Saturday, March 31, 2012

A New Way to Multitask

On December 9, 1968, Douglas Engelbart rocked the computing world with The Mother of All Demos. One of the many advancements Engelbart discussed was the creation of a simple, intuitive pointing device that would allow you to manipulate a cursor on a screen with the movement of your hand. The world met the mouse.



Before the mouse, the primary way to interact with a computer was to type a command, wait for a response, and type a second command. The ability to coordinate between the movement of a marker on the screen and a flick of the wrist was truly revolutionary, and has transformed the way we interface with our machines today.



However, for decades, the full power of the mouse has been limited. While we’ve been mousing away with one hand, our other hand has often been idle. As information has moved faster and faster, our mousing capacity has stayed the same.



On the Chrome team, we’ve been working to address this problem. Today, we’d like to announce a new way to get twice as much web from your browser. We call it Multitask Mode.







Multitask Mode lets you have access to multiple mice at the same time, so you can make a chess move while you watch a dance move, or draw a horse while you draw on a friend for relationship advice.



Chrome can handle as many mice, touchpads, styli, joysticks, trackballs, and other pointing devices as you can plug into your computer, so you and your friends can browse dozens of sites at the same time.



Try it out and let us know what you think!



Thursday, March 29, 2012

Announcing App Engine Research Awards

One of the most rewarding things about working on App Engine is watching our customers use the platform in new and unexpected ways. We're lucky to have a front row seat to the growth and success of so many innovative new projects, and in that spirit, we are pleased to announce the Google App Engine Research Awards.

This new awards program will support 15 projects by providing App Engine credits in the amount of $60,000 to each project for one year, additional Google services such as Google Cloud Storage will be coming soon as part of the program.

We are committed to supporting scientific and academic research and welcome university faculty from all fields to participate.  Award projects may focus on activities such as social or economic experiments, developing academic aids, analysis of gene sequence data, or using App Engine MapReduce in ways we hadn’t even considered!  If your research has the potential to advance discovery, generates heavy data loads or is in need of an easy-to-use, easy-to-scale platform, we encourage you to submit your proposal.

You can find details on how to apply on our Google Research website. Applications will be accepted until 11:59 p.m. PST, May 11, 2012.




- Posted by the App Engine Team

Wednesday, March 28, 2012

Crossing the 50 billion km mark & giving Google Maps for Android a fresh look

(Cross-posted on the Official Google Blog)



Every day, millions of people turn to Google Maps for Android for free, voice-guided GPS navigation to guide them to their destination. So far, Navigation on Google Maps for Android has provided 50 billion kilometers of turn-by-turn directions, the equivalent of 130,000 trips to the moon, 334 trips to the sun, 10 trips to Neptune or 0.005 light years! When getting to your destination matters most, Google Maps for Android will get you there:










A new look for Navigation on Android 4.0+ phones

In today’s release of Google Maps 6.5 for Android we’ve redesigned the Navigation home screen in Android 4.0+ to make it easier to enter a new destination or select from recent and favorite locations by swiping left or right.








Left: New Navigation home screen Right: Navigation in Google Maps for Android




Crisper, faster maps for high pixel density devices

If your device has a high pixel density screen, such as those on Galaxy Nexus, Galaxy S II, Droid Razr and others, you’ll now get higher resolution map tiles that take better advantage of the pixels-per-inch on your screen. The result is a crisper, less cluttered map that is easier to read:







Left: Previous style Right:New style in Google Maps 6.5 for Android




Compare our new map on the right to the previous map on the left. The road network is easier to see, less obstructed by labels, and has more color contrast. At more zoomed-in levels, you’ll notice a more controlled amount of maps labels to avoid cluttering the map and blocking out street names. The new style also helps maps react faster to panning, zooming, and twisting.



You'll start seeing the new style as you navigate around new areas on the map; however, you can see these changes immediately by clearing your cache from the Maps settings.



Pick your preferred public transit mode and route option

Google Maps 6.5 for Android now lets you choose to prioritize a particular transit mode (such as the bus or subway) and route option (like taking the recommended route, one with fewer transfers or one with less walking). Whether you just need to get somewhere as fast as possible, or you want to avoid the risk of a missed connection or you prefer not to tire your legs, you can get the transit directions that best suit you. Transit directions and schedules are available for 475 cities around the world.







To start using Google Maps 6.5 for Android, download the update from Google Play. Learn more about how to use other great features of Google Maps for Android on the redesigned Google Maps YouTube channel that has 12 new videos available today.



