Googland |
- [G] Discontinuous Seam Carving for Video Retargeting
- [G] New imagery of the San Bruno fire
- [G] A welcome and a look back
- [G] Join the conversation: Visit the AdSense forum
- [G] Hood to Coast 2010
- [G] Maximizing openness of broadband data
- [G] You Can Be Lost in Data Without A Map
- [G] Share private Picasa Web Albums privately in Buzz
- [G] Urchin 7 64-bit Released!
- [G] AdWords Campaign Experiments rolling out globally
| [G] Discontinuous Seam Carving for Video Retargeting Posted: 13 Sep 2010 05:05 PM PDT Official Google Research Blog: Discontinuous Seam Carving for Video RetargetingPosted by Matthias Grundmann and Vivek Kwatra, Google ResearchVideos come in different sizes, resolutions and aspect ratios, but the device used for playback, may it be your TV, mobile phone, or laptop, only has a fixed resolution and form factor. As a result, you cannot watch your favorite old show that came in 4:3 on your new 16:9 HDTV without having black bars on the side, referred to as letterboxing. Likewise, widescreen movies and user-videos uploaded on YouTube are shot using various cameras with wide-ranging formats, so they do not fit completely on the screen. As an alternative to letterboxing, several devices try to upscale the content uniformly, which either changes the aspect ratio, making everything look stretched out, or simply crop the frame, thereby discarding any content that cannot fit the screen after scaling. At Google Research, together with collaborators from Georgia Tech, we have developed an algorithm that resizes (or retargets) videos to fit the form factor of a given device without cropping, stretching or letterboxing. Our approach uses all of the screen's precious pixels, while striving to deliver as much video-content of the original as possible. The result is a video that adapts to your needs, so you don't have to adapt to the video.  Six frames from the result of our retargeting algorithm applied to a sub-clip of "Apologize", © 2006 One Republic. Original frame is shown on the left, our resized result on the right. The original content is fit to a new aspect ratio. The key insight is that we can separate the video into salient and non-salient content, which are then treated differently. Think of salient content as actors, faces, or structured objects, where the viewer anticipates specific, important details to perceive it as being correct and unaltered. We cannot change this content beyond uniform scaling without it being noticeable. On the other hand, non-salient content, such as sky, water or a blurry out-of-focus background can be squished or stretched without changing the overall appearance or the viewer noticing a dramatic change. Our technique, which we call discontinuous seam carving -- named so because it modifies the video by adding or removing disconnected seams (or chains) of pixels -- allows greater freedom in the resizing process than previous approaches. By optimizing for the retargeted video to be consistent with the original, we carefully preserve the shape and motion of the salient content while being less restrictive with non-salient content. 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. The outcome is a scalable system capable of retargeting videos featuring complex motions of actors and cameras, highly dynamic content and camera shake. For more details, please refer to our paper or visit the project web-site.  URL: http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2010/09/discontinuous-seam-carving-for-video.html       |
| [G] New imagery of the San Bruno fire Posted: 13 Sep 2010 05:05 PM PDT Google LatLong: New imagery of the San Bruno fireOne of the most common requests we get from users--literally thousands of times each month--is that we update or improve the imagery of a certain location in Google Earth and Maps. In order to provide the freshest, highest quality data possible, we partner with different organizations such as GeoEye, Spot Image, Infoterra, DigitalGlobe, the USDA, as well as national, city and county governments. At times we also collect our own imagery using planes equipped with aerial mapping cameras.We collect imagery to improve overall quality--especially when we want to refresh data very quickly, for example after disasters, to complement data provided by our partners. To date we've collected imagery in the U.S. and in Haiti following the earthquake. This past Saturday we collected imagery over the parts of San Bruno devastated by last week's terrible gas explosion. Google's data and tools are used by many government and non-governmental organizations to assist in post-disaster recovery, as well of course by our millions of users. This San Bruno imagery is now live in Google Earth through a KML overlay link and will be part of the base layer soon. We are committed to providing the most accurate and up-to-date data in our maps at all times and especially in post-disaster situations.  Posted by Matt Manolides, Senior Geo Data Strategist  URL: http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2010/09/new-imagery-of-san-bruno-fire.html   |
| Posted: 13 Sep 2010 05:00 PM PDT Official Google Reader Blog: A welcome and a look backThe Reader team was saddened to hear that Bloglines will be shutting its doors on October 1. Bloglines was a pioneer in the feed reading space, and for Web 2.0 in general. We know that nothing will be quite like Bloglines in the hearts of its users, but if you're looking for another online feed reader, we encourage you to give Reader a shot. All you need is a Google account (you already have one if you use Gmail) -- and here's a video to help you get started. It's also very easy to bring your Bloglines subscriptions over, you just have to export them from Bloglines and import them into Reader. Since Reader's fifth anniversary is also approaching (though it feels like yesterday, Reader was launched on October 7, 2005), we thought it might be a good time to reflect on how Reader has grown over the past few years. While we were busy redesigning (twice!), making friends with Buzz and iGoogle, translating, breaking up, gossiping and playing, more and more people picked up the Reader habit. Here's a graph of Reader users over time (where "user" is defined as someone who has used Reader at least once a week):
And as we found out this past April, Reader users sure do like to read lots of items. Here's another graph, this time of the number of items read per day.
