Friday, November 12, 2010

Googland

Googland

[G] Honoring Veterans Day 2010 at Google

Posted: 12 Nov 2010 03:22 AM PST

Official Google Blog: Honoring Veterans Day 2010 at Google

Today is Veterans Day, the annual U.S. holiday honoring military veterans and the end of World War I, also celebrated as Armistice Day or Remembrance Day in other parts of the world. As we did last year, we want to recognize and thank these courageous men and women who willingly serve to defend the freedoms and rights of others.

For those of us who haven't served, it's also a day when we can seek to understand what it means to serve in the armed forces—in any country—and the burdens that military personnel and their families bear on our behalf.

This year, we celebrate the holiday with a special doodle on google.com—and YouTube is featuring content from veterans sharing their personal stories about life in combat and beyond. You'll hear from Peter, who was awarded a Silver Star, the third-highest military decoration that can be awarded to a member of any branch of the U.S. armed forces for valor; Justin, a disabled veteran who is advocating for wounded warriors; and other brave men and women.

The Google Veterans Network, our employee group dedicated to veterans' issues led 11 service projects in the U.S., U.K., Canada and Australia—bringing employees together with those who have served or are still serving. Nearly 200 Googlers volunteered approximately 500 hours in local communities like Ann Arbor, MI. and Seattle, WA. In Mountain View, we taught 510 students at Monta Loma Elementary School about the historic meaning of November 11 and service to one's country. We also offered Veterans Day and Remembrance Day menus in our company cafes, including military paraphernalia displays and samples of MREs (meals ready to eat).

Through financial and in-kind support, the Google Veterans Network has worked closely with the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA), the Coming Home Project, Fisher House Foundation (Puget Sound), the Ann Arbor VA Hospital, The Royal British Legion and The Returned and Services League of Australia to make this November 11 a special one.

Posted by Carrie Laureno, Audience Evangelist, Creative Lab and Founder, Google VetNet
URL: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/11/honoring-veterans-day-2010-at-google.html

[G] Helping you find emergency information when you need it

Posted: 12 Nov 2010 03:22 AM PST

Official Google Blog: Helping you find emergency information when you need it

(Cross-posted from the google.org blog)

We know that in times of crisis, it's especially important for you to find the crucial information you're looking for—and find it fast. Today, in 13 countries, we'll begin displaying some combination of special search results for searches around poison control, suicide and common emergency numbers that point to emergency information.

This effort started last year when I received an email from a mother in the U.S. who had trouble finding the phone number for the poison control hotline after her daughter accidentally ingested something potentially poisonous (fortunately, her daughter was fine). As a result, people in the U.S. performing various searches including "poison control" began to see a special result displaying the national phone number for the American Association of Poison Control Centers last fall.

Example of the poison control result in Spain

Soon after we added poison control information to search results, we heard from Googlers whose lives had been affected by suicide and who thought that suicide prevention could be another case for a special search result. In April we began prominently displaying the number for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at the top of the results page for certain search queries in the U.S. Since then, our friends at the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline have reported a 9 percent increase in legitimate calls to its hotline.

Example of the suicide prevention result in the U.K.

So, following positive feedback from consumers and our hotline partners, we decided to expand the poison control and suicide prevention special search results beyond the U.S. Each of these 13 countries will see one or more of these results: Australia, Belgium, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. We looked for hotlines that are available nationally and 24/7 and we hope to add additional countries in the future.

We're also introducing a new special search result for common emergencies, such as fire, medical and police emergencies. We want to make this information easier to find for residents as well as travelers, especially as some countries have different numbers for different emergencies.

Example of the emergency number result in France

An emergency is stressful enough. We hope this small step helps connect people with the information they need immediately.

Posted by Roni Zeiger, MD, Chief Health Strategist
URL: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/11/helping-you-find-emergency-information.html

[G] Ireland's Belle and Rollo goes Google

Posted: 11 Nov 2010 10:17 PM PST

Official Google Enterprise Blog: Ireland's Belle and Rollo goes Google

Editor's note: Over 3 million businesses have adopted Google Apps. Today we'll hear from Michael Wejchert, founder of Belle and Rollo. To learn more about other organizations that have gone Google and share your story, visit our community map or test drive life in the cloud with the Go Google cloud calculator.

Belle and Rollo is an Ireland-based online children's lifestyle store offering a unique and eclectic range of items for children and families. It opened in Autumn 2010 and uses Google Apps as the heart of its communication infrastructure.


When we embarked on the path to open our store in January 2010, I was in the position of creating a business from the ground up and making critical decisions for solutions that would help us run an effective and efficient business.

I had come from a business with over 2,000 users on a Microsoft Exchange® system and was familiar with the various issues of cost, maintenance and reliability that affected our day to day communications systems. As a small start-up business, I strongly wanted to avoid the problems I had previously witnessed. We needed to have rock solid reliability but did not want to have the added complexity of running our own email hardware and the added expense of maintenance costs.

