Wednesday, June 8, 2011

Googland

Googland

[G] Know when your bus is late with live transit updates in Google Maps

Posted: 08 Jun 2011 07:34 AM PDT

Official Google Blog: Know when your bus is late with live transit updates in Google Maps

(Cross-posted on the Lat Long Blog and Mobile Blog)

Often when I'm taking public transit, I arrive at my stop on time only to anxiously check my watch and look down the street for my bus, which is running late once again. Those extra minutes I'm forced to wait seem like an eternity, and the only information I can access on my phone is when the bus was supposed to arrive.

Starting now, Google Maps for mobile and desktop can tell you when your ride is actually going to arrive with new live transit updates. We partnered with transit agencies to integrate live transit data in four U.S. cities and two European cities: Boston, Portland, Ore., San Diego, San Francisco, Madrid and Turin.



When you click on a transit station or plan a transit route with Google Maps and there are delays or alerts related to your trip, you'll now see "live departure times" (indicated with a special icon) and service alerts.

Live transit departure times after tapping on a station

Live service alerts when receiving transit directions

Live departures and alerts on desktop

We're working with our public transit partners to help them provide live data to more people in more cities. You can get live transit updates in the latest version of Google Maps for mobile (requires Android 1.6+), as well as Google Maps on all supported desktop and mobile browsers.

Posted by Sasha Gontmakher, Software Engineer
URL: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/06/know-when-your-bus-is-late-with-live.html

[G] Changes to the open Internet in Kazakhstan

Posted: 08 Jun 2011 07:34 AM PDT

Official Google Blog: Changes to the open Internet in Kazakhstan

(Cross-posted on the European Public Policy Blog and Public Policy Blog)

The genius of the Internet has always been its open infrastructure, which allows anyone with a connection to communicate with anyone else on the network. It's not limited by national boundaries, and it facilitates free expression, commerce and innovation in ways that we could never have imagined even 20 or 30 years ago.

Some governments, however, are attempting to create borders on the web without full consideration of the consequences their actions may have on their own citizens and the economy. Last month, the Kazakhstan Network Information Centre notified us of an order issued by the Ministry of Communications and Information in Kazakhstan that requires all .kz domain names, such as google.kz, to operate on physical servers within the borders of that country. This requirement means that Google would have to route all searches on google.kz to servers located inside Kazakhstan. (Currently, when users search on any of our domains, our systems automatically handle those requests the fastest way possible, regardless of national boundaries.)

We find ourselves in a difficult situation: creating borders on the web raises important questions for us not only about network efficiency but also about user privacy and free expression. If we were to operate google.kz only via servers located inside Kazakhstan, we would be helping to create a fractured Internet. So we have decided to redirect users that visit google.kz to google.com in Kazakh. Unfortunately, this means that Kazakhstani users will experience a reduction in search quality as results will no longer be customized for Kazakhstan.

Measures that force Internet companies to choose between taking actions that harm the open web, or reducing the quality of their services, hurt users. We encourage governments and other stakeholders to work together to preserve an open Internet, which empowers local users, boosts local economies and encourages innovation around the globe.

Posted by Bill Coughran, SVP, Research & Systems Infrastructure
URL: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/06/changes-to-open-internet-in-kazakhstan.html

[G] World IPv6 Day begins 24 hours from now. Websites, start your engines.

Posted: 07 Jun 2011 03:10 PM PDT

Official Google Blog: World IPv6 Day begins 24 hours from now. Websites, start your engines.

Back in January, we joined the Internet Society and a handful of leading Internet companies to announce World IPv6 Day. The announcement was a rallying call for adoption of the new Internet Protocol; now, less than six months later, participation has grown to more than 400 organizations. We believe this is an important milestone, as IPv6 is the only long-term solution to IPv4 address exhaustion, and its deployment is crucial to the continued growth of the open Internet.

About 24 hours from now, at midnight UTC on June 8 (Tuesday afternoon in the U.S., Wednesday morning in Asia), all the participants will enable IPv6 on their main websites for 24 hours. For Google, this will mean virtually all our services, including Search, Gmail, YouTube and many more, will be available over IPv6.