Crossing the 50 billion km mark & giving Google Maps for Android a fresh look

(Cross-posted on the Official Google Blog)



Every day, millions of people turn to Google Maps for Android for free, voice-guided GPS navigation to guide them to their destination. So far, Navigation on Google Maps for Android has provided 50 billion kilometers of turn-by-turn directions, the equivalent of 130,000 trips to the moon, 334 trips to the sun, 10 trips to Neptune or 0.005 light years! When getting to your destination matters most, Google Maps for Android will get you there:










A new look for Navigation on Android 4.0+ phones

In today’s release of Google Maps 6.5 for Android we’ve redesigned the Navigation home screen in Android 4.0+ to make it easier to enter a new destination or select from recent and favorite locations by swiping left or right.








Left: New Navigation home screen Right: Navigation in Google Maps for Android




Crisper, faster maps for high pixel density devices

If your device has a high pixel density screen, such as those on Galaxy Nexus, Galaxy S II, Droid Razr and others, you’ll now get higher resolution map tiles that take better advantage of the pixels-per-inch on your screen. The result is a crisper, less cluttered map that is easier to read:







Left: Previous style Right:New style in Google Maps 6.5 for Android




Compare our new map on the right to the previous map on the left. The road network is easier to see, less obstructed by labels, and has more color contrast. At more zoomed-in levels, you’ll notice a more controlled amount of maps labels to avoid cluttering the map and blocking out street names. The new style also helps maps react faster to panning, zooming, and twisting.



You'll start seeing the new style as you navigate around new areas on the map; however, you can see these changes immediately by clearing your cache from the Maps settings.



Pick your preferred public transit mode and route option

Google Maps 6.5 for Android now lets you choose to prioritize a particular transit mode (such as the bus or subway) and route option (like taking the recommended route, one with fewer transfers or one with less walking). Whether you just need to get somewhere as fast as possible, or you want to avoid the risk of a missed connection or you prefer not to tire your legs, you can get the transit directions that best suit you. Transit directions and schedules are available for 475 cities around the world.







To start using Google Maps 6.5 for Android, download the update from Google Play. Learn more about how to use other great features of Google Maps for Android on the redesigned Google Maps YouTube channel that has 12 new videos available today.



Go Version 1 now on App Engine



Today, with the release of Go 1, a stable version of the Go language, libraries and tools, we're releasing a new Google App Engine SDK for the Go runtime.


Go is a statically typed, compiled language with a dynamic and lightweight feel. With Go you get the efficiency benefits of being close to the machine–your programs compile to native code–with the productivity and quick turnaround of a scripting language. Go apps are easy to write, start fast, and run fast. There has never been a better way to build scalable high-performance cloud applications.

The Go runtime provides clean, idiomatic Go APIs for the popular App Engine services (Blobstore, Datastore, Memcache, and so on) and a straightforward development process. As with the Python and Java SDKs, Go apps can be tested locally with the development server and, most convenient, the development server automatically compiles your Go code, so to test a change all you need to do is to refresh your browser.

The Go 1 SDK also brings improvements and bug fixes. It uses the new Go 1 time API throughout the SDK, provides a MultiError type for error handling in batch operations, and  supports Datastore Cursors and the XMPP and Log services. See the release notes for the details.

Although the Go App Engine runtime is still in experimental status for now, the language stability offered by Go 1 is a major milestone. To learn more about Go 1, see the announcement post at the Go blog and the wealth of documentation at golang.org.





- Posted by the Go and App Engine Teams

Tuesday, March 27, 2012

App Engine 1.6.4 Released

App Engine’s march of progress continues with another release that’s full of new features, system improvements, and bug fixes. As we spring forward into pre-Google I/O season, we’re keeping our focus on product polish and this release is a shining example.

System Wide Changes



  • Logs - Now that the new settings for log storage have been available for one month, logs over the limit you specify will be deleted.



  • Datastore Index Stats - The Datastore Statistics page in the Admin Console now displays the storage used by your Datastore Indexes in addition to your Datastore Entities.

  • Blobstore Migration - The Datastore Migration tool now includes an experimental option which allows you to migrate your Blobstore objects during the migration process from M/S to HRD. We strongly encourage all applications to migrate to HRD.

  • Datastore Backup to Google Cloud Storage - In 1.6.3, we launched backup and restore to Blobstore, and in this release we’ve added the ability to backup your data to Google Cloud Storage.

  • Memcache viewer - We’ve introduced the ability to view Memcache statistics and examine memcache entries by key.

  • Serve objects from Google Cloud Storage - You can now serve blobs directly from Google Cloud Storage as well as Blobstore.



