Tuesday, August 31, 2010


Growing the display advertising pie

Jonathan Bellack, (Director of Product Management) Say's

This is the latest post in our series on the future of display advertising. Today, director of product management Jonathan Bellack looks at our efforts to help online publishers generate more advertising revenue - Ed.

For millions of online publishers—from the smallest blogger to the largest entertainment, news, e-commerce and information sites—online advertising revenue is vital. When publishers can maximize their returns, everyone benefits from more vibrant online content and websites. But the pace of change in the industry can be intimidating—how can a publisher keep up with what's new, let alone grow their business?

We believe that the new technology we're developing to make display advertising work better will help to grow the display advertising pie for all publishers, by orders of magnitude. We shouldn't be asking how publishers can eke another 5 or 10 percent out of display advertising in the next few years. We should be looking at how the industry can double or triple in size.

We've previously described our three core display ad products for publishers:
  • AdSense, which places the most valuable, relevant ads on our partners' websites, without the publishers having to sell the ad space themselves;
  • DoubleClick for Publishers, our ad serving platform, which maximizes the value of ad space that publishers have directly sold themselves;
  • DoubleClick Ad Exchange, a real-time auction marketplace, which maximizes large publishers' overall returns, by "dynamically allocating" the highest value ad, whether directly sold, or indirectly sold through an ad network.
I wanted to highlight the key principles guiding our future product innovations in this area, as we work to help all publishers maximize their online ad revenues.

1. Making life more efficient
For most large publishers, directly sold ads (ads sold by their own sales force) comprise the vast majority of their ad revenues. But today, selling and managing these ads is frustrating, expensive and often involves tedious manual processes. 

Imagine a TV network that receives TV commercials in 100 different formats, languages, lengths and video dimensions, and then has to manually convert, translate and edit them all, then manually count the number of TV sets on which the ad appeared before sending a bill. Sounds crazy, right? Well, that scenario is far less challenging than what most large online publishers face today with display advertising. Today, across the industry, for every dollar spent on display advertising, 28 cents is eaten up in administrative costs. If we can reduce that proportion, it would mean a lot more money going to publishers.

Things like new standards for video ad serving and systems that connect buyers and sellersare helping publishers support the most engaging and creative ads across their sites. But there are quantum leaps to come in this area, for small and large publishers. Think of a political candidate who is seeking donations on his or her website—the candidate can receive money in seconds. Imagine if publishers—even the smallest website—had tools that enabled advertisers to click a button on their site to upload an ad, let them pay for it with a credit card, and then deliver this ad—through the publisher's ad server—within minutes. This sort of "immediate ad" will become possible as ad serving technology continues to simplify the process of buying and selling ad space.

2. Total revenue management
AdSense selects the most valuable ad for publishers from a large number of ad networks, to maximize ad revenues every time a page loads.

New ad serving and "dynamic allocation" technology, like the DoubleClick Ad Exchange, is emerging that enables ad revenues to be maximized across both directly and indirectly sold ad space, ad impression by ad impression, using real-time prices. Second by second, across millions of ad impressions, this can meaningfully boost major publishers' revenues. Using this technology, the average price that a publisher receives for ad space sold through the Ad Exchange is more than 130 percent higher than the average price of ad space sold directly to ad networks. In fact, without this type of dynamic allocation across sales channels, a publisher's revenues can never truly be maximized. 

In years to come, this true revenue maximization can get even smarter. There's no question that delivering the right ad to the right user at the right time delivers better results. We have years of experience in doing this with search and text ads; we're now bringing that experience to the world of display. This means investing in a smarter ad server that can automatically learn where and when a given ad will get the best response, as well as manage delivery to deliver those improved results for publishers. This new ad server can even anticipate a publisher's future events and adjust delivery accordingly—for example, if traffic drops off every weekend, the ad server can automatically speed up during the week to keep everything moving smoothly.

3. More insight and control
Our vision is to provide all publishers the smartest possible advertising system that can give them knowledge and control of everything going on with their ad business. The vision is already becoming a reality: the upgraded DoubleClick for Publishers platform offers publishers 4,000 times more data than its predecessor. And in recent years, we've been constantly adding new reporting options for our AdSense partners.

By putting publishers in firm control and empowering them with more data, reports and controls (for example, over what advertisers and ad networks they allow), they'll be able to make fully informed decisions about ad space forecasting, segmentation, targeting, allocation and pricing. This helps them to extract the maximum value from their sites and uncover new advertising opportunities—the gold that's buried under their own sites.

