Saturday, July 31, 2010

Googland

Googland

[G] Swivel Viewer, an open source embeddable album viewer

Posted: 30 Jul 2010 10:44 PM PDT

Google Open Source Blog: Swivel Viewer, an open source embeddable album viewer

A while back, we noticed that lots of sites were starting to show 360 degree views of their products.

So a few months ago we added a feature to Picasa Web Albums that lets you flip through the photos in an album in "Full Screen View" or "Slideshow" mode by dragging left and right on the current photo. This works especially well if you put an object on a turntable, but it also works fine for other albums, like our featured shots from the 2010 Winter games.

The embedded album viewer also supports this feature:



So any albums you've embedded already support swiveling.

If you prefer to host a viewer and images on your own site, check out
the Swivel Viewer site at code.google.com, where you'll find an open source embeddable album viewer that also supports zooming and panning. Alternatively, you can go directly to the page about hosting your own viewer, or check out these other albums from the gallery:




We also posted tips on how to take your own 360 views, and even some sketches for our experimental high-volume object scanner:


Swivel viewers are fundamentally simple, but it's tricky to communicate to the end user what they can do. I actually used the viewer for several weeks without realizing I could shift+drag to pan around while zoomed in! So we're excited to see what UI enhancements you can come up with.

By Jason Holt, Google Street View Team
URL: http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2010/07/swivel-viewer-open-source-embeddable.html

[G] Conversion Champion Challenge: Get those entries in!

Posted: 30 Jul 2010 10:39 PM PDT

Inside AdWords: Conversion Champion Challenge: Get those entries in!

In early June, we announced the Conversion Champion Challenge, a contest challenging you to use free AdWords conversion products to increase your ROI, then submit a mini-case study telling us about your experience. The grand prize winner will receive an AdWords voucher as well as an all-expenses paid trip to Google Mountain View or Google Zurich, where the Google Conversions team will meet with you to review your account and provide customized recommendations.

For those of you who took us up on the challenge, final entries are due tomorrow, July 31 and can be submitted here. So get those entries in soon!

Posted by Jason Shafton, Inside AdWords crew
URL: http://adwords.blogspot.com/2010/07/conversion-champion-challenge-get-those.html

[G] Find a place for fun in sun with our latest imagery

Posted: 30 Jul 2010 08:36 PM PDT

Google LatLong: Find a place for fun in sun with our latest imagery


It's time for another imagery update, and we have a great batch of new data that will help you scout out vacation spots where you can enjoy the height of summer. In our last update, we highlighted an ancient Egyptian temple; and this time, we've got updates of another Sphinx, an exhilarating hydroplane race, and of course, a beautiful summer resort where rest and relaxation await.


Las Vegas


Hydroplane racing


Baja California resort

High Resolution Aerial Updates:
USA: Seattle, Sacramento, San Jose, Las Vegas, Des Moines, Waukegan (IL), Boston, Portland (ME), Tallahassee, and the Florida counties of Sarasota, Levy, Hernando, DeSoto and Martin
Canada: Banff, Alert Bay
Netherlands: Soest, Maarssen, Bussum, Vlaardingen

Countries receiving High Resolution Satellite Updates:
Mexico, Cuba, Jamaica, Haiti, Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Morocco, Algeria, Egypt, Mali, Guinea-Bissau, Guinea, Sierra Leone, Ghana, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Uganda, Burundi, Kenya, Somalia, Malawi, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, South Africa, Madagascar, Turkmenistan, Kazahkstan, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, China, Mongolia, Russia, Myanmar, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia

Countries receiving Medium Resolution Satellite Updates:
Canada, Nepal

Right now these updates are only available in Google Earth, but will be in Google Maps soon. For a complete picture of where we updated imagery, download this KML for viewing in Google Earth.

Posted by Matt Manolides, Senior Geo Data Strategist
URL: http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2010/07/find-place-for-fun-in-sun-with-our.html

[G] Google Publications

Posted: 30 Jul 2010 06:29 PM PDT

Official Google Research Blog: Google Publications

Posted by Corinna Cortes and Alfred Spector, Google Research

We often get asked if Google scientists and engineers publish technical papers, and the answer is, "Most certainly, yes." Indeed, we have a formidable research capability, and we encourage publications as well as other forms of technical dissemination--including our contributions to open source and standards and the introduction of new APIs and tools, which have proven to sometimes be foundational.

