, Canada. D-Wave develops processors that realize the adiabatic quantum algorithm by magnetically coupling superconducting loops called rf-squid flux qubits. This design realizes what is known as the Ising model which represents the simplest model for an interacting many-body system and it can be manufactured using proven chip fabrication methods. Unfortunately, it is not easy to demonstrate that a multi-qubit system such as the D-Wave chip indeed exhibits the desired quantum behavior and experimental physicists from various institutions are still in the process of characterizing the chip.


Layout of the qubits in the C4 Chimera chip employed to train the car detector. The irregular graph structure results from the fabrication process not yet rendering all qubits functional.

Today, at the Neural Information Processing Systems conference (NIPS 2009), we show the progress we have made. We demonstrate a detector that has learned to spot cars by looking at example pictures. It was trained with adiabatic quantum optimization using a D-Wave C4 Chimera chip. There are still many open questions but in our experiments we observed that this detector performs better than those we had trained using classical solvers running on the computers we have in our data centers today. Besides progress in engineering synthetic intelligence we hope that improved mastery of quantum computing will also increase our appreciation for the structure of reality as described by the laws of quantum physics.

The theory paper on which the demonstration is based can be found on the arXiv and a report describing the details of the implementation is here.
URL: http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2009/12/machine-learning-with-quantum.html

[G] Google Chrome for the holidays: Mac, Linux and extensions in beta

Posted: 08 Dec 2009 09:43 AM PST

Google Chrome Blog: Google Chrome for the holidays: Mac, Linux and extensions in beta

There was nothing more excruciating for me as a kid than seeing the presents pile up under the Christmas tree but knowing that I couldn't open them until Christmas morning. On the Google Chrome team, we've had the same feeling as we've been working to get betas ready for Mac, Linux and extensions. It's been a long time coming, but today we can check the top three items off our users' wish lists.

Google Chrome for Mac (Beta)
We've been working hard to deliver a first-class browser for the Mac — it took longer than we expected, but we hope the wait was worth it! We wanted Google Chrome to feel at home on the Mac, so we've focused on uniting our clean, simple design with subtle animations and effects to create a snappy and satisfying browsing experience on OS X. As you might expect, the speed of Google Chrome for Mac is something we're very proud of. If you have a Mac, try installing the beta and see how fast it launches — there's hardly even time for the icon in the dock to bounce!

For more details on this beta release of Google Chrome for Mac, read on in the Google Mac blog or watch this video from one of our engineers, Mike Pinkerton:



Google Chrome for Linux (Beta)
At Google, most engineers use Linux machines, so we certainly heard loud and clear how much they wanted Google Chrome for Linux. Just like Google Chrome for Windows and Mac, we focused on speed, stability and security, but we also wanted a high-performance browser that integrated well with the Linux ecosystem. This includes tight integration with native GTK themes, updates that are managed by the standard system package manager, and many other features that fit in natively with the operating system where possible.

Google Chrome for Linux in various GTK themes

Just as important, we've had quite a bit of help from the open source community. More than 50 open source contributors have worked on Chromium and they've been especially helpful on delivering our Linux version of Google Chrome. For more details on the beta release of Google Chrome for Linux, check out the Chromium blog.

Extensions in Google Chrome for Windows and Linux (Beta)
When we first launched Google Chrome in September 2008, we knew that we wanted to make it easy for you to customize the browser with extensions. We also wanted to make extensions easy to create and maintain, while preserving Google Chrome's speed and stability. Extensions on Google Chrome accomplishes all these goals: they are as easy to create as web pages, easy to install, and each extension runs in its own process to avoid crashing or significantly slowing down the browser.

Extensions installed on Google Chrome (for PC or Linux)

If you're on a PC or a Linux machine, you can check out more than 300 extensions in the gallery, including a few cool, useful and cute extensions . Extensions aren't quite beta-quality on Mac yet, but you will be able to preview them on a developer channel soon. And if you're a web developer, you can learn more about writing extensions for Google Chrome on the Chromium blog.


We hope the betas for Mac, Linux and extensions were some of the things on your wish list this year. We'd like to say thanks to Mac and Linux users who gave our early developer versions of Google Chrome a test drive on these platforms, as well as developers who wrote great extensions for Google Chrome. And in case you're wondering what we'd like for the holidays, we're always eager for feedback — and I wouldn't mind a brand new extension that makes it snow on demand!


Posted by Brian Rakowski, Product Manager
URL: http://chrome.blogspot.com/2009/12/google-chrome-for-holidays-mac-linux.html

[G] Changing your perspective

Posted: 08 Dec 2009 05:42 AM PST

Google LatLong: Changing your perspective



As an avid travel planner or discerning house hunter, you might always be looking for another view of a location before you make your final decision. On the Google Maps team we're always looking for ways to make the search experiences like this more useful for you. This is what inspired our plans to provide a new type of mapping imagery.



Starting today, developers will have access through the Google Maps API to high-resolution overhead imagery that is presented in a new aerial perspective. This is currently available in 2 spots in California: San Jose and San Diego. This new perspective gives users the ability to tilt their view of the world. In addition to seeing hotel rooftops like in our current "satellite" view, users can now see both the rooftop and sides of the hotel at an angle. In fact, users can rotate around all the sides of a hotel to get 4 different views from back to front.



While the imagery is great to look at, we wanted to make sure it was also a useful tool for users. Consequently, we decided to stitch thousands of images together so that users can smoothly pan across the map in perspective. This makes it especially easy to maintain context while viewing what buildings look like from the ground and where they're located.



Since it's often easier to show than tell, a few of our travel and real estate partners have added this imagery to their Google Maps implementations. Whenever you're checking out this new feature, be sure to rotate the ring around the compass to see all the various perspectives of the property.



Orbitz uses this new aerial imagery within its search experience for hotels. Search either for San Diego hotels or San Jose hotels, then click on the "Map" link within any individual hotel card and zoom in from the Satellite view. You'll quickly see how valuable this will be for your next hotel booking:



Online real estate brokerage Redfin presentspresents an "angled" view of their properties with an embedded Google map that utilizes this new aerial imagery to help home buyers get a much better sense of an entire home lot, and neighborhood. They include it within the property details for homes in San Diego and San Jose (scroll down to the map and select "Angled"):



Trulia integrates this new imagery on profile pages for all real estate listings, recently sold homes, and property records in San Jose and San Diego. They present this as "Perspective view" for these homes to complement photos, which you'll find located below the default map for each property:

We're very excited about how these new perspectives on a property will help to improve your geographic searching, whether it's for a new home, a great hotel for your next trip, or any of the other great uses that developers come up with.



If you're a geo developer, please read our the Geo Developers Blog or review the implementation documentation that will explain how to quickly add this to your Google Maps API implementation. What's great about this new imagery is that all of your existing data and Google Maps services like driving directions can be displayed on your map with no extra work. This is a result of a lot of code and computing power that reprojects the imagery to make it easy to overlay data on the map given lat/lon locations like in any other Google Map type. The result is a great user experience together with easy display of data on the map.



In the coming months, we'll be working hard to improve the existing imagery and release more cities. We can't wait to see what creative mashups and tools the Maps API development community creates with it!



Posted by Randy Wilson and Manish Patel, Google Imagery Team
URL: http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2009/12/changing-your-perspective.html
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