Thursday, February 18, 2010

Googland

Googland

[G] Powerful, Flexible, Secure and now approved by the US Federal Government

Posted: 17 Feb 2010 04:39 PM PST

Google Analytics Blog: Powerful, Flexible, Secure and now approved by the US Federal Government

This week, the US federal General Services Administration (GSA) has approved listing Google Analytics in its apps.gov web site, which is a place for government agencies and services to find approved cloud computing applications. It's goal is to drive innovation and adoption of cloud-based apps in the government, and Google and the GSA have worked together to ensure that Google Analytics is compatible with the needs of US Federal agencies (e.g., Department of Homeland Security, NASA, FCC, and others).

We are very proud of and humbled by this listing and excited by the potential opportunities to serve US federal agencies and help them monitor and improve their website experiences. We understand that working with US Federal agencies includes a responsibility to protect our users and we would like to take this opportunity to further explain how seriously Google Analytics takes data security and protecting data privacy for our users, as detailed in our Terms of Service.

As an enterprise-class web analytics solution, Google Analytics not only provides site owners with information on their website traffic and marketing effectiveness, it also does so with high regard for protecting user data privacy. Privacy and security are core elements of Google's design and development processes, and we're proud to pass that benefit on to users of Google Analytics. Google's security philosophy is outlined here, and Google's commitment to protecting the information stored on its computer systems is outlined in the Google Code of Conduct.

We're gratified that the US Federal GSA has approved the listing of Google Analytics in its apps.gov site. We will continue to work hard to ensure that we earn this approval in the years ahead.

Posted by Phil Mui, Sr. Product Manager, Google Analytics
URL: http://analytics.blogspot.com/2010/02/powerful-flexible-secure-and-now.html

[G] Announcing the winner of our Map Maker global competition

Posted: 17 Feb 2010 03:22 PM PST

Google LatLong: Announcing the winner of our Map Maker global competition


Google's first Global Mapping Competition ran from December 15 - January 31, 2010 and the big moment has come: announcing the winner! The competition entrant who added the most universities, schools, hospitals, and medical clinics with high quality into Google Map Maker was (drumroll please...) Wayne Dell Manuel of the Philippines.

Already one of the top 10 all-time mappers, Wayne made hundreds of moderations and added more than 1500 qualifying map features (i.e. schools, universities, hospitals and medical clinics) during the course of the competition. Google Map Maker is available in more than 175 countries and allows users to become "citizen cartographers" by adding and editing map features.

Wayne Dell Manuel at the 2009 Map Maker user conference in Bangalore, India.


Wayne first found out about Map Maker right here on this blog, "which is also where I found out about the competition," said Wayne. "For the competition, I added mostly government schools in the biggest island of the Philippines: Luzon. Government schools in the country tend to be used as temporary evacuation centers

during times of calamity such as typhoons and earthquakes which are common to the Philippines. It would greatly help in disaster planning and management."


Wayne's dedication to mapping his homeland is motivated by helping others: "After the devastating typhoon Ketsana (local name Ondoy), a volunteer group used Google Maps to map distress calls, among other things, to facilitate rescue operations. I was so happy to see the roads that I've helped map were used to locate the houses." Map Maker maps display in Google Maps for more than 140 countries and territories, including the Philippines.


As of late last year, Wayne's mapping contributions in the Philippines are also available as part of the Map Maker download program. Non-profits, government agencies and individuals can use the mapping data in the Philippines and more than 60 other countries for research, humanitarian relief and other non-commercial uses.


For his remarkable mapping efforts, Wayne has won a $50,000 UNICEF donation to benefit projects empowering young people through technology in the Philippines. Wayne will get a VIP tour of the local projects in the Philippines that are benefiting from the $50,000 donation, and he will also attend the upcoming Supper Mapper 2010 conference at Google's office in Zurich, Switzerland.


Congratulations to Wayne for winning the grand prize -- the $50,000 donation to UNICEF will go to projects in the Philippines!


Posted by Jennifer Mazzon, Maps Community Organizer
URL: http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2010/02/announcing-winner-of-our-map-maker.html

[G] Seven million students have gone Google...and we're road tripping!