To all our users, new and old, thanks for making a great 5 years!  URL: http://googlereader.blogspot.com/2010/09/welcome-and-look-back.html   |
| [G] Join the conversation: Visit the AdSense forum Posted: 13 Sep 2010 04:56 PM PDT Inside AdSense: Join the conversation: Visit the AdSense forumIf you've ever had a question about your AdSense account, you've likely visited our Help forum, a virtual meeting place where a community of publishers, advertisers, AdSense experts, and Google employees convene to discuss all things AdSense.If you browse through the discussions, you'll notice replies from Google employees and non-Google contributors who are passionate AdSense publishers and experts. We rely on all of you to keep the conversations lively, providing each other with information that ensures the forum is a fantastic place for you to interact, troubleshoot, and learn from one another. You'll also notice some posts from our Top Contributors. Top Contributors are the rock star volunteers of the forum who regularly help their fellow forum members by answering questions and providing product expertise. We trust our Top Contributors to give you top quality advice; in fact, the Top Contributors teach us new things almost every day! From optimizations to tuna fishing, they know a lot, and we're working on ways to introduce some of them to you in the coming weeks. In the meantime, we encourage you take a look through the current forum discussions and join the conversation! Posted by Katrina Kurnit - Inside AdSense Team  URL: http://adsense.blogspot.com/2010/09/join-conversation-visit-adsense-forum.html   |
| Posted: 13 Sep 2010 04:55 PM PDT Official Google Blog: Hood to Coast 2010At Google we like things fast and fun. That's why we launch enhancements to search like Google Instant and Caffeine, and why 11 speedy Googlers set out from the top of Mount Hood, 6,000 feet above sea level, to run Hood to Coast, nicknamed the "Mother of All Relays."As our first runner zipped down the mountain with the sun setting over the hills and our cheers spurring him on, it was hard to believe we had 197 miles to cover—not to mention dozens of pop tarts and energy drinks to consume—before reaching the sandy finish line the next afternoon in Seaside, Oregon. Most members of team Google One, comprised of members of AdSense, AdWords, business analytics, business operations, consumer operations, engineering and legal groups, had run Hood to Coast or similar distance relays before, such as The Relay and Ragnar Relay New York. Most of us knew the drill. Each runner runs three separate legs, one leg typically at some ungodly hour of the morning with a headlamp. When not running, you either wildly cheer on your teammates or try to catch an hour of sleep in one of the two vans—if you're lucky. As usual, we used a number of Google products during our journey. We posted "essential" status updates (e.g., "Stopped in Portland for pizza around 1 AM") on a Blogger blog, so co-workers and friends could keep track of our progress. Followers were also able to check the Google Latitude gadget, embedded on our blog, to keep tabs on our current location and to ensure we didn't pull a Rosie Ruiz. We even inputted each of our typical 10K road race times into a Google spreadsheet and used a formula which factored in leg difficulty and distance to help us determine our projected exchange points. There was one unexpected hurdle—due to unforeseen circumstances, we were short a runner and a few Googlers had to run four legs over the course of the night instead of three, covering nearly a marathon total each. In the end, this didn't seem to hurt us. In fact, when our last runner crossed the finish line, we had averaged a little over six minute miles, capturing first place corporate team for the first time and seventh overall (PDF). We beat our projected arrival time by 15 minutes, allowing us to join the bustling beach party a little earlier than expected. More importantly, Hood to Coast exceeded its projected fundraising goal, raising over $500,000 for the American Cancer Society.  Posted by Matt Kane, Associate, Consumer Operations  URL: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/09/hood-to-coast-2010.html   |
