Wednesday, April 27, 2011

Googland

Googland

[G] Helping small businesses start and manage Google Apps for Business

Posted: 27 Apr 2011 12:51 AM PDT

Official Google Enterprise Blog: Helping small businesses start and manage Google Apps for Business

Google Apps launched five years ago. Since then, we've spoken with many of our more than three million customers about how we can better serve them. Small businesses in particular often ask us to make Apps easier to adopt and manage. Today we're announcing several upcoming changes designed to address those requests.
New flexible billing options
Small businesses operate in dynamic environments – everything from workforce size to cash flow can change overnight – and we want our billing options to better support this reality. So we're making two improvements to our billing programs in the next few weeks to ensure that Google Apps works across businesses.

First, for customers who sign up online we're adding the Flexible Plan, a new $5 per user per month pricing option which requires no contractual commitment – one of the most flexible plans in the industry today. With this plan, businesses can add or remove users as necessary and will automatically be billed for the proper amount. We'll continue to offer the current pricing option – $50 per user per year with a one-year commitment – as the Annual Plan.

Second, we're eliminating upfront payments for new customers to make it easier for them to manage their cash flow. Whether they choose the Flexible or Annual Plan, customers will pay at the end of each month. We'll also begin to offer direct debit in the US, UK, Austria, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, and Spain to make payment even easier.

Over the course of the next few months, we'll also make these billing options available to our many reseller partners.

Change to Google Apps user limit
Starting on May 10, new organizations (excluding schools and non-profits) with more than 10 users will need to sign up for our paid service, Google Apps for Business, which offers valuable features designed for businesses – customer support, more generous storage limits, a 99.9% SLA, and more. This change will allow us to deliver on the expectations of our small business customers and invest in new features that will help them succeed.

Only new customers will be impacted; existing Google Apps customers can expand beyond 10 users (up to a maximum of 50) at no additional charge, and we'll continue to offer Google Apps for free to groups with 10 users or fewer. Schools and non-profits that qualify for Google Apps for Education will not be affected.

Fewer steps to get started
Two businesses sign up for Google Apps every minute, and we want to get them up and running as quickly as possible. Using our new "setup wizard," most customers are now able to complete setup in under one hour – less than the average time people spend commuting to and from work each day. And in a few weeks we will streamline this process even further, by launching a single sign-up page that lets businesses create an account in minutes without even pulling out a credit card.

We hope these improvements will encourage more businesses to adopt Google Apps for Business. And there's a lot more to come: we've already launched 57 feature improvements this year – including Google Cloud Connect for Microsoft Office, discussions in Google Docs, and an improved control panel for business users – and we'll continue to provide the innovation our customers expect. We look forward to helping more businesses flourish in the months and years to come.

Posted by: Hunter Middleton, Google Apps Product Team
URL: http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2011/04/helping-small-businesses-start-and.html

[G] Bird watching with John James Audubon

Posted: 27 Apr 2011 12:25 AM PDT

Inside Google Books: Bird watching with John James Audubon

Posted by Ryan Sands, Google Books Online Team

Today on our homepage, Google honors the 226th birthday of French-American artist and ornithologist John James Audubon:


J. J. Audubon, who immigrated to America at the start of the 19th century, was a naturalist whose writings on the bird species of North America had a wide and long-lasting impact on the fields of natural history, evolutionary biology, and art. Charles Darwin himself quoted Audubon's work in On the Origin of Species, and the naturalist (and keen hunter) continued to work cataloging birds, and later mammals, into the 1840s.

Audubon's seminal work, Birds of America is in the public domain and available for easy reading (and downloadable as a PDF file) via Google Books. This book, which included dozens of beautiful paintings of bird species, had a storied publication history, and an article in the The Economist noted that 5 of the 10 highest prices paid for physical books were for original copies of Birds of America.

Sophia Foster-Dimino, an artist on the Doodle team that worked on today's tribute says this of J. J. Audubon: "His watercolor and gouache paintings are fascinating from an artistic perspective as well as a scientific one -- Audubon intentionally tried to capture the liveliness and personality of his subjects. I think this warm personal approach is what elevates these images above scientific illustration."

On Audubon's birthday, the Google Books team encourages you to check out this American gem's most important work.

URL: http://booksearch.blogspot.com/2011/04/bird-watching-with-john-james-audubon.html

[G] New Smartphone User Study and Webinar

Posted: 26 Apr 2011 04:41 PM PDT

Official Google Mobile Blog: New Smartphone User Study and Webinar

79% of smartphone consumers use their phones to help with shopping, from comparing prices and finding more product info to locating a retailer, 72% use their smartphones while consuming other media, and 88% of those who look for local information on their smartphones take action within a day.

These are some of the key findings from "The Mobile Movement: Understanding Smartphone Users," a study from Google and conducted by Ipsos OTX, an independent market research firm, among 5,013 US adult smartphone Internet users at the end of 2010.

Check out our post on the Google Mobile Ads blog for more of the study's findings, or join us in tomorrow's webinar where we'll present the full research findings. In the meantime, enjoy this research highlights video.



Posted by Dai Pham, Google Mobile Ads Marketing Team
URL: http://googlemobile.blogspot.com/2011/04/79-of-smartphone-consumers-use-their.html

[G] Google Workshops: a place for Googlers to get their hands dirty

Posted: 26 Apr 2011 12:14 PM PDT

Official Google Blog: Google Workshops: a place for Googlers to get their hands dirty

This is the latest post in our series profiling entrepreneurial Googlers working on products across the company and around the world. Here, mechanical engineer Dan Ratner gives you a peek at a collection of machine workshops on campus that were used to construct the prototypes for the Street View trike, snowmobile and trolley, among other personal and 20 percent time projects. -Ed.