Posted: 17 Feb 2010 01:58 PM PST

Official Google Enterprise Blog: Seven million students have gone Google...and we're road tripping!

Editor's note: We're sharing some news – and a cross post from the Official Google Blog – about a new milestone for Google Apps Education Edition: use by 7 million students and faculty worldwide.

Since the fall of 2009 we've seen more and more students and faculty take advantage of Google Apps Education Edition. We've seen our active users grow – first we had 5 million, then 6 million, and today we're happy to announce that we've crossed the 7 million mark. With so many students and faculty using Google Docs, Google Sites, and Gmail to collaborate and share their academic work, we figured it's the perfect time to hit the road and help more schools see Google Apps in action.

Beginning in April, the Google Apps Education team will travel to universities across the southern and eastern US to meet with regional CIOs and IT directors in higher education. We'll be hosting these events with some great universities using Google Apps, including Hofstra, Columbus State University, the University of South Florida, Texas Southern University, and the University of Virginia.

At every stop, the host universities will share how their students and/or faculty use Google Apps, and show how they've deployed and connected Apps within their technology infrastructure. We'll be devoting a lot of time for questions and we'll have plenty of demos from the Google Apps team. If you're a university CIO, CTO. or IT Director in New York, Florida, Georgia or Virginia (or nearby!) and would like to join us at a roadtrip stop, please let us know via this contact form. We hope to see you there!

Google Apps Education Edition CIO Roadtrip - Spring 2010

4/16 : Hofstra University
(in conjunction with the New York Higher Education Technology Forum)
Hempstead, NY

4/19 : University of South Florida
Tampa, FL

4/21 : Columbus State University
Columbus, GA

4/23 : University of Virginia
Charlottesville, VA

Early June : Texas Southern University
Houston, TX

Posted by Jason Cook, Google Apps Education team
URL: http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2010/02/seven-million-students-have-gone.html

[G] Integrating translation into Google Goggles

Posted: 17 Feb 2010 12:42 PM PST

Official Google Mobile Blog: Integrating translation into Google Goggles

(cross-posted with Google Translate Blog)

Yesterday, at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Eric Schmidt and I demonstrated a prototype version of Google Goggles that showcases the potential of integrating Google's machine translation and image recognition technologies. In the video below, you'll see how we use Goggles to take a picture of a German menu and instantly translate the text into English:


You may wonder what's happening in the background. On the simplest level, this prototype connects the phone's camera to an optical character recognition (OCR) engine, recognizes the image as text and then translates that text into English with Google Translate.

Right now this technology only works for German-to-English translations and it's not yet ready for prime time. However, it shows a lot of promise for what the future might hold. Soon your phone will be able to translate signs, posters and other foreign text instantly into your language. Eventually, we're hoping to build a version of Google Goggles that can translate between all of the 52 languages currently supported by Google Translate — bringing even more information to you on the go.

Posted by Hartmut Neven
URL: http://googlemobile.blogspot.com/2010/02/integrating-translation-into-google.html

[G] What to expect at Google I/O 2010

Posted: 17 Feb 2010 12:42 PM PST

Official Google Blog: What to expect at Google I/O 2010

Back in January, we announced the start of early registration for Google I/O (our annual developer conference), and our team was excited to publish our new website for this year's event. Today, we're excited to give you a quick update on what's in store for this year's Google I/O and a brief look at what we've announced in the past five weeks.
  • 63 sessions to be led by the engineering teams behind all the products to be featured at I/O, including Android, Google Chrome, Google Web Toolkit and Google Wave. We'll have over 80 sessions listed by May.
  • 58 companies are listed on the Developer Sandbox page, and we expect over 150 companies to participate in the Sandbox at I/O.
  • 99 speakers, including Google engineers and prominent web development experts from other companies.
  • We introduced our very first I/O BootCamp, which sold out in just two days.
Of course, some things will stay under wraps until the event itself, but we're excited to share some Google I/O planning details with you in advance.

