Tuesday, October 12, 2010

Googland

Googland

[G] Making an Impact on a Thriving Speech Research Community

Posted: 12 Oct 2010 05:04 AM PDT

Official Google Research Blog: Making an Impact on a Thriving Speech Research Community

Posted by Vincent Vanhoucke, Google Research

While we continue to launch exciting new speech products--most recently Voice Actions and Google Search by Voice in Russian, Czech and Polish--we also strive to contribute to the academic research community by sharing both innovative techniques and experiences with large-scale systems.

This year's gathering of the world's experts in speech technology research, Interspeech 2010 in Makuhari, Japan, which Google co-sponsored, was a fantastic demonstration of the momentum of this community, driven by new challenges such as mobile voice communication, voice search, and the increasing international reach of speech technologies.

Googlers published papers that showcased the breadth and depth of our speech recognition research. Our work addresses both fundamental problems in acoustic and language modeling, as well as the practical issues of building scalable speech interfaces that real people use everyday to make their lives easier.

Here is a list of the papers presented by Googlers at the conference:
URL: http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2010/10/making-impact-on-thriving-speech.html

[G] Geek Time with James Bottomley

Posted: 11 Oct 2010 10:42 PM PDT

Google Open Source Blog: Geek Time with James Bottomley



When people first meet Linux Kernel SCSI subsystem maintainer James Bottomley, one question that often comes up is, "Why the bow tie?" Jeremy Allison, Samba co-founder and Google Open Source Programs Office team member, spent time with James at LinuxCon last month and uncovered the answer. After that, Jeremy gets the backstory on the inspiration behind James' LinuxCon talk about how to convince management to embrace open source (4:58). James also talked about how he became the SCSI subsystem maintainer (1:54) and how he started working on open source (6:47).

Thanks to Sergio Victorino for operating the camera.

By Ellen Ko, Open Source Team
URL: http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2010/10/geek-time-with-james-bottomley.html

[G] Custom shoes made possible with custom AdWords campaigns

Posted: 11 Oct 2010 04:08 PM PDT

Inside AdWords: Custom shoes made possible with custom AdWords campaigns

Cross-posted from the Official Google Blog.

Mike Knapp and Michael Fox had always dreamed of founding a start-up. Jodie Fox (Michael's wife) had always loved custom-made shoes. When her friends started asking her to design shoes for them and to bring these handmade shoes back from her travels, she, Mike and Michael saw a business opportunity. The trio founded their online custom shoe design company Shoes of Prey to share the design experience with the rest of the world.



The business first took flight in Australia, where the founders live and their company is headquartered. Their first customers were trusted friends, who tested the online creation tool and proudly wore their personalized designs. The ability to create custom shoes quickly went viral. It seemed that with each step they took, the initial testers received questions about where they found their fabulous footwear. Soon strangers began making purchases, and when the website spread to overseas locations, the team began offering different currencies to allow for international sales.

The team had already created an AdWords account to promote Shoes of Prey to online customers in Australia. As they expanded internationally, they created new AdWords campaigns targeted at English-speaking countries with currencies they could process. They used AdWords location-targeting to show ads in new locations: Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, the U.K. and the U.S. Michael says, "Despite being based in Australia, it took only a matter of days for our first orders to start coming in from the other side of the world. It was exciting to see!"



Currently, about 10 percent of Shoes of Prey's shoe sales come from AdWords customers—and about 40 percent of those sales are from international buyers. One of the main reasons they've been successful in reaching international audiences is the ease with which they can edit ad texts for each location. "Gift certificates have been really popular on our site," Michael says. "So we use AdWords to promote our gift certificates. Key events for us are Mother's Day, Valentine's Day and Christmas."

Michael then uses Google Insights for Search to identify each country's peak search traffic dates for these occasions. "We time specific AdWords campaigns to target each of these events. Mother's Day is on a different day in different countries, so AdWords lets us run ads at different times of the year for the various countries, and edit the ads so they speak to users in those countries. For example, we'll mention the price of our shoes in euro in Ireland and in dollars in the U.S."



After only a year of operation, the founders have hired three new employees and have formed partnerships with local firms in Japan and Russia to localize their offering in those markets. "Early on in the life of our business, AdWords showed us the potential our business has for growth outside Australia, so we now offer Japanese and Russian versions of our website, complete with local marketing and customer support in those markets," says Michael.

With AdWords, Michael, Jodie and Mike have been able to share their passion for custom shoes with international customers who share their love for customization. Their next step is to inspire all shoe lovers to design their own footwear. Michael tells us: "We're starting to experiment with the Google Display Network to help us find those first customers while they're browsing the web." And they'll continue to use AdWords location targeting and ad text customization to reach new international customers who might not know just how much fun designing shoes can be!

Posted by Gordon Zhu, Inside AdWords crew
URL: http://adwords.blogspot.com/2010/10/custom-shoes-made-possible-with-custom.html

[G] If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a video is worth a million

Posted: 11 Oct 2010 09:52 AM PDT

YouTube Blog: If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a video is worth a million

Editors note: Today's guest bloggers are Troy Olson, Digital Advertising Manager, and Jeff Loquist, Search Marketing Manager, for ShoppersChoice.com. ShoppersChoice.com owns and operates a family of web stores with a wide selection of products, from barbecue grills and accessories to patio sets.

We sell everything from home furniture and fireplaces to kitchen cookware, but our true passion is barbecuing and grills. We're in BBQ country, where people are fanatical about barbecuing and smoking. We've found that the best way to connect with customers is to provide them with great videos – grill reviews, how-tos, and recipes – presented on our branded YouTube channel, YouTube.com/BBQGuys.

We started with instructional videos to address customer service. Then our attitude toward video morphed when our CEO was on a business trip 1,000 miles away from home and was recognized as the "Barbecue Guy." We saw how great YouTube could be for reaching many people at once and conveying our company image. Our important performance indicator is our relationship with viewers. It excites us when we see comments such as, 'Great recipe! I tried it a few days back, loved it.'

In 2009, we brought on Chef Tony. He knows Cajun food and has a gregarious personality that our viewers love. We get hundreds of thousands of views whether we're showing how to smoke a brisket



or how to make honey-glazed sweet potatoes sweet potatoes



We want our customers to love our grills, and the way we do it is to give them recipes that make them proud and happy with the results they can achieve.

Through Promoted Videos, there have been almost 100,000 views on our YouTube channel and more than 15 million impressions of our brand name – all at the most competitive cost-per-click you will find anywhere online. Our campaign is easily managed in the Google Adwords interface. Every tool we need is there to grow quickly and manage easily our video efforts. So far this year, we've had over 2,200 visitors to our BBQGuys.com site from YouTube. We've also seen a significant increase in subscribers across all our social media channels since we started using YouTube.

Online video advertising is central to our business. For this past August, our revenue was up 48%. Our videos were viewed 94,000 times during that month alone. Overall traffic to BBQGuys.com is up 20% from last year.

We've been so successful on YouTube that we are now planning to extend our YouTube presence to our SportsmanGuys brand and beyond.

For us, video is our secret sauce. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a video is worth a million!

Serena Satyasai, Marketing, recently watched "Homemade Pizza Dough"


URL: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/youtube/PKJx/~3/oCP0YdkJOA4/if-picture-is-worth-thousand-words-then.html
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