Friday, August 6, 2010

Googland

Googland

[G] Google Summer of Code Midterm Evaluations

Posted: 05 Aug 2010 09:32 PM PDT

Google Open Source Blog: Google Summer of Code Midterm Evaluations


Midterm evaluations for Google Summer of Code 2010™ have wrapped up and we have some great news about the program.

Out of the over 1,000 participating students from the beginning of the program, 964 have passed their midterm evaluation. That's just a over 90% pass rate - exactly on target for what we expect from the program.

Since Google Summer of Code started in 2005, we've had over 5,000 students complete the Google Summer of Code program. Take a look at the timeline on our website for more details about the program - our final evaluations are approaching!

By Carol Smith, Open Source Team
URL: http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2010/08/google-summer-of-code-midterm.html

[G] Bergelectric on evaluating Microsoft BPOS-S and choosing Google Apps

Posted: 05 Aug 2010 05:47 PM PDT

Official Google Enterprise Blog: Bergelectric on evaluating Microsoft BPOS-S and choosing Google Apps

Editor's Note: We invited Kyle Swafford, Director of IT Services for Bergelectric, to share the story of Bergelectric's evaluation of Google Apps and Microsoft BPOS-S and their subsequent migration from Novell Groupwise to Google Apps using Google Apps Authorized Reseller SADA Systems, Inc.

Since our founding in 1946, Bergelectric Corporation has provided electrical contracting on thousands of construction projects for clients such as Phoenix International Raceway, the FBI, the University of Southern California, and Ritz Carlton Hotels. Bergelectric has more than 1,300 field employees and over 400 office professionals coast to coast.

Our company had been a Novell Groupwise shop for many years, and IT staff had begun to feel increasing frustration with the platform due to its stagnancy. They were forced to dedicate substantial time and resources to maintaining servers across many sites nationwide. And we had to enforce email storage quotas of 100MB, though this amount of storage was often inadequate for users. Collaboration possibilities were practically nonexistent. In short, this aging environment wasn't keeping pace with Bergelectric and this created a significant challenge for the organization.

The choice to move to a hosted e-mail service was discussed passionately at every level of the company and marked a significant departure from the costly, and dated, infrastructure constraints of our on-premise system. After we made the decision to move to a hosted provider, we spent a considerable amount of time comparing offerings, including Microsoft BPOS-S and Google Apps. Initially we found Microsoft BPOS-S an attractive option, but as we delved deeper into the contract and piloted a production environment deployment we found the BPOS-S solution came up short - even with the significant concessions Microsoft made in order to be competitive with Google. For example, we were put off by the fact that we would have to go through a third party company for email archiving and retention. We soon came to the realization that we would have to invest significant additional time and money into BPOS in order to meet our initial expectations of migrating to the cloud.

We decided to revisit Google Apps. For email archiving and retention, Google Message Discovery was easier to use, significantly cheaper, better integrated into the entire email migration process, and offered more features than the third party options available with BPOS. Once more, through the course of our lengthy evaluation, Google continued to update Apps' functionality to incorporate virtually all of the features that we had valued in Microsoft's offering. After updates such as Google Calendar Sync, which syncs events between Google Calendar and Microsoft Outlook Calendar, and the ability to delegate calendar management to an administrative assistant, we had reached the tipping point where users adamant about using Outlook became confident in the capabilities of the Google Apps suite.

Following a rapid response by a combined team from Google and Google Apps Authorized Reseller, SADA Systems, Inc., Bergelectric quickly made plans to "Go Google." Key components of the deployment included user synchronization between Active Directory and Google Apps, single sign-on to Apps using Active Directory credentials, migration of all data from Groupwise to Google (including historical email, contacts and calendar items), Google Apps integration with BlackBerry Enterprise Server, implementation of the Google Message Discovery product for mail archiving and discovery, and a complete training and change management effort to ensure the smoothest possible transition and high user adoption rates.

