Friday, March 25, 2011

Googland

Googland

[G] Webcast: How cities in Florida and Michigan are providing simple & powerful communication and collaboration

Posted: 25 Mar 2011 02:36 AM PDT

Official Google Enterprise Blog: Webcast: How cities in Florida and Michigan are providing simple & powerful communication and collaboration

Rochester Hills, Michigan, and Panama City, Florida have improved internal communications and dramatically reduced costs by implementing Google Apps. These cities faced the same challenges that many other government agencies do: declining budgets, pressure to deliver better citizen services, and the high cost of a do-it-yourself hardware infrastructure.

Join IT managers from Rochester Hills and Panama City, a senior fellow from Center for Digital Government, and Google for a live discussion where they will shed light on how government agencies can:
  • Cut costs on email and office productivity applications
  • Improve collaboration with employees and the public
  • Move quickly to implement these solutions
  • Respond to trends in government cloud computing
Register to attend the live webinar on Tuesday, March 29 at @ 11am PST / 2pm EST. We hope to see you there.

Posted by Wendy Wu, Google Enterprise team
URL: http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2011/03/webcast-how-cities-in-florida-and.html

[G] Live Webinar: Improved data migration tools to switch to 100% web

Posted: 25 Mar 2011 02:36 AM PDT

Official Google Enterprise Blog: Live Webinar: Improved data migration tools to switch to 100% web

Customers are switching from legacy systems to Google Apps at an astounding rate. In 2010, our customers migrated over 3.5 billion emails, over 100 million calendar events and 25 million contacts. Over 6 million (and growing) emails are migrated to Google Apps every day!

To help make it easy for our customers to make the switch we've made several improvements and updates. Our data migration tools for Microsoft® Exchange and Microsoft Outlook® now support several additional IMAP servers, including Novell® GroupWise, Cyrus®, Dovecot® and Courier®. Customers like Premier Access Insurance – a network of 10,000 dentists in California and other locations throughout the United States ‐ have used our migration tools to make the switch to Google Apps.

Join William Woodson of Premier Access Insurance and me on a live webinar on Thursday, March 24th at 10am PST where William will share his experience and perspectives in planning and managing the migration process, as well as lessons learned. You can also hear more about new updates and improvements to our tools and best practices in planning a migration.

If you are planning a switch, this webinar can't be missed. Register today!

Posted by Aditya Kulkarni, Product Manager, Google Enterprise
URL: http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2011/03/live-webinar-improved-data-migration.html

[G] Talking to your computer (with HTML!)

Posted: 25 Mar 2011 01:05 AM PDT

Google Chrome Blog: Talking to your computer (with HTML!)

Today, we're updating the Chrome beta channel with a couple of new capabilities, especially for web developers. Fresh from the work that we've been doing with the HTML Speech Incubator Group, we've added support for the HTML speech input API. With this API, developers can give web apps the ability to transcribe your voice to text. When a web page uses this feature, you simply click on an icon and then speak into your computer's microphone. The recorded audio is sent to speech servers for transcription, after which the text is typed out for you. Try it out yourself in this little demo. Today's beta release also offers a sneak peek of GPU-accelerated 3D CSS, which allows developers to apply slick 3D effects to web page content using CSS.

Lastly, as mentioned in yesterday's blogpost, those of you on the beta channel will start seeing the brand new shiny Chrome icon on your desktops.

Stay tuned as we make all these updates widely available in the stable channel soon!

Correction (March 23, 2011): This beta release's Speech API implementation is a prototype of Google's proposal to the HTML Speech Incubator Group. The title of the blogpost has been changed to reflect this.

Posted by Satish Sampath, Software Engineer
URL: http://chrome.blogspot.com/2011/03/talking-to-your-computer-with-html5.html

[G] A fresh take on an icon

Posted: 25 Mar 2011 01:05 AM PDT

Google Chrome Blog: A fresh take on an icon

Some of you on Chrome's early release channels may have noticed our latest tweak to Chrome's icon:



Since Chrome is all about making your web experience as easy and clutter-free as possible, we refreshed the Chrome icon to better represent these sentiments. A simpler icon embodies the Chrome spirit — to make the web quicker, lighter, and easier for all.

Even before this effort, the new version of the Chrome logo was already being conjured up by Googlers and Chrome fans. Numerous creative reinterpretations have organically moved the icon towards simplicity and abstraction, so it felt right to make the icon structure cleaner and easier to recreate.

