We’re excited to announce we’ve acquired Slide, a social technology company with an extensive history of building new ways for people to connect with others across numerous platforms online.
For Google, the web is about people, and we’re working to develop open, transparent and interesting (and fun!) ways to allow our users to take full advantage of how technology can bring them closer to friends and family and provide useful information just for them.
Slide has already created compelling social experiences for tens of millions of people across many platforms, and we’ve already built strong social elements into products like Gmail, Docs, Blogger, Picasa and YouTube. As the Slide team joins Google, we’ll be investing even more to make Google services socially aware and expand these capabilities for our users across the web.
While we don’t have any detailed product plans to share right now, we’re thrilled to welcome Max and his very talented team to Google, and we can’t wait to work together to give people more and better tools to communicate and connect.
About Me
Friday, August 6, 2010
Thursday, August 5, 2010
The 2010 Google Faculty Summit
Last week, we held our sixth North American Computer Science Faculty Summit at our Mountain View headquarters. About 100 faculty members from universities around the world attended the summit, which focused on security, cloud computing and the social web.
Included in the agenda were presentations by Eric Grosse on security at scale, Ulfar Erlingsson on cloud computing and software security, Betsy Masiello on engineering private spaces online, and Andrew Fikes on “planetary-scale” storage systems in the cloud. Andrew Tompkins also moderated a panel on the future of the social web. Alfred Spector, VP of Research and Special Initiatives, talked of “prodigiousness” in his discussion of the potential of cloud computing. He noted that the network underlying the Internet is predicted to carry a zetta-byte (1021) per year, which translates to 32 KB/sec for 1 billion people. You can see a more complete list of the topics and panels on the Faculty Summit site.
In his closing talk last Friday, Vint Cerf spoke about the “Future of the Internet.” Among his topics were the challenges in migrating from IPv4 to IPv6, which has a much larger address space than IPv4. This results from the use of a 128-bit address, whereas IPv4 uses only 32 bits. We will soon exhaust the IPv4 address space, so migration is imminent, and complex.
Vint also discussed the great potential in implementing an “Internet of things,” which refers to a network of everyday objects. Imagine that you’re traveling, and receive a text message informing you that the temperature in your wine cellar has increased to a level that can damage the wine. You then start an app on your smartphone that interfaces with the cellar’s temperature control system to bring the level down. That’s just one possible application as we connect more and more of our personal and home electronics to the Internet.
Over on the Research Blog, we’ve posted deeper dives on a few of the talks—on cloud and security, cloud computing and the social web. Visit the research site for videos of the plenary talks and presentations. And if you have questions, please add them to our Moderator page and we’ll be glad to answer.
Included in the agenda were presentations by Eric Grosse on security at scale, Ulfar Erlingsson on cloud computing and software security, Betsy Masiello on engineering private spaces online, and Andrew Fikes on “planetary-scale” storage systems in the cloud. Andrew Tompkins also moderated a panel on the future of the social web. Alfred Spector, VP of Research and Special Initiatives, talked of “prodigiousness” in his discussion of the potential of cloud computing. He noted that the network underlying the Internet is predicted to carry a zetta-byte (1021) per year, which translates to 32 KB/sec for 1 billion people. You can see a more complete list of the topics and panels on the Faculty Summit site.
In his closing talk last Friday, Vint Cerf spoke about the “Future of the Internet.” Among his topics were the challenges in migrating from IPv4 to IPv6, which has a much larger address space than IPv4. This results from the use of a 128-bit address, whereas IPv4 uses only 32 bits. We will soon exhaust the IPv4 address space, so migration is imminent, and complex.
Vint also discussed the great potential in implementing an “Internet of things,” which refers to a network of everyday objects. Imagine that you’re traveling, and receive a text message informing you that the temperature in your wine cellar has increased to a level that can damage the wine. You then start an app on your smartphone that interfaces with the cellar’s temperature control system to bring the level down. That’s just one possible application as we connect more and more of our personal and home electronics to the Internet.