Wood, metal, welding and electronics shops are probably not what come to mind when you think about Google but in fact, we often have to build physical products to help us collect and organize information that's found outside of the web. We do this at the Google Workshops, a hands-on facility equipped with everything from an oscilloscope to a miter saw and even a plasma cutter. Day and night—and even on weekends—the workshops are alive with Googlers working on personal projects—such as home furniture or model airplanes—as well as work-related ones like green business prototypes or components of our self-driving cars.

Googlers using a MIG welder in one of the workshops

In 2007, I took a trip to Barcelona, where I became inspired to share with the world the magnificent architecture lining the narrow alleys through which even a Smart Car can't squeeze. When I returned home and saw a pedicab pedaling along the pier in San Francisco, I decided how I was going to do it. That spark of an idea became the Street View trike, which collects outdoor imagery from parks and cultural sites, and was my first attempt at creating a mobile unit to traverse areas unreachable by car. Over a weekend, a couple of engineers and I hacked together a somewhat rudimentary trike design and quickly followed that up with a second and better prototype that enabled us to capture usable imagery during a test run at Emerald Park in Dublin, Calif. Our initial images proved that the concept was feasible, and after a bit more work on both hardware and software, we were invited to use our prototype trike around Legoland, our first participant in the Street View Partner Program. Our prototype and 20 percent project eventually evolved into a production-quality trike fleet and full-scale operation employing many Googlers around the world.

Me on the Street View trike, capturing imagery in Legoland

People have asked us to visit historical buildings, national landmarks and other places that even a trike can't reach—and we're always trying to find new ways to do so. However, designing a new vehicle requires more than just sticking a camera on top of an apparatus. We often spend hours in the workshops testing out entirely new components made out of wood, metal and—it must be said—quite a bit of duct tape in order to find new and better ways to capture remote imagery. We worked extensively in our own facilities on components of the Street View snowmobile and trolley—from wiring up electronics to milling metal.

Our first prototypes sometimes start out rough around the edges—the first trolley prototype was actually built from an off-the-shelf, narrow dolly designed for schlepping around beer kegs—but our polished production vehicles wouldn't exist if we didn't first make early stage "hack" prototypes in our workshops.

Innovation at Google comes in many forms—it can be an idea, a program or even a handmade prototype. For me, it's in a workshop with a table saw, 3D printer, TIG welder, vertical mill and a variety of raw materials. As a robotics enthusiast and mechanical engineer, these are the kinds of challenges and opportunities that bring me back to work every day.

We're always looking for new and exciting sites to explore. If you'd like to include your property in Street View, please visit our submission form.

Posted by Daniel Ratner, Senior Mechanical Engineer, Google Geo Team
URL: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/04/google-workshops-place-for-googlers-to.html

[G] Music Tuesday: R.E.M. video premiere, Blitz the Ambassador’s new album and more

Posted: 26 Apr 2011 07:09 AM PDT

YouTube Blog: Music Tuesday: R.E.M. video premiere, Blitz the Ambassador's new album and more

It's Tuesday, and music fans, we've got a feast for you. We're featuring one full-length album premiere and two innovative videos -- one of which is an exclusive premiere on YouTube. But don't worry -- we're not ignoring the great music hitting the streets this week: albums from Steve Earle, EmmyLou Harris, Of Montreal, Prefuse 73 and more. We'll have a playlist of the week's freshest sounds later this week; be sure to check back to youtube.com/music to watch it.

Michael Stipe and Jim McKay Pick Their Favorite Videos
R.E.M. premieres their new video "Every Day Is Yours To Win" on YouTube today. The video, a pastiche of clips found on YouTube a la Kutiman, was co-directed by Jim McKay (you may know him from his work on a little HBO show called The Wire). It's an exercise in humanity, finding and treating with great kindness the surprisingly intimate moments uploaded to YouTube. In honor of its release, longtime friends McKay and R.E.M. lead singer Michael Stipe assembled a captivating playlist of their favorite YouTube videos; find it on the homepage today.



Blitz the Ambassador "Native Sun"
"Live from Accra city, that's my city, that's beyond what they call gritty."
When Chuck D gives a shout-out on your record ("It's not where you from; it's where you at...."), you could say you've made it as a hip-hop artist. Ghanaian-born Samuel Bazawule may not be a household name, but if his new album "Native Sun" is any indication, he should be. "Native Sun" is one of the most organic marriages of African music and hip-hop we've heard -- an effortless release that incorporates Afrobeat, highlife and kora music into old-school hip-hop. It's a warm and danceable record with a social conscience, and it speaks to anybody who's lived between two cultures -- as more and more of us do. We're thrilled to premiere it a week before the release date.



Jib Kidder's "Blue"
When we read an interview with Sean Schuster-Craig, aka the audio/visual artist Jib Kidder, in which he talked about his video-making ethic as an extension of the dream world, we were hooked. ("Dreams are like a collage made by your subconscious out of the raw materials of your inner experience," Schuster-Craig told a blog earlier this year.) His music is a collage, too: a folk-art endeavor made from the found sounds of our digital world. Both the song and video for "Blue" repurpose material from his label's archives, and they are meticulously crafted and strangely full of heart.



Sarah Bardeen, Music Community Manager, recently watched "Foo Fighters. Wasting Light Live from 606."


URL: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/youtube/PKJx/~3/imH9TCUKwxo/music-tuesday-rem-video-premiere-blitz.html
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