The Modern Browser poster by Mike Lemanski, celebrating Chrome's 2nd birthday




Chrome Magnets by Tyson Kartchner







Redesigning the icon was very much a group effort. Collectively, we explored many variations, tried the icon in several different contexts, and refined the details as we moved along. It was important to maintain consistency across all media, so we kept print, web, and other possible formats in mind. Once we arrived at a good place, we finished up the icon by resizing, pixel-pushing, and getting everything out the door.

For Chrome users, you'll see this latest icon reflected in your browsers soon, as we bring the latest features and improvements to the beta and stable channels in the coming weeks!

Posted by Steve Rura, Designer
URL: http://chrome.blogspot.com/2011/03/fresh-take-on-icon.html

[G] No video camera? No problem! Create original videos with your own photos, clips or just an idea

Posted: 24 Mar 2011 03:51 PM PDT

YouTube Blog: No video camera? No problem! Create original videos with your own photos, clips or just an idea

More than 35 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute, and with the motto of "Broadcast Yourself", it's hard to believe that anyone is left out of the YouTube experience. But the truth is, sites like YouTube do largely leave out people who don't have a video camera. That's changing with the beta launch of youtube.com/create, where anyone can use video creation sites Xtranormal, Stupeflix and GoAnimate to make personal videos or animations and post them directly to YouTube.

Create original animations
Creating animation can be pretty hard and often requires expensive software, but GoAnimate and Xtranormal Movie Maker let you create animated videos with just a text storyline. In minutes, you can make two bears discuss fiction-writing, or create your own cooking show parody.

Use your own photos, clips and music to create dynamic videos
Stupeflix lets you pull together your own images, clips and even maps into a dynamic video slideshow. You can tell a personal story or even make a jazzy promo for your craft company.

Start creating!
To try these out for yourself, visit www.youtube.com/create and click on each title to learn more, watch a tutorial and see video examples. You can make an original creation in minutes--and it's free (though some sites have premium services which you can access from their sites directly).



So give it a test drive. Here are some ideas:

  • Create an educational video
  • Reenact a scene from your favorite movie or play
  • Create a digital 2010 year book, or a 2011 graduation video

This is still early and we look forward to adding more sites, so check them out and give us some feedback in the comments section below. We look forward to seeing what you come up with!

Stanley Wang, Software Engineer, recently watched "First Test on This...GoAnimate App on YouTube" and Shenaz Zack, Product Manager, recently watched "IT'S FRIDAY!" (created using Xtranormal Movie Maker)



URL: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/youtube/PKJx/~3/aHo1tjpLlvo/no-video-camera-no-problem-create.html

[G] Making what’s old, new

Posted: 24 Mar 2011 03:19 PM PDT

Docs Blog: Making what's old, new

Almost a year ago, we introduced a new version of the document editor. The new version launched with character-by-character collaboration, higher import fidelity and new features like a ruler and support for positioned images. Since then, we've been continually adding more features like collaborative highlighting, better revision history, mobile editing, and discussions.

Since launch, the new editor has been available only for newly created documents. Beginning today, we're testing a new feature that lets you convert an old document to the new editor. If you're the owner of a document made in the old editor, you may now receive a notice at the top of your document giving you the option to preview the document in the new editor.


From there you'll get a chance to see what the document looks like in the new editor and either choose to convert it or leave it in the old format. There are two important things to note about this process. First, this feature will not be available to Google Apps customers initially. Second, revision history will not be imported into the new editor.

Because we're converting between two very different editors, it's also possible that the document could look slightly changed in the new editor. For example, there are still more table features we need to add to the new editor before it will be able to perfectly import all forms of tables that can be created in the old editor.

If you want to freshen up your old documents, try opening them today and seeing what they look like when you upgrade to the version with all the latest features.

Posted by: Jeff Harris, Product Manager
URL: http://googledocs.blogspot.com/2011/03/making-whats-old-new.html

[G] 20 percent time spent coding in the clouds

Posted: 24 Mar 2011 11:12 AM PDT

Official Google Blog: 20 percent time spent coding in the clouds

This is the latest post in our series profiling entrepreneurial Googlers working on products across the company and around the world—even 35,000 feet above the ground. Read how one engineering director tried Google App Engine for the first time to build an Android app—now used by nearly half a million people—during a 12-hour plane ride to Japan. -Ed.