Needless to say, with our great commitment to technical excellence in computer science and related disciplines, we find it natural and rewarding to contribute to the scientific community and to ongoing technical debates. And we know that it is important for Google to help create the fundamental building blocks upon which continuing advances can occur.

To be specific, Googlers publish hundreds of technical papers that appear in journals, books, and conference and workshop proceedings every year. These deal with specific applications and engineering questions, algorithmic and data structure problems, and important theoretical problems in computer science, mathematics, and other areas, that can guide our algorithmic choices. While the publications are interesting in their own right, they also offer a glance at some of the key problems we face when dealing with very large data sets and demonstrate other questions that arise in our engineering design at Google.

We'd like to highlight a few of the more noteworthy papers from the first trimester of this year. The papers reflect the breadth and depth of the problems on which we work. We find that virtually all aspects of computer science, from systems and programming languages, to algorithms and theory, to security, data mining, and machine learning are relevant to our research landscape. A more complete list of our publications can be found here.

In the coming weeks we will be offering a more in-depth look at these publications, but here are some summaries:

Speech Recognition

"Google Search by Voice: A Case Study," by Johan Schalkwyk, Doug Beeferman, Francoise Beaufays, Bill Byrne, Ciprian Chelba, Mike Cohen, Maryam Garrett, Brian Strope, to appear in Advances in Speech Recognition: Mobile Environments, Call Centers, and Clinics, Amy Neustein (Ed.), Springer-Verlag 2010.

Google Search by Voice is a result of many years of investment in speech at Google. In our book chapter, "Google Search by Voice: A Case Study," we describe the basic technology, the supporting technologies, and the user interface design behind Google Search by Voice. We describe how we built it and what lessons we have learned. Google search by voice is growing rapidly and being built in many languages. Along the way we constantly encounter new research problems providing the perfect atmosphere for doing research on real world problems.

Computer Architecture & Networks & Distributed Systems

"Energy-proportional Datacenter Networks," by Dennis Abts, Mike Marty, Philip Wells, Peter Klausler, Hong Liu, International Symposium on Computer Architecture, ISCA, June 2010.

Google researchers have called on industry and academia to develop energy-proportional computing systems, where the energy consumed is directly proportional to the utilization of the system. In this work, we focus on the energy usage of high-bandwidth, highly scalable cluster networks. Through a combination of an energy-efficient topology and dynamic fine-grained control of link speeds, our proposed techniques show the potential to significantly reduce both electricity and environmental costs.

Economics & Market Algorithms

"Quasi-Proportional Mechanisms: Prior-free Revenue Maximization," by Vahab S. Mirrokni, S. Muthukrishnan, Uri Nadav, Latin American Theoretical Informatics Symposium, LATIN, April 2010.

Say a seller wishes to sell an item, but the buyers value it vastly differently. What is a suitable auction to sell the item, in terms of efficiency as well as revenue? First and second price auctions will be efficient but will only extract the lower value in equilibrium; if one knows the distributions from which values are drawn, then setting a reserve price will get optimal revenue but will not be efficient. This paper views this problem as prior-free auction and proposes a quasi-proportional allocation in which the probability that an item is allocated to a bidder depends (quasi-proportionally) on their bids. The paper also proves existence of an equilibrium for quasi-proportional auctions and shows how to compute them efficiently. Finally, the paper shows that these auctions have high efficiency and revenue.

"Auctions with Intermediaries," Jon Feldman, Vahab Mirrokni, S. Muthukrishnan, Mallesh Pai, ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce, EC, June 2010.

We study an auction where the bidders are middlemen, looking in turn to auction off the item if they win it. This setting arises naturally in online advertisement exchange systems, where the participants in the exchange are ad networks looking to sell ad impressions to their own advertisers. We present optimal strategies for both the bidders and the auctioneer in this setting. In particular, we show that the optimal strategy for bidders is to choose a randomized reserve price, and the optimal reserve price of the centeral auctioneer may depend on the number of bidders (unlike the case when there are no middlemen).

Computer Vision

"Discontinuous Seam-Carving for Video Retargeting," Matthias Grundmann, Vivek Kwatra, Mei Han, Irfan Essa, Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, CVPR, June 2010.

