Tuesday, June 22, 2010

Googland

Googland

[G] Universal mediums and languages

Posted: 21 Jun 2010 11:14 PM PDT

Google Public Policy Blog: Universal mediums and languages

Posted by Bob Boorstin, Director, Public Policy

A year ago today, Neda Soltan was shot on the streets of Tehran amid protests over the disputed results of the Iranian elections. Officials locked foreign journalists out of the country and stalled all modes of communication, but an individual caught the final moments before her death on video. That video was posted to YouTube, and captured the hearts and minds of millions around the world.

Little is known about Neda's life, but as I read more about her, I noticed one thing in particular: Neda was a singer in a country where women are not allowed to sing in public.

Music, Neda's passion in life, is a universal language that has the ability to inspire feelings of patriotism or dissent, fuel political and social movements, educate and influence entire populations, and serve as a connecting force for people around the world. The open Internet, which memorialized Neda's life, has the same inherent capabilities. It's no coincidence that repressive regimes that silence minority voices do so by restricting the platforms that can elevate them most; the top eight countries that violate the freedom of musical expression also censor heavily online.

As with all mediums, languages, and innovations that transcend borders, the Internet and music will and can be used for both good and bad purposes. And neither will ever be a silver bullet for the world's problems. But both are able to carry and amplify messages that would otherwise be lost, empowering individuals to speak, and serving as incomparable platforms for engagement, expression.
URL: http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2010/06/universal-mediums-and-languages.html

[G] Security First: Google at the Gartner Security & Risk Management Summit

Posted: 21 Jun 2010 10:01 PM PDT

Official Google Enterprise Blog: Security First: Google at the Gartner Security & Risk Management Summit

This week the Google Enterprise team is excited to be participating in the Gartner Security and Risk Management Summit. From today through Wednesday, IT and business executives responsible for information security, risk management, compliance, and business continuity management will gather to discuss new technologies and strategies to better secure their organizations and reduce risk.

We're particularly excited to be joined by Chet Loveland of MWV and Brian Bolt from Boise State University for a panel on security and cloud computing. They discussed why their organizations chose Google Apps, and the steps Google takes to protect the security and privacy of their data.

On Tuesday, we'll be presenting a review of Google Apps security and reliability, building on the content in our recently published Apps security white paper.

If you'll be at the conference, please join us for a session or stop by our booth to learn more about Google's solutions for cloud security. If you're not going to be at the conference, you can find lots of information on Google Apps here.

Posted by Adam Swidler, Sr. Manager – Google Enterprise
URL: http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2010/06/security-first-google-at-gartner.html

[G] The City of Los Angeles on Going Google

Posted: 21 Jun 2010 10:01 PM PDT

Official Google Enterprise Blog: The City of Los Angeles on Going Google

Editor's note: Today's guest blogger is Kevin Crawford, Assistant General Manager for the City of Los Angeles Information Technology Agency. Kevin was part of a team of technology executives that chose Google Apps six months ago to support the city's 30,000+ employees and 44 different departments, from police and fire to transportation and more. In the past, Kevin has served as CIO of Sound Transit, senior manager of IT infrastructure at Port of Seattle, and support manager at Weyerhauser. Kevin shares his thoughts about how the US's second largest city has gone Google in perhaps one of the most-watched technology deployments in recent memory. This post is a follow-up to the initial blog post on the City of LA from Randi Levin, CTO.

Kevin will speak at a live webcast this Thursday, June 24, 2010 at 2:00 PM (EDT) | 11:00 AM (PDT) Register today.

The City of Los Angeles currently faces a $400 million deficit, but from a technology standpoint, we still have to provide advanced tools to 30,000+ employees and 44 different departments – technology is vital to the inner workings of the city. Running a city of this size requires people to work together, from designing and operating public facilities to policing the streets.

At the city's Information Technology Agency (ITA), we are responsible for managing all of the City's enterprise applications – including email. Up until about six months ago, we had an aging, on-premise email system. Our Novell Groupwise system didn't work on some mobile devices and we had to enforce inbox space quotas that City employees found limiting.

In addition to providing better collaboration tools and remote access, we also needed archiving and disaster recovery capabilities to safeguard information. Disaster recovery precautions are especially important in this part of the world where earthquakes are not a question of if, but when.

We looked at 15 different proposals and went through extensive due diligence, finally gaining the City Council's unanimous buy-in with a 12-0 vote in favor of a proposal from Google and CSC. We found that Google Apps provided the richest, most cost-effective and efficient communication solutions. That was six months ago. Since then, we've worked with CSC to implement Google Apps City-wide.