| [G] Maximizing openness of broadband data Posted: 13 Sep 2010 04:51 PM PDT Google Public Policy Blog: Maximizing openness of broadband dataPosted by Derek Slater, Senior Policy AnalystEarlier this year the FCC launched a wide-ranging Data Innovation Initiative to improve the ways it collects, analyzes, and disseminates information about the state of broadband in the United States. They've already made great strides, launching a Consumer Broadband Test and a Spectrum Dashboard. In comments filed today, we offered some ideas on how the FCC can take these efforts to the next level. Data innovation depends on open data. The more open and transparent the FCC makes its broadband measurement data, the easier it will be for third-parties to build on them – to analyze the information, layer it on top of maps, or create other user-friendly reports. Some of the most useful insights may come from network researchers engaging in deep analysis of raw data, as well as examining and comparing different data sets. Open data also will drive better measurement over time. There's a common saying among open source advocates: Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow. Providing open access to the raw data will help network researchers and others identify shortcomings and improve methodologies. The Commission has made some good progress on this front. For example, last week the FCC released software to help others build on the results of its Consumer Broadband Test. This test uses the Network Diagnostic Tool that runs on Measurement Lab (M-Lab), an open platform for broadband measurement. All M-Lab test results – currently, over 100 terabytes of information – are made publicly available so that anyone can build on and learn from the data without restriction (data is currently available through Amazon Web Services, Google Big Query and Google Storage for Developers). The FCC is now building on this effort through the TestMyISP project, a collaboration with SamKnows, to comprehensively measure U.S. broadband quality. The project intends to make use of M-Lab, and make the resulting data openly available. As the FCC embarks on this and other measurement projects, maximizing openness and transparency will be absolutely essential.  URL: http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2010/09/maximizing-openness-of-broadband-data.html   |
| [G] You Can Be Lost in Data Without A Map Posted: 13 Sep 2010 04:46 PM PDT Official Google Enterprise Blog: You Can Be Lost in Data Without A MapEditor's note: From time to time, Google likes to highlight partners and customers who have developed interesting and unique applications using our products. Peter Rossiter is a founder and CEO of Integeo, a company whose product leverages Google Maps API Premier. With over thirty years experience in the IT industry, Peter has led many innovative commercial ventures and research projects.Location-based services have quickly become pervasive in our everyday lives and maps are now widely used as a convenient and useful visual tool to present data in ways that people can easily relate to. Business Intelligence (BI) covers a collection of techniques and tools that support an organization's decision making process. The advent of Google Maps familiarized people with the concept of data points on a map and progressively more and more BI customers are expecting fully integrated maps and spatial analytics with their tools of choice. Seeing data in the context of its location often exposes information previously hidden in the raw data. But a tool is only useful if it's usable. You need to focus on solving your business problems not technology. Avoiding the need for specialist programming resources is a good start followed by ensuring the BI skills of a dashboard or report designer are sufficient even if the underlying spatial analysis is quite complex. Google Maps API Premier is a solid platform for presenting a rich background context of street and satellite data for analysis of business data. The Google API also enables us to dynamically geocode address data and users can zoom to particular areas of interest using our enhanced Google Search facility.  There is a lot more to visualizing data on maps than just plotting points and icons. Integeo's Map Intelligence comes out of the box with an extensible, easy to use palette of spatial analytical functions. These enable clear and immediate perception of data relationships, groupings, classifications, patterns, trends and variations that stand out when mapped. A summary of the features of Map Intelligence can be found on our website. At the click of a button, the analytics currently being viewed by a user can be interactively viewed on Google Earth. The dynamic map layers are generated by Map Intelligence from the "facts and dimensions" in the dashboard or spreadsheet, offering the choice to either use KML (KMZ including images, legend, etc.) or a network link that will update from the Map Intelligence server whenever the user changes