Saturday, February 20, 2010

Googland

Googland

[G] A simple way for local businesses to enhance their listing

Posted: 19 Feb 2010 08:01 PM PST

Google LatLong: A simple way for local businesses to enhance their listing


We recently launched a trial, currently limited to the cities of San Jose and Houston, for a new ads feature in local search that allows business owners to enhance their listings. We've seen a lot of curiosity about this feature, so I wanted to take this opportunity to provide further information about it for everyone interested in learning more.

These enhanced listings allow business owners to highlight an aspect of their Local Business Center listing that they think best reflects what they have to offer their customers. The business owner can choose to enhance the way their listing appears in search results by including a link to point customers directly to photos, videos, website, coupons, directions, menu or reservations signup. Let's say a deli owner thinks the huge selection of imported cheeses really makes her deli stand out - she may want to give potential customers a quick way to see the menu on your website or a photo of your display case. Customers who access this relevant information can make an easier, more informed decision about which business to call or visit.

Here's an example for optometrist in San Jose, CA. Notice the yellow tag below the North Valley Optometry listing with a link to "View photos" of their business and the photo icon placed on the map:


These enhancements are an easy and straightforward way for businesses to emphasize information that may already be available on their Place Pages or websites, and to connect with interested, locally-based potential customers. When the listing shows up in your Google.com or Google Maps search results, the enhancement also appears alongside it. The enhancements do not affect the ranking of LBC listings, and we clearly indicate which parts of the search result are sponsored.

We hope both users and business owners find this feature useful, so we'll monitor the trial closely and may make changes. Based on the initial results, we may choose to expand it into additional areas. We don't have a specific timeline to share at the moment but we'll post again if and when we do. In the meantime, business owners can claim their listing in the Local Business Center, and those located in San Jose and Houston will see an invitation to enhance their listing for a flat fee of $25/month in the dashboard. Interested businesses outside these areas can be notified when enhanced listings come to their area by filling out this form.

Posted by Shalini Agarwal, Product Manager
URL: http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2010/02/simple-way-for-local-businesses-to.html

[G] Google Apps highlights – 2/19/2010

Posted: 19 Feb 2010 07:18 PM PST

Official Google Blog: Google Apps highlights – 2/19/2010

This is part of a regular series of Google Apps updates that we post every couple of weeks. Look for the label "Google Apps highlights" and subscribe to the series. - Ed.

Over the last couple of weeks we've been busy adding new functionality to make communicating and sharing with Google Apps easier than ever, whether you use Google Apps for work, for school or at home.

Web clipboard for Google Docs
As more and more people are getting work done in the cloud with Google Docs, a common stumbling block has been copying and pasting formatted content between documents, spreadsheets and presentations. On Wednesday we made this a whole lot easier with a web clipboard for Google Docs. Just highlight what you want to copy, select from the web clipboard menu, move to your other Google Docs window and choose what you want to paste from the web clipboard menu. Your pasted content will retain its original formatting so you don't have to spend time reformatting.


New saving buttons in Google Docs
One of the most frustrating things about using traditional software is losing your work if something unexpected happens before you remember to save. Google Docs helps solve this problem by frequently saving your latest changes automatically. Still, we've heard from people that they want that extra reassurance that autosave is happening, and to be able to manually save their work more easily. New saving buttons in Google Docs do just that. The buttons let you know when your document is fully saved, in the process of being autosaved or has unsaved changes that haven't been picked up by autosave yet. Now, if there are unsaved changes the "Save now" button is clickable.


Google Buzz
Last week we launched Google Buzz, a new way to start conversations about things you find interesting, like photos, videos, webpages or whatever might be on your mind. Buzz lets you share right from Gmail, or from your mobile phone. You can connect other sites you use like Twitter, Picasa, and Google Reader, and you can post buzz privately or publicly. Since we released Google Buzz, we quickly made a number of improvements based on input from users, and we're committed to keep improving it. Individuals can use Google Buzz now, and we plan to make it available to businesses and universities using Google Apps within a few months.

Google Apps Script for Google Sites
Google Apps Script lets you create programmatic interactions between a whole variety of Google services including contacts, calendars, email, finance data, spreadsheets and more. Businesses often use scripts to automate repetitive processes. Last week, we added Google Sites to the list of products that you can control with scripts. Now, instead of manually updating the content in a site, you can use Google Apps Script to automatically populate pages in your site with calendar data, contact information and data from the other services that work with Google Apps Script. Scripts can even add attachments and be used to update the sharing preferences for your site.

Who's gone Google?
With 3,500 employees, Lincoln Property Company is one of the largest property management firms in the United States. Recently, Lincoln Property made the decision to switch to Google Apps from their complex and costly Novell Groupwise email infrastructure. Not only will they save an estimated $200,000 per year, they'll finally be able to equip every single employee with email, instant messaging and calendars — not just the 950 desk-based workers who previously had email access.

The Google Apps train keeps rolling in the education space as well. Seven million students around the world are now using Google Apps at school! DePauw University, Yale University, Davenport University and the College of William and Mary are just a handful of the most recent schools to switch to Google Apps.