We'll be teaming up with Maker Faire again this year for our After Hours evening party. Google I/O attendees will get to preview some of the amazing DIY projects that will be showcased at Maker Faire in San Mateo just a couple of days after I/O, and discounted Maker Faire tickets will be available during After Hours. We've also invited the organizers of Gadgetoff. They'll be bringing along exciting, interactive gadgets, robots and vehicles.

Whether you're already developing apps using products like App Engine, or wondering how to get started on your first Android app, we hope to see you at Google I/O in May. To learn more and to sign up, visit code.google.com/io.

Posted by Joyce Sohn, Google Developer Team
URL: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/what-to-expect-at-google-io-2010.html

[G] A web clipboard for Google Docs

Posted: 17 Feb 2010 12:42 PM PST

Official Google Docs Blog: A web clipboard for Google Docs

We want copying and pasting content within Google Docs to just work. So, today we're launching a new web clipboard that improves copy and paste in Google Docs. This new clipboard temporarily stores items you've copied in the cloud, then allows you to paste them with proper formatting into other Google Docs.

Say you work for a cheese company and you've created a table in a Google spreadsheet summarizing cheese sales. You want to present the results to your coworkers using a Google presentation.

Now, you can just select your cells in the spreadsheet and copy them using the new clipboard menu.

In your presentation, select the cells from the web clipboard menu to paste.

Your spreadsheets table will now be in your presentation. It works just as you would expect.

The new web clipboard lets you copy content between documents, spreadsheets and presentations more easily and with improved fidelity, and this is just our first step. Note that while items in your web clipboard are available across browsers and across sessions, they do expire after a month.

We hope you find these changes useful, but please let us know how you think we can improve interaction between Google Docs on our forum.

Posted by: Ben Margolin, Engineer, Google Docs
URL: http://googledocs.blogspot.com/2010/02/web-clipboard-for-google-docs.html

[G] A picture's worth a thousand (translated) words

Posted: 17 Feb 2010 12:42 PM PST

Official Google Blog: A picture's worth a thousand (translated) words

Imagine being in a foreign country staring at a restaurant menu you can't understand, a waiter impatiently tapping his foot at your tableside. You, a vegetarian, have no idea whether you're about to order spaghetti with meatballs or veggie pesto. What would you do? Well, eventually you might be able to take out your mobile phone, snap a photo with Google Goggles, and instantly view that menu translated into your language. Of course, that's not possible today — but yesterday at the Mobile World Congress we demonstrated a prototype of Google Goggles that has the power to do just that. It's still in an extremely early stage, but we thought we'd share this demo with you because it shows just how powerful a smartphone can be when it's connected to our translation technologies. For more information and to watch the demo, check out our brand-new Google Translate blog.

Posted by Andrew Gomez, Associate Product Marketing Manager
URL: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/pictures-worth-thousand-translated.html

[G] Open-sourcing the Living Stories format

Posted: 17 Feb 2010 11:19 AM PST

Google News Blog: Open-sourcing the Living Stories format

Posted by Neha Singh, Software Engineer, and Josh Cohen, Senior Business Product Manager

For the past two months, small teams of reporters and editors from the New York Times and Washington Post have been experimenting with Living Stories, a new format for covering news on the web. Using this technology platform, we can capture hundreds of developments as events unfold on a single dynamic page so that readers have many ways to easily digest the information. Living Stories has helped the Times enlighten readers on such subjects as global warming, the Afghanistan war, the N.F.L. playoffs and executive compensation. The Post has used it to report on health care reform, the Redskins' season and the overhaul of the D.C. school system.

Since we launched this proof-of-concept test on Google Labs in December, 75% of people who sent us feedback said they preferred the Living Stories format to the traditional online news article. Users also spent a significant amount of time exploring stories. This tells us there's a strong appetite for great journalism displayed in a compelling way.

In addition to the positive input from visitors, we've also heard from publishers interested in telling their own stories through the format. So we think it's time for the next stage of this experiment: releasing Living Stories more broadly to see what you can do with it. Today we're open-sourcing the code so all developers can build their own Living Story pages. (Here's the open-source documentation for technical details; read our Google News Help Forum to ask and answer general support questions.) Now that we're shifting into this public phase of the experiment, the Times and the Post are going to wind down their work on the version hosted on Google Labs. We'd like to thank them for embarking on this stage of the project with us. We're looking forward to continuing to work with them, and many other publishers, on Living Stories as well as other projects that help to advance how news is presented online.