From my personal experience using Gmail and Google Docs I felt that a cloud solution would be very suitable for our needs. We needed to have accounts covering email, calendar and contacts that were accessible from anywhere, especially when working from mobile devices. Increasing the number of users quickly is also important for us as our business grows. I researched Google Apps further and contacted Baker Security & Networks - a Google Apps Authorized Reseller - who talked me through the various functionality features which lead to our decision to use Google Apps. They also recommended Irish mobile network 3 who supplied us with Android handsets to allow us to be fully connected to Google Apps when we were away from the office.

After more than six months running Google Apps, I continue to be impressed. As I spend the majority of my time on the road, the Android integration with Google services has been invaluable. Syncing multiple accounts for email, contacts and calendars has allowed me to respond to suppliers immediately and process customer queries and action orders efficiently. Once back in the office (or home) everything is in place and just as easy to access due to the Cloud.

Google Docs has given us a central hub for data creation and storage, with flexible and secure sharing settings. We have recently started to use it to streamline our invoicing process - we can generate invoices from any PC and then store them in the Cloud with Google Docs - removing the problem of being tied to a specific person, location or computer. As we work from various places - office, home office, on the road - it's very helpful to have a central data store for the company. We have found the collaborative nature of Google Docs a very natural way of working over distance.

I am looking forward to seeing our company grow, safe in the knowledge that our Google Apps system will grow hand in hand with us, and without any of the usual technology growing pains!

Posted by Michael Wejchert, Belle and Rollo Limited
URL: http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2010/11/irelands-belle-and-rollo-goes-google.html

[G] Announcing Google Refine 2.0, a power tool for data wranglers

Posted: 11 Nov 2010 09:01 PM PST

Google Open Source Blog: Announcing Google Refine 2.0, a power tool for data wranglers


Our acquisition of Metaweb back in July also brought along Freebase Gridworks, an open source software project for cleaning and enhancing entire data sets. Today we're announcing that the project has been renamed to Google Refine and version 2.0 is now available.

Google Refine is a power tool for working with messy data sets, including cleaning up inconsistencies, transforming them from one format into another, and extending them with new data from external web services or other databases. Version 2.0 introduces a new extensions architecture, a reconciliation framework for linking records to other databases (like Freebase), and a ton of new transformation commands and expressions.

Freebase Gridworks 1.0 has already been well received by the data journalism and open government data communities (you can read how the Chicago Tribune, ProPublica and data.gov.uk have used it) and we are very excited by what they and others will be able to do with this new release. To learn more about what you can do with Google Refine 2.0, watch the following screencasts:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yNccGtn3Wb0 (7 min)



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45EnWK-fE9k (9 min)



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m5ER2qRH1OQ (6 min)



The project is open source and its code and downloads are available here. Changes from version 1.1 to 2.0 are listed here.

By David Huynh, Google Search Infrastructure
URL: http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2010/11/announcing-google-refine-20-power-tool.html

[G] Adding Robots to Wave in a Box

Posted: 11 Nov 2010 09:01 PM PST

Google Open Source Blog: Adding Robots to Wave in a Box


Starting this past July, I had the opportunity to spend some time "Down Under" working as an intern on Google Wave. Since I had worked with Google before on building the open source software that runs the Google Summer of Code and Google Code-in, I joined the Wave open source effort this time. I was primarily focused on open sourcing the Robots API, so that non-Google wave servers could support robots for their users.


One month into my internship, Google announced its plan to discontinue developing Wave as a standalone product, however Wave technology will continue to move forward as an open source project.

The Wave open source project, renamed Wave in a Box, is aiming to become a server for hosting waves inside a small company or community. With a few extra steps you will even be able to talk to other wave servers all over the world, based on a concept called "federation." Over the past few months the Wave in a Box team has made a lot of improvements, for instance the panel for viewing waves now supports much more of the functionality from Google Wave, and it looks better and is a lot faster too!

The Robots API has now also been included in Wave in a Box and has most of the functionality available on Google Wave. One of our example robots, Echoey, for Google Wave also works on Wave in a Box. This robot -- as the name might suggest -- echoes whatever is being typed. Due to the realtime nature of Wave, the echoing happens while you type!

Wave in a Box still has a ways to go and the future of the project is being discussed at this week's Wave Summit in San Francisco. Keep an eye on the Wave in a Box website for videos of the sessions. If you are interested in running your own wave server or want to help make Wave in a Box better, take a look at our repository and mailing list.

By Lennard de Rijk, Google Wave Team
URL: http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2010/11/adding-robots-to-wave-in-box.html

[G] Dig Into Holiday Recipes

Posted: 11 Nov 2010 06:05 PM PST

Official Google CPG Blog: Dig Into Holiday Recipes

Post by Scott Townsend, CPG Account Planner and Ali Manning, CPG Industry Analyst

Earlier this year, Google CPG held our first "Dig Into Data" session, where we explored holiday recipe opportunities for advertisers. There are over 500M recipes [1] during the holiday season, which makes November and December a critical time to win for CPG advertisers. Not only have we consistently seen searches spiking around the holidays, but the volume of searches has increased year over year, as depicted here:


Interestingly, both the Super Bowl and Cinco De Mayo appear to have become more popular holiday eating occasions within the last four years.