Over on the Research Blog, we’ve posted deeper dives on a few of the talks—on cloud and security, cloud computing and the social web. Visit the research site for videos of the plenary talks and presentations. And if you have questions, please add them to our Moderator page and we’ll be glad to answer.
Google Tags makes it easy as pie to find local customers
This is the latest post in our series about Small Business and the real-life entrepreneurs who are using Google tools to fuel their success. Previous posts have illustrated the possibilities enabled by online resources like Google Places, Google Apps, Google AdWords and YouTube. Starting today, we invite small business owners to check out our new Google Small Business Blog for more inspiring stories like these and the latest news, updates and tips to help you grow your business. -Ed.
To characterize the life of a small business owner as “busy” would be a bit of an understatement. You get up early to set up shop, spend all day on your feet working with customers and burn the midnight oil balancing expenses—then do it all over again the next day. It’s no wonder you sometimes feel you’d have to be superhuman (or be able to stop time) just to keep up!
With so many hats to wear, we know you don’t have much time to play the role of marketer. But attracting potential customers is an essential part of growing your business. With that in mind, we designed Google Tags, our newest online advertising offering through Google Places that lets you personalize your Google.com and Google Maps listing with specific information such as a coupon, video, website, menu, reservations, photos or a custom message.
Susan Holt, the co-founder of a recreational cooking school in Washington, D.C., has been using Google Tags, and I’ve asked her to share her experience:
To characterize the life of a small business owner as “busy” would be a bit of an understatement. You get up early to set up shop, spend all day on your feet working with customers and burn the midnight oil balancing expenses—then do it all over again the next day. It’s no wonder you sometimes feel you’d have to be superhuman (or be able to stop time) just to keep up!
With so many hats to wear, we know you don’t have much time to play the role of marketer. But attracting potential customers is an essential part of growing your business. With that in mind, we designed Google Tags, our newest online advertising offering through Google Places that lets you personalize your Google.com and Google Maps listing with specific information such as a coupon, video, website, menu, reservations, photos or a custom message.
Susan Holt, the co-founder of a recreational cooking school in Washington, D.C., has been using Google Tags, and I’ve asked her to share her experience:
My friend Susan Watterson and I had been friends for about 20 years and were both instructors at the same culinary institute when we saw a unique market opportunity and decided to go for it. Our employer, who was primarily focused on professional training for students and one-off recreational cooking classes for the public, was constantly turning away business; their business model relied on a paper catalog of printed classes that were advertised months in advance, so they had little flexibility to accept new bookings. But after watching an estimated $40,000 worth of business walk out the door one week because they couldn't accommodate the size or timing of these types of corporate events, Susan and I decided we could flip that model and create a cooking school specifically tailored to recreational learning and private events.
With no previous business experience, we began the long and eye-opening process of starting our own company. Along the way, we learned more about raising capital, leasing property and complying with design and construction codes than we ever could have imagined. Our vision and passion kept us going, and in November 2008, CulinAerie opened its doors in a 3,800 square foot space in downtown D.C.
A strong website with the built-in functionality to register and pay for classes online was part of our strategy from the start, but we soon realized we needed a way to generate more awareness. Part of that effort included building out our Place Page on Google Places to gain more visibility and make sure people looking for us online had basic information like our phone number and location.
Then in May 2010, we heard about Google Tags, a super-easy way to do online advertising that wouldn’t require any ongoing work. We already knew through our website analytics data that our free business listing on Google.com and Google Maps was bringing in lots of customers—about 60 percent, in fact. So the ability to include a little yellow tag to help our listing stand out against the competition was a no-brainer—and at $25 a month, it wouldn’t break the bank. At first, we used the website tag to drive more traffic to our website, but then we decided to push the envelope and switched to a coupon tag that promoted a discount on our classes.
