Faster, better order management

Since migrating to the Google stack last September, we’ve been working to improve the Google Affiliate Network interface by both adding new features and enhancing some existing ones.



As a part of that effort, we’ve just pushed out a brand new release of the Orders tab for both advertisers and publishers.



First, we've made the Orders tab fast. Very fast. Whether you’re looking up 10 orders or 10,000 orders, you'll see query results load in about the same amount of time.



Advertiser-facing changes:

We want to make it easier for you to handle bulk operations. So, we enabled inline order editing right from the Orders tab. No need to click through to another page -- you can simply edit the order inline. Once an order is updated, publisher and network fees are updated, too.

Also, it’s now easier to cancel orders in bulk. When you search for multiple orders, just select the orders you want to cancel and cancel them all at once.

Publisher-facing changes:

The key publisher feature we’ve added is the ability to directly edit the Member ID field for an order inline. If you're a publisher whose workflow involves verifying or editing the Member ID field, this process will now be much easier.

Finally, based on your feedback, we now display locked orders (e.g. those that have been paid out) in the tab, rather than just open orders. Keep in mind though that those locked orders can't be edited.




As always, we look forward to your feedback. Please use our forum for feedback and comments. Thanks!



Posted by:

Ali Pasha, Product Manager

Collaborate and edit anywhere with the updated Google Docs for Android

As I was sitting on the ferry commuting to Google’s Sydney office this morning, two thoughts occurred to me. First, Australia is beautiful. If you’ve never been here, you really should visit. And second, it’s amazing how productive I can be with just my Android phone and an Internet connection. I was responding to email, reading news articles, and editing documents—just like I do at the office. Only the view was better!



We want to give everyone the chance to be productive no matter where they are, so today we’re releasing a new update to the Google Docs app for Android. We've brought the collaborative experience from Google Docs on the desktop to your Android device. You'll see updates in real time as others type on their computers, tablets and phones, and you can just tap the document to join in.



We also updated the interface to make it easier to work with your documents on the go. For example, you can pinch to zoom and focus on a specific paragraph or see the whole document at a glance. We also added rich text formatting so you can do things like create a quick bullet list, add color to your documents, or just bold something important. Watch the new Google Docs app in action:







If you want to hear about the latest Docs news or send us feedback on the new app, visit Google Docs on Google+.



Gotta run—I’ve got another ferry to catch!



Posted by Vadim Gerasimov, Software Engineer

Collaborate and edit anywhere with the updated Google Docs for Android

As I was sitting on the ferry commuting to Google’s Sydney office this morning, two thoughts occurred to me. First, Australia is beautiful. If you’ve never been here, you really should visit. And second, it’s amazing how productive I can be with just my Android phone and an Internet connection. I was responding to email, reading news articles, and editing documents—just like I do at the office. Only the view was better!



We want to give everyone the chance to be productive no matter where they are, so today we’re releasing a new update to the Google Docs app for Android. We've brought the collaborative experience from Google Docs on the desktop to your Android device. You'll see updates in real time as others type on their computers, tablets and phones, and you can just tap the document to join in.



We also updated the interface to make it easier to work with your documents on the go. For example, you can pinch to zoom and focus on a specific paragraph or see the whole document at a glance. We also added rich text formatting so you can do things like create a quick bullet list, add color to your documents, or just bold something important. Watch the new Google Docs app in action:







If you want to hear about the latest Docs news or send us feedback on the new app, visit Google Docs on Google+.



Gotta run—I’ve got another ferry to catch!



Posted by Vadim Gerasimov, Software Engineer

Abt.com transitions to Google Affiliate Network and grows revenue 119%

Over the past few years, Google Affiliate Network has helped advertisers and publishers grow their businesses with the right mix of technology, service, and data insights. We’ll be sharing these stories on the blog over the coming weeks. 



Today, we turn the spotlight to Abt.com, an online electronics retailer based just north of Chicago in Glenview, IL. Since launching in 1998, Abt.com has climbed to #151 on Internet Retailer’s list of America's top retail websites. The Abt.com team came to Google Affiliate Network in 2008 with three objectives: to grow online sales, reach new customers, and expand their existing reach across top affiliate publishers.