Our migration off the Groupwise platform has allowed the IT staff to focus its resources on more strategic, business-driven initiatives in the online space. The IT team has regained precious time previously spent patching and keeping the e-mail servers running and are now able to focus on things like business continuity and compliance. Employees have a generous 25 GB of e-mail storage and the ability access e-mail and collaboration tools from our many offices and remote project sites, whether it's via a desktop, laptop or mobile device.

We were impressed by Google's commitment to making it easy and simple for long-term on-premise users to migrate to the cloud. And Google's data liberation policy gave us peace of mind that, if we ever wanted to move platforms, we'd be able to readily do so. Once more, their commitment to open standards and APIs allow us to access our own data and customize our implementation in ways that we never thought possible. As our business needs evolve, we can find additional apps in the Google Apps Marketplace or we can easily build our own on Google App Engine.

Overall, our employees have been extremely happy with the move to Google Apps. IT is relieved to finally have true redundancy, painless scalability and better control, all while no longer needing to maintain remote servers and tape backups. Management is pleased with the cost savings and vastly improved service offerings.

Posted by Kevin Gough, Sr. Product Marketing Manager, Google Enterprise
URL: http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2010/08/bergelectric-on-evaluating-microsoft.html

[G] Introducing the Google Small Business Blog

Posted: 05 Aug 2010 05:42 PM PDT

Google LatLong: Introducing the Google Small Business Blog


Most every business, including ours, starts small. These days, technology is giving businesses even more ways to grow bigger... faster.

In our recent Small Business series on the Official Google Blog, a handful of real-life entrepreneurs have shared their experiences building companies from scratch and embracing Internet tools that have taken their businesses to the next level. We've received fantastic feedback about these posts, and realized that there's a healthy appetite among small- and medium-sized business owners who want to know all about the latest web tools and tricks. Fortunately, we have lots more to share with you, too!

That's why we're introducing the Google Small Business Blog, a central hub that brings together all the information about our products, features and projects of specific interest to the small business community. Rather than having to sleuth around in many different locations for details about templates for creating video ads on YouTube, tips for your employees using Gmail or how to respond to the business reviews on your Place Page, you can find all of this helpful information right here in one place.

Of course, we'll continue to post relevant news about individual services such as AdWords, Apps, Google Places and YouTube on their respective "home" blogs, but feel free to visit or subscribe to the Google Small Business Blog to get everything relating to your small business needs. We're starting small today, but who knows what tomorrow will have in store!

Posted by Deanna Yick, Small Business Blog Team
URL: http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2010/08/introducing-google-small-business-blog.html

[G] The 2010 Google Faculty Summit

Posted: 05 Aug 2010 04:33 PM PDT

Official Google Blog: The 2010 Google Faculty Summit

Last week, we held our sixth North American Computer Science Faculty Summit at our Mountain View headquarters. About 100 faculty members from universities around the world attended the summit, which focused on security, cloud computing and the social web.

Included in the agenda were presentations by Eric Grosse on security at scale, Ulfar Erlingsson on cloud computing and software security, Betsy Masiello on engineering private spaces online, and Andrew Fikes on "planetary-scale" storage systems in the cloud. Andrew Tompkins also moderated a panel on the future of the social web. Alfred Spector, VP of Research and Special Initiatives, talked of "prodigiousness" in his discussion of the potential of cloud computing. He noted that the network underlying the Internet is predicted to carry a zetta-byte (1021) per year, which translates to 32 KB/sec for 1 billion people. You can see a more complete list of the topics and panels on the Faculty Summit site.

In his closing talk last Friday, Vint Cerf spoke about the "Future of the Internet." Among his topics were the challenges in migrating from IPv4 to IPv6, which has a much larger address space than IPv4. This results from the use of a 128-bit address, whereas IPv4 uses only 32 bits. We will soon exhaust the IPv4 address space, so migration is imminent, and complex.

