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+.

Posted by Yong-Hoon Choi, Software Engineer

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+.

Posted by Yong-Hoon Choi, Software Engineer

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

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.



Posted by Ajith Rao, Software Engineer, recently watched “Adaalat - Episode 104,” and Gowri Ramkumar, Technical Account Manager, recently watched “Kuch toh log Kahenge - episode 118.”

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