In all likelihood, you won't even notice the test. The vast majority (99.95%) of people will be able to access services without interruption: either they'll connect over IPv6, or their systems will successfully fall back to IPv4. However, as with any next-generation technology, there may be teething pains. We estimate that .05% of systems may fail to fall back to IPv4, so some people may find Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Bing and other participating websites slow or unresponsive on World IPv6 Day. This is often due to misconfigured or misbehaving home networking equipment, such as home routers, that can make a computer think it has IPv6 connectivity when in fact it's not working.

Over the past few months, we've been working hard with other industry players to prepare. Operating system vendors and browser manufacturers have been releasing updates to resolve IPv6 connectivity issues—for example, Google Chrome now incorporates workarounds for malfunctioning IPv6 networks—and we've seen router manufacturers test their devices for robust IPv6 support as well. For our part, we've been busy adding IPv6 support to services that didn't yet have it, and fixing minor issues with those that did. And since the best way to find bugs in your services is to hammer on them yourself, Google employees have been operating in "World IPv6 Day mode" for several months now.

We've also been thinking about how best to notify people who may have connectivity issues. To that end, we've run a prominent notice in Google Search for people who may not be able to connect, directing them to a new test page and help article. If you're curious, you can test your connection now at ipv6test.google.com.

Posted by Lorenzo Colitti, Network Engineer and IPv6 Samurai
URL: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/06/world-ipv6-day-begins-24-hours-from-now.html

[G] From acquisition to in-app payments in less than one year

Posted: 07 Jun 2011 03:10 PM PDT

Official Google Blog: From acquisition to in-app payments in less than one year

(Cross-posted on the Commerce Blog)

This is the latest post in our series profiling entrepreneurial Googlers working on products across the company and around the world. In this post, you'll read why one team decided to sell their company to Google, and how they went from acquisition to product launch in less than a year. - Ed.

The decision to sell your company is one of the hardest an entrepreneur can make, and as the CEO of Jambool, I thought long and hard about Google's offer to acquire us when they came calling in August 2010. Ultimately, we decided to join Google for two reasons: one, we shared the goal of offering consumers and merchants unified online payment solutions, and two, we realized that Google was serious about helping us integrate our technology into their digital tools by providing us with infrastructure and other support. Less than a year later, we've already taken a major step to help Google deliver on this vision with Google In-App Payments, which we announced last month at Google I/O. In-App Payments enable web application developers to receive payments for digital and virtual goods without the user ever leaving the application.

Me on stage at Google I/O introducing Google In-App Payments

When we first joined, we expected to spend a lot of time ramping up, meeting people and learning Google's technology. In reality, our shared vision for the product enabled us to quickly partner with teams across the company to build out our product at scale. As a startup, you spend the majority of your time building teams from scratch to focus on functions like product, sales, marketing, operations and legal. At Jambool, I'd divide my time across operations, raising funds and meeting with outside developers. But at Google, we were able to combine our efforts with teams already in place who could manage those areas while we focused on the core product.

We set an ambitious goal of launching in-app payments nine months later at Google I/O, which motivated us to work quickly. We worked with Google's established teams—especially Chrome, Android and Google Checkout—to build a simple API and intuitive user interface. During the last few weeks before Google I/O—when we were still working around the clock just to finish the product—we were invited to announce our launch as part of the day two keynote. That gave us even more drive to finish on time. And, thanks to the Chrome team, we found partners like Angry Birds and Graphic.ly, which really demonstrated the product's usefulness and got developers excited about our broader vision of seamless digital payments.

As a startup, we never imagined we'd stand on a stage like the one at I/O and instantly reach consumers, businesses and developers around the world. In the first 24 hours after the announcement, thousands of developers signed up to use the API. This is something we wouldn't have been able to do so quickly on our own, and it's a testament to the big things a startup can accomplish by joining Google. We're already looking forward to what the next year brings as developers around the world start to build great businesses on our platform.

If you're interested in integrating your apps into Google's In-App Payments API, we invite you to sign up and send us feedback.

