Thursday, September 16, 2010

Googland

Googland

[G] Broadcast your business through the TV for All Contest

Posted: 16 Sep 2010 02:03 AM PDT

Inside AdWords: Broadcast your business through the TV for All Contest

Today we're announcing the second annual TV for All contest, where your business has the opportunity to win $25,000 in national advertising with Google TV Ads and online video partner sites, including YouTube.


We originally launched this contest last year and received nearly 250 submissions. Three winners, including Owners.com, won free TV media through Google and successfully extended their brands across the nation.

"It's always exciting to see what other marketers think of your work," says George Karavaras of Owners.com about why the company entered TV for All in 2009. The best part, he says, is that "it doesn't take a lot of time or money to create a high impact TV ad through Google's creative network."

Now it's your turn! Entering is easy: simply create a video ad for your business, upload it to YouTube and submit it to our TV for All YouTube Channel between September 15th and October 12th. If you don't have a video ad or the tools to create one, professional tools by SpotMixer will be available for free to help you make a polished ad in just minutes.

Three winners whose ads best exemplify creativity and a compelling message will receive $25K, $15K, or $10K in national TV and online video advertising using Google AdWords.

If you've never promoted your business using TV and video, the TV for All contest is your chance to get started. For more details and to enter the contest, visit www.youtube.com/tvforall.

Posted by Nathania Lozada, Inside AdWords crew



URL: http://adwords.blogspot.com/2010/09/broadcast-your-business-through-tv-for.html

[G] Tip: Just the text, please!

Posted: 15 Sep 2010 11:50 PM PDT

Google Chrome Blog: Tip: Just the text, please!

Has this ever happened to you? You're writing an email online and you try to copy some text from a webpage. But when you paste it in, you get all the original fonts, colors, and spacing. "Wait!" you say, "I just wanted the text!"

This happened to us so many times while building Google Chrome that we added a special shortcut to do just that. Alongside the common Ctrl-V keyboard shortcut for "paste", Google Chrome supports a similar shortcut, Ctrl-Shift-V, for "paste as plain text". (And it's Command-Shift-Option-V on a Mac.)



You can use this shortcut in any rich text editor (like Gmail's compose window, or when writing in Google Docs) to strip out all the presentation from the original source and just paste in a block of text.


Posted by Peter Kasting, Software Engineer
URL: http://chrome.blogspot.com/2010/09/tip-just-text-please.html

[G] FreeBSD’s Summer Highlights

Posted: 15 Sep 2010 10:03 PM PDT

Google Open Source Blog: FreeBSD's Summer Highlights

FreeBSD is a modern open source operating system for servers, desktops, and embedded systems, based on over 30 years of continuous development. The FreeBSD Project has participated as a mentoring organization in Google Summer of Code each year since the program's inception in 2005. This year, FreeBSD mentored 18 students with a final success rate of 89%. The cumulative total over 6 years has been 117 students improving FreeBSD. This participation in the program has brought many new features into FreeBSD, several new long-term committers to the project, and many of the former students have by now joined some of the mentors as colleagues at their respective companies.

A complete list of FreeBSD Projects is available from the wiki, but I wanted to select a small number of the many successful projects to showcase here.
Efstratios Karatzas's project extended the FreeBSD NFS server to support security auditing (logging) of client activity -- before his work, as with most systems out there, FreeBSD logged only local file system activity. This work is valuable and timely: FreeBSD is used widely as a file server, as well as being the foundation OS for numerous storage products including NetApp, Isilon, Panasas, and the open source FreeNAS. We look forward to shipping this feature in FreeBSD 9.0, as the patches mature, as well as seeing Efstratios at EuroBSDCon in Karlsruhe this autumn!

Zheng Liu spent the summer working with veteran FreeBSD kernel hacker John Baldwin on enhancing FreeBSD's ext2fs to support preallocation and implementing read-only support for ext4 file systems. This was a particularly challenging project and Zheng Liu's efforts at benchmarking his new implementation and documenting his work were particularly appreciated. This work will likely be included in an upcoming FreeBSD release.

David Forsythe returned to the Google Summer of Code program this year to work on developing a robust library with a clean API to manage FreeBSD packages. The goal is to abstract out some of the capabilities used in the current package tools into a library so they can be easily reused by new tools. David has even started assembling some replacements for the existing package tools implemented on top of his new library, and did a great job coordinating with other students and developers working in this area over the summer.
As usual our mentors are looking forward to continuing to work with their students to leverage all the great work that was done this summer, and to working with new contributors on exciting projects in operating systems, networking, and security research throughout the year.

