Official Google Blog |
- Google Apps highlights – 12/3/2010
- This week in search 12/3/10
- On demand is in demand: we’ve agreed to acquire Widevine
- International tourists find the Polish seaside through Google AdWords
- Great advice from industry experts on building businesses on mobile
- Can we talk? Better speech technology with Phonetic Arts
| Google Apps highlights – 12/3/2010 Posted: 03 Dec 2010 03:42 PM PST 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. The Google Apps team had a nice Thanksgiving break, but that didn't slow things down one bit. Over the last few weeks we've introduced mobile editing in Google Docs, automatic typo correction, improvements to meeting scheduling and the ability for businesses, schools and organizations using Google Apps to access more than 60 additional applications from Google. Document editing in your mobile browser Google Docs has always offered a central place where you can find and edit documents in your computer's browser, and now English-language users can edit documents on the go from many Android and iOS devices including the iPhone and the iPad. Your mobile edits show up in near real-time for co-authors, and you can see their edits as they happen on your mobile device. As before, you can also edit spreadsheets from your mobile browser. Faster, more accurate typing in documents If you've never memorized all those pesky exceptions to the "I before E" spelling rule, you'll like the new AutoCorrect feature for documents, which can fix typos and format symbols like ¼ and © on the fly as you type. You can edit the text replacement list for your own habitual typos in the Tools > Preferences menu of Google documents.  Optional attendees in Google Calendar events On Monday we released a highly requested feature in Google Calender: the ability to invite optional attendees to appointments and meetings. Allowing non-critical attendees to be optional makes it easier to find convenient meeting times for key attendees, and helps everyone understand which meetings they really need to attend. Just click "Make some attendees optional" when creating an event to get started.  10 times more applications for Google Apps customers Until now, businesses, schools and organizations have only had access to a limited set of applications with their Google Apps accounts, including Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs and a few others. But customers gave us overwhelming feedback that they wanted to manage multiple phone numbers with Google Voice, publish their organization's blog with Blogger, find customers with AdWords, track industry news with Google Reader and much more. After extensive testing with pilot users, we've now made it possible for Apps customers to use more than 60 additional Google applications with their Google Apps accounts. This gives customers access to a tremendous amount of innovation that a typical office suite could never offer. Who's gone Google? Organizations all around the world are switching to Google Apps in droves. We're especially pleased that the U.S. General Services Administration has selected Google Apps for Government through a competitive request for proposal (RFP) process. This federal agency will be moving all 17,000 employees and contractors from its previous on-premises solution to Google Apps for modern, cloud-based email and collaboration tools. State and local governments are getting onboard with Google Apps, too. A warm welcome goes out to Panama City, Fla. and Larimer County, Colo.! This week we're also welcoming a flock of businesses that have recently "gone Google." Z Gallerie, Spyder, PlayPlanit.com, Medialocate, Flight Centre and Ray White have all moved to the cloud to help their employees become more productive with tools that save people time and hassles. I hope these updates help you and your organization get even more from Google Apps. For details and the latest news in this area, check out the Google Apps Blog.      |
| Posted: 03 Dec 2010 03:04 PM PST This is one of a regular series of posts on search experience updates. Look for the label This week in search and subscribe to the series. - Ed. It's the time of year when many of us begin our holiday shopping in earnest. Whether you're more into "Black Friday" or "Cyber Monday," many of us increasingly turn to the Internet and search engines to find the best prices, product reviews, gift guides and recommendations. This week, we made a number of improvements that should help make it easier than ever to find gifts for friends and family (or yourself!) from reputable merchants, whether you're out on your phone looking for a store, searching at home for an online merchant, or looking for a friend to get a recommendation. Place Search on mobile In October, we introduced Place Search, which helps you find local information by organizing websites around real world places. As you've probably experienced, local information is particularly useful when you're out and about and have only your phone to rely on. That's why we've worked to quickly bring Place Search to your mobile phone. Now when you search for [museums new york city] on your phone, you'll see the web result for Metropolitan Museum of Art along with comments and reviews about the place—all nicely organized in one cluster of information. If you want to call the museum or get directions, both are just one button click away.  More protection from disreputable merchants Last Sunday, the New York Times reported that a particular online merchant had deliberately abused customers in an attempt to increase his ranking on Google and other search engines. We immediately convened a team to look carefully at the issue. Our initial analysis pointed to this being an edge case and not a widespread problem, but nonetheless we developed an algorithmic solution and have already implemented it. The change currently impacts hundreds of merchants detected to provide an extremely poor user experience. You shouldn't notice any significant differences in your search results, except now you're even less likely to find these undesirable sites. You can learn more about this change and the thinking behind it in our blog post from Wednesday. Social sitelinks Usually when you search for a social site like Twitter or MySpace, you're looking for information from your friends and social network, like their tweets and profile pages. This week we added new social sitelinks to search results, giving you more direct access to content from your friends. A social sitelink includes your friend's name and profile photo, and it links to her content on a particular website. Social sitelinks are based on the same technology as Google Social Search; we use your social circle to identify relevant websites and user pages. To see social sitelinks in action, try a search for [twitter] or [youtube]. If you're not seeing social sitelinks, try creating a Google profile and adding links in your profile to other online social sites you belong to so we can build your social circle.  NBA Live Results We've offered sports scores in search results for a long time, but recently we've been working with partners to make sure you can always find the latest information. Last month hockey fans started finding live results from the NHL.com, and this week we've added basketball. With the season already underway, we worked with NBA.com to provide real-time game scores, schedules and standings information as part of NBA.com search results on Google. These results also include links for quick access to game previews, ongoing live updates, and game recaps to make sure you don't miss out on the latest NBA action.  Example searches: [nba], [cavaliers] The Google Beat We're back this week with another edition of the Google Beat. Check out this week's video to see what people were searching for this Thanksgiving, on Cyber Monday and beyond.     |
| On demand is in demand: we’ve agreed to acquire Widevine Posted: 03 Dec 2010 01:52 PM PST With rapidly improving broadband and wireless speeds, more powerful smartphones, and higher resolution screens on devices of all shapes and sizes, it's becoming easier than ever to watch video wherever you want, whenever you want. And while it's still fun to pull an old movie off the shelf and throw it in the DVD player, streaming is rapidly becoming the standard way for you to find the content you want to watch now. We've seen this on YouTube—where we get over 2 billion views every day—but it's much bigger than that, as proven by the increasing popularity of movie subscription services and tablets. Content creators and distributors are making huge strides in bringing us content in this way, but to do so, many require high-quality video and audio, secure delivery, and other content protection and video optimization technologies. With these tools in place they can easily and effectively give you access to the rich library of content you want to watch, with the immediacy you've come to expect. So we're pleased to announce that we've agreed to acquire Widevine. The Widevine team has worked to provide a better video delivery experience for businesses of all kinds: from the studios that create your favorite shows and movies, to the cable systems and channels that broadcast them online and on TV, to the hardware manufacturers that let you watch that content on a variety of devices. By forging partnerships across the entire ecosystem, Widevine has made on demand services more efficient and secure for media companies, and ultimately more available and convenient for users. We are committed to maintaining Widevine's agreements and will provide direct, quality support for their existing and future clients—and we plan to build upon Widevine's technology to enhance both their products and our own. We're excited to welcome the Widevine team to Google, and together we'll work to improve access to great video content across the web.     |
| International tourists find the Polish seaside through Google AdWords Posted: 03 Dec 2010 12:41 PM PST (Cross-posted on the Google Small Business Blog) Sebastian's parents handle reservations, property development and sometimes breakfast. Sebastian runs the advertising efforts for his parents' Villa, including Google AdWords. "When we first started our AdWords campaigns, we focused on Poland but we soon realized that there was increasing interest from our neighboring countries," says Sebastian. When he noticed an upward trend in drop-in visitors from other countries, he decided to launch campaigns across Poland's borders as well.  Villa Zdroj - courtesy of Marcin Matecki Photography According to Sebastian, the variety of outdoor activities combined with the relatively inexpensive cost of Polish tourism make Wolin a vacation paradise for Germans and Scandinavians. "Germans and Scandinavians were coming to Miedzyzdroje, but mostly staying in expensive five-star hotels," says Sebastian. "B&B's were never an option since they didn't know where to find them." So Sebastian made Denmark, Germany, Norway and Sweden his first international targets. The strategy proved correct: "We were one of the first Polish B&B's to create a website in English. When we targeted an AdWords campaign to these people, they started calling and booking reservations." As time went on, Sebastian noticed that Poland had become more and more accessible to Europeans due to an increase in flights to the area. To capitalize on this trend, Sebastian expanded his AdWords campaigns even beyond bordering countries. "With time we extended the campaign to the Great Britain and the Netherlands." says Sebastian. "Europeans tend to explore new places and travel extensively."  