Wednesday, February 23, 2011

Googland

Googland

[G] And February’s “On The Rise” winner is...theDOMINICshow

Posted: 23 Feb 2011 12:01 AM PST

YouTube Blog: And February's "On The Rise" winner is...theDOMINICshow

The people have spoken, and the people love Dominic! That's right, D-trix from theDOMINICshow won this month's "On The Rise" contest, the program that lets you decide which up-and-coming YouTube user gets a spot on the homepage. Thanks to your support (and votes!), D-trix is featured today.





D-trix is a talented dancer with a big love for comedy. When he's not spoofing Justin Bieber or teaching us how to rap, he's dancing out a surprisingly romantic Valentine's message.







And, now, a few more words from the man himself:



"Hey, everyone! First off I would just like to say 'Thank You' for all the support and for getting me here today. This experience thus far has been a blast and I extremely honored to be a part of the poll. How it all began was I was on reality television (So You Think You Can Dance and America's Best Dance Crew) and from there I wanted to stay in the eye so I thought YOUTUBE was the best route for me. But, all in all, I totally wouldn't be here if it weren't for my great friend Ryan Higa, who pretty much introduced me to this whole YouTube experience. So to all my supporters old and new I just want to say THANK YOU times a thousand and stay tuned for more! Much love!"



If you want to learn more about this program, head over to our "On The Rise" channel, where you can watch trending partners as well as "On The Rise" winners and nominees. And be sure to check out our browse page to see other budding YouTube stars.



Sarah Bardeen, Music Community Manager, recently watched "Tommy Guerrero - Nomadic State."


URL: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/youtube/PKJx/~3/bk-8UDBQEK8/and-februarys-on-rise-winner.html

[G] Googlers at Tech@State: Open Source Technology Conference

Posted: 22 Feb 2011 08:02 PM PST

Google Open Source Blog: Googlers at Tech@State: Open Source Technology Conference



Earlier this month two members of the Google Open Source Programs Office, Chris DiBona and Jeremy Allison, traveled to Washington, D.C. to speak on a panel about open source in government at the State Department's Tech@State: Open Source conference.

Chris and Jeremy were joined by an impressive lineup of speakers who joined together to illustrate how open source software can improve the education, health, and welfare of the world's population. The video of their discussion is featured above, and more information about the event and videos from all of the sessions are available on the conference's video page.

By Ellen Ko, Open Source Team
URL: http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2011/02/googlers-at-techstate-open-source.html

[G] Live Webinar on Thursday, February 24th - A case study: Iowa DOT Takes Google Maps into Enterprise GIS

Posted: 22 Feb 2011 05:14 PM PST

Official Google Enterprise Blog: Live Webinar on Thursday, February 24th - A case study: Iowa DOT Takes Google Maps into Enterprise GIS

Faced with increased demand for live traffic and road closure information, the State of Iowa Department of Transportation (DOT) has chosen to leverage Google Maps API Premier to combine and visualize geospatial data from multiple sources. Join us for a webinar on February 24th to learn why Google Maps API Premier was the ideal tool for presenting traffic and road-related data to the public. We'll also highlight other ways that this product can be used in conjunction with other enterprise geospatial tools to build all sorts of effective, public-facing/public serving websites.

Register now for this webinar which runs on Thursday, February 24, 2:00PM EST/11:00AM PST. You will learn:
  • How the Iowa DOT has used Google Maps API Premier to unlock the value of siloed and stored geospatial data.
  • How the Iowa DOT has integrated Google Maps API Premier with Oracle Spatial and ESRI tools within the Enterprise.
  • How underlying geospatial data is managed throughout the Iowa DOT.

Who Should Attend:
Anyone in state and local government involved in map-based application development for public-facing websites. Other businesses and organizations looking to connect with the public using Google Maps API Premier will also find this webinar valuable.

Posted by Wendy Wu, Google Apps for Government Team
URL: http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2011/02/live-webinar-on-thursday-february-24th.html

[G] Google Message Continuity now supporting Microsoft Exchange® 2010

Posted: 22 Feb 2011 05:14 PM PST

Official Google Enterprise Blog: Google Message Continuity now supporting Microsoft Exchange® 2010

Back in December we announced a new email continuity service that helps organizations running Microsoft Exchange® 2003 and 2007 Servers bolster the reliability of their email environments. Today, we're excited to announce that Google Message Continuity now also supports Microsoft Exchange® 2010 Servers, helping to protect an even broader range of users from business continuity and email access disruptions.

Recent research conducted by the Radicati Group suggests that users of Microsoft Exchange® face on average over five hours of downtime a month, which is a combination of both unplanned outages and regularly scheduled downtime1. Let's compare this to Gmail. Google Apps offers a service level agreement of 99.9% for all of its services. However, as we noted back in January, our own measurements showed that Gmail only experienced on average seven minutes of downtime per month throughout 2010 – 46 times less than an Exchange-based environment – which represented a total uptime average of 99.984% for the entire year. Google Message Continuity works by leveraging this outstanding record of reliability and extending it to Microsoft Exchange® users, allowing them to benefit from the availability and redundancy of Google's services.

For more information on Google Message Continuity and how a cloud-based continuity solution can help your email environment remain more secure, accessible, and reliable, stop by www.google.com/postini to learn more.