Vint also discussed the great potential in implementing an "Internet of things," which refers to a network of everyday objects. Imagine that you're traveling, and receive a text message informing you that the temperature in your wine cellar has increased to a level that can damage the wine. You then start an app on your smartphone that interfaces with the cellar's temperature control system to bring the level down. That's just one possible application as we connect more and more of our personal and home electronics to the Internet.

Over on the Research Blog, we've posted deeper dives on a few of the talks—on cloud and security, cloud computing and the social web. Visit the research site for videos of the plenary talks and presentations. And if you have questions, please add them to our Moderator page and we'll be glad to answer.

Posted by Maggie Johnson, Director of Education & University Relations
URL: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/08/2010-google-faculty-summit.html

[G] Google Tags makes it easy as pie to find local customers

Posted: 05 Aug 2010 04:33 PM PDT

Official Google Blog: Google Tags makes it easy as pie to find local customers

This is the latest post in our series about Small Business and the real-life entrepreneurs who are using Google tools to fuel their success. Previous posts have illustrated the possibilities enabled by online resources like Google Places, Google Apps, Google AdWords and YouTube. Starting today, we invite small business owners to check out our new Google Small Business Blog for more inspiring stories like these and the latest news, updates and tips to help you grow your business. -Ed.

To characterize the life of a small business owner as "busy" would be a bit of an understatement. You get up early to set up shop, spend all day on your feet working with customers and burn the midnight oil balancing expenses—then do it all over again the next day. It's no wonder you sometimes feel you'd have to be superhuman (or be able to stop time) just to keep up!

With so many hats to wear, we know you don't have much time to play the role of marketer. But attracting potential customers is an essential part of growing your business. With that in mind, we designed Google Tags, our newest online advertising offering through Google Places that lets you personalize your Google.com and Google Maps listing with specific information such as a coupon, video, website, menu, reservations, photos or a custom message.

Susan Holt, the co-founder of a recreational cooking school in Washington, D.C., has been using Google Tags, and I've asked her to share her experience:
My friend Susan Watterson and I had been friends for about 20 years and were both instructors at the same culinary institute when we saw a unique market opportunity and decided to go for it. Our employer, who was primarily focused on professional training for students and one-off recreational cooking classes for the public, was constantly turning away business; their business model relied on a paper catalog of printed classes that were advertised months in advance, so they had little flexibility to accept new bookings. But after watching an estimated $40,000 worth of business walk out the door one week because they couldn't accommodate the size or timing of these types of corporate events, Susan and I decided we could flip that model and create a cooking school specifically tailored to recreational learning and private events.

With no previous business experience, we began the long and eye-opening process of starting our own company. Along the way, we learned more about raising capital, leasing property and complying with design and construction codes than we ever could have imagined. Our vision and passion kept us going, and in November 2008, CulinAerie opened its doors in a 3,800 square foot space in downtown D.C.

A strong website with the built-in functionality to register and pay for classes online was part of our strategy from the start, but we soon realized we needed a way to generate more awareness. Part of that effort included building out our Place Page on Google Places to gain more visibility and make sure people looking for us online had basic information like our phone number and location.


Then in May 2010, we heard about Google Tags, a super-easy way to do online advertising that wouldn't require any ongoing work. We already knew through our website analytics data that our free business listing on Google.com and Google Maps was bringing in lots of customers—about 60 percent, in fact. So the ability to include a little yellow tag to help our listing stand out against the competition was a no-brainer—and at $25 a month, it wouldn't break the bank. At first, we used the website tag to drive more traffic to our website, but then we decided to push the envelope and switched to a coupon tag that promoted a discount on our classes.


Since setting up Google Tags, the clickthroughs on our listing have increased a whopping 400 percent! Class bookings also jumped 9 percent because of the coupon tag, and our 24 contract instructors are busier than ever teaching classes on baking and entertaining for occasions like team-building events, birthday parties and summer bridal showers.

Now, while we're concentrating on the important things that ensure our clients have a good time at our school—like creating new concoctions for the cocktail mixing course—our Tags are working for us and helping us connect with new local customers online. I guess you could say it's been a recipe for success.