Runtime Changes

  • Threads - Both Java and Python now offer background threads when running on backends as an experimental feature. Additionally, we’ve added the ability to use threads for frontend requests in Java to match Python 2.7.



Datastore Framework Changes

  • NDB for Python - The NDB API has graduated from experimental and is now a fully supported feature. This next-generation datastore API improves data modeling and querying and has been built from the ground up to support an asynchronous computing model.

  • JPA 2 and JDO 3 for Java - We have made significant improvements to App Engine’s DataNucleus plugin. This experimental release of version 2.0 of the plugin adds support for JPA 2, JDO 3, and contains over 40 bug fixes. Check out the full release notes here.



And that’s not all, you can read about all the new features and bug fixes in our release notes (Python, Java). Send all your feedback to our Google Group, and if you have coding questions, find help from us and other talented developers on Stack Overflow.








- Posted by the App Engine Team

Monday, March 26, 2012

First-Party audience segments in the upgraded DFP service

Buying and selling ads based on audience has transformed the display industry in recent years. Buyers use new technologies to run highly relevant campaigns to users across ad networks and exchanges. This benefits publishers greatly, because it allows them to deliver more useful ads to their users ultimately helping increase RPMs on their indirectly sold inventory.



Publishers are increasingly taking control of their audience data as one of the key assets of their digital businesses. But publishers tell us they still want better tools to improve the integration, transparency, and control over their own audience data for both direct and indirect ad sales.



Today we’re announcing the first in a series of features in the upgraded DFP service that help publishers manage and control audience data through one platform, integrated directly with their primary ad serving technology.



This first release is focused on first-party segments - as a publisher, you will have the ability to define your own user audience based on criteria that you define (e.g., sports enthusiasts, travel readers). First party audience segmentation was available in the existing DFP service, and is now integrated seamlessly with the upgraded DFP service.



First-party segmentation involves no implementation or integration effort by you. Simply define the criteria you want for your audience segments, in DFP and DoubleClick technology does the work of populating them directly from the ad tag. Once you’ve defined your audience you can use it to increase the direct sales value of undersold inventory, and gain insights on how different audience segments are engaging with content across your site. We have designed it to be seamless, easy to use and to put you in control of your data.



First party segmentation is a great tool for our publishers, but it’s just the first step in the work of building out DFP’s audience capabilities. In the coming months you’ll see more information from us as we release a series of new features that are directly integrated with the upgraded DFP service.



Friday, March 23, 2012

Here is your chance to become a Bollywood Star!

T-Series launches a star hunt for the lead pair in Aashiqui 2 (sequel to the 90s super hit Aashiqui) on YouTube



It does not get bigger than this. If you’ve always dreamed of becoming a Bollywood star, here is your chance. Starting today - Vishesh Films and T-Series bring to you ‘Aashiqui 2 Star Hunt’ on YouTube. For the first time ever, the lead pair for a mainstream Bollywood film will be selected on YouTube. All you need to do is log on to: www.youtube.com/aashiqui2 and upload a 2 minute video from a list of scenes and songs on the Aashiqui 2 channel. Your audition videos will be screened by a Creative Jury, Producer/Director of the film and will subsequently go for Public Voting on the Aashiqui 2 channel.



When Vishesh Films & T-Series released Aashiqui, 22 years ago – it became one of the most successful musical blockbusters in Indian cinema. It gave movie goers and music lovers, music that people still love to listen to. Carrying forward the spirit of Aashiqui from Director Mahesh Bhatt & Producer Gulshan Kumar are Director Mohit Suri and Bhushan Kumar from T-Series.







You can also stay updated with all the news on Aashiqui 2 on the Official Google Plus Page of T-Series.

You can also join the Hangout on Google plus with Director Mahesh Bhatt on this page on Monday, 26th March, at 11:30 am.



This is a fantastic opportunity for aspiring and deserving artists to audition on YouTube and get a chance to be the Next Big Thing in Bollywood! Auditions Open Now!



Thursday, March 22, 2012

Doubling Down on Publishers



This morning, I had the pleasure of addressing the third-annual Admeld Partner Forum in New York. When we completed our acquisition of Admeld this past December, we said that we’d be looking at how to bring the best of their products and ours together to help us achieve our shared vision: helping our publisher partners make the web work for them, and get the most out of what online advertising has to offer. 



Over the past couple of months our teams have been hard at work figuring out exactly how this might happen. Today, we’d like to put our cards on the table and share what we’ve done and where we’re headed. 