1. The Radicati Group, 2010. "Corporate IT Survey – Messaging & Collaboration, 2010-2011"

Posted by Adrian Soghoian, Associate Product Marketing Manager, Google Postini Services
URL: http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2011/02/google-message-continuity-now.html

[G] Speech technology at Google: teaching your phone to talk and listen

Posted: 22 Feb 2011 11:33 AM PST

Official Google Blog: Speech technology at Google: teaching your phone to talk and listen

This is the latest post in our series profiling entrepreneurial Googlers working on products across the company and around the world. Here, you'll get a behind-the-scenes look at how one Googler built an entire R&D team around voice technology that has gone on to power products like YouTube transcriptions and Voice Search. - Ed.

When I first interviewed at Google during the summer of 2004, mobile was just making its way onto the company's radar. My passion was speech technology, the field in which I'd already worked for 20 years. After 10 years of speech research at SRI, followed by 10 years helping build Nuance Communications, the company I co-founded in 1994, I was ready for a new challenge. I felt that mobile was an area ripe for innovation, with a need for speech technology, and destined to be a key platform for delivery of services.

During my interview, I shared my desire to pursue the mobile space and mentioned that if Google didn't have any big plans for mobile, then I probably wouldn't be a good fit for the company. Well, I got the job, and I started soon after, without a team or even a defined role. In classic Google fashion, I was encouraged to explore the company, learn about what various teams were working on and figure out what was needed.

After a few months, I presented an idea to senior management to build a telephone-based spoken interface to local search. Although there was a diversity of opinion at the meeting about what applications made the most sense for Google, all agreed that I should start to build a team focused on speech technology. With help from a couple of Google colleagues who also had speech backgrounds, I began recruiting, and within a few months people were busily building our own speech recognition system.

Six years later, I'm excited by how far we've come and, in turn, how our long-term goals have expanded. When I started, I had to sell other teams on the value of speech technology to Google's mission. Now, I'm constantly approached by other teams with ideas and needs for speech. The biggest challenge is scaling our effort to meet the opportunities. We've advanced from GOOG-411, our first speech-driven service, to Voice Search, Voice Input, Voice Actions, a Voice API for Android developers, automatic captioning of YouTube videos, automatic transcription of voicemail for Google Voice and speech-to-speech translation, amongst others. In the past year alone, we've ported our technology to more than 20 languages.



Speech technology requires an enormous amount of data to feed our statistical models and lots of computing power to train our systems—and Google is the ideal place to pursue such technical approaches. With large amounts of data, computing power and an infrastructure focused on supporting large-scale services, we're encouraged to launch quickly and iterate based on real-time feedback.

I've been exploring speech technology for nearly three decades, yet I see huge potential for further innovation. We envision a comprehensive interface for voice and text communication that defies all barriers of modality and language and makes information truly universally accessible. And it's here at Google that I think we have the best chance to make this future a reality.

Posted by Mike Cohen, Manager, Speech Technology
URL: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/speech-technology-at-google-teaching.html

[G] The Data Viz Challenge: can you make tax data exciting?

Posted: 22 Feb 2011 11:33 AM PST

Official Google Blog: The Data Viz Challenge: can you make tax data exciting?

This time of year, everyone in the United States is starting to fill out—with varying levels of enthusiasm—our federal income tax forms. Yet, after we write our checks to the IRS, most of us don't really know exactly where our money is going.

Fortunately, there's a new online tool to help us find out. Last year, Andrew Johnson and Louis Garcia, two developers from Minneapolis, Minn., created a website called whatwepayfor.com that uses public data to estimate how our tax money is spent. You enter your income and filing status on the site, and it creates a formatted table of numbers showing your contributions to the federal budget—down to the penny:


We're impressed by what the website uncovers. In 2010, for example, a married couple making $40,000 a year contributed approximately $14.07 to space operations, $6.83 to aviation security and $0.91 to the Peace Corps…and those are just a few of the hundreds of expenditures revealed on the site. As we spent time exploring all of these details, it got us thinking: how we could make the information even more accessible? So we created a simple interactive data visualization:


Click the image above to try the interactive version—it lets you drag the bubbles around, change the income level and so on. You can now look at the data in a new way, and it's a little more fun to explore. Of course, there are lots of ways to visualize the data, and we're very sure there are many talented designers and developers around the country who can do it even better than we have.

To make that happen, we've teamed up with Eyebeam, a not-for-profit art and technology center, to host what we're calling the Data Viz Challenge. Andrew and Louis have built an API to let anyone access the data, so now you can choose how to display it. Could you create a better animated chart? Something in 3D? An interactive website? A physical display somewhere in the real world? We want you to show everyone how data visualization can be a powerful tool for turning information into understanding.

You can enter the challenge at datavizchallenge.org, where you'll also find more information about challenge and the data. The challenge starts today and ends March 27, 2011, and is open to the U.S. only. The top visualization, as chosen by a jury, will receive a $5,000 award and a shout-out on the site and this blog. We'll announce the shortlist on the week of April 11, and the winners on April 18, a.k.a. Tax Day.

If you're a data viz enthusiast, we hope you'll take a look at the data and build your own creative visualization. But even if you're not, hopefully the results will help you appreciate what data visualization can do, and its usefulness in turning raw information—like federal income tax numbers—into something you can explore and understand.

Posted by Valdean Klump, Creative Lab
URL: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/data-viz-challenge-can-you-make-tax.html
Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)