Posted by Chikai Ohazama, Director of Product Management, Google Tags
URL: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/08/google-tags-makes-it-easy-as-pie-to.html

[G] You can count the number of books in the world on 25,972,976 hands

Posted: 05 Aug 2010 04:33 PM PDT

Official Google Blog: You can count the number of books in the world on 25,972,976 hands

Ever wonder just how many different books there are in the world? After some intensive analysis, we've come up with a number. Standing on the shoulders of giants—libraries and cataloging organizations—and based on our computational resources and experience of organizing millions of books through our Books Library Project and Books Partner Program since 2004, we've determined that number.

As of today, we estimate that there are 129,864,880 different books in the world. That's a lot of knowledge captured in the written word! This calculation used an algorithm that combines books information from multiple sources including libraries, WorldCat, national union catalogs and commercial providers. And the actual number of books is always increasing.

Ultimately, it is truly incredible to fathom the depth and breadth of published works out there in the world. To find out how we calculated this number (no, we didn't count them on our fingers:), check out the Google Books blog.

Posted by Leonid Taycher, Software Engineer
URL: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/08/you-can-count-number-of-books-in-world.html

[G] Introducing the Google Small Business Blog

Posted: 05 Aug 2010 11:56 AM PDT

Official Google Enterprise Blog: Introducing the Google Small Business Blog

Most every business, including ours, starts small. These days, technology is giving businesses even more ways to grow bigger... faster.

In our recent Small Business series on the Official Google Blog, a handful of real-life entrepreneurs have shared their experiences building companies from scratch and embracing Internet tools that have taken their businesses to the next level. We've received fantastic feedback about these posts, and realized that there's a healthy appetite among small- and medium-sized business owners who want to know all about the latest web tools and tricks. Fortunately, we have lots more to share with you, too!

That's why we're introducing the Google Small Business Blog, a central hub that brings together all the information about our products, features and projects of specific interest to the small business community. Rather than having to sleuth around in many different locations for details about templates for creating video ads on YouTube, tips for your employees using Gmail or how to respond to the business reviews on your Place Page, you can find all of this helpful information right here in one place.

Of course, we'll continue to post relevant news about individual services such as AdWords, Apps, Google Places and YouTube on their respective "home" blogs, but feel free to visit or subscribe to the Google Small Business Blog to get everything relating to your small business needs. We're starting small today, but who knows what tomorrow will have in store!

Posted by Deanna Yick, Small Business Blog Team
URL: http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2010/08/introducing-google-small-business-blog.html

[G] Access two Gmail accounts at once in the same browser

Posted: 05 Aug 2010 11:51 AM PDT

Official Gmail Blog: Access two Gmail accounts at once in the same browser

Posted by Macduff Hughes, Engineering Director

I have a couple different Gmail addresses that I use for different purposes. Historically, Google Accounts – including Gmail accounts — have only let people access one account at a time per browser, so using both accounts has been a bit inconvenient. I've either had to sign out and sign back in, use a second browser for my second account, or use a Chrome incognito window. And I'm not alone; lots of people have asked us for a better way to use multiple accounts at once in the same browser.

Now, you can visit google.com/accounts and click the link next to "Multiple sign-in." After you sign into your first account, you can sign in with up to two additional accounts from the new accounts menu in the upper right hand corner of Gmail, then easily toggle back and forth between them. You can even open multiple Gmail tabs — one for each of your accounts.



Please keep in mind that this is a feature for advanced users, and there are a couple things to watch out for:

1) Not all Google services support multiple account sign-in yet. For the services that don't support it (like Blogger and Picasa Web Albums), you'll be defaulted to the first account you signed in with during that browser session. So if you click a link from Gmail to Blogger, for example, you'll be logged into Blogger with the first account you signed in with, even if you clicked the link to Blogger from your second Gmail account.