Hope you're enjoying the latest round of new capabilities, whether you're using Google Apps with friends and family, with work colleagues or with classmates. For details and the latest news in this area, check out the Google Apps Blog.

Posted by Jeremy Milo, Google Apps Marketing Manager
URL: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/google-apps-highlights-2192010.html

[G] RTEMS and Google Summer of Code 2009

Posted: 19 Feb 2010 05:43 PM PST

Google Open Source Blog: RTEMS and Google Summer of Code 2009

The RTEMS Project had 6 students accepted for Google Summer of Code™ 2009, with one additional student that was funded through the donation that Google gives to mentoring organizations in conjunction with a donation from OAR Corporation. We were extremely pleased with our students' results and their interaction with other projects, each other, and the community.

Xi Yang's project was to provide more RTEMS Board Support Packages (BSPs) that run on the free Skyeye simulator and to improve testing capabilities when using Skyeye. RTEMS uses Skyeye to test as well as GCC on ARM targets. Xi also implemented an LCD framebuffer driver for use with RTEMS.

Another student, Santosh Vattam worked on improving the Object Coverage of our test suites for a core part of RTEMS. Our initial coverage reports were generated for the SPARC/ERC32 using the closed source simulator TSIM. Santosh and I, his mentor, addressed cases which appeared to be test suite deficiencies while apparent simulator anomalies were passed on to Xi. During this, an obscure bug in RTEMS was uncovered and Xi and I worked together via chat to solve it. At the end of the summer, 3 SPARC and 2 ARM configurations were either at 100% or very close.

Santosh's project was a tie-in to the work of Roxana Leontie. Roxana operated under the same rules as Google Summer of Code but worked outside of the program. Her project was updating the Nano-X RTEMS port and providing a new RTEMS framebuffer device interface, and her first succesful demonstration was running the Nano-X Minesweeper program on RTEMS. As Roxanna progressed, Xi updated his LCD framebuffer driver to match her new interface.

Aanjhan Ranganathan's project was to provide a generic interface for RTEMS applications to use the Memory Management Hardware Unit available in most recent embedded processors for memory protection. His major tasks included studying the PowerPC MMU hardware architecture implementation and behavior, to propose a multi-level API design within the scope of RTEMS infrastructure. Most of the above tasks have been accomplished successfully and tested, but a lot of scope for further work exists.

Josh Switnick had a project which suffered from those unexpected "challenges" that make software development interesting. His project was to port RTEMS to the 8-bit AVR, as RTEMS had previously only been ported to 16- and 32-bit architectures. Mentors worked with Josh to produce a cross-toolset built with AVR specific libc support ported from AVR-LIBC to newlib, and to build the free AVR simulator simulavrxx. Josh produced a working port and is continuing to work to tidy up the loose ends.

Lucian Cocan's project was to continue the 2008 Google Summer of Code project of Real-Time trace. Lucian's initial work was to package the work into something that is suitable for a user. The tool was modelled on the command line tool, libtool, as it provided a simple yet consistent interface for the user. Lucian successfully produced traces for a number of the sample programs plus the example priority inheritance capture engine example.

JiSheng Zhang's project was to implement run-time dynamically loading relocatable object files or libraries into RTEMS, which is based on the IEEE Std 1003.1-2004 API (dlfcn.h) interface. Jisheng completed the basic functions of elf loader after the midterm, then he worked on figuring out how to get the dependencies included in the RTEMS kernel. Currently two tools are supported, i386 and sparc, and Jisheng is continuing to work on add other architecture support such as m68k, power pc, mips, and arm etc.

You can read my full report about our 2009 Google Summer of Code experience on the RTEMS wiki.



By Joel Sherrill, RTEMS Maintainer and Google Summer of Code mentor
URL: http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2010/02/rtems-and-google-summer-of-code-2009.html

[G] Release Notes: Nonprofit Program, Private Sharing, Streams

Posted: 19 Feb 2010 03:22 PM PST

YouTube Blog: Release Notes: Nonprofit Program, Private Sharing, Streams

News from the YouTube universe...

 

Nonprofit program launches in Australia and Canada: Like their American and British cohorts, nonprofits in Australia and Canada can now apply to become part of the YouTube Nonprofit Program. Members receive free branded channels, custom thumbnails, longer video uploads, and call-to-action overlays. For more information, and to apply, please go to www.youtube.com/nonprofits.



Easier private video sharing: You no longer need to be friends with someone in order to share a private video with them. You can either generate a special URL that up to 25 people can click on, or select the "Private share with YouTube users" option on the video's details page and write in the username(s), separated by a comma, with whom you'd like to share (see screenshot below). After you click "send," the recipient will see the video in his or her inbox.




 







Streams retired: Streams was an experimental product launched in TestTube, our ideas incubator, three years ago. We know some of you enjoyed watching videos while chatting with other users, but we've not been able to give Streams the time and attention needed to make it a more mainstream offering. Thus, we've decided to retire it for now as part of our pre-spring cleaning effort, though we hope to build other features that make it easier for you to share and talk about videos with friends.