Steve Tazic, Abt.com’s Director of eCommerce Marketing, transitioned the company’s affiliate program to Google Affiliate Network based on the platform’s ease of use, automation, robust quality controls and advanced reporting. With less time spent managing processes, Steve collaborated with his Google Affiliate Network account team to optimize key relationships and implement best practices. Just a few highlights include:

• Data-driven optimization: The Abt.com team used advanced reports to “reach out to publishers in different situations when numbers are good or bad to try and capitalize on opportunities. For example, we can easily pinpoint publishers who have dropped off in sales and know exactly who to contact to get them back on track.”
  


• Take advantage of platform efficiency: “The Google Affiliate Network platform automates processes for creating ads, pinpointing potential new affiliates and recognizing current affiliates that need attention, whether it be good or bad. One big time saver is that we were able to automate the reconciliation process which we used to do manually.”

“Since coming from our previous network, we have seen average monthly revenue increase 119%. We have better relationships with each publisher and feel it is easier to get our offers out to our publishers. The affiliate channel now represents 15% of our online business.” - Steve Tazic, Abt.com’s Director of eCommerce Marketing 

Learn more by reading the full case study.



Posted by Will Heidrich, Account Manager

The BugSense hybrid app: experiences using Clojure on Google App Engine

Today’s post comes to us from Jon Vlachogiannis and Panos Papadopoulos, founders of BugSense, a mobile error analytics service. We hope you find their insights on using Clojure on Google App Engine informative.

BugSense is a cross-platform error analytics infrastructures for mobile devices. BugSense uses Google App Engine to power its backend, processing more than 1.6 million daily errors, generated by more than 45 million devices around the world. Chances are one of the applications installed on your smart phone (like SoundCloud or Trulia) is already using BugSense.

The Problem
Lots of our clients want to optimize and protect their mobile apps (through code obfuscation) using ProGuard. ProGuard creates more compact code, resulting in faster transfer across networks, faster loading, and smaller memory footprints. On top of that it makes programs and libraries harder to reverse-engineer.

However, because the Android Market doesn't automatically de-obfuscate of stack traces from ProGuard-ed apps, developers who want to analyse errors from their apps must get the stack trace from the Market, format it and use ProGuard locally. The whole process for just a single error could take more than 3 minutes, so we decided to add support for ProGuard to BugSense to make debugging easier and faster.

The Solution: Clojure and Python
The main data-serving portion of our app is written in Python, our language of choice, but ProGuard is an open source project in Java. For easier development, we ported parts of ProGuard to Clojure, a dynamic language belonging to the Lisp family that runs on the JVM. This allows us to “beat the averages” by exploiting all the great features that a LISP language offers (such as macros  and exploratory programming). Using Clojure and having access to a vast number of Java libraries assisted us in tackling the difficult problem of de-obfuscation, with great results.

Once we were done, we deployed using AppEngineMagic and now it's trivial (one click) for our users to de-obfuscate their stacktraces. Now we have the best of two worlds: Python for serving data and Java/Clojure for doing calculations, all in the same Google App Engine application. And it scales automatically and runs even faster than running ProGuard on your laptop!

Practically, that means that we can have a heterogeneous app on Google App Engine so that we can keep programming in our favourite language, Python, but still harness the tremendous wealth of Java libraries using Clojure. Running a hybrid app on App Engine is trivial since they share the same resources task queues, Datastore, and memcache.

However, because our app is implemented in multiple languages, we need to start two different local instances (one for Python and one for Clojure). We use a combination of mocks for both of the instances in order to emulate the hybrid app and their interaction in a local environment for development and testing.

Google App Engine, a success factor
We started as a two-developer startup and our product rapidly became popular across the world. Building on Google App Engine helped us focus on product development and forget about infrastructure and administration, thus enabling us to focus more on our customers' needs. (And sleep tight at night.) Furthermore it helped us to keep costs low and iterate quickly.

To learn more about BugSense, check out our website. If you have comments or questions about this post or just want to reach out directly, you can find us at +jonromero or +bugsense.

Introducing Chrome for Android

In 2008, we launched Google Chrome to help make the web better. We’re excited that millions of people around the world use Chrome as their primary browser and we want to keep improving that experience. Today, we're introducing Chrome for Android Beta, which brings many of the things you’ve come to love about Chrome to your Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich phone or tablet. Like the desktop version, Chrome for Android Beta is focused on speed and simplicity, but it also features seamless sign-in and sync so you can take your personalized web browsing experience with you wherever you go, across devices.