Playing a video on devices with different form factors requires resizing (or retargeting) the video to fit the resolution of the given device. We have developed a content-aware technique for video retargeting based on discontinuous seam-carving, which unlike standard methods like uniform scaling and cropping, strives to retain salient content (such as actors, faces and structured objects) while discarding relatively unimportant pixels (such as the sky or a blurry background). The key innovations of our research include: (a) a solution that maintains temporal continuity of the video in addition to preserving its spatial structure, (b) space-time smoothing for automatic as well as interactive (user-guided) salient content selection, and (c) sequential frame-by-frame processing conducive for arbitrary length and streaming video.

Machine Learning

"Random classification noise defeats all convex potential boosters," Philip M. Long, Rocco A. Servedio, Machine Learning, vol. 78 (2010), pp. 287-304.

A popular approach that has been used to tackle many machine learning problems recently is to formulate them as optimization problems in which the goal is to minimize some "convex loss function." This is an appealing formulation because these optimization problems can be solved in much the same way that a marble rolls to the bottom of a bowl. However, it turns out that there are drawbacks to this formulation. In "Random Classification Noise Defeats All Convex Potential Boosters," we show that any learning algorithm that works in this way can fail badly if there are noisy examples in the training data. This research motivates further study of other approaches to machine learning, for which there are algorithms that are provably more robust in the presence of noise.

IR

"Clustering Query Refinements by User Intent," Eldar Sadikov, Jayant Madhavan, Lu Wang, Alon Halevy, Proceedings of the International World Wide Web Conference, WWW, April 2010.

When users pose a search query, they usually have an underlying intent or information need, and the sequence of queries he or she poses in single search sessions is usually determined by the user's underlying intent. Our research demonstrates that there typically are only a small number of prominent underlying intents for a given user query. Further, these intents can be identified very accurately by an analysis of anonymized search query logs. Our results show that underlying intents almost always correspond to well-understood high-level concepts.

HCI

"How does search behavior change as search becomes more difficult?", Anne Aula, Rehan Khan, Zhiwei Guan, Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI , April 2010.

Seeing that someone is getting frustrated with a difficult search task is easy for another person--just look for the frowns, and listen for the sighs. But could a computer tell that you're getting frustrated from just the limited behavior a search engine can observe? Our study suggests that it can: when getting frustrated, our data shows that users start to formulate question queries, they start to use advanced operators, and they spend a larger proportion of the time on the search results page. Used together, these signals can be used to build a model that can potentially detect user frustration.
URL: http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2010/07/google-publications.html

[G] Google Apps highlights – 7/30/2010

Posted: 30 Jul 2010 06:28 PM PDT

Official Google Blog: Google Apps highlights – 7/30/2010

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 introduced several new capabilities in Google Docs for documents and drawings, and added the ability for organizations to tailor Google Apps to meet the needs of different groups within their organizations. We also launched a new version of Google Apps to meet the security and policy needs of government agencies in the U.S.

Document translation and undo smartquotes in Google Docs
On Tuesday we introduced automatic document translation to the new document editor in Google Docs. This allows you to instantly convert your document into any one of the 53 languages, powered by the technology behind Google Translate. And while we were at it, we added the ability for you to change smartquotes—angled quotation marks—back to straight quotation marks by pressing Ctrl-Z (Cmd-Z on a Mac).


Zoom and more in drawings
Last Monday, we also made improvements to the drawing editor in Google Docs, too. You can zoom in several different ways now: with the toolbar zoom icon, by drawing a rectangle around the area to zoom, zoom options in the "View" menu and with zoom keyboard shortcuts. We also introduced several changes to the shape-drawing tools, including pie and arc drawing improvements, the ability to duplicate shapes while resizing and rotating, new line ending decoration controls and new style options for the corners of shapes.




User policy management
One of the top requests from businesses, organizations and schools using Google Apps has been the ability to enable different applications for different groups within the organization. For example, a K-12 school may choose not to give Chat to students, but still allow faculty and staff to instant message with each other. Last Tuesday we launched user policy management, which lets administrators divide their users in to organizational units, and give each group access to different sets of services.


Google Apps for Government now available
On Monday we announced Google Apps for Government, a new version of Google Apps specifically tailored to the policy and security needs of federal, state and local governments in the United States. In addition to the applications and administrative controls available in the business edition of Google Apps, the service for government agencies has received Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) certification and accreditation from the U.S. General Services Administration, the first such certification for any cloud computing messaging and collaboration suite.

