Google has always displayed a link on the homepage that bypassed country redirects: "Google.com in English" or "Go to Google.com", depending on the language. The link sent users to google.com/ncr (ncr=no country redirect), the pure flavor of Google that has all the new features and it's not biased towards the pages from a certain country.
Now the link to Google.com is also displayed below the search box so you can check the search results for the same query at Google.com. It's an useful feature, but Google also changes a cookie value and users are no longer redirected to the country-specific domain. Maybe a toggle link similar to the link to iGoogle and the classic homepage would be more useful.
This is part of a regular series of Google Apps updates that we post every couple of weeks. Look for the label “Google Apps highlights" and subscribe to the series. - Ed.
In the last couple of weeks, we’ve helped you personalize Gmail in new ways, made our applications speedier to use, brought text recognition and editing powers to Android phones, and given you a glimpse into the inner workings of a Google data center.
Customize Gmail with a favorite photo For a long while, Gmail has had themes so your inbox can reflect a bit of your personality. Now, you can set Gmail’s background to a photo from your computer or Picasa Web Albums. So if Gmail’s standard theme choices don’t quite float your boat, now we’re sure you can create a theme you’ll love.
Faster multitasking in Gmail with the Background Send Lab Features like nearly-instant search and integrated instant messaging help you save time in your inbox, but we’re always looking for new ways to speed up your experience in Gmail. On Monday we released a new feature in Labs called Background Send that can shave off a few seconds each time you hit “Send.” With this feature enabled, you can start working with other messages while your outgoing message is processed in the background without slowing you down. Give it a try from the Labs tab of Gmail Settings.
Streamlined file uploads in Google Docs On Monday, we sped up the Google Docs experience with improvements to file uploads. Now you can upload a whole folder at once, and if you use Chrome, Safari or Firefox, you can even drag and drop files from your desktop into the documents list or specific collections. You'll also see an upload progress window right in the documents list.
New Google Docs app for Android Thanks to a brand new Google Docs app for Android, it’s easier to browse, search, edit and share your documents right from your mobile phone. You can even create new documents by snapping a picture of text with your phone’s camera, and thanks to Google Docs’ optical character recognition (OCR) capabilities, words in the image are converted to text that you can continue editing from your phone or computer.
100 new fonts in Google Sites
With more design choices in Google Sites, you can create better looking sites that match the look and feel you want to achieve. This Wednesday, we added 100 new fonts to the text formatting options in Google Sites, so it’s easier to make more personalized pages for your organization, project, classroom or business.
Get a sneak peek into a Google data center Businesses, schools and individuals considering Google Apps often want to learn more about the technology and procedures in our data centers designed to help keep your data safe, secure and available whenever you want it. Since we can’t invite everyone to tour one of our data centers, we thought we’d pull the curtain back with an in-depth video:
Who’s gone Google? A hearty welcome goes out to over 50,000 businesses, schools and organizations that have switched to Google Apps in the last two weeks. Several have shared their stories on the Google Enterprise Blog, so you can learn about how Cinram has improved communication and collaboration across 20 manufacturing facilities in North America and Europe, how Gibson Sotheby's International Realty is empowering hundreds of mobile workers like never before, and how the states of Rhode Island and Missouri are making Google Apps available to more than a million students and 100,000 staff members.
I hope these product updates and customer stories help you and your organization get even more from Google Apps. For more details and the latest news, check out the Google Apps Blog.
Posted by Jeremy Milo, Google Apps Marketing Manager
This is part of a regular series of posts on search experience updates that runs on Fridays. Look for the label "This week in search" and subscribe to the series. - Ed.
This week, you can find what you’re searching for a little faster, whether it’s a recipe, the time of the royal wedding or a local prayer time.
More relevant predictions in Recipe View In the past, when you searched in Recipe View on Google, you’d see the same search predictions that you’d see on the main web results page, which wasn’t always helpful for specifically food-related searches. Now when you search in Recipe View, you’ll see more relevant search predictions. For example, typing [c] will give you predictions for [chicken] or [cake] versus [craigslist] or [cnn], and typing [co] will predict [cookies] or [coconut]—and maybe inspire you to make coconut cookies. This feature is currently available in English, with more languages and local delicacies to follow.
Rich snippets for prayer times Rich snippets are the brief descriptions you see beneath search results that summarize what's on a webpage and provide you with more information before you click on a site link. For example, if you search for [events], you’ll see a list of upcoming local events on the results page.