Thanks to FreeBSD Administrators Robert Watson, Brooks Davis, and Tim Kientzle for helping to put together this post, and to all the other FreeBSD Mentors for helping run another successful Google Summer of Code for the FreeBSD Project.

By Murray Stokely, Software Engineering Team
URL: http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2010/09/freebsds-summer-highlights.html

[G] Digital Meets Shopper Marketing

Posted: 15 Sep 2010 10:01 PM PDT

Official Google CPG Blog: Digital Meets Shopper Marketing

Posted by Jenny Liu, Industry Marketing Manager, CPG

For decades, a marketer's control over consumer communication was generally straightforward - they dictated the times, places and delivery channels to passive consumers via offline media vehicles. The internet changed that completely, turning the act of consuming into a self-initiated exercise or a two way communication, rather than a passive process. Today's consumer actively seeks out the information for herself, and increasingly is able to find everything that she needs quickly, easily and whenever and wherever she needs it. The result is an increasingly complex path to purchase.

Google and Catapult, a digital shopper agency teamed up with In-Store Marketing Institute to sponsor at 24-page white paper titled "Clicking Through the Path to Purchase: Best Practices in Digital Shopper Marketing" authored by Peter Breen of the In-Store Marketing Institute. The comprehensive report paints a vivid picture of the "Zero Moment of Truth" and examines the behaviors and impact of online couponing, search, social media, product reviews and mobile. The paper illustrates clear examples of the innovative techniques that brands in the CPG space are employing today to engage with this audience.

The reports with a list of things that marketers need to do to take full advantage of the new digital era. We highlight 5 below:

1. Focus on insights - Developing programs that will resonate with today's shoppers requires a deep understanding of their needs and behaviors.
2. Look beyond the brand - Resonating with shoppers and aligning with retail partners will often require looking at the category or store-wide level.
3. Develop relevant content - The most important thing you can do is think about building your own assets.
4. Target - Many marketers are viewing location-based communication as the Holy Grail. Technology may soon let retailers "market by the aisle."
5. Measure - Successful marketers will engage their research and analytics departments while designing programs (rather than after the fact) to assure a higher level of confidence in the accuracy of results.

Visit the full report for more details.
URL: http://google-cpg.blogspot.com/2010/09/digital-meets-shopper-marketing.html

[G] For your viewing pleasure: a new and improved way to explore online photos

Posted: 15 Sep 2010 09:34 PM PDT

Google LatLong: For your viewing pleasure: a new and improved way to explore online photos


When you're curious about a new place - be it a restaurant that you haven't yet tried or a popular tourist attraction you're considering visiting on an upcoming trip - you may find it useful to see what that place looks like in advance. For this reason, Place pages make it possible to visually explore various locations by aggregating and displaying photos from around the web.

Today, we're offering you a better, more streamlined way to view these photos. With this new feature, you can easily flip through a whole collection of photos and find the sites on the web that have relevant pictures of a given place. Photos that have been uploaded by our Panoramio or Google Places users will appear in high-resolution as an overlay when users click on them. For photos from other sources, you can easily click on a specific photo to see more and visit the site it comes from.



This simple and intuitive online album experience makes it easier to explore all the wonderful photographs of places all over the world. For example, the above photos on the Place page for Coit Tower in San Francisco really help bring the place to life since they're shot from multiple angles and different times of day, and provide context about this landmark's location in San Francisco.

If you're interested in uploading your photos of places and making them more discoverable online, check out Panoramio, a great way to share geo-tagged photos on the Web.

By Sascha Häberling, Software Engineer
URL: http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2010/09/for-your-viewing-pleasure-new-and.html

[G] Security First: Google at the ISSA International Conference

Posted: 15 Sep 2010 08:28 PM PDT

Official Google Enterprise Blog: Security First: Google at the ISSA International Conference

This week the Google Enterprise team is excited to be participating in the Information Systems Security Association's (ISSA) International Conference in Atlanta, GA from September 15-17. The ISSA is a not-for-profit, international professional organization of information security professionals and practitioners. It promotes management practices that will ensure the confidentiality, integrity and availability of information resources. This year more than 500 IT and security professionals will gather under this year's theme of "Connect and Collaborate".

Eran Feigenbaum, Director Security for Google Enterprise wil be delivering a keynote presentation entitled "A New Security Model in the Cloud" on Thursday, September 16th, at 12:40 PM.