their Google Earth view. All the information and data relationship layers are dynamically available so that as filters are applied in the BI environment they are automatically applied to the view in Google Earth. Please visit www.integeo.com if you would like to learn more about Integeo and see why Map Intelligence is the only BI product to rank top 10 among purpose built GIS solutions (Ovum Research 2009). We offer integrated mapping analytics incorporating Google Maps API Premier as an "off the shelf" solution for users of all the major BI platforms - currently these include (but are not restricted to) BI products from Cognos (IBM), Business Objects (SAP), Oracle, MicroStrategy, QlikView, Actuate, BIRT, Microsoft Excel and SQL Reporting Services. Posted By Natasha Wyatt, Google Earth and Maps Team  URL: http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2010/09/you-can-be-lost-in-data-without-map.html   |
| [G] Share private Picasa Web Albums privately in Buzz Posted: 13 Sep 2010 02:13 PM PDT Google Photos Blog: Share private Picasa Web Albums privately in BuzzPosted by Jonathan Sposato, Product Management — Photos TeamIt used to be all or nothing when it came to sharing a new Picasa Web Album in Buzz. If you created a public album in Picasa Web Albums, it created a public Google Buzz post. That was great for when you wanted to share your photos broadly. But for those times when you wanted to share with a smaller circle — no Buzz. Now when you create a private album, the select people you choose to share your photo album with will see a notification in Google Buzz as well.  Just make sure you have Buzz as one of your connected sites to take advantage of this easy way to share your albums.   URL: http://googlephotos.blogspot.com/2010/09/posted-by-jonathan-sposato-product.html   |
| Posted: 13 Sep 2010 01:28 PM PDT Google Analytics Blog: Urchin 7 64-bit Released!Do you need self-hosted analytics software? In some cases, particularly with intranets and other behind-the-firewall web services, running your own internal analytics application is the only way to access to usage data. In other cases, company or agency policy may prohibit the use of hosted analytics. And like Google Analytics, it keeps getting better. Case in point: now available, a new version: Urchin 7. Urchin 7 represents the pinnacle of web analytics software, with a feature set only Google Analytics can compete with. Check out these new features:
 Posted by Scott Crosby, Urchin Team  URL: http://analytics.blogspot.com/2010/09/urchin-7-64-bit-released.html   |
| [G] AdWords Campaign Experiments rolling out globally Posted: 13 Sep 2010 09:24 AM PDT Inside AdWords: AdWords Campaign Experiments rolling out globallyFollowing a successful launch in the U.S., AdWords Campaign Experiments (ACE) is starting to roll out globally. For those who missed the last blog post, ACE is a free tool that makes it easier to test and precisely measure the impact of changes to your keywords, bids, ad groups and placements. How ACE can help you ACE reduces the guesswork and potential risk involved with making changes to your campaign. Its scientific split-testing approach gives you valid measurements regardless of changes in demand, competitor movements, or other sales and marketing activity that can complicate traditional before-and-after measurement approaches. If you can relate to any of the following scenarios, you'll probably find ACE useful:
In each case, you can set up the experiment to measure the impact with just 10-50% of your traffic -- whatever you specify. ACE runs the experiment side-by-side with the existing setup. In AdWords, easy-to-read visual indicators show you wherever performance is significantly different between the two. Where to find ACE and learn more After signing into AdWords, you can access ACE on the Campaign tab under Settings. For those outside the U.S., this is a rolling launch so you should see it within a week or so. To learn more about using ACE, check out these videos and the Help Center FAQ. * ACE makes it simple to test two different landing pages for a keyword, an ad, or an ad group directly in AdWords. If you want to test more than two landing page designs at a time, test a landing page with multiple traffic sources (for example, all search traffic, display and email campaigns, etc.) or simultaneously test multiple elements on the landing page, we instead recommend Google Website Optimizer. Posted by Jason Shafton, Inside AdWords crew  URL: http://adwords.blogspot.com/2010/09/adwords-campaign-experiments-rolling.html   |
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