A 12-hour plane flight may seem daunting to some, but I look at it as uninterrupted time to do what I love—code new products. My bi-monthly trips from London to Tokyo and California are how I spend my 20 percent time—what I consider my "license to innovate." It was on a flight to Tokyo that I first built what became Chrome to Phone, an Android app and Chrome extension that allows you to instantly send content—like a webpage, map or YouTube video—from your Chrome browser to your Android device.

As an engineering director, I spend the bulk of my time managing software engineers and various projects. As a result, there's not a lot of time to just sit at my desk and code, and it's possible for my technical skills to become rusty. So on one of my frequent cross-continent trips, I decided to take the opportunity—and time—to brush up on my engineering skills by exploring device-to-device interaction, an area that has a lot of potential in our increasingly connected world. I'd never written a Chrome extension or used App Engine, a platform that allows developers to build web applications on the same scalable systems that power Google's own applications and services. But rather than sleeping or reading a book, I spent my flight figuring it out. And somewhere over Belgium on my way to Japan, I had a working prototype of Chrome to Phone.

A few days later, on my trip back to London, I emailed my prototype to Andy Rubin and Linus Upson, who lead the Android and Chrome engineering teams. Before my plane even landed, they'd both given the product their blessing. With a little help from a developer in Mountain View and a user interface designer back in London, we tidied things up and ultimately launched the open source code for Chrome to Phone at Google I/O just two months later.



As an engineering director, I don't always have the time to get deeply involved in every aspect of a product launch. Chrome to Phone game me a unique opportunity to be actively involved at the grassroots of product development at Google—from concept to launch—working directly with the legal, internationalization and consumer operations teams. With few restrictions on how I spent my time, I was able to build a prototype and launch it quickly, adding more features based on user feedback. Today, more than 475,000 people use the extension, and that number is still growing.

When you're leaving your house to go out, you take your phone, keys and wallet. I don't think it will be long before you just take your phone—it will contain everything that you need—and that's our motivation to explore device-to-device interaction. In order to get there, we have engineers here in the U.K. and around the world examining the mobile space, both in their full-time roles and as 20 percent projects. There isn't only one solution, so by encouraging engineers to work on new projects, we hope that ideas will come from all over the world—whether from a Google office or even 35,000 feet above one.

Posted by Dave Burke, Engineering Director, Android
URL: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/03/20-percent-time-spent-coding-in-clouds.html

[G] Why Connecting your YouTube and Google Accounts Matters

Posted: 24 Mar 2011 10:23 AM PDT

YouTube Blog: Why Connecting your YouTube and Google Accounts Matters

Over the last several months many of you who created a YouTube account before May 2009 may have seen prompters asking you to upgrade to a Google account. We first announced this transition in a blog post last July. In the coming weeks, all YouTube accounts created before May 2009 will need to complete the process of linking to a Google account. A Google account is a single-sign in system for accessing all Google products and services. Any existing email address can be used to create a Google account.

You're probably asking yourself ''Why am I being required to connect my YouTube Account with a Google Account?" Well, let's use an analogy. Imagine instead of that sleek new mobile phone you bought last year, you were instead carrying around one of those big brick phones from the 90's. It might still make calls, but it would be slow and bulky and unable to do 90% of what current smart phones do. Your old YouTube account is a lot like that cell phone. It still works, but it's not as fast, secure and efficient as the Google Account we're asking you to link to.

While we understand that change isn't always welcome, we're confident that this transition will result in a better experience for you on YouTube. Not only does connecting your YouTube account to a Google Account improve your account security, it will also give you better video recommendations and quick access to the very latest updates and features which our engineers are releasing on the site every week.

After linking to a Google Account, your YouTube username will stay the same. However, when you link to a Google Account, your old YouTube password won't work anymore. After linking, you'll instead need to use your Google Account password when you sign into YouTube.

If you're having any issues, we've created a series of articles that you can reference for help. By clicking on the links below, you can learn how to easily solve some common issues that may arise in the linking process:
If you're still experiencing difficulties, you can contact our support team. We know this process isn't always easy, and it can sometimes be frustrating, but hang in there. Connecting your accounts will create a better, more up-to-date and secure YouTube experience and we'll do our best to do everything we can to guide you through this process.

Michael Ortali, YouTube Web Developer, recently watched "Macarena - Los del Rio"


URL: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/youtube/PKJx/~3/TZe4k29OP3I/why-connecting-your-youtube-and-google.html
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