Posted by Vikas Gupta, Head of Consumer Payments
URL: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/06/from-acquisition-to-in-app-payments-in.html

[G] Known Issue: Socialize service not working for some users

Posted: 07 Jun 2011 02:58 PM PDT

The FeedBurner Status Blog: Known Issue: Socialize service not working for some users

Issue: The Socialize service fails to deliver messages to Twitter for some users. We have identified the source of the problem and are working on a solution. Reconnecting your Twitter account will not solve this problem. We will update this post as soon as service is working properly again.
URL: http://feedburnerstatus.blogspot.com/2011/06/known-issue-socialize-service-not.html

[G] Announcing the Asia Pacific Google Policy Fellows

Posted: 07 Jun 2011 02:06 PM PDT

Google Public Policy Blog: Announcing the Asia Pacific Google Policy Fellows

Posted by Ross LaJeunesse, Head of Public Policy and Government Affairs, Asia Pacific

There are now more than 2 billion people online, with approximately 850 million of them in Asia Pacific.

Given Asia Pacific's importance, we're excited to announce the extension of the Google Policy Fellowship program to this part of the world. The goal of the program is to assist public interest organizations at the forefront of debates on important Internet policy issues, and to support talented young advocates and scholars. Since its inception in 2007, the Google Policy Fellowship has provided a platform for students interested in technology policy to contribute to the public dialogue on these issues, and to explore future academic and professional interests.

The Asia Pacific program for 2011 includes one Fellow each in Australia, Hong Kong and India. The University of New South Wales, the City University of Hong Kong, and the Centre for Internet and Society in Bangalore will be serving as the respective host institutions.

In this region, we see many policy challenges concerning access to information online. The 2011 Asia Pacific Fellows will therefore focus on legal and policy issues related to the open Internet.

Congratulations to our first class of Asia Pacific Google Policy Fellows:
  • Lauren Loz, University of New South Wales, Faculty of Law Australia
  • Henry Hu Ling, University of Hong Kong, Faculty of Law, Hong Kong
  • Rishabh Dara, Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, India
We extend our sincere thanks to everyone who applied. If this pilot program proves to be a success, we hope to expand the Policy Fellowship for 2012.
URL: http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2011/05/announcing-asia-pacific-google-policy.html

[G] Live updates on the first Chromebook preview

Posted: 07 Jun 2011 01:49 PM PDT

Google Chrome Blog: Live updates on the first Chromebook preview

Welcome to live updates on the first Chromebook preview, a 2-day exploration of the web that also gives you a way to get your Chromebook early. We will continue to live update this blog post with subsequent preview locations.
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Live Updates (latest at the top)

12:18pm PT - YouTube changed the way billions of people watched, shared and discovered videos, but what was the first video uploaded to the site? It's also the location of the next Chromebook preview, now live here.

9:28am PT - The first Chromebook preview is now open here. For the first stop, we're taking you back to where it all began: Tim Berners-Lee's original memo calling for people to help with his CERN-funded WorldWideWeb project. Look for a familiar icon which will serve as your entryway to the Chromebook preview. Each preview will only be open for a limited time before moving to a new location.

Posted by Azhar Hashem, Product Marketing Manager
URL: http://chrome.blogspot.com/2011/06/live-updates-on-first-chromebook_07.html

[G] A new stable release of Chrome: safer and snazzier

Posted: 07 Jun 2011 01:49 PM PDT

Google Chrome Blog: A new stable release of Chrome: safer and snazzier

Today's new stable release of Chrome brings improvements in security, privacy, and graphics to Chrome's 160 million users.

Chrome is now more secure, thanks to enhancements to our Safe Browsing technology. In addition to protecting you from certain malware and phishing websites, Chrome now warns you before downloading some types of malicious files. We've carefully designed this feature so that malicious content can be detected without Chrome or Google ever having to know about the URLs you visit or the files you download.

Chrome also now gives you more control over the data that websites store on your computer. This includes Flash Player's Local Shared Objects (LSOs), which were previously only manageable using an online settings application on Adobe's website. We've worked closely with Adobe to integrate Flash LSO deletion directly into Chrome, making it easier for you to manage your online privacy.