If you'll be at the conference, please join us for Eran's session. If you're not going to be at the conference, you can find more information on the security and privacy of data in Google Apps.

Posted by Adam Swidler, Sr. Manager - Google Enterprise Team
URL: http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2010/09/security-first-google-at-issa.html

[G] An HTTP Fetcher Class for Mac OS X and iOS Apps

Posted: 15 Sep 2010 05:51 PM PDT

Official Google Mac Blog: An HTTP Fetcher Class for Mac OS X and iOS Apps

By Greg Robbins, Software Engineer

(Editor's note: Today's blog post is another cool one for programmers in the audience. Non-developer readers, thanks for bearing with us.)

Mac OS X and iOS provide developers with a high-level class, NSURLConnection, that makes interacting with servers pretty easy. NSURLConnection follows the system networking preferences, navigates through proxies, and handles other details just as users expect on their devices. But in applications that require a series of server requests and responses, NSURLConnection can be inconvenient to use. All connections made by an application's class call back into a single set of delegate methods, and when there are numerous connections to be made, sorting out the responses is a bit of a chore.

So ever since Google's first Mac application, Gmail Notifier, we've used a wrapper around NSURLConnection to make it easier to issue http requests. After years of being hidden away and evolving inside of other projects, the Google Toolbox for Mac HTTP Fetcher has now been promoted to its own Google Code open source project. Though simple to use for basic GETs and POSTs, it also offers a variety of convenient features for developers of networking applications.

Here is an example of using the fetcher to make a request of a server:

#import "GTMHTTPFetcher.h"
 
NSURL *url = [NSURL URLWithString:@"http://www.example.com/"];
NSURLRequest *request = [NSURLRequest requestWithURL:url];
GTMHTTPFetcher* myFetcher = [GTMHTTPFetcher fetcherWithRequest:request];
[myFetcher beginFetchWithDelegate:self
             didFinishSelector:@selector(myFetcher:finishedWithData:error:)];

and when the request is complete, the fetcher invokes a single callback in the application:

- (void)myFetcher:(GTMHTTPFetcher *)fetcher 
  finishedWithData:(NSData *)retrievedData 
  error:(NSError *)error {
  // if error is not nil, the fetch succeeded
}

One class can initiate many fetches, each with their own callback selectors, making it easy to pack a lot of networking into a single class. In iOS 4 and Mac OS X 10.6, Objective-C blocks simplify fetching even further, avoiding the need for callback methods:

[myFetcher beginFetchWithCompletionHandler:^(NSData *retrievedData, 
   NSError *error) {
    // check the error and use the retrieved data here
  }];

As with the underlying NSURLConnection class, the fetcher's requests are always asynchronous, so the user experience is never blocked waiting for a server response.

This basic http fetcher functionality requires adding just a single source file and header to an application. But the fetcher comes with support for many more advanced features, such as automatic retry on errors, cookie handling, ETag tracking and response caching, convenient request and response logging, and multi-part MIME upload.

To get started using the GTM HTTP Fetcher, read the introduction at the project site, and join the Google Toolbox for Mac discussion group. You can find even more of our open source resources for iOS and Mac developers at the Google Mac Developer Playground.
URL: http://googlemac.blogspot.com/2010/09/http-fetcher-class-for-mac-os-x-and-ios.html

[G] A Google Health update

Posted: 15 Sep 2010 04:56 PM PDT

Official Google Blog: A Google Health update

Google Health launched a bit over two years ago, and since then we've been listening to our users, analyzing feedback and conducting research. We've learned a lot from you! You've confirmed that having a central place online to store and share medical data with whomever you want is important and a step in the right direction. And we've added a number of features based on what you've asked for so far. But you've also told us that it's not enough; that you're also looking for tools that will help you act on all your health and wellness concerns. We've heard you ask for easier data tracking, more personalization and the ability to set and track progress toward your health goals. We've listened, and today we're announcing a new design and new features for Google Health.


So what's new? Well, we've developed an easier-to-use dashboard that brings together even more of your health and wellness information in one place and makes it easier for you to organize and act on that information. We've also heard from you that focusing on wellness, and wellness goals, is a big part of the solution, and that it's important to record your daily experience and set goals.


So our new re-design better organizes your medical information, while creating a more welcoming place to set goals for yourself and check in daily on your progress. For example, you might want to set a goal around walking more each day or to lower your cholesterol over time. With our new design, you can easily monitor your path to success with a visual graph that shows your progress towards your personalized goal. You can even create custom trackers for other things that you want to monitor like daily sleep, exercise, pregnancy or even how many cups of coffee you drink a day.