Now, in addition to rich snippets for events, reviews and people, you can find local prayer times quicker and easier in your results. For example, a search for Islamic prayer times in London will show prayer times and locations. As more sites around the world use rich snippets for prayer times, you’ll start seeing results for additional cities.
The technology is open for use by religious organizations from any faith, and is particularly useful for Islamic prayer times, which are measured according to the movement of the sun. If you have a site with prayer times, you can update your site using the rich snippets format specified in Google Webmaster Central.
Google Instant in Japan Searchers in Japan will now be able to see search predictions and results appear as they type. Google Instant will be available for everyone in Japan over the next few days, as well as for those typing in Japanese on other domains that currently support Google Instant.
Time for the royal wedding The highly anticipated royal wedding of Prince William and Catherine Middleton had many people setting their alarm clocks to watch the live broadcast from Britain—which meant figuring out exactly what time the ceremony would be in your local time zone. To make it easier to tune in at the right hour, searches related to the royal wedding displayed a box at the top of the results page with the time of the wedding in your local time zone; this info was available in 23 languages. Congratulations to the happy couple!
We’ve released the following improvements to Google Docs file uploads:
- Folder uploads that maintain the folder structure - An upload page that’s integrated into the Docs List - Settings that remember your conversion and OCR preferences - The ability to drag-and-drop files to the Docs List for upload
Release track: Rapid Release*
Editions included: Google Apps, Google Apps for Business, Government and Education
Languages included: All languages supported by Google Docs
How to access what's new: - Upload files and folders via the ‘Upload’ button in the upper left hand side of the Docs List. - The new upload window will display in the bottom right of your Docs List. - Set upload settings the first time you upload a file or via the drop down in the upload menu or the pop-up.
Note: Folder upload and drag-and-drop upload are only available on the latest versions of Chrome, Firefox, and Safari. You’ll need to first install an applet if you’d like to upload a folder in Firefox or Safari. Please be aware that these new features do not support the ability to select a language when converting a document via OCR or select visibility settings before upload. You can revert to the older version of the upload page by selecting ‘Basic’ from the ‘Upload’ menu.
From time to time we invite guests to post about topics of interest and we’re pleased to have Emily Limm join us for U.S. Arbor Day. Emily is the science director for the non-profit Save the Redwoods League and is studying the impact of climate change on the redwood forests of northern California. To raise awareness about the League’s research, she worked with Google Earth Outreach to model old-growth redwoods on Google Earth. In this post, Emily shares her ideas on how technology and citizen science can help scientific research. -Ed.
Today is U.S. Arbor Day, a holiday established 120 years ago to celebrate our often under-appreciated forests, which provide us with necessities like clean air and drinking water as well as small pleasures like shade for a summer’s day picnic or a beautiful place to hike with crunchy leaves underfoot. Arbor Day holds special meaning for me because I spend most of my time in the coastal redwood forests of California, working to protect the world’s tallest tree species.
Over the past few months, Save the Redwoods League and the Google Earth Outreach team have collaborated to create 3D models of the old-growth redwood forest in Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park in northern California, so you can now take a virtual hike among the ancient trees and cruise over towering treetops. Explore the park by activating the 3D trees layer in Earth (under 3D Buildings) and searching for [jedediah smith redwoods state park, ca]. Tilt your view angle toward the horizon to make the trees appear. You can download the KML file for the narrated tour about redwoods to view in Google Earth, or watch the video version below:
In order to protect redwoods in Jedediah Smith and elsewhere, my colleagues and I are working to collect data on geographic regions where the trees are currently thriving to determine how future forests will fare in our changing climate. A critical piece of our work is collecting and comparing field observations of redwoods across different climates, but we need more data to draw strong conclusions—and that’s where you come in.
Today, Save the Redwoods League is launching our citizen science project Redwood Watch, powered by iNaturalist.org, a platform for recording, organizing and mapping nature observations. By sharing a simple digital photograph of a redwood tree and the time and location where the picture was taken, you can help the League track and monitor the species. If you know of a redwood tree—perhaps in your own backyard or in a nearby park—you can use the free Redwood Watch iPhone application or your own camera to take a photo, add a comment and submit it online. iNaturalist stores your observation and, if geographical coordinates weren’t captured automatically, uses the Google Maps APIs to assign them to your photo. With your geolocated observation, we can zoom out and analyze your observation in the context of global environmental and climatic patterns.
An observation of a coast redwood submitted to the Redwood Watch on iNaturalist.org.
The more field observations Save the Redwoods League collects, the better we’ll understand what climate makes a healthy redwood today, and predict where the redwood forests of tomorrow will thrive. We hope to see you on the Redwood Watch.
Happy Arbor Day from Save the Redwoods League and Google Earth!
Note: There are plenty of parallel projects going on around the world, so if you don’t live near redwoods, consider participating in one of the other iNaturalist.org citizen science projects.
Posted by Emily Limm, Ph.D., Director of Science and Planning, Save the Redwoods League
Google Chrome 7 started to support folder uploading, but not many people used this feature until Google Docs enabled it. "We've added folder upload via the new Upload menu in the latest versions of Chrome, Firefox and Safari. The existing folder structure is preserved on upload which means that folders within folders will also upload and become collections within collections," explained Google.
Firefox and Safari users will have to install a Java applet to upload folders. These browsers don't have native support for uploading folders, but the Java applet has an important advantage: you can upload both folders and files simultaneously.
Google replaced the uploading page with a more intuitive interface. Files and folders are uploaded to the selected collection and you can check the progress in a new panel at the bottom of the page. Files are displayed immediately after they are uploaded, so you can quickly share them or edit them.
You can also upload files using drag and drop in Chrome, Firefox and Safari. It's faster and much easier, especially if you want to upload some files from the desktop. All these features are slowly rolled out, so you may not see them yet.
Google released a basic Android app for Google Docs that lets you upload files, in addition to viewing and editing your documents. The application doesn't add many features that aren't available in the mobile web app: you can quickly find files, share them with the phone contacts and create documents from photos. "The Docs app also allows you to open documents directly from Gmail. You can also add a widget to your home screen for easy access to three core tasks: jumping to your starred documents, taking a photo to upload, or creating a new document with one tap," informs Google.
Google Spreadsheets now lets you upload images and add them to your sheets. "From the Insert menu, select Image... Then, choose an image file to upload into your spreadsheet. With this feature, you can upload an image already stored on your computer, search for an image online, or add personal photos directly from one of your Picasa Web Albums."
Google Docs is now more about uploading and managing files and less about editing files, so the next logical step is to add file syncing.
Google added a new feature to the sidebar: patents search. You no longer have to visit Google Patents to search the full text of the U.S. patent corpus since you can just click "patents" in the vertical navigation menu. Here's an example.
It may seem like a minor improvement, but this shows that Google's specialized search engines will be available from the sidebar. At some point, you'll no longer have to visit Gmail to find a contact, Google Docs to find a file or Android Market to find an Android app.
Google Chrome 11 has been released and there are many interesting features to try:
1. Use the Speech Input API by visiting Google Translate and selecting "English" from the list of input languages. "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."
Google tests a similar feature for Web search:
2. A new interface that notifies users when popup windows are blocked. Here's a site that lets you test Chrome's popup blocker.
3. Type chrome://crashes in the address bar to see a list of the most recent crashes.
4. Delete multiple search engines from the tabbed settings page. Press Ctrl while clicking the search engines you want to delete.
5. A new Chrome 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," explained Google last month.
This is the latest in our series of YouTube highlights. Every couple of weeks, we bring you regular updates on new product features, interesting programs to watch and tips you can use to grow your audience on YouTube. Just look for the label “YouTube Highlights” and subscribe to the series. – Ed.
Music, Mother Earth, flash mobs and royalty were all celebrated on YouTube in the past two weeks. Read on for more details.
A front row seat to the royal wedding The much anticipated royal wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton is finally here, and you have a front seat. Tune into the Royal Channel, the official YouTube channel of the British Monarchy, on April 29 to see the entire wedding celebration live. The live stream will begin at 10:00am BST (9:00am GMT, 2:00am PT, 5:00am ET) on Friday, April 29, and will follow the wedding procession, marriage ceremony at Westminster Abbey and balcony kiss. The Royal Channel will also feature live blog commentary of the event to give timely updates and insights as the day unfolds. If you can’t watch the live event, footage will be shown in its entirety directly following the celebration and will be available in full on the site to view afterward.
From Brazil to the California desert, a celebration of music Earlier this year, we took on the task of capturing the festivity, passion and celebration of Brazil’s famed Carnaval. We live streamed six days of incredible festivities for the world, resulting in more than 11 million channel views to date. Continuing in that spirit of sharing world events more broadly, we helped expand the reach of California’s Coachella Festival by live streaming the event. YouTube streamed more than 65 bands and three days of music on three separate channels, generating more than 60 million views during live and re-broadcast events. If you missed the events, you can still check out the magic of Carnaval or your favorite artists’ Coachella performances at www.youtube.com/Carnaval and www.youtube.com/Coachella.
It’s easy being green In conjunction with Earth Day on April 22, we introduced YouTube Live Green, a guide to eco-living. With sponsor Garnier Fructis, we’ve curated videos on natural beauty tips, healthy menu options, recommendations on how to live a more sustainable lifestyle and other eco-friendly content to inform and inspire you. New videos will be featured each week from some of our top eco-friendly partners including Ehow, Planet Green, HGTV and National Geographic, so check back often!
This week in trends Some quick highlights from YouTube Trends:
T-Mobile's "Royal Wedding Entrance" is averaging around 1 million views per day! Last week it was among our most shared videos, and just two weeks after it was posted, it's clocked 13 million views
As excitement gears up worldwide for the royal wedding this Friday, we thought we'd take a look at how wedding frenzy for everything from flowers to fruitcake is manifesting itself online. Not only have searchers caught the matrimony bug, but savvy businesses around the world are capitalizing on the increased interest in the day with clever online ad campaigns.
We often tell marketers that “searchers are very engaged;” it now appears that the engaged are very searched. Searches for [royal wedding] have been steadily rising since the engagement announcement and have risen an additional 90% worldwide since the beginning of April as more details of Kate and William’s big day are revealed. Search volumes have boomed—from the [royal wedding carriage] (up 70 percent since it was announced in March), to Kate’s choice of coat at official appearances and the [royal wedding flowers]. Smart merchants have had plenty of opportunity to grow their wedding-related businesses online.
For example, a centerpiece of royal wedding coverage has been Kate’s sapphire engagement ring. Searches for [sapphire rings] are up almost 25 percent in 2011 compared to 2010, and jewelers have taken notice. U.S. retailer HSN saw huge sales of its various sapphire rings and other royal wedding memorabilia, including commemorative royal wedding coins. In fact, HSN had more than 350,000 impressions and over 20,000 clicks since its royal wedding online campaigns began in December 2010. Across the pond, Martine Wester Jewellers in Fulham, London, has seen sales of its £29 replica sapphire engagement ring skyrocket as much as 250 percent.
While many Londoners are leaving town and renting out their houses, scores of people outside the city are trying to get a front-row seat at the festivities: searches for [london vacation] are up more than 10 percent since the beginning of April. Virgin Atlantic Airways used online campaigns to promote its onboard street parties for passengers flying on the day of the royal wedding.
One of the oddest searches that turns out to be royal wedding-related is [fruitcake], which is up about 15 percent in the last 90 days in the U.S. and up 8 percent year over year worldwide. Turns out, fruitcake will be the official royal wedding cake flavor. If you weren’t lucky enough to score an invitation, you can still eat like a wedding guest thanks to clued-in bakeries around the country whose well-timed ads led to soaring fruitcake orders.
So settle in with your sapphire ring and fruitcake and tune in to the Royal Household’s YouTube channel to watch the whole event. And if anybody knows where you can actually buy one of those royal carriages, let us know.
Posted by Dan Schock, Google Retail Industry Director
Sometimes, the expressions on a person's face can mean much more than what they say. To help you stay in touch with your friends and family, we’re launching Google Talk with video and voice chat for Android phones.
You can now video or voice chat with your friends, family and colleagues right from your Android phone, whether they’re on their compatible Android tablet or phone, or using Gmail with Google Talk on their computer. You can make calls over a 3G or 4G data network (if your carrier supports it) or over Wi-Fi.
In your Google Talk friends list, a video or voice chat button will appear next to your contacts and you can simply touch the button to connect with them. Any text chats from the person you’re talking with will be overlaid on your phone’s screen so you can read them without having to leave the video. And, if you need to check something else, the video pauses automatically so you can go back to your phone’s home screen or another app. The audio will keep going even though the video has paused. Check out how this works:
Google Talk with video and voice chat will gradually roll out to Nexus S devices in the next few weeks as part of the Android 2.3.4 over-the-air update and will launch on other Android 2.3+ devices in the future. To learn more about using video and voice chat, check out our Help Center.
Post content Posted by Colin Gibbs, Product Manager and Wei Huang, Tech Lead
In the latest version of Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook®, users can now sync Outlook Notes with their Google Docs account. This means that your notes in Outlook are synchronized with your Google Docs account in the cloud, which in turn syncs them with any other device where you open the same Outlook profile. Things to note: - Only top-level notes are synced - Leave Docs as private, plain-text - Categories aren’t synced
Editions included: Google Apps for Business, Government and Education
How to access what's new: Existing installs will be updated automatically.
Note: Please be aware that synchronizing notes with Google Docs is currently an early, or Beta release feature, available with Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook® version 2.3 or later.
You can now find and edit your documents via a native Google Docs app for Android. Its features include:
- A widget that makes it easy to create new docs and access starred items - The ability to open documents directly from Gmail - OCR to create documents from photos - Document sharing with contacts on your phone
Editions included: Google Apps, Google Apps for Business, Government and Education
Languages included: US English Only
How to access what's new: Google Docs for Android is available for phones running Android 2.1+ and can be downloaded on Android Market.
You can now customize your Sites with over 100 new fonts. We’ve also added the ability to change font sizes and selectively apply styling to one page or an entire site.
Release track: Rapid Release*
Editions included: Google Apps, Google Apps for Business, Government and Education
Languages included: All languages supported by Google Sites
How to access what's new: To change font styling for the Site, click the ‘Manage site’ option in the ‘More actions’ drop down and select ‘Color and Fonts’ in the left-hand navigation bar.
Increasingly, people are using mobile phones to access information -- from email to web browsing to editing documents. Part of getting work done on the go is being able to easily access, edit and share content, which is why we’re happy to announce the new Google Docs app for Android.
With this new app it’s easy to filter and search for your content across any Google account, then jump straight into editing docs using the online mobile editors. The app also allows you to easily share items with contacts on your phone, right from within the app.
The Docs app also allows you to upload content from your phone and open documents directly from Gmail. You can also add a widget to your home screen for easy access to three core tasks: jumping to your starred documents, taking a photo to upload, or creating a new document with one tap.
And my favorite feature: Using the app and your phone’s camera, you can turn photos with text into editable Google documents with the power of optical character recognition (OCR). Just create a new ‘Document from Photo' or select the camera icon from the widget, and your converted document will appear in your documents list shortly after you snap the picture. You can also convert photos already stored on your phone by sharing them with the Google Docs app. OCR does a pretty good job capturing unformatted text in English but won't recognize handwriting or some fonts - stay tuned, it will get better over time!
The Google Docs app is currently available in English and works on Android 2.1+ phones. Try it out by scanning the QR code below or by visiting Android Market.
Let us know what you think of the new Google Docs Android app in our forum.
We’ve always jumped at the chance to bring the wonders of space a little closer to home. We’ve announced a Moon office, a Moon race and an expedition to Mars and brought many nooks and crannies of the universe to Google Earth—Sky, Moon, Mars, NASA images and a Hubble tour, to name a few.
On Friday, April 29, the crew of STS-134 will launch into space for the final mission of Space Shuttle Endeavour and we want to give you the chance to connect with them. On May 2, NASA Commander Mark Kelly and his crew will take your questions live from space on YouTube. PBS NewsHour will live stream the interview from its YouTube channel with veteran space reporter Miles O’Brien curating and asking your questions to the crew.
Starting today, you can visit www.youtube.com/pbsnewshour to submit a video or written question for the crew of STS-134 to be used in the live interview and vote for your favorite questions. You can also submit questions on Twitter with the hashtag #utalk2nasa. Don’t be shy—if you’re most curious about how to prepare for a spacewalk or wondering if the astronauts have a speech prepared for an extra-terrestrial encounter, this is your chance to find out. Here’s a video from PBS and Miles O’Brien to inspire you:
A few suggestions before submitting your questions:
Video questions are preferred, and should be a max of 20 seconds long
Speak clearly and film in a place with minimal background noise. Keep the camera as still as possible and ask the question directly to the camera
Look through NASA videosonYouTube about STS-134 to learn more about the mission and crew
You have until Saturday April 30 at midnight ET to submit your questions. The top ranked questions will be used in the live interview on Monday, May 2 at 2:15pm ET / 11:15am PT.
To get the full experience of STS-134, you can also watch a live stream of the shuttle launch on Friday April 29 starting at 3:47pm ET at www.youtube.com/pbsnewshour. Both the launch and the interview will be available for archived viewing.
Houston, we’re ready for lift-off.
Update 5/18: The interview time has been moved to 6:00am ET on Thursday, May 19, and can be seen on youtube.com/pbsnewshour.
Update 5/13: Pending the launch of STS-134 on May 16 at 8:56am ET, this interview will be conducted on Thursday May 19 at 7:24am ET. Check here for more info.
Update 4/29: NASA has scrubbed the launch attempt today due to a technical problem. We'll provide an update here on the live streamed launch and live interview, and you can follow NASA updates here.
Posted by Ginny Hunt, Public Sector Program Manager
The following features are now available to these domains: Gmail: - Ability to use ‘custom from’ feature from an unsecured connection on port 25. - Recipient suggestions labs graduating from Gmail labs. These two features prevent you from making two common mistakes: forgetting to include someone on an email, and sending a message to the wrong person with a similar name to the person you meant to email.
Google Docs: Pagination: Ability to see visual pages on your screen.
Google Documents list: Some small improvements to the interface have been made such as: - Improved dialog when deleting an item - ‘Owned by me’ section in the navigation pane - A Details/Column view and collapsible details pane - Ability to show or hide the preview pane on the right side
The following features are now intended for release to these domains on May 3rd: Gmail: - Background images in Themes - Longer label names
Release track: Scheduled*
Editions included: Google Apps, Google Apps for Business, Government and Education
Google Apps administrators now have the option to hide nicknames from the global address list/autocomplete. They can choose one of the following options:
- Show all email addresses - Hide nicknames - Hide the primary email address if the user has a nickname
Editions included: Google Apps, Google Apps for Business, Government and Education
Languages included: US English Only (Next Generation Control Panel)
How to access what's new: In the administrator control panel, select “Domain Settings”, then “User Settings” and “Contact Sharing” to access the new options.
Note: - The setting can take up to 24 hours to propagate. - Email addresses based on domain aliases will not be affected by this setting - they will continue to be hidden. - Email addresses that the user already has in their contact list will not be affected by this setting - they will continue to appear in autocomplete unless that contact is manually deleted. - This setting also controls whether nicknames will appear in Contacts search and Contacts details view.
Some small changes have been made to the Menu in Google Spreadsheets including: - New ‘Data’ option to better reflect the recently added filtering functionality - The Form menu is now in ‘Tools’ - Other minor changes
Release track: Rapid*
Editions included: Google Apps, Google Apps for Business, Government and Education
Languages included: All languages supported by Google Spreadsheets
How to access what's new: See the new Menu options when editing a spreadsheet.
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
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
From the presidential inauguration to the World Series to gorgeous cityscapes, for the past few years the GigaPan team at Carnegie Mellon University has been making it possible to explore breathtaking panoramic photos from around the world. GigaPan pioneered the hardware design that captures these photos and used innovative rendering techniques—similar to those of Google Maps—to create seamless transitions between photos, so people can pan and zoom through the image for an interactive and incredibly detailed photo experience.
Yesterday, the GigaPan team took their creative and technical skills to the next level with the GigaPan Time Machine, which brings this same kind of visual interactivity to video using the power of HTML5 and modern browser technology. Time Machine works particularly well on Google Chrome, thanks to its support for the latest HTML5 features and its stability architecture, which ensures it can smoothly run complex web applications without crashing. Time Machine is featured on the gallery of Chrome Experiments, a showcase of creative web applications submitted by developers around the world, and built using the latest web technologies.
The sophisticated cameras the GigaPan team uses for their photographs capture hundreds or even thousands of digital pictures and stitch them together to form an interactive panorama. With Time Machine, the cameras capture these image mosaics at regular intervals to create a video with hundreds of millions or even billions of pixels in each frame. The result is a video that viewers have the ability to zoom in on while it’s playing and see incredible detail.
With Time Machine, watching paint dry or grass grow is actually pretty cool. Take a look at a table full of potted plants grow and bloom into flowers. Zoom in to examine a specific plant or even a single leaf, or watch a caterpillar bite off a leafy green for lunch.
One of the critical elements of making Time Machine work was developing algorithms that allow the site to shift seamlessly from one portion of a video to another, to give people the experience of zooming and panning across a video of almost limitless resolution. This is particularly challenging because a seamless transition between videos requires starting a new video before the old one is finished, and then queueing it to align perfectly in time before the swap. The GigaPan researchers were able to accomplish this successfully using HTML5’s video tag feature, as well as by taking advantage of Chrome’s speed and stability to render the content smoothly as videos start and stop dynamically.
While you can’t fast-forward to the weekend (yet), head over to GigaPan’s Time Machine to zoom around in space and time with some of the samples, or create your own Time Warp by building your own animated tour through any of the sample videos.
Google Calendar Connector for Lotus Notes R1.2.3 is now available for download:
New connection test feature: Checks the tool’s and domain configuration. Also identifies any firewalls or proxy restrictions between the Domino server and the web. Bug Fixes: The connector tool was failing to return Notes busy time for user's where there was an apostrophe in the name.
Editions included: Google Apps for Business, Government and Education
This is part of a regular series of posts on search experience updates that runs on Fridays. Look for the label "This week in search" and subscribe to the series. - Ed.
This week, we sped up search by bringing more predictions to autocomplete and enabling Google Instant in the new Google Toolbar 7 for Internet Explorer. You’ll also find more personalization for the tools you use most in this new version of Toolbar, as well as in Google News, which we updated with new features to help you find more articles on topics you’re interested in.
More predictions in autocomplete One of the main ways autocomplete predicts searches while you type is by looking at the most popular searches on Google. This week we improved autocomplete for less common, longer and more complicated queries so that now we make predictions based on the last word or words of your search, getting you results even faster.
For example, previously you wouldn’t have gotten a prediction for [online store with underwater gadgets] since few people have searched for that exact query. But many more have searched for [underwater gadgets], so by looking at just the last part of what you’ve typed into the box, we can now generate a prediction for “gadgets.” You’ll see a dropdown box below the end of your search with predictions for just that word. This change is currently available for all google.com users in English.
Google Toolbar 7 with Toolbar Instant We continued to bring the speed of Google Instant to more places with this week’s launch of Google Toolbar 7 for Internet Explorer 8 and 9. Once you enable Instant under “Toolbar Options,” you’ll see search predictions and results appear as you type in the Toolbar search box. The new Toolbar also sports a cleaner look, and is more personalized—showing you only the tools you use the most. It’s currently available in English, but we’ll be bringing it to other supported languages over the next week. Visit www.google.com/toolbar to download the new Google Toolbar 7.
Automatic personalization and Recommended Sections in Google News Yesterday, the U.S. English edition of Google News got two new features: automatic personalization and a recommendations gadget. When logged into your Google account, you’ll now see stories based on your news-related web history. For instance, if you click on a lot of articles about baseball, we’ll make sure you get a chance to see breaking baseball news. In the new Recommended Sections in the right-hand column, you’ll see suggested topics to follow based on stories you’ve clicked before. Learn more about personalization features in the Help Center.
Finally, before you head off for the weekend, don’t forget to test your search skills and try solving today’s A Google a Day question at www.agoogleaday.com:
You can now create labels in Gmail with up to 225 characters. Previously the old limit was 40 characters, which wasn’t enough for some people who had switched from Outlook or accessed Gmail through IMAP with complex folder structures.
If you also use the Nested Labels Lab, Gmail will now shorten the label name so as not to clutter up your interface.
Release track: Rapid Release*
Editions included: Google Apps, Google Apps for Business, Government and Education
Languages included: All languages supported by Gmail
How to access what's new: Simply create a label in Gmail as normal.
Today, we’re celebrating Earth Day with an animated, interactive doodle on our homepage and events at Google offices around the world. At our headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., we’re holding an environmental fair for Googlers, complete with speakers and contests to strengthen Googlers’ green acumen, and a cookout using—what else—parabolic solar cookers (don’t worry, we’ll compost the leftovers).
Our campus garden in Mountain View
We’ve been carbon neutral since 2007 and—Earth Day or not—we’re always asking ourselves what we can do to make the world greener today than it was yesterday. This week, we launched a new website with many of the questions we’ve been asking over the years that have inspired our environmental initiatives. What can we do to make renewable energy cheaper than coal? How can we run a data center using 50 percent less energy? And what does it take to green our energy supply?
It’s questions like these that led us to install solar panels on our Mountain View campus in 2007—at the time, the largest corporate solar installation in the U.S. They’re also what made us decide to donate to Googlers’ favorite charities based on how often they self-power their commute, whether by bike or by pogo stick. We hope the new website helps you start asking bold questions that lead to innovative solutions to make the world a greener place.
In addition to our new site, we’ve had a busy few weeks continuing our green streak. We doubled down on greening our energy supply with our second power purchase agreement (PPA) in less than a year and made several new investments: at a solar photovoltaic plant in Germany (our first in Europe), and others in the largest wind farm and solar project in the world, bringing our total invested in clean energy to more than $350 million. While the investments won’t supply our operations with energy, we believe they make business sense and will spur development and deployment of compelling clean energy technologies.
This Earth Day, we’ll continue to ask ourselves what else we can do to bring us closer to true sustainability. We hope that you, and companies across the world, will be doing the same.
Google Apps administrators can now control whether or not to allow Calendar Labs to be used within their domain.
Editions included: Google Apps, Google Apps for Business, Government and Education
Languages included: All languages supported by the Admin Control Panel (Current version)
How to access what's new: In the Admin Control Panel, in “Settings” then “Calendar”, there is a new checkbox to enable/disable the use of Calendar Labs in Calendar.
Rodgers and Hammerstein weren’t kidding when they wrote what is now Oklahoma’s official state song. The gusts on the plains are fierce, which makes the Sooner State a great place to harness clean, renewable wind energy. Our commitment to greening our energy supply is also strong, which is why we’ve just signed a power purchase agreement (PPA) for wind energy—our second in less than a year—in Oklahoma.
The purchase is similar in size and structure to the agreement we signed last July for wind energy in Iowa, but this time we will be applying the power to our Mayes County, Okla. data center, which will be fully operational later this year. We’ve agreed to purchase all of the energy from NextEra Energy Resources’ Minco II wind facility in Oklahoma for the next 20 years, through Google Energy LLC, an entity that enables us to participate in the wholesale energy market. This 100.8 megawatt facility will be built as a direct result of our financial commitment and should be operational in late 2011.
We’ve made the commitment to be a carbon neutral company, and this purchase is part of our effort to minimize our impact on the environment. We’ve managed to reduce our energy consumption by over 50 percent by building highly energy-efficient facilities, but we know that efficiency alone isn’t enough to eliminate our carbon footprint. We’ve been exploring ways, such as this PPA, to reduce emissions further by increasing the amount of renewable energy we use to power our operations; we purchase high-quality carbon offsets for any remaining emissions.
If you’re interested in learning more about the whys and wherefores of our renewable energy purchases, we’ve just published a white paper (PDF) on the topic. Our hope is that by laying out our reasoning and methods we’ll make it easier for others in the industry to explore similar arrangements.
These purchases represent long-term, meaningful actions to reduce our carbon footprint and power our operations with clean electricity. Our infrastructure team will continue to seek similar opportunities globally as Google’s businesses continue to grow. As a company we hope that purchases like these, plus the additional $350 million we’ve invested in renewableenergyprojects, support the market and drive down the cost of clean energy. This will enable even more companies to invest in sustainable energy solutions.
Google launched a new version of its toolbar for Internet Explorer, but it's only for IE8 and IE9. Google Toolbar 7 focuses on search: there's support for Google Instant, the search box is a lot bigger and all the other features are available in the "More" drop-down.
There's a funny help center article titled "Where did my buttons go?" which answers the most obvious question after installing Google Toolbar 7.
"You may have noticed that some or all of your Toolbar buttons have disappeared with the latest update of Toolbar. The newest version of Toolbar helps you focus on the features you use the most, by removing your less frequently used buttons from view. If you've recently used a specific Tool on your Toolbar, its button will be pinned to the Toolbar so that you have easy access to it. Otherwise, all buttons are removed by default. Don't fret -- you can easily add your favorite features back to the Toolbar. Click More next to the search box and select the tool that you want to add. It'll automatically appear back on the Toolbar."
So Google Toolbar features are less discoverable, users lost some of their preferences, but the toolbar is less cluttered.
Google Instant integration is not enabled by default, but you can open the options dialog and check "Enable Instant for faster searching and browsing".
For some reason, Google also installs Google Toolbar 7.1 for Firefox, which is an old version of toolbar and doesn't include the new features. The extension can be uninstalled from Control Panel, not from Firefox.