Investing in the team: We realize that helping our partners succeed requires not just the right products, but the right people. So we’re investing in the team, bringing together our sales and services teams from across the DoubleClick Ad Exchange and Admeld. This enables a continued focus on high-touch service for Admeld’s publisher partners, and also boosts Admeld’s presence across the globe.<



Tapping new pools of demand: Next quarter, we’ll start offering AdX Connect, a way for Admeld clients to start getting access to demand from the DoubleClick Ad Exchange. We’ll also be enhancing the advertiser, buyer, and bid transparency levels in the exchange, so that they are comparable with those currently provided to Admeld publishers.



Connecting the dots with DFP: We’re taking two big steps towards tying together Admeld and DoubleClick for Publishers: making it much easier for publishers to leverage SSP-style ad network optimization functionality directly within the DFP platform, and building an API so that Admeld’s mobile optimization capabilities will be more fluidly integrated with DFP mobile.



While we’re excited about these changes, they are just the initial steps. Our long term goal is to create a single, seamless platform for publishers that allows them to manage all their inventory -- across desktop, video and mobile -- with the control and flexibility their businesses require. Our publisher partners make the web the wonderful place that it is today, and by empowering their continued growth and success, we all come away winners. 




Posted by Neal Mohan, Vice President, Display Advertising

App Engine Community Update

One of the best things about App Engine is our lively developer community. This week, we’re officially moving technical and development questions to Stack Overflow and retiring the language-specific App Engine Google groups. With this week’s move, we wanted to take a moment to highlight some of the best ways to engage with the community.

Technical & Development Questions
For technical and development questions big and small, add the google-app-engine tag to your App Engine questions on Stack Overflow. You can also join our hangouts or office hours to talk directly with App Engine team members.

Google+
Many community and team members are active on Google+, using the #appengine hashtag. Our weekly community updates and chats with App Engine community and team members are a great source of tips and tricks and to learn more about what our
community members are up to.

Google Groups
For general discussion about the platform, use the Google App Engine group.

Happy coding!

- Posted by the App Engine Team

Google Voice for Android, now with Ice Cream Sandwich voicemail integration

(Cross posted on the Google Voice Blog)



Since we launched Google Voice back in 2009, we’ve supported visual voicemail so you could open the Google Voice app, see all your voicemails with text transcripts, and play them on-demand. But sometimes when I get a missed call, I don’t want to jump between my call log and the Google Voice app to see who has called me and what message they left.



So, today, we’re updating our mobile app so you can view and listen to your voicemails on demand directly from the call log on your Android phone. Your voicemails will appear alongside your outgoing, incoming, and missed calls in your phone’s call log and you can just simply touch them to play them. You can slow down the playback of the message which is great for when someone is telling you their callback number, or you even speed playback up, so you can quickly listen to longer messages.









To turn this feature on, download the latest app from Google Play and check “Voicemail display” under settings. This new feature requires Android 4.0+.






Google Voice for Android, now with Ice Cream Sandwich voicemail integration

(Cross posted on the Google Voice Blog)



Since we launched Google Voice back in 2009, we’ve supported visual voicemail so you could open the Google Voice app, see all your voicemails with text transcripts, and play them on-demand. But sometimes when I get a missed call, I don’t want to jump between my call log and the Google Voice app to see who has called me and what message they left.



So, today, we’re updating our mobile app so you can view and listen to your voicemails on demand directly from the call log on your Android phone. Your voicemails will appear alongside your outgoing, incoming, and missed calls in your phone’s call log and you can just simply touch them to play them. You can slow down the playback of the message which is great for when someone is telling you their callback number, or you even speed playback up, so you can quickly listen to longer messages.









To turn this feature on, download the latest app from Google Play and check “Voicemail display” under settings. This new feature requires Android 4.0+.






Wednesday, March 21, 2012

Customize your search preferences

Hi Bloggers.

Ensuring that your blog, posts, and images are accurately indexed so they appear correctly in search results is valuable. Today we introduced a suite of new features that enable you to more effectively customize your search preferences. Managing how your blog is viewed by search engines is an important aspect of maintaining a healthy blog, regardless of whether you’re new to blogging, or a seasoned veteran.

Here’s an overview of what we added:

The first thing you’ll notice is a new “Search preferences” option under the “Settings” tab.




Clicking it will display three sub-sections: Meta Tags, Errors and Redirections, and Crawlers and Indexing. When enabled, some of these features, such as Search Description and Custom robots header tags will also appear in the “Post settings” area of Blogger's post editor as well. For example, if you elect to create a Search Description, you may do so for your blog, and/or individual posts.