We've also integrated with several new partners to make it easier for you to collect the data you need to track your progress, including Fitbit, maker of a wearable device that captures health and wellness data such as steps taken, calories burned and sleep quality; and CardioTrainer, one of the top mobile apps for tracking fitness activity and weight loss. In the two weeks since CardioTrainer's integration went live, CardioTrainer developer WorkSmart Labs reports that users have already uploaded more than 150,000 workouts to Google Health, where they can more easily view, track and set goals around their workouts and monitor them along with other health and wellness information.

Besides tracking progress toward your health goals, our new design also gives you the ability to take notes or keep a journal on your progress for each health condition or medication you're taking. The new design also delivers information that is more personalized to your particular set of medical conditions or specific medications. You can access improved content links for each medical condition, medication or lab result you have in your Google Health profile. And we've made the Google Health profile easier to read and customize, with the ability to hide past items or sections that are outdated or no longer relevant. All of this helps you keep your dashboard up-to-date with current, relevant information, while still letting you maintain a complete health history.

In addition to redesigning the product and forming new partnerships with device and mobile apps developers, we've continued to expand our more traditional integrations with hospitals and other healthcare data providers. Three recent highlights include Lucile Packard Children's Hospital at Stanford, University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) and Sharp HealthCare.

With this update, we've made Google Health an even more powerful tool for organizing all your health information online, and also for achieving your health and wellness goals. We think you'll find that organized, measurable and engaging information helps make it easier to achieve better health and wellness.

Posted by Aaron Brown, Senior Product Manager
URL: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/09/google-health-update.html

[G] Gaining Altitude: Productivity in the Cloud

Posted: 15 Sep 2010 08:35 AM PDT

Official Google Enterprise Blog: Gaining Altitude: Productivity in the Cloud

As part of a new series, "Gaining Altitude," we've invited well-known productivity experts and thought leaders to provide their perspectives on managing information overload and tips for success in a world where real-time communication and overflowing inboxes have become the norm.

This week we've invited Douglas Merrill to give his perspectives on productivity in the cloud. Dr. Douglas C. Merrill is the author of "Getting Organized in the Google Era: How to Get Stuff Out of Your Head, Find It When You Need It, and Get It Done Right", a book on personal and workplace organization. Douglas is also the Founder & CEO of ZestCash - a financial services technology company committed to serving the underbanked - and was previously CIO and VP of Engineering at Google. Prior to Google, Douglas spent time at Charles Schwab, Price Waterhouse, and RAND Corporation. He has a Ph.D. in Psychology from Princeton.

We are drowning in new information. For example, during the time it's taken you to read this far, people around the world have sent enough email to fill about 10,000 hardcover books.

However, the main barrier to getting organized is nestled between your ears: your brain. It weighs about three pounds -- roughly the same size as a roasting chicken. Your brain is amazing. You can recognize a person's face when you can only see their nose. Pretty cool, yes?

But your brain has limitations. You can't consciously remember more than about 9 items. To remember more items, you need to stick them into long-term memory and tag them with cues that you will use later to find the information. When you need the information you've learned, you "ask" your long-term memory by looking for information with matching tags.

But it's hard to predict what you will need a bit of information in the future. If you can't predict its use, it's hard to tag the information as you store it.

This is why filing doesn't work well. You mark a manila folder with a couple of words when you store it. However, since you can't be sure what you will use the information for, you don't know which words are best.

This is why many of us have drawers full of manila folders, all totally unused. We didn't mark them with the right tags, and so they aren't stored where we actually need them to be. The same is true with email folders -- generally, people stick email in folders and never see them again.

Given how much information we face, and how much help our brains need to store it all, we need tools to help us. Enter Gmail. When you use Gmail, you leave your email in your Inbox and use search to find it. Instead of trying to guess what you'll need the email for later, so you can tag the email correctly, you just ask Google to find it for you.

Even though you search for your email, it still helps to tag them to improve your searches. Gmail will do some tagging automatically -- as in when it recognizes mails that seem important to you and puts them in your Priority Inbox.

Additionally, you could consider building your own filters to tag your mail. Unlike manila folders, with only a word or two as tags, Gmail can tag each mail with several labels, making it more likely you can find and use the email when you need it.

At the core, organization is being able to store and use information later. After all, the only reason you care about being organized is because it makes you more effective at what you are going to do tomorrow.