4. Betting on openness
An open ecosystem drives meaningful results for publishers. When a wide range of buyers can bid for a publisher's ad space, through an advertising exchange or network, this creates more competition for that ad space, while giving publishers choice over whose ads they want to appear. On the DoubleClick Ad Exchange, an enormous number of advertisers, belonging to over 50 ad networks, compete for publishers' ad space. Of course, at the same time, we're also providing publishers robust technologies and controls that can block any unwanted ads or networks.

Similarly, we believe that one of the best ways to encourage innovation is to open code to the web developer community. Look at the incredible mashups that have been created through the Google Maps API, or the range of mobile devices that have been created from our open source Android code.

This same approach can generate significant advantages for publishers. When we rolled out the upgraded DoubleClick for Publishers, we launched a new public API. This gives publishers and developers the tools to drive innovation and deliver value-adding "advertising apps" for publishers—like inventory analysis, sales workflow tools and more—without having to build an ad server from scratch. This will help drive the next generation of better, more valuable ad innovations.

5. Everything is going to be "display"
Display advertising is about much more than ads in web browsers. People are watching video, reading newspapers, magazines, books and listening to digital music at an ever-increasing rate. They're turning to a plethora of new devices—smartphones, tablets, e-readers and even video game consoles. We've designed our platform, and are continuing to invest in it, to give publishers a single base that can deliver ads into this expanding world—including streaming video, mobile ad delivery and more.

Looking forward, what we call "display" today will just be "advertising"—a single platform that can coordinate an advertiser's campaign across streaming audio ads in car stereos, interactive mobile experiences on smartphones, and HD video ads on set-top boxes. Imagine if that single platform could optimize the campaign, automatically delivering the best-performing ads, best returns and best mix, across all those platforms. That's the future we envisage.

An exciting time ahead
We're unapologetically optimistic about the future of display advertising for online publishers. There's great innovation taking place in this area that will make the current landscape look primitive within a few years. We'll keep working hard to help all publishers take advantage of these opportunities.


--- related ---


Google Wave is not yet dead!

Say's

Some of you may have seen a post on the official Google blog several weeks ago about some changes to the Wave project, and we wanted to let you know that since then we've been hard at work figuring out all the details of the next steps. We're looking at ways to continue and extend Wave technology in other Google products, open sourcing more of our code and providing support for our loyal users and Apps customers.

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0PxhMHizkHxMXHRkQpSRdn2f4PjNOLx1N2WcOvxhzxPkv98HmmyQYTQC-dcCH24rc5yvDyMJnatwC3I1DZQJni3BvdR16FLDSNd2erfiT4oJ7qRGs44Vdd9vTmfsAh9TCMvYjaF7W3jE/s320/Google_Wave_logo_thumb.png

While we're still working on plans, we do want to specifically call out that:

  • Wave.google.com will be available at least through the end of the year
  • There will be ways to export your waves before the end of the year
Thank you for your outpouring of support and kind comments. We're grateful to all the people who have been using Wave and the partners and developers who have built on and improved the technology with us. We look forward to sharing more information with you in the coming weeks.

--- related ---

Wave Blog : http://googlewave.blogspot.com/2010/08/quick-note-on-next-steps-for-google.html
Gmail Blog : http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2010/08/email-overload-try-priority-inbox.html


Track your blog using Blogger Stats

Just in time for our eleventh birthday, we are excited to introduce Stats for Blogger. First launched to Blogger in Draft back in July, Blogger Stats is a cool real-time stats service that's fully integrated with Blogger; you don't need to do anything to enable it for your blog. You can find the new Stats tab on your blog's dashboard—go ahead and take it for a spin!

Feature Highlights

Stats is an important piece of the blogging puzzle, as it allows you to track your blog's traffic and find out exactly what your audience is looking for. As such, integrated, real-time stats has been one of the most frequently requested features from our users. You can find more information about Blogger Stats in our earlier announcement; meanwhile, here are some quick highlights for you.
  • Real-time tracking. Each time your blog is viewed, you can see the change on your stats almost immediately
  • Insights about your audience. Top search keywords, countries, browsers, and more
  • Great user interface. Beautiful, easy-to-read graphs and charts

Updates

After our initial launch to Blogger in Draft, we had some very helpful feedback and suggestions from you. Based on them, we've made improvements including the following:
  • Self-view exclusion. Some of you wanted Blogger Stats to exclude your own pageviews, and now there's an option for that: On Stats | Overview, click on "Don't track your own pageviews" link (that's on the right side, under the pageview summary) and select the "Don't track..." option. We're also now excluding traffic coming from Blogger admin or Preview, providing more accurate pageview data.
  • More effective bot traffic filtering. We've extended our list of known "bots" (the non-human visitors, such as crawlers), another measure to provide more accurate pageviews from real visitors.
  • Rate-limiting visit counts from the same user. We now rate-limit repeated visits from the same user (real visitors or bots) above a certain threshold.
  • Internationalization. Now Blogger Stats is available in more than 40 languages.