Sebastian with his family - courtesy of Marcin Matecki Photography Today, foreigners account for more than half of Villa Zdroj's guests. And Sebastian estimates that up to 60% of those international guests book Villa Zdroj because they found his AdWords ads. Thanks to his effective targeting, Sebastian now sells out all of the villa's rooms during peak summer travel season. He adjusts his ad campaigns to reflect availability: "In summer, we track vacancies and adjust our campaigns accordingly. We pause the campaigns if we're booked a few weeks out." In 2012, Poland will host the Euro Cup and Sebastian's dad is already getting ready for an influx of visitors. "My father is considering buying a big projector so everyone can watch the games together in the communal room," says Sebastian. "We're already excited to share the Polish seaside with more out of town visitors!" Learn more about Villa Zdroj Bed and Breakfast and Sebastian's success with online advertising in this short video (it's in Polish, but you can view captions).     |
| Great advice from industry experts on building businesses on mobile Posted: 03 Dec 2010 11:45 AM PST (Cross-posted on the Google Mobile Ads Blog) With hundreds of thousands of apps available for mobile devices, developers are all looking for advice on app design, business models, app discovery and user retention. The AdMob strategic partnership team has learned a great deal from our mobile publishers about what works on mobile. We've watched as many of them have climbed the app charts and built sustainable businesses on mobile. However, these developers spent a lot of time testing ideas, gaining insights from user feedback and iterating to build better apps, learning invaluable lessons along the way. For example, Arash Keshmirian, co-founder and CEO of Limbic Software, told us that simply changing the icon of their popular iPhone game TowerMadness and moving to a freemium model led to a 10x increase in downloads! Today, we're introducing a new Google Mobile Ads YouTube channel where developers can watch videos that will help them turn their great app ideas into thriving mobile businesses. We'll also feature videos to help advertisers start taking advantage of opportunities on mobile. Our first video is from Rovio Mobile Inc, makers of Angry Birds, a gaming app that has been downloaded more than 30 million times across 60 countries, 12 million of which are paid downloads. This game is easy to pick up but difficult to put down, and Rovio reports an average of 65 million minutes of game-play per day. We invited Peter Vesterbacka, "The Mighty Eagle of Rovio," to share insights into the creation of this mobile game and advice for developers on how to think about building a mobile business. We're inspired by the developers and companies we work with that have already made investments in mobile and hope that sharing these stories will encourage further growth in the mobile industry. Our thanks go out to the great team at Rovio for helping us put this video together. And we'll continue to update the Google Mobile Ads YouTube channel with mobile success stories from top developers as well as tips from industry experts. Don't forget to subscribe to be the first to see cool new videos.     |
| Can we talk? Better speech technology with Phonetic Arts Posted: 03 Dec 2010 09:37 AM PST In Star Trek, they don't spend a lot of time typing things on keyboards—they just speak to their computers, and the computers speak back. It's a more natural way to communicate, but getting there requires chipping away at a range of hard research problems. We've recently made some strides with speech technologies and tools that take voice input: for example, we launched Voice Search, Voice Input and Voice Actions for mobile phones, allowing you to speak web searches, compose emails by voice, ask your phone to play any song, and more. And last year we started automatically transcribing speech to produce captions on YouTube videos. But what about when the computer speaks to you—in other words, voice output? There are already places you can hear this in action today—for example, Google Translate "speaks" translated text in multiple languages, and you can listen to navigation instructions as you drive—but there's still a lot to do. That's why we're pleased to announce we've acquired Phonetic Arts, a speech synthesis company based in Cambridge, England. Phonetic Arts' team of researchers and engineers work at the cutting edge of speech synthesis, delivering technology that generates natural computer speech from small samples of recorded voice. There's a particular focus right now in the U.K. on technology and innovation, and we're delighted to be deepening our investment in the country with this acquisition. We already have a strong engineering center in London and look forward to welcoming Phonetic Arts to the team. We are excited about their technology, and while we don't have plans to share yet, we're confident that together we'll move a little faster towards that Star Trek future.     |
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