2) We're still working on making Gmail and Calendar work offline with multiple sign-in. If you rely on offline access, you probably don't want to enable this feature quite yet.

3) Multiple account sign-in only works on desktop browsers for now, so if you use Gmail on your phone's browser you won't see this option yet.

Since Google Apps customers can already sign in to their accounts at the same time as their personal Google Accounts, we won't be adding this new feature to Google Apps until the new infrastructure is in place.

If you use more than one Google Account, we hope this makes you more efficient. If you have any questions, check out our help center.
URL: http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2010/08/access-two-gmail-accounts-at-once-in.html

[G] Books of the world, stand up and be counted! All 129,864,880 of you.

Posted: 05 Aug 2010 10:17 AM PDT

Inside Google Books: Books of the world, stand up and be counted! All 129,864,880 of you.

Posted by Leonid Taycher, software engineer

When you are part of a company that is trying to digitize all the books in the world, the first question you often get is: "Just how many books are out there?"

Well, it all depends on what exactly you mean by a "book." We're not going to count what library scientists call "works," those elusive "distinct intellectual or artistic creations." It makes sense to consider all editions of "Hamlet" separately, as we would like to distinguish between -- and scan -- books containing, for example, different forewords and commentaries.

One definition of a book we find helpful inside Google when handling book metadata is a "tome," an idealized bound volume. A tome can have millions of copies (e.g. a particular edition of "Angels and Demons" by Dan Brown) or can exist in just one or two copies (such as an obscure master's thesis languishing in a university library). This is a convenient definition to work with, but it has drawbacks. For example, we count hardcover and paperback books produced from the same text twice, but treat several pamphlets bound together by a library as a single book.

Our definition is very close to what ISBNs (International Standard Book Numbers) are supposed to represent, so why can't we just count those? First, ISBNs (and their SBN precursors) have been around only since the mid 1960s, and were not widely adopted until the early-to-mid seventies. They also remain a mostly western phenomenon. So most books printed earlier, and those not intended for commercial distribution or printed in other regions of the world, have never been assigned an ISBN.

The other reason we can't rely on ISBNs alone is that ever since they became an accepted standard, they have been used in non-standard ways. They have sometimes been assigned to multiple books: we've seen anywhere from two to 1,500 books assigned the same ISBN. They are also often assigned to things other than books. Even though they are intended to represent "books and book-like products," unique ISBNs have been assigned to anything from CDs to bookmarks to t-shirts.

What about other well-known identifiers, for example those assigned by Library of Congress (Library of Congress Control Numbers) or OCLC (WorldCat accession numbers)? Rather than identifying books, these identify records that describe bibliographic entities. For example the bibliographic record for Lecture Notes in Mathematics (a monographic series with thousands of volumes) is assigned a single OCLC number. This makes sense when organizing library catalogs, but does not help us to count individual volumes. This practice also causes duplication: a particular book can be assigned one number when cataloged as part of a series or a set and another when cataloged alone. The duplication is further exacerbated by the difficulty of aggregating multiple library catalogs that use different cataloging rules. For example, a single Italian edition of "Angels and Demons" has been assigned no fewer than 5 OCLC numbers.

So what does Google do? We collect metadata from many providers (more than 150 and counting) that include libraries, WorldCat, national union catalogs and commercial providers. At the moment we have close to a billion unique raw records. We then further analyze these records to reduce the level of duplication within each provider, bringing us down to close to 600 million records.

Does this mean that there are 600 million unique books in the world? Hardly. There is still a lot of duplication within a single provider (e.g. libraries holding multiple distinct copies of a book) and among providers -- for example, we have 96 records from 46 providers for "Programming Perl, 3rd Edition". Twice every week we group all those records into "tome" clusters, taking into account nearly all attributes of each record.

When evaluating record similarity, not all attributes are created equal. For example, when two records contain the same ISBN this is a very strong (but not absolute) signal that they describe the same book, but if they contain different ISBNs, then they definitely describe different books. We trust OCLC and LCCN number similarity slightly less, both because of the inconsistencies noted above and because these numbers do not have checksums, so catalogers have a tendency to mistype them.