During the winter holidays, people are 3x more likely to be searching for "easy recipes". Easy pie recipes, in particular, top the request list [2]:

As we dug through the data, we find that Thanksgiving recipe Searchers often prepare in 3 phases (Research, Plan, and Last Minute). Among the core items searched for, the items broke down into Pie, Turkey, and sides.

Baking takes center stage during Christmas with core items including Christmas cookies, which receive 45% of all cookie related searches, and cheesecake which gets 71% of all cake related searches during the Christmas season.

Our data also shows that during the winter holidays, consumers are 1/2 as likely to search for "healthy recipes" than any other average point in the year. Perhaps people save their healthy recipe searches for after the New Year, thinking that if you're going to do the holidays right, you might as well go big or go home!

Sources:
[1] Hitwise + Ad Planner source
[2] Google Internal Data
URL: http://google-cpg.blogspot.com/2010/11/dig-into-holiday-recipes.html

[G] New Chrome Extensions by Google

Posted: 11 Nov 2010 04:06 PM PST

Google Chrome Blog: New Chrome Extensions by Google

We've been thrilled to see many useful Chrome extensions created by developers around the world. Similarly, Googlers have been very enthusiastic about creating extensions that allow users to add features to their favorite Google products. We have a handful of new extensions in the gallery that we're keen to share with you, including new official extensions for Google Calendar, Google Docs and YouTube.

For those of you with busy schedules, the new Google Calendar extension lets you easily check your Google Calendar for upcoming events and add new events from the websites you visit. For example, if you see an icon with a green plus sign on sites like Facebook or Evite, you can add the event to your Google Calendar. It will also show a map if it detects a location associated with the event.



The Web Clipboard extension allows you to copy and paste text and images easily with the Google Docs clipboard. This means that all the web content that you copy and paste is stored in the online clipboard so you can access it quickly and easily across multiple browser windows.



To stay on top of your favorite videos, YouTube Feed notifies you whenever new videos are available in your YouTube homepage feed. You can directly access videos that your friends uploaded, rated and liked right in your browser.



And there's more! Other Google extensions like Blog This, Google Calendar Checker and News Reader have been updated with new features like enabling special characters in blog posts, support for multiple calendars and custom news feeds.

These are just a few extensions that enhance your experience with Google products. With more than 8,000 extensions to choose from in the gallery, you can find the right extensions to complement your favorite Google products.

Posted by Koh Kim, Associate Product Marketing Manager
URL: http://chrome.blogspot.com/2010/11/new-chrome-extensions-by-google.html

[G] Tips & Tricks: Moving my files to the cloud

Posted: 11 Nov 2010 09:10 AM PST

Official Google Docs Blog: Tips & Tricks: Moving my files to the cloud

About a year ago, I started scanning and uploading all the important papers floating around my house into Google Docs. It seemed like an obvious solution to three things that drove me crazy:
  • Clutter (I believe papers not only accumulate but secretly multiply)
  • Access (I always need that bill/file that is at home and not at the office with me)
  • Sharing (It's a common occurrence that I need someone else to also look at that file, and that person is hardly ever with me at the office either.)
Scanning and uploading ended up being only half the battle. My house was cleaner, but my organizing and sharing work-flow was far from perfect. So, I developed a system in Google Docs to keep organized. Here are some tips & tricks that you may find useful:

Folders and sub-folders
What: With the Create New button in the upper left, you can create folders to organize your content. Click on your newly created folder on the left hand side of your document list. While you're there, you can click Create New again to make a sub-folder within the first folder.
Tip: To minimize how many folders I see on the left hand side, I create general folder titles like Bills and Photos. I then use sub-folders for clearer classification like Electricity and Cell Phone under my 'Bills' folder. When I'm uploading a scanned document I'm able select the appropriate sub-folder right away.

Shared folders
What: Once you've created a folder, you can keep it for yourself, or share it with anyone. Right click on a folder, select Share, and choose the sharing option that best fits your need.
Tip: My husband and I compiled all of our immigration paperwork into one folder. Recently my brother took the plunge and also had to work his way through this process. By sharing my folder with him, it made it easier for him to see what was needed and simplified the process a bit (at least that's what he told me...).

Managing document versions
What: Click on any file and select 'Add or manage versions' in order to upload and group different versions of the same document together.
Tip: While this is an ideal tool for a designer that wants to keep iterations of the same graphic in one place, I found my own everyday use for this feature. I keep track of items where the most recent has more importance than past ones. For example, I scan my taxes, and upload the oldest ones first so the newest one is visible, but I have the option to download past copies.

Exporting your files
What: Someone you know doesn't live in the cloud? Gasp! No worries, I can easily export all the files in a folder. Just right-click the folder, choose Export, and click the Download button.
Tip: Taking this action will save a .zip file to my computer's hard drive that I can then email to anyone who's not as tech-savvy (though, I might have to unzip the file for them too!).

If you're in the mood to give your filing cabinet the boot, chime in here with your own tips for moving your files to the cloud.

Posted by: Rebecca Steelman, Consumer Operations
URL: http://googledocs.blogspot.com/2010/11/tips-tricks-moving-my-files-to-cloud.html
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