Also available is the ability to add a custom “Page Not Found” (eg. a “404”) message, and Custom Redirects for pages on your blog.



While most of the new features are located in the Settings tab, a few others can be found in the post editor. For example, we’ve introduced the ability to incorporate “alt” and “title” tags to images in your post.




Last but not least, you’ll also find a “rel=nofollow” link attribute in the link tool. Checking this box means that you don’t want this link to be considered when web crawlers are searching for information they’ll use to index your page.



While most of these features are easy to understand and use, others, such as custom robots header tags are geared toward advanced users only, hence the warning message:



Before diving in, I would encourage a quick read through the Help Center articles. They’re comprehensive, and do a great job translating some technical concepts to the layperson.




We hope you enjoy the new features. It’s all part of our effort to bring you a much improved and modernized Blogger. Next week, we’ll be holding a Hangout on our Google+ page to talk with you about your experience with these features and answer your questions. Follow us on +Blogger for details.




Happy blogging!






Bruce Polderman, Product Manager

Thursday, March 15, 2012

19,000+ episodes of Indian TV on YouTube Shows

[Cross posted from the Youtube blog]



India is one of world’s largest producers of TV shows. With more than 400 terrestrial and local channels available, Indians often face the challenging question: What am I going to watch?



The good news is that we increasingly don’t have to worry about when to watch. Over the last few years, major Indian broadcasters such as Sony Entertainment Television, Colors, ImagineTV, Star India, and VikatanTV have been bringing their shows to YouTube so that you can watch them whenever you want.



Now that our Indian TV partners offer more than 19,000 full episodes of 300 programs in six different languages (Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Bengali, Gujarati, and Punjabi), we wanted to offer our Indian viewers an updated Shows page at youtube.com/shows to help you better follow shows you love and discover new favorites. For the rest of the world, you can still find the shows through youtube.com/shows/other-languages.





You’ll find programs into genres like drama and comedy, as well as the latest and top watched episodes featured on the page. Missed the last episode of Bade Acche Lagte Hai? It’ll be right there in the channel waiting for you. If you’re looking for a few good places to start, check out popular shows like Balika Vadhu, Ramayan, CID, Devon Ke Dev...Mahadev, Taarak Mehta Ka Ooltah Chashmah and Thendral.



These 19,000+ episodes are just a start, so we hope we can keep delivering more and more content that viewers across India—and around the world—want to see.



Using the updated Google Prediction API in App Engine applications

Although we can’t reliably compare its future-predicting abilities to a crystal ball, the Google Prediction API unlocks a powerful mechanism to use machine learning in your applications.

The Prediction API allows developers to train their own predictive models, taking advantage of Google’s world-class machine learning algorithms. It can be used for all sorts of classification and recommendation problems from spam detection to message routing decisions. In the latest release, the Prediction API has added more detailed debugging information on trained models and a new App Engine sample, which illustrates how to use the Google Prediction API for the Java and Python runtimes.

To help App Engine developers get started with the prediction API, we’ve published an article and walkthrough detailing how to create and manage predictive models in App Engine apps with simple authentication using OAuth2 and service accounts. Check out the walkthrough and let us know what you think on the group. Happy coding!


- Posted by the App Engine Team

Wednesday, March 14, 2012

Get ready for spring with Google Affiliate Network exclusive promotions









                                





How do I access these promotions?



  1. Apply for Google Affiliate Network with your AdSense Publisher ID (or sign in if you're already a Google Affiliate Network publisher). 

  2. Once approved, review the promotions available and click the "Apply Now" link for each one that you wish to promote.

  3. Tracking links will be available in your Google Affiliate Network account by viewing the Home tab on March 19th. You can also search for “March Exclusive” links in the Links tab on March 23rd.

Need help applying or want more information? Review the Publisher Beginner’s guide.



When can I post these promotions on my site?





For additional questions, check out the Help Center or contact us.



Posted by Jamie Ross, Affiliate Network Strategist

Wednesday, March 7, 2012

The importance of community policing

Google Affiliate Network works hard to ensure a high quality network for advertisers, publishers, and users. In addition to our integration with AdSense and the safety net you get with Google’s cross-product security and fraud prevention efforts, advertisers and publishers must adhere to our terms of service and program policies.

We also get a lot of great input from the affiliate community via our help forum and other feedback channels. We believe that community policing is an important part of a healthy, high-quality network and review every entry that comes in through our ‘Report a Violation’ form. We encourage you to use this form to report abusive or suspicious publishers who may be in violation of our program policies or terms of service around site content, traffic sources, or our software guidelines.

Posted by Matt Dougherty, Network Quality