Finally, Chrome's graphics capabilities continue to improve. This release includes support for hardware-accelerated 3D CSS, which means you'll get a snazzier experience in some web pages and web apps that choose to implement 3D effects. To see hardware-accelerated 3D CSS in action, check out this Chrome Experiment on Windows Vista / Mac OS X 10.6 or above, featuring clips from Aardman Studio's "Shaun the Sheep." In this simple experiment, you can rotate the video, scale it up and down, toggle the reflection on and off, and activate a rotating carousel of videos. Of course, you can also just enjoy the animated antics of a few funny animals.




As always, Chrome users will be automatically updated to this new version of Chrome in the coming days. As Chrome continues executing on its six-week release schedule, we've got many more improvements coming your way. Check back in a few weeks for our next beta channel release!

Posted by Adrienne Walker, Software Engineer
URL: http://chrome.blogspot.com/2011/06/chrome-12-safer-and-snazzier.html

[G] Faces of Gmail: Hareesh Nagarajan

Posted: 07 Jun 2011 10:28 AM PDT

Official Gmail Blog: Faces of Gmail: Hareesh Nagarajan

Posted by Kathleen Chen, Consumer Operations

In this edition of "Faces of Gmail," we'll introduce you to Hareesh Nagarajan who balances managing datacenters with improving his golf game.



What's your role on the Gmail team?
I am the tech lead for part of Gmail's backend infrastructure. Gmail has lots of datacenters to support hundreds of millions of users. We try to balance out these users in a way that will ensure that a good experience and run our datacenters at maximum efficiency. You could say that we like having our cake and eating it too: the software we've written tries to come up with a fine balance between keeping both our users and our datacenters happy.

What did you do before joining Google?
Google is my first full-time gig. Before Google, I went to graduate school at the University of Illinois at Chicago where I lived above a piano bar. Before Chicago, I went to college in Bangalore. I wrote a bunch of software that no one uses (including me!). I did give my creations memorable names though: I built a text editor called "Save Trees," an instant chat messenger called ionicChat (after the ionic bond in chemistry), and an assembler called "miASMa." I was also active in the local quizzing circuit. I think I raked up about 40,000 INR in prize money in those four years.

What do you do when you're not working on Gmail?
I've been playing golf for nearly two years now. I'm not very good, but I've been seeing improvements in my game. Since I like data and statistics, I try and collect everything that I can when I'm playing. The data I've collected so far says that I've pared or bogey one in three holes in 2010, but so far in 2011 I've improved to one in two holes. Hopefully there are more big improvements to come. Golf is a hard game: errors propagate. I've tried to analyze why tennis has fewer unique winners than golf on my blog. Apart from golf and occasional blogging, I also like writing software (in a few hours) that empowers people. For example, I built pravaas.org to provide high quality mentorship and advice to any student for free, and I built tweetandbeat.com to track real time updates for the keyword cancer. You can follow my updates and my photos from my phone on twitter.com/hnag.



How do you get your workday started?
I come in at about 10:00 in the morning. I check system dashboards to make sure that Gmail users are happy, that our datacenters are running cool, and that I haven't broken anything from the previous day. I usually do all this while eating cereal. I buy cereal boxes (Kashi Autumn Wheat) by the dozen from Amazon. Folks who enter my cubicle at the start of my cereal cycle are shocked to find 12 boxes of cereal right next to my desk and ask, "Are you going to eat all that cereal?" to which I say, "Well yes, would you like some?".

Photos by Cody Bratt, Google Talk team
URL: http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2011/06/faces-of-gmail-hareesh-nagarajan.html

[G] Music Tuesday: Battles, Vetiver and the power of CANADA

Posted: 07 Jun 2011 07:01 AM PDT

YouTube Blog: Music Tuesday: Battles, Vetiver and the power of CANADA

This week, Coldplay returns with a brand new album, Duncan Sheik covers '80s classics, Youssou N'Dour celebrates reggae, Branford Marsalis keeps jazz vital and country star Randy Travis celebrates 25 years in music. But we first turn our attention to a math-rock supergroup some had written off after they lost their lead singer -- until their new album landed on critics' laps, four years after their lauded debut.

Battles curate the YouTube homepage
Battles' 2007 debut Mirrored still amazes with its precise shards of sound and wholly formed aesthetic. It integrated electronics and rock instrumentation into such a seamless whole that some hailed the band as the future of rock — and avant-garde vocalist Tyondai Braxton as its voice-manipulating headman. Braxton's departure from the band left doubt about their future, but four years after their lauded debut, they're back: sans Braxton, but full of sonic innovation and a bevy of guest vocalists. Gloss Drop is an engrossing listen, and it gains in texture with contributions from Gary Numan (yes, the man behind the '80s classic "Cars"), Kazu Makino of Blonde Redhead, Chilean producer and vocalist Matias Aguayo and Yamantaka Eye of Japanese rockers the Boredoms. Battles bring their heady, wonky, original aesthetic to the homepage today, choosing their favorite videos and debuting a new version of their video for "Ice Cream."



The Power of CANADA
Battles are likely to gain fans on the strength of their new video, and they have the amusingly-named Spanish video director collective CANADA to thank for that. The team features three directors: Luis Cervero, Nicolas Mendez and Lope Serrrano. After spending years as the go-to videographers for Spain's indie rock artists, CANADA gained a massive following from their provocative video for El Guincho's "Bombay." El Guincho has a growing U.S. fan-base, and his global ghetto pop/electronic sound mashed perfectly with the directors' aesthetic: bawdy (which has earned their videos more than a few age restrictions), comic and flooded with images that often find their power in rapid-fire juxtaposition. Their videos poke fun but also celebrate everything from bad '70s flicks and European art films to Carl Sagan. They seem to have an endless storehouse of images at their fingertips, and their editing borders on revelatory. We share some of their best work today on youtube.com/music.



Vetiver "Wonder Why?"
They're transplanted San Franciscans (native to North Carolina), friends of freak folk luminaries Devendra Banhart and Joanna Newsom, and willing slaves to harmony and twang. Vetiver make the kind of urban roots music that feeds people looking for organic, unprocessed music in our highly digitized age. Check out the brand-new video from their upcoming album, premiered on youtube.com/music today. It takes a city's inanimate landscape and brings it to life; watch as sandwich carts mouth the words to the song and buildings blink their windows in time.



Sarah Bardeen, Music Community Manager, recently watched "J Rocc - Stay Fresh."


URL: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/youtube/PKJx/~3/wjQykm-QJSc/music-tuesday-battles-vetiver-and-power.html

[G] Introducing appointment slots in Google Calendar

Posted: 07 Jun 2011 06:48 AM PDT

Official Google Enterprise Blog: Introducing appointment slots in Google Calendar

Posted by Irene Chung, Software Engineer

(Cross-posted on the Gmail Blog.)

Google Calendar is an essential tool for organizing your time and sharing your schedule with friends and coworkers. But what about letting others know about your preferred availability? Likewise, when you look at a business's online calendar, do you wonder why you can't just book an open slot instead of remembering to call during regular business hours? Now, with appointment slots in Google Calendar, any individual or business can manage appointment availability online 24/7.

Creating appointment slots

To get started, set up blocks of time you'd like to offer as appointment slots. Simply click anywhere on your calendar and then on "Appointment slots." From there, create a single block of time or automatically split a larger block of time into smaller appointment slots.


Every Google Calendar has its own personal appointments sign up page; you can embed it on your website or give the URL directly to friends and clients. You can find the URL for your appointment page at the top of the set-up page, which you can access via the Edit details link.


Signing up for an appointment slot

When someone visits your sign up page, their calendar is overlaid for convenience and they can sign up directly for any available appointment slot. When they sign up, Google Calendar conveniently creates a new shared event on both of your calendars.


At Google, many people are already using appointment slots to manage their office hours. We're starting to roll it out widely today, and appointment slots should be available for everyone within the next few days.
URL: http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2011/06/introducing-appointment-slots-in-google.html
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