Since setting up Google Tags, the clickthroughs on our listing have increased a whopping 400 percent! Class bookings also jumped 9 percent because of the coupon tag, and our 24 contract instructors are busier than ever teaching classes on baking and entertaining for occasions like team-building events, birthday parties and summer bridal showers.
Now, while we’re concentrating on the important things that ensure our clients have a good time at our school—like creating new concoctions for the cocktail mixing course—our Tags are working for us and helping us connect with new local customers online. I guess you could say it’s been a recipe for success.
You can count the number of books in the world on 25,972,976 hands
Ever wonder just how many different books there are in the world? After some intensive analysis, we've come up with a number. Standing on the shoulders of giants—libraries and cataloging organizations—and based on our computational resources and experience of organizing millions of books through our Books Library Project and Books Partner Program since 2004, we’ve determined that number.
As of today, we estimate that there are 129,864,880 different books in the world. That's a lot of knowledge captured in the written word! This calculation used an algorithm that combines books information from multiple sources including libraries, WorldCat, national union catalogs and commercial providers. And the actual number of books is always increasing.
Ultimately, it is truly incredible to fathom the depth and breadth of published works out there in the world. To find out how we calculated this number (no, we didn’t count them on our fingers:), check out the Google Books blog.
As of today, we estimate that there are 129,864,880 different books in the world. That's a lot of knowledge captured in the written word! This calculation used an algorithm that combines books information from multiple sources including libraries, WorldCat, national union catalogs and commercial providers. And the actual number of books is always increasing.
Ultimately, it is truly incredible to fathom the depth and breadth of published works out there in the world. To find out how we calculated this number (no, we didn’t count them on our fingers:), check out the Google Books blog.
Wednesday, August 4, 2010
Update on Google Wave
We have always pursued innovative projects because we want to drive breakthroughs in computer science that dramatically improve our users’ lives. Last year at Google I/O, when we launched our developer preview of Google Wave, a web app for real time communication and collaboration, it set a high bar for what was possible in a web browser. We showed character-by-character live typing, and the ability to drag-and-drop files from the desktop, even “playback” the history of changes—all within a browser. Developers in the audience stood and cheered. Some even waved their laptops.
We were equally jazzed about Google Wave internally, even though we weren’t quite sure how users would respond to this radically different kind of communication. The use cases we’ve seen show the power of this technology: sharing images and other media in real time; improving spell-checking by understanding not just an individual word, but also the context of each word; and enabling third-party developers to build new tools like consumer gadgets for travel, or robots to check code.
But despite these wins, and numerous loyal fans, Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked. We don’t plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product, but we will maintain the site at least through the end of the year and extend the technology for use in other Google projects. The central parts of the code, as well as the protocols that have driven many of Wave’s innovations, like drag-and-drop and character-by-character live typing, are already available as open source, so customers and partners can continue the innovation we began. In addition, we will work on tools so that users can easily “liberate” their content from Wave.
Wave has taught us a lot, and we are proud of the team for the ways in which they have pushed the boundaries of computer science. We are excited about what they will develop next as we continue to create innovations with the potential to advance technology and the wider web.
We were equally jazzed about Google Wave internally, even though we weren’t quite sure how users would respond to this radically different kind of communication. The use cases we’ve seen show the power of this technology: sharing images and other media in real time; improving spell-checking by understanding not just an individual word, but also the context of each word; and enabling third-party developers to build new tools like consumer gadgets for travel, or robots to check code.
But despite these wins, and numerous loyal fans, Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked. We don’t plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product, but we will maintain the site at least through the end of the year and extend the technology for use in other Google projects. The central parts of the code, as well as the protocols that have driven many of Wave’s innovations, like drag-and-drop and character-by-character live typing, are already available as open source, so customers and partners can continue the innovation we began. In addition, we will work on tools so that users can easily “liberate” their content from Wave.
Wave has taught us a lot, and we are proud of the team for the ways in which they have pushed the boundaries of computer science. We are excited about what they will develop next as we continue to create innovations with the potential to advance technology and the wider web.
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