Experience our largest developer gathering online

Google I/O has come and gone, and we've been working to get all of the content online so those of you who couldn't be there could experience some of the excitement. At the conference, we shared our thoughts on the future of the web along with some exciting announcements including a developer preview of Google Wave, our new collaboration and communication tool, and Google Web Elements, which makes adding a bit of Google to your website or blog as simple as copy and paste. In addition, I/O featured 80+ sessions of technical insight, and over 140 companies joined our developer sandbox at the conference to showcase the web applications they've been building using Google developer products. 

All of these sessions, along with interviews and screencasts from many of the sandbox developers, are now available for you to watch online. Also, to get a real feel for the happenings on the conference floor at Moscone Center in San Francisco, check out our interactive map to watch session videos embedded in their actual conference rooms, or browse our photo gallery.

You can stay tuned for further updates on all of our developer products at the Google Code Blog and code.google.com. We had a great time getting to meet all of developers building amazing apps using Google technology and want to thank the 140 other companies that participated. See you next year!

Posted by Azhar Hashem, Google Developer Products and Mike Marchak, Google Code Team

The state of cloud computing

Earlier today at the Clift Hotel in San Francisco, we convened a group of journalists, partners and customers for a discussion on Google Apps in the enterprise. We're pleased to report that the "state of the cloud" is strong, and we've taken a number of steps to make it stronger.

At the event we discussed the growth of our business, introduced some new customers, and announced a feature that makes switching to Apps even easier. The Clift was a particularly appropriate venue because it's a member of the Morgans Hotel Group, which is deploying Google Apps to its 1,750 employees. JohnsonDiversey, a global provider of commercial cleaning and hygiene products and solutions, has also gone Google. Choosing Apps helped JohnsonDiversey migrate its 12,000 employees to one communications platform while lowering its IT costs and furthering its commitment to sustainability through the elimination of a number of energy-intensive email servers.

Of course, when big companies like Morgans move all their employees from Microsoft Exchange to Google Apps, there are often a few folks who aren't ready to give up Microsoft Outlook right away. To help them make the transition, today we also introduced Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook to our Premier and Education edition customers. It lets Outlook work easily with Apps and — like offline Gmail and the Google Apps Connector for BlackBerry® Enterprise Server — is another example of how we're making it dead simple to switch to Google Apps.

To read more about Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook and hear why 1.75 million companies are now running their business on Google Apps, check out the Google Enterprise Blog.

Posted by Matthew Glotzbach, Product Management Director, Enterprise team

Translating the world's information with Google Translator Toolkit

At Google, we consider translation a key part of making information universally accessible to everyone around the world. While we think Google Translate, our automatic translation system, is pretty neat, sometimes machine translation could use a human touch. Yesterday, we launched Google Translator Toolkit, a powerful but easy-to-use editor that enables translators to bring that human touch to machine translation.

For example, if an Arabic-speaking reader wants to translate a Wikipedia™ article into Arabic, she loads the article into Translator Toolkit, corrects the automatic translation, and clicks publish. By using Translator Toolkit's bag of tools — translation search, bilingual dictionaries, and ratings, she translates and publishes the article faster and better into Arabic. The Translator Toolkit is integrated with Wikipedia, making it easy to publish translated articles. Best of all, our automatic translation system "learns" from her corrections, creating a virtuous cycle that can help translate content into 47 languages, or over 98% of the world's Internet population.


Besides Wikipedia, we've also integrated with Knol, and we support common document types including Word and HTML. For translation professionals, we provide advanced features such as terminology and translation memory management.

For more information, check out our introductory video below. And if you're a professional translator or just a linguaphile, try Google Translator Toolkit for easier and faster translations. Be sure and let us know what you think.



Posted by Michael Galvez and Sanjay Bhansali, Google Translator Toolkit team

Design It Shelter Competition: Unleash your inner architect

Today, Frank Lloyd Wright's 142nd birthday, we're excited to announce the Design It: Shelter Competition. Held by the Guggenheim Museum and Google SketchUp, the competition is inspired by Wright's assignment for his apprentices at Taliesin: If you wanted to study to be an architect with Wright, you had to design and build a shelter in the desert outside of Phoenix, Arizona. Then you had to live and study in it.

Unlike the Taliesin assignment, the shelters in this competition are virtual. To enter, use Google SketchUp to design a small structure where someone might sleep and work. Your shelter should be created for a specific site anywhere in the world and geo-located in Google Earth. It also should conform to size constraints and must not include running water, gas or electricity. When you're done with your design, upload it to the Google 3D Warehouse, then fill out the submission form on the Guggenheim website. Check out the video below to learn more:



The deadline for submissions is August 23rd. You can find more details, including information about judging and prizes, on the the Google SketchUp Blog or the competition website. Good luck!

Posted by Aidan Chopra, SketchUp Product Evangelist

Picasa Web Albums stays big, gets faster

I use Picasa to manage the photos on my computer in part because it's the fastest way to manage all of the pictures I take. When I started working on Picasa Web Albums, the speed and responsiveness of the desktop program were a tough act to follow. Typically, when you move your photos from the desktop to the web, you have to choose between viewing high resolution photos that take forever to download, and tiny photos that lack any detail. For Picasa Web Albums, we thought we could do better.

We chose to show large images, the very biggest we can fit into your browser window. If you open up a slideshow or full-screen view, we can fill your entire monitor. But it wasn't snappy enough for us, so we had a choice to make: either use smaller images, make the Internet faster, or make our code smarter. We think large images are important, because seeing a photo's little details can make a big difference, and as much as we wanted to, making the whole Internet faster was a little impractical in the short term. So we went deep into the code and gave it a thorough tune-up.

The results, I hope, speak for themselves. Take a look at any album or slideshow on Picasa Web (here's one of mine) and you should notice that browsing photos is significantly faster. Give full-screen mode a try to see even bigger photos. If you've got a reasonable connection to the Internet, you should be able to hold down one of the arrow keys and zip through the entire album at a pretty good clip, flip-book style. Of course, while you could zoom past entire albums at ludicrous speed, we hope you'll enjoying spending your time looking at the photos themselves, rather than navigating between them.

Posted by Shawn Brenneman, Software Engineer