The combination of search and email labels let you do what your brain does well -- understanding -- and helps you do what your brain struggles with -- remembering.

Posted by Ashley Chandler, Google Apps team
URL: http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2010/09/gaining-altitude-productivity-in-cloud_15.html

[G] Focusing on Our Users: The Google Health Redesign

Posted: 15 Sep 2010 08:18 AM PDT

Official Google Research Blog: Focusing on Our Users: The Google Health Redesign

Posted by Hendrik Mueller, User Experience Researcher

When I relocated to New York City a few years ago, some of the most important health information for me to have on hand was my immunization history. At the time, though, my health records were scattered, and it felt like a daunting task to organize them -- a not-uncommon problem that many people face. For me, the solution came when Google Health became available in May of 2008, and I started using it to organize my health information and keep it more manageable. I also saw the potential to do much more within Google Health, such as tracking my overall fitness goals. When I joined the Google Health team as the lead user experience researcher, I was curious about the potential for Google Health to impact people's lives beyond things like immunization tracking and how we could make the product a lot easier to use. So I set out to explore how to expand and improve Google Health.

Here at Google, we focus on the user throughout the entire product development process. So before Google Health was first launched, we interviewed many people about how they managed their medical records and other health information to better understand their needs. We then iteratively created and tested multiple concepts and designs. After our initial launch, we followed up with actual Google Health users through surveys, interviews, and usability studies to understand how well we were needing their needs.



From this user research, we learned what was working in the product and what needed to be improved. Here are some of the things our users found especially useful:
  • Organizing and tracking health-related information in a single place that is accessible from anywhere at any time
  • Sharing medical records easily with loved ones and health care providers, either by allowing online access or by printing out health summaries
  • Referencing rich information about health topics, aggregated from trusted sources and Google search results

Our users also described to us the benefits they saw from using Google Health:
"Google Health gives me many tools to research my prescriptions and symptoms, and to track all of the many tests I keep having. Google Health made several necessary and cumbersome tasks easy and worry free."

"For years now, I've tried to remember my son's allergies and medications, but the list has grown so long, that I kept forgetting one or two when a doctor asked me about them. That can't happen again because I now have a single place to keep up with them. And I love the fact that I can print off information for situations when I really need it."

"I really like that I can share my profile with others. I want my mom to know my medical information, just in case anything ever happens to me."

While we learned that our users were clearly getting positive results from using Google Health, our research also taught us that more was needed. We learned that we needed to make fundamental changes to fully meet the needs of all of our current and prospective users, such as those that are chronically ill, those who care for family members, and especially those users looking to track and improve their wellness and fitness.

On this last point, our user surveys already pointed out that there was more we could do to help our users track and manage their wellness, not just their sickness, so we conducted further research about how people collect, monitor, track, and analyze their wellness data. We interviewed several people in their homes and invited others into our usability labs. As a result, we identified several areas where we could improve Google Health to make it a more useful wellness tool, including:
  • Dedicated wellness tracking including pre-built and custom trackers
  • Efficient manual data entry as well as automatic data collection through devices
  • A customizable summary dashboard of wellness and other health topics
  • Goal setting and progress tracking using interactive charts
  • Personalized pages for each topic with rich charts, journaling, and related information

These insights led us to a whole new set of design proposals. We gathered feedback on the resulting sketches, wire-frames, and screenshots from active and new Google Health users. The results throughout this process were eye-opening. While we were on the right track for some parts of the design, other parts had to be corrected or even redesigned. We went through several iterations until we had a design that tested well and we felt met the user needs our research had uncovered. Finally, we conducted several usability studies with a functioning prototype throughout the product development process to continuously improve usability and function.



At the end, the collaboration between the user experience, engineering, and product management teams resulted in an entirely new user experience for Google Health combined with a set of new functionality that is now available for you to try out at www.google.com/health. See for yourself how the old and new versions compare. Here is a screenshot of a health profile in the new version:



And this is how the same account and profile looked in the old user interface:



As a Google Health user, I am excited to take advantage of the new design and have already started using it for my own exercise and weight tracking. And on behalf of the user experience team and the entire Google Health team, we're excited about being able to bring you a new design and more powerful tool that we think will meet more of your health and wellness needs.

We look forward to continuing to explore how we can make Google Health even more useful and easier to use for people like you. As you use Google Health, you may see a link to a feedback survey at the top of the application. If you do, please take the time to fill it out - we will be listening to your input!
URL: http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2010/09/focusing-on-our-users-google-health.html
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