By ITA estimates, Google Apps is saving Los Angeles $5.5 million over five years by allowing us to shift resources currently dedicated to email to other purposes. For example, moving to Google has freed up nearly 100 servers that were previously used for our existing email system, which in turn – an unanticipated benefit – is lowering our electricity bills by hundreds of thousands over five years. Los Angeles found Google's system availability of 99.9% and service levels for response in the event of an issue to be equivalent – if not better – to what we could provide ourselves. In short, this decision to go Google helps us safeguard information and get the most out of the city's IT budget.



Because we are such a large government organization, people are eager to hear how our deployment is going. We also built a Google Site to help us easily provide updates on the process and gather input from our user base. We'd be pleased to discuss the progress we've made in the six months since we unanimously decided to go to Google Apps. Please join me for an interactive webinar!

On switching 30,000 Employees to Google Apps
Thursday, June 24, 2010
Time: 2:00 PM (EDT) | 11:00 AM (PDT)


Posted by Serena Satyasai, The Google Apps Team

Do you have an informative and fun Google Apps story to share? Please submit it here.
URL: http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2010/06/city-of-los-angeles-on-going-google.html

[G] The Iterative Web App: New Compose Interface for Gmail on iPad

Posted: 21 Jun 2010 03:27 PM PDT

Official Google Mobile Blog: The Iterative Web App: New Compose Interface for Gmail on iPad

In April 2009, we announced a new version of Gmail for mobile for iOS and Android. Among the improvements was a complete redesign of the web application's underlying code which allows us to more rapidly develop and release new features that users have been asking for, as explained in our first post. We'd like to introduce The Iterative Web App, a series where we will continue to release features for Gmail for mobile. Today: New Compose Interface on the iPad.

Today we're happy to announce an improved experience for writing emails on Gmail web interface for iPad. When you write an email you'll now get a big full screen compose window instead of splitting the screen between your inbox and the compose view. More text is visible at once and there are no more distractions with messages on the side. We've also fixed problems that prevented scrolling on long messages. Thanks to everyone who reported the issue via the 'Send feedback' feature at the bottom of the screen.



We're continuing to experiment with the large touchscreen and tablet form factor so send more feedback if you have suggestions. To try out Gmail on the iPad, just go to gmail.com in Safari. Please note that the new interface is only available in US English for now.



Posted by Craig Wilkinson, Software Engineer, Google Mobile
URL: http://googlemobile.blogspot.com/2010/06/iterative-web-app-new-compose-interface.html

[G] Introducing Google Commerce Search 2.0

Posted: 21 Jun 2010 12:50 PM PDT

Google Affiliate Network: Introducing Google Commerce Search 2.0


To help retail sites get ready for the summer shopping season, the Google Commerce Search team launched Google Commerce Search 2.0 for retailers in the US and UK. The new version of Google Commerce Search gives merchants greater control and shoppers a better experience online—not to mention a higher ROI for retailers.





Google Commerce Search, initially launched just seven months ago, is an enterprise-grade website search solution hosted in Google's cloud and designed for specific retail needs like parametric sorting and fast search result loading. This second release includes a number of improvements:

  • More merchant customization: Today we're launching a full merchandising dashboard, giving merchants more control over promotions, ranking rules and filtering - with no custom code so marketers and product merchandisers can do all of this themselves. New intuitive retailer controls like time-based promotions, full left-hand panel facet control and simple product ranking rules mean seasonal optimization on the fly.
  • Unparalleled shopper experience:  With query autocompletion, retailers can offer common queries to shoppers in real time, as they type, without any custom coding. Search quality improvements make GCS faster and more relevant than before. Because it's hosted in the Google cloud, search results are returned to shoppers in less than a second. Spelling and stemming dictionaries and new custom synonyms mean that shopping on a retail site can be as easy and accurate as searching on Google.com.
  •  Better browsing and navigation: Though more and more shoppers are turning directly to the search bar on retail sites when they're looking to make a purchase, some people will always prefer to navigate through different categories and discover new products. Now, Google Commerce Search allows visitors to shop by browsing around your site as well as searching directly for products.
     
    To learn more, visit google.com/commercesearch or sign up for our upcoming webinar:
    Google Commerce Search: Delivering Search Innovations to Retailers and Shoppers
    Wednesday, June 23, 2010
    1:00 p.m. EDT / 10:00 a.m. PDT / 5:00 p.m. GMT

     
    Posted by Vijay Koduri and Alex Dovlecel, Google Commerce Search team
URL: http://googleaffiliatenetwork-blog.blogspot.com/2010/06/introducing-google-commerce-search-20.html
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