In coming months, we're going to look into creating software tools that make Living Stories even easier to use for news organizations. Until then, we can't wait to see what fascinating works of journalism developers, reporters and editors, working together, create using the open-sourced Living Stories code.
URL: http://googlenewsblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/open-sourcing-living-stories-format.html

[G] Seven million students have gone Google...and we're road tripping!

Posted: 17 Feb 2010 10:58 AM PST

Official Google Blog: Seven million students have gone Google...and we're road tripping!

Since the fall of 2009 we've seen more and more students and faculty take advantage of Google Apps Education Edition. We've seen our active users grow — first we had 5 million, then 6 million, and today we're happy to announce that we've crossed the 7 million mark. With so many students and faculty using Google Docs, Google Sites and Gmail to collaborate and share their academic work, we figured it's the perfect time to hit the road and help more schools see Google Apps in action.

Beginning in April, the Google Apps Education team will travel to universities across the southern and eastern U.S. to meet with regional CIOs and IT directors in higher education. We'll be hosting these events with some great universities using Google Apps, including Hofstra, Columbus State University, the University of South Florida, Texas Southern University and the University of Virginia.

At every stop, the host universities will share how their students and/or faculty use Google Apps, and show how they've deployed and connected Apps within their technology infrastructure. We'll be devoting a lot of time for questions and we'll have plenty of demos from the Google Apps team. If you're a university CIO, CTO or IT Director in New York, Florida, Georgia or Virginia (or nearby!) and would like to join us at a roadtrip stop, please let us know via this contact form. We hope to see you there!
Google Apps Education Edition CIO Roadtrip - Spring 2010

4/16: Hofstra University
(in conjunction with the New York Higher Education Technology Forum)
Hempstead, NY

4/19: University of South Florida
Tampa, FL

4/21: Columbus State University
Columbus, GA

4/23: University of Virginia
Charlottesville, VA

Early June: Texas Southern University
Houston, TX
Posted by Jason Cook, Google Apps Education team
URL: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/seven-million-students-have-gone.html

[G] Open-sourcing Living Stories

Posted: 17 Feb 2010 09:55 AM PST

Google Open Source Blog: Open-sourcing Living Stories

For the past two months, small teams of reporters and editors from the New York Times and Washington Post have been experimenting with Living Stories, a new format for covering news on the web. Using this technology platform, we can capture hundreds of developments as events unfold on a single dynamic page so that readers have many ways to easily digest the information. Living Stories has helped the Times enlighten readers on such subjects as global warming, the Afghanistan war, the N.F.L. playoffs and executive compensation. The Post has used it to report on health care reform, the Redskins' season and the overhaul of the D.C. school system.

Since we launched this proof-of-concept test on Google Labs in December, 75% of people who sent us feedback said they preferred the Living Stories format to the traditional online news article. Users also spent a significant amount of time exploring stories. This tells us there's a strong appetite for great journalism displayed in a compelling way.

In addition to the positive input from visitors, we've also heard from publishers interested in telling their own stories through the format. So we think it's time for the next stage of this experiment: releasing Living Stories more broadly to see what you can do with it. Today we're open-sourcing the code so all developers can build their own Living Story pages. (Here's the open-source documentation for technical details; read our Google News Help Forum to ask and answer general support questions.) Now that we're shifting into this public phase of the experiment, the Times and the Post are going to wind down their work on the version hosted on Google Labs. We'd like to thank them for embarking on this stage of the project with us. We're looking forward to continuing to work with them, and many other publishers, on Living Stories as well as other projects that help to advance how news is presented online.

In coming months we're going to look into creating software tools that make Living Stories even easier to use for news organizations. Until then, we can't wait to see what fascinating works of journalism developers, reporters and editors, working together, create using the open-sourced Living Stories code.

By Neha Singh, software engineer, and Josh Cohen, senior business product manager
URL: http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2010/02/open-sourcing-living-stories.html
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