 



Spotlight enhancements: The homepage spotlight is a periodic module featuring thematic or timely content selected by YouTube. (If you don't see it on your homepage, add it here.) Used to be we *had* to feature four videos and a channel in the module. But now we have a lot more flexibility: we can spotlight just one video, as we might in a breaking news situation, or multiple videos rotating randomly every time the page refreshes, as we might for a guest curatorship or spotlight featuring many contest entries. This might be hardly noticeable to you, but we're excited about the programming possibilities this change brings.

 



The YouTube Team


URL: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/youtube/PKJx/~3/LZNe8wJPg-U/release-notes-nonprofit-program-private.html

[G] System Maintenance Scheduled for Saturday, Feb 20

Posted: 19 Feb 2010 12:54 PM PST

Google Affiliate Network: System Maintenance Scheduled for Saturday, Feb 20

We will be performing system maintenance February 20; the interface will be unavailable at this time. Tracking will not be interrupted and reporting data will be restored shortly after the interface comes back online.

We anticipate the interface will be unavailable from 9 a.m. through 5 p.m. CDT (GMT -6).
URL: http://googleaffiliatenetwork-blog.blogspot.com/2010/02/system-maintenance-scheduled-for.html

[G] Go Mobile! Series: Targeting options to make your mobile ads relevant

Posted: 19 Feb 2010 11:37 AM PST

Inside AdWords: Go Mobile! Series: Targeting options to make your mobile ads relevant

Last week, we showed you how to use Google Analytics to understand how mobile visitors interact with your website. We also showed you how to use that information to optimize your AdWords campaigns. This week, we'll show you how you can tailor your campaigns to reach the most relevant mobile audience.

What mobile device are they using?
Ensure that your ad is only displayed to the right mobile audience. For example, if you sell iPhone accessories, your ad is likely not relevant to Android device owners. With advanced mobile device targeting options, you can ensure that only users with an iPhone, as seen in this example, will see your ad.


Where are they located?
With Google Analytics, you can also see where your mobile traffic is coming from. If you notice that a lot of visits are coming from a place where you have a physical business location, you may want to display your business address or phone number alongside your ads. This makes your ads more relevant. It also provides mobile customers with the ability to click to call your business from within your text ad so they can take action right away.


We hope these tips help you mobile-ize your campaigns to help you reach the right audience while they're on-the-go.

Posted by Katrina Kurnit, Inside AdWords crew
URL: http://adwords.blogspot.com/2010/02/go-mobile-series-targeting-options-to.html

[G] Up Six: Discount Office Items Switches to Google Commerce Search and Increases Revenue 6%

Posted: 19 Feb 2010 10:18 AM PST

Official Google Enterprise Blog: Up Six: Discount Office Items Switches to Google Commerce Search and Increases Revenue 6%

Editor's note: Today's guest blogger is Tim Horton, Co-Founder and CEO of DiscountOfficeItems.com, one of the largest office supply superstores on the internet. Offering more than 65,000 name brand office supplies, technology products and office furniture, DiscountOfficeItems.com is an Inc. 500 and Internet Retailer Top 500 company.

In late 2009 Tim and his team identified search as a problem area for their site and began researching eTail search solutions. When they saw a demo of Google Commerce Search, they decided to switch and were able to integrate the new solution within their existing UI in less than a month. Almost immediately, they saw sizable lifts in revenue, traffic, transactions, and average order size.

Tim will join Nitin Mangtani, Senior Product Manager at Google Enterprise on a live webcast Thursday, March 4 at 10:00 a.m. PST / 1:00 p.m. EST to share his experience and answer questions about their decision to switch to Google Commerce Search.

When I co-founded Discount Office Items in 2003, our main objective was to offer customers a large selection, low prices, and top-notch customer service. Our site experienced rapid growth and high overall customer satisfaction, but our homegrown search was sluggish and returned irrelevant results.

In late 2009 we decided to evaluate Google Commerce Search and requested a demo. When we saw how fast we could recoup our spending and start making more money due to better, faster search, the decision to implement Google Commerce Search was clear. After the deployment process (which took just a couple of weeks including the winter holiday), we saw an immediate lift in revenue and traffic as well as transactions and searches done on our site.

More people are using our site search now to find the right products – Google Commerce Search works well and the results are highly relevant. Search was one of the weakest parts of our site. Now, it's one of the strongest – all with less load on our servers and less time spent on maintenance for the IT staff.

Please join me and the Google Commerce Search team for this live webinar:

How Discount Office Items Increased Revenue 6% by Switching to Google Commerce Search
Thursday, March 4, 2010
10:00 a.m. PST / 1:00 p.m. EST


You can contact our sales team, download the datasheet, or learn more on our website.

Posted by Eric Larson, Enterprise Search Deployment Engineer
URL: http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2010/02/up-six-discount-office-items-switches.html
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