We hope you like the new Blogger Stats. By the way, there must be something good about August—not only is it our birth month, we've gone from four Admin Dashboard tabs to six, just this month alone! (The other new tab we've added this month was the Comments tab, which was another highly requested feature.) We still have some more ground to cover, but just wanted to say we're working really hard to deliver the features you've wanted to see on Blogger. Looking forward to seeing you all at the upcoming Meetup!

Recent Updates: Source (Blogger) - Gmail Blog - Google Blog - Chrome - Wave


Find your important mails. Try Priority Inbox

Doug Aberdeen, (Software Engineer) Say's

People tell us all that time that they're getting more and more mail and often feel overwhelmed by it all. We know what you mean—here at Google we run on email. Our inboxes are slammed with hundreds, sometimes thousands of messages a day—mail from colleagues, from lists, about appointments and automated mail that's often not important. It's time-consuming to figure out what needs to be read and what needs a reply. Today, we're happy to introduce Priority Inbox (in beta)—an experimental new way of taking on information overload in Gmail.

Gmail has always been pretty good at filtering junk mail into the "spam" folder. But today, in addition to spam, people get a lot of mail that isn't outright junk but isn't very important—bologna, or "bacn." So we've evolved Gmail's filter to address this problem and extended it to not only classify outright spam, but also to help users separate this "bologna" from the important stuff. In a way, Priority Inbox is like your personal assistant, helping you focus on the messages that matter without requiring you to set up complex rules.

Priority Inbox splits your inbox into three sections: "Important and unread," "Starred" and "Everything else":

As messages come in, Gmail automatically flags some of them as important. Gmail uses a variety of signals to predict which messages are important, including the people you email most (if you email Bob a lot, a message from Bob is probably important) and which messages you open and reply to (these are likely more important than the ones you skip over). And as you use Gmail, it will get better at categorizing messages for you. You can help it get better by clicking the or buttons at the top of the inbox to correctly mark a conversation as important or not important. (You can even set up filters to always mark certain things important or unimportant, or rearrange and customize the three inbox sections.)

After lots of internal testing here at Google, as well as with Gmail and Google Apps users at home and at work, we're ready for more people to try it out. Priority Inbox will be rolling out to all Gmail users, including those of you who use Google Apps, over the next week or so. Once you see the "New! Priority Inbox" link in the top right corner of your Gmail account (or the new Priority Inbox tab in Gmail Settings), take a look.

Source: http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2010/08/email-overload-try-priority-inbox.html

Monday, August 30, 2010


Arcade Fire: Chrome Experiment's in HTML5

What would a music experience designed specifically for the modern web look like? This is a question we've been playing around with for the last few months. Browsers and web technologies have advanced so rapidly in the last few years that powerful experiences tailored to each unique person in real-time are now a reality.

Today we're excited to launch a musical experience made specifically for the browser. Called "The Wilderness Downtown", the project was created by writer/director Chris Milk with the band Arcade Fire and Google. Building this project on the web and for the browser allowed us to craft an experience that is not only personalized, but also deeply personal for each viewer. "The Wilderness Downtown" takes you down memory lane through the streets you grew up in. It's set to Arcade Fire's new song "We Used to Wait" off their newly released album The Suburbs (which you may be familiar with, especially if you were one of 3.7 million viewers who live-streamed Arcade Fire's concert on YouTube earlier this month). The project was built with the latest web technologies and includes HTML5, Google Maps, an integrated drawing tool, as well as multiple browser windows that move around the screen.


"The Wilderness Downtown" was inspired by recent developments in modern browsers and was built with Google Chrome in mind. As such, it's best experienced in Chrome or an up-to-date HTML5-compliant browser. You can launch the project and learn more about it on our Chrome Experiments site at www.chromeexperiments.com/arcadefire.

We hope you enjoy it.

Recent updates from Google:
Google - Blogger - Gmail - GMobile - Docs - Chrome - GEarth - Orkut - Wave - Youtube - G Korea - G Ