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Sessions and snacks at Google I/O
May 30, 2008
Posted by Andrew Bowers, Product Manager
We hosted
Google I/O
at the Moscone Center in San Francisco this week, with 3,000+ developers in attendance. They took advantage of nearly
100 in-depth technical sessions
, on-site massage therapists, and 3,500 pounds of assorted snacks (including 395 pounds of M&Ms and 190 pounds of Gummi Bears).
While we can't embed snacks or massages directly into this browser -- we're hoping the
Gears
team will make this possible next year -- presentations will be posted to
Google Code
shortly. In the meantime, feel free to check out the Google I/O keynote:
Happy birthday,
Google
Gears!
May 28, 2008
Posted by Chris Prince, Software Engineer
It has been a year since the launch of Google Gears, and we wanted to offer a glimpse into what's changing, and what's ahead.
First of all, to better reflect the open nature of this project, we've decided to rename ourselves. Henceforth, the project will be simply "Gears." We want to make it clear that Gears isn't just a Google thing. We see Gears as a way for everyone to get involved with upgrading the web platform.
Our first year focused on offline-enabling applications, but that was only the beginning. Our broader goal has always been to close the gap between web apps and native apps by giving the browser new capabilities. There is no shortage of web application pain points to be addressed! In its second year, Gears will begin to tackle some of these problems.
On the applications front, there have been a number of exciting developments. Today, MySpace is launching enhanced functionality for MySpace mail using Gears. They are using the original
Gears Database API with Full Text Search
to enable fast and easy search and sort capabilities. The latest build of WordPress also integrates Gears, to improve performance, and to let users manage their blogs offline. And as many of you know, the Google Docs team added
offline capabilities
just a few weeks ago.
Gears remains a completely open source project. We
strongly support web standards
, and we continue to work with the W3C and WHATWG committees to help define standards for browsers.
Finally, we want Gears to be available to everyone, regardless of platform or browser. To that end, we are currently adding Firefox 3 and Safari support. And Opera is working to support Gears on both desktop and mobile. These new platforms will nicely complement our current set: Internet Explorer and Firefox, across Windows, Mac, Linux, and even Windows Mobile.
We're very excited about our progress this past year, and we have even bigger plans for 2008. All of you are welcome to
jump in
and join our fledgling community -- we're helping to push the web forward, and it's a lot of fun! :)
Mini Hear, Mini Do
May 27, 2008
Posted by Cyrus Mistry, Product Manager, Google Enterprise
The
Google Mini
has been making its way
across the globe
, reaching
thousands of businesses
that have taken to our little blue box, and along the way picking up suggestions for improvement from devoted users. As a result we've just introduced to the Mini three greatly requested features that can make search inside businesses even more powerful. Finding the most up-to-date and authoritative document within your company has never been easier now that you can search for documents filed in shared drives and weight documents by date or value. We've also added support for six new languages (Basque, Catalan, Galician, Greek, Hungarian, and Polish).
We're listening, so keep those suggestions
coming
.
Read more about the new Mini features on the
Google Enterprise Blog
.
Treasure Hunt - week 3
May 25, 2008
Posted by Phillip Grasso, Manager, Engineering/Operations
We're now entering the third week of Google's Treasure Hunt competition, a puzzle contest designed to test your knowledge of computer science, networking, and low-level UNIX trivia. Last week
we posted the second puzzle
. This week's puzzle is set to be released on Tuesday, May 27 at 10 a.m. PDT. We'll also be featuring our brand-new San Francisco office along with it.
We'll be giving out a few prizes for the fastest contestants to complete each question. There will also be a grand prize for the contestant who correctly answers all four questions in the shortest cumulative time (time is defined as the time between the question's release and the submission of the correct answer). The previous puzzles will still be accessible off of the
main page
.
The treasure is within reach, so grab yer shovels and keep on diggin', mateys!
San Francisco office rides the wave
May 23, 2008
Posted by Todd Curtiss, Director of Engineering, Site Reliability (SRE)
San Francisco has been attracting freethinking writers, artists, instigators, and entrepreneurs for more than 150 years. The people who built, experienced, and created this diverse place have all shared a passion for innovation and extending beyond the conventional. San Franciscans kicked off the gold rush and made the first pair of
jeans
, received the
first transcontinental telephone call
in 1915, came together for the
Summer of Love
and the
original Burning Man
, and played a major role in the dot-com and Web 2.0 booms. The City always seems to blaze new trails.
Sure, our summers are cool and foggy, our hills are steep, and our streets are twisty. But SF Googlers think this is the perfect place to work. Earlier this year, our own "Father of the Internet"
Vint Cerf
launched the office by inspiring the assembled engineers to think about today's challenges at scale, speaking about the challenges of interplanetary IP communication, the future of the Internet, and who's to blame for IPv4's limited address space (Vint says it's him).
We in the
SF office
contribute to a broad cross-section of the Google world in a number of ways: we write software for managing big computing clusters and keeping them efficient; we analyze vast piles of data to understand how the web works; we engineer reliability, scalability, and security into the apps many people rely on; we share our tools and methods with the open source community; we create internal productivity apps to support our engineers.
And that's just in engineering. The SF office also supports ad agency customers, local markets and classifieds. We're home to our philanthropic arm
Google.org
, and we make time to participate in community volunteer programs through our employee-created Google Cares-SF program. We have an active green committee, access to the GFleet car-share program, and we're the first plastic-bottle–free office among all of the Googleplexes.
Here's what some of us have to say about working here:
While we may be new, Google SF is growing fast. With close proximity and access to Mountain View and the rest of the Silicon Valley, we span the best of worlds: local and global, campus and city, 'burbs and urban, highways and dirt roads. We're always looking for talented and passionate people to
join our team
, so if you want to be part of building the next big thing, we'd love to hear from you.
And in case you need another reason to come visit us in Shaky Town,
Google I/O
, our largest developer conference to date, takes place at the
Moscone Center
on May 28-29. It's not too late to
register
-- we hope to see you there.
Exploring "las oportunidades" for small businesses
May 22, 2008
Posted by Carolina Shea, AdSense Account Strategist
Last week, I flew from our Phoenix office to Washington, D.C. to deliver our first U.S. seminar for small business. It's a simple and straightforward presentation about how Google tools can help small businesses establish a presence online, work more collaboratively and efficiently, and earn money from their websites through our
AdSense
program.
If you were able to catch a glimpse of our
testimony
in front of the U.S. House Small Business Committee a couple of weeks ago, you'll know that helping small businesses thrive on the Internet is something we're really passionate about. And we thought we should share the training first with one of the most entrepreneurial communities in the U.S.: Hispanic Americans. Working with the enthusiastic support of the
U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce
and the
League of United Latin American Citizens
, I'm happy to say that this first session is in Spanish. We call it "Google 101 para pequeñas empresas."
Check out the seminar in this video (in Spanish, with an introduction in English), or have a look at our small business resource page (
in English
) and (
en Español
).
Google Sites now open to everyone
May 21, 2008
Posted by Andrew Zaeske, Engineering Manager
A few months ago we
launched Google Sites
exclusively as part of Google Apps for companies and organizations that wanted to use the service on their own domains. Now we've made it easy for anyone to set up a website to share all types of information -- team projects, company intranets, community groups, classrooms, clubs, family updates, you name it -- in one place, for a few people, a group or the world. You can securely host your own website at
http://sites.google.com/[your-website]
and add as many pages as you like for free.
Getting started with
Google Sites
is easy. You can create different types of pages from scratch with the click of a button, and you can embed documents, calendars, photos, videos and gadgets directly into those pages. Similar to Google Docs, built-in editing tools allow for popular text and formatting changes to be made in a straightforward, WYSIWYG manner. Once your site is up and running, inviting people to edit or view your content is as simple as entering in their email address (of course, you can change access levels at any time). And you (or anyone who has editing privileges) can add or edit information whenever you'd like.
Here's a quick look:
Stay up to date with the latest news on our new
Google Sites blog
.
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