We put even less trust in the "free-form" attributes such as titles, author names and publisher names. For example, are "Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Volume 1234" and "Proceedings of the 4th international symposium on Logical Foundations of Computer Science" the same book? They are indeed, but there's no way for a computer to know that from titles alone. We have to deal with these differences between cataloging practices all the time.

We tend to rely on publisher names, as they are cataloged, even less. While publishers are very protective of their names, catalogers are much less so. Consider two records for "At the Mountains of Madness and Other Tales of Terror" by H.P. Lovecraft, published in 1971. One claims that the book it describes has been published by Ballantine Books, another that the publisher is Beagle Books. Is this one book or two? This is a mystery, since Beagle Books is not a known publisher. Only looking at the actual cover of the book will clear this up. The book is published by Ballantine as part of "A Beagle Horror Collection", which appears to have been mistakenly cataloged as a publisher name by a harried librarian. We also use publication years, volume numbers, and other information.

So after all is said and done, how many clusters does our algorithm come up with? The answer changes every time the computation is performed, as we accumulate more data and fine-tune the algorithm. The current number is around 210 million.

Is that a final number of books in the world? Not quite. We still have to exclude non-books such as microforms (8 million), audio recordings (4.5 million), videos (2 million), maps (another 2 million), t-shirts with ISBNs (about one thousand), turkey probes (1, added to a library catalog as an April Fools joke), and other items for which we receive catalog entries.

Counting only things that are printed and bound, we arrive at about 146 million. This is our best answer today. It will change as we get more data and become more adept at interpreting what we already have.

Our handling of serials is still imperfect. Serials cataloging practices vary widely across institutions. The volume descriptions are free-form and are often entered as an afterthought. For example, "volume 325, number 6", "no. 325 sec. 6", and "V325NO6" all describe the same bound volume. The same can be said for the vast holdings of the government documents in US libraries. At the moment we estimate that we know of 16 million bound serial and government document volumes. This number is likely to rise as our disambiguating algorithms become smarter.

After we exclude serials, we can finally count all the books in the world. There are 129,864,880 of them. At least until Sunday.
URL: http://booksearch.blogspot.com/2010/08/books-of-world-stand-up-and-be-counted.html

[G] Join Arcade Fire live from Madison Square Garden

Posted: 05 Aug 2010 08:21 AM PDT

YouTube Blog: Join Arcade Fire live from Madison Square Garden

Tonight, thousands of fans will pack into Madison Square Garden in New York City to hear Arcade Fire...but they won't be the only ones experiencing the band's orchestral indie rock roar: the concert will be live-streamed right here at 10 p.m. (ET). The global webcast will be directed by Monty Python alum and award-winning filmmaker Terry Gilliam, and is the first show in the new "Unstaged" concert series brought to you by YouTube, American Express and Vevo.


But don't simply watch -- participate! During tonight's concert, you can interact with the band and the performance itself by choosing your own camera angle. You can also be part of the show via the "Share Your Suburb" photo project. Since Arcade Fire's new album is called The Suburbs, they're encouraging fans to upload pictures of their own leafy neighborhoods, including snapshots of front porches, tree-lined streets and grocery store parking lots -- anything that reflects your hometown. The band will feature their favorite submissions onstage during their live performance, so go ahead and submit your images here.

Viewers will also hear from the group in a special pre-show Q&A interview conducted by Terry Gilliam, based on questions you asked here.

So tune in tonight at 10 p.m. ET to catch these chart-topping Canadians performing live from one of the most legendary venues in NYC. And don't fret if you miss anything: highlights from the concert will be available on the band's YouTube channel shortly after the event.

Michele Flannery, Music Manager, recently watched "Neon Bible/Wake Up! Take Away Show."


URL: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/youtube/PKJx/~3/uohV36Ql56c/join-arcade-fire-live-from-madison.html
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