Who's gone Google?
To go along with the launch of Google Apps for Government, we're excited to share stories from two government organizations who are now using Google Apps. The U.S. Navy InRelief program is using Google Apps to improve coordination in disaster relief efforts, and the Berkeley Lab, a member of the National Laboratory system supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, is using Google Docs and Sites to support better collaboration among scientists and researchers.



We're also thrilled to welcome another new crop of schools to Google Apps. Haverford College, Wayne County Community College District and Westwood College are all going Google!

I hope you're making the most of these new features, whether you're using Google Apps with friends, family, coworkers or classmates. For more details and updates from the Apps team, head on over to the Google Apps Blog.

Posted by Jeremy Milo, Google Apps Marketing Manager
URL: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/07/google-apps-highlights-7302010.html

[G] Swivel through your photos

Posted: 30 Jul 2010 02:39 PM PDT

Google Photos Blog: Swivel through your photos


Posted by Jason Holt, Software Engineer for Street View

Ever marveled at the way many retail sites create 360 views of products? Now you can bring your own photo albums to life by clicking and dragging left and right on a photo in full screen mode. This works especially well if you put an object on a turntable, but even if you're not looking to create a 3-D effect, it also provides a unique browsing experience for albums in general, like our featured shots from the 2010 Winter games.



This feature is available in our embedded album viewer, or if you prefer to host a viewer and images on your own site, check out the Swivel Viewer site at code.google.com, where you'll find an Open Source embeddable album viewer that also supports zooming and panning.
URL: http://googlephotos.blogspot.com/2010/07/swivel-through-your-photos.html

[G] Introducing a new ad format for mobile devices: location extensions with map features

Posted: 30 Jul 2010 12:30 PM PDT

Inside AdWords: Introducing a new ad format for mobile devices: location extensions with map features

Earlier this year we launched click-to-call location extensions for search ads appearing on mobile devices with full Internet browsers. Today we're excited to announce more ways location extensions can be used to connect with local users on the go, whether they're using their phones to browse the mobile web or engage with their favorite mobile apps.

Many mobile consumers use maps to locate a business and get directions on their phones. With AdWords location extensions, you can now feature your business location and phone number on an expandable map ad that can appear on mobile websites and apps across the Google Display Network. The ad appears as a banner text ad with a business icon that expands to show your business location on a Google map along with your ad creative, click-to-call phone number and option to get directions. Since ads can be served based on the user's location, a potential customer will see the phone number and map of the store location that's nearest to them. By providing mobile consumers more options to connect with your business, you can drive more traffic to your store, visits to your website and calls to your business.

This new ad format is available on mobile devices with full Internet browsers and allows you to expand your advertising campaigns to reach highly engaged mobile users with relevant local information as they use their favorite apps or websites. Advertising with location extensions on mobile devices is also a great value because you're only charged when a user clicks to call your business or clicks to visit your website. You're not charged when users click to expand the map or get directions. The cost of a click to call your business is the same as the cost of a click to visit your website.

To get started using location extensions with the expandable map feature for mobile apps and websites, follow these three easy steps within your AdWords account:

1. Ensure your campaigns are opted into the Google Display Network.

2. Set up location extensions and add your business phone number and address. Be sure to also upload your business logo or icon, or choose from the set of icons available. Your ad will display a default icon if none is chosen.


3. Check that you've chosen to show your ads on iPhones and other mobile devices with full Internet browsers.


That's it! You don't need any special programming skills to create the map, we'll automatically generate it for you based on your business location.

We hope that you'll take advantage of this new ad format and the power of location extensions to create mobile-specific, locally relevant ads to reach mobile users on the go!

Posted by Dai Pham, Google Mobile Ads Marketing Team
URL: http://adwords.blogspot.com/2010/07/introducing-new-ad-format-for-mobile.html

[G] Known Issue: Email delivery disruption for parts of 29-Jul thru 30-Jul

Posted: 30 Jul 2010 12:30 PM PDT

The FeedBurner Status Blog: Known Issue: Email delivery disruption for parts of 29-Jul thru 30-Jul

Issue: FeedBurner's regularly scheduled email delivery process was interrupted for a period beginning 15:00PST, 29-Jul and lasting until 06:00PST, 30-Jul, encompassing roughly 15 hours of inactivity. The issue has been resolved and all emails should be delivered by 11:00PST, 30-Jul.
URL: http://feedburnerstatus.blogspot.com/2010/07/known-issue-email-delivery-disruption.html
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