Speed

With Chrome for Android, you can search, navigate and browse fast—Chrome fast. You can scroll through web pages as quickly as you can flick your finger. When searching, your top search results are loaded in the background as you type so pages appear instantly. And of course, both search and navigation can all be done quickly from the Chrome omnibox.





Simplicity

Chrome for Android is designed from the ground up for mobile devices. We reimagined tabs so they fit just as naturally on a small-screen phone as they do on a larger screen tablet. You can flip or swipe between an unlimited number of tabs using intuitive gestures, as if you’re holding a deck of cards in the palm of your hands, each one a new window to the web. One of the biggest pains of mobile browsing is selecting the correct link out of several on a small-screen device. Link Preview does away with hunting and pecking for links on a web page by automatically zooming in on links to make selecting the precise one easier. And as with Chrome on desktop, we built Chrome for Android with privacy in mind from the beginning, including incognito mode for private browsing and fine-grained privacy options (tap menu icon, ‘Settings,’ and then ‘Privacy’).





Sign in

You can now bring your personalized Chrome experience with you to your Android phone or tablet. If you sign in to Chrome on your Android device, you can:

• View open tabs: Access the tabs you left open on your computer (also signed into Chrome)—picking up exactly where you left off.


• Get smarter suggestions: If you visit a site often on your computer, you'll also get an autocomplete suggestion for it on your mobile device, so you can spend less time typing.


• Sync bookmarks: Conveniently access your favorite sites no matter where you are or which device you’re using.

Chrome is now available in Beta from Android Market, in select countries and languages for phones and tablets with Android 4.0, Ice Cream Sandwich. We’re eager to hear your feedback. Finally, we look forward to working closely with the developer community to create a better web on a platform that defines mobile.



Posted by Sundar Pichai, SVP, Chrome and Apps



(Cross-posted from the Chrome blog and the Official Google blog)

Introducing Chrome for Android

In 2008, we launched Google Chrome to help make the web better. We’re excited that millions of people around the world use Chrome as their primary browser and we want to keep improving that experience. Today, we're introducing Chrome for Android Beta, which brings many of the things you’ve come to love about Chrome to your Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich phone or tablet. Like the desktop version, Chrome for Android Beta is focused on speed and simplicity, but it also features seamless sign-in and sync so you can take your personalized web browsing experience with you wherever you go, across devices.









Speed

With Chrome for Android, you can search, navigate and browse fast—Chrome fast. You can scroll through web pages as quickly as you can flick your finger. When searching, your top search results are loaded in the background as you type so pages appear instantly. And of course, both search and navigation can all be done quickly from the Chrome omnibox.





Simplicity

Chrome for Android is designed from the ground up for mobile devices. We reimagined tabs so they fit just as naturally on a small-screen phone as they do on a larger screen tablet. You can flip or swipe between an unlimited number of tabs using intuitive gestures, as if you’re holding a deck of cards in the palm of your hands, each one a new window to the web. One of the biggest pains of mobile browsing is selecting the correct link out of several on a small-screen device. Link Preview does away with hunting and pecking for links on a web page by automatically zooming in on links to make selecting the precise one easier. And as with Chrome on desktop, we built Chrome for Android with privacy in mind from the beginning, including incognito mode for private browsing and fine-grained privacy options (tap menu icon, ‘Settings,’ and then ‘Privacy’).





Sign in

You can now bring your personalized Chrome experience with you to your Android phone or tablet. If you sign in to Chrome on your Android device, you can:

• View open tabs: Access the tabs you left open on your computer (also signed into Chrome)—picking up exactly where you left off.


• Get smarter suggestions: If you visit a site often on your computer, you'll also get an autocomplete suggestion for it on your mobile device, so you can spend less time typing.


• Sync bookmarks: Conveniently access your favorite sites no matter where you are or which device you’re using.

Chrome is now available in Beta from Android Market, in select countries and languages for phones and tablets with Android 4.0, Ice Cream Sandwich. We’re eager to hear your feedback. Finally, we look forward to working closely with the developer community to create a better web on a platform that defines mobile.



Posted by Sundar Pichai, SVP, Chrome and Apps



(Cross-posted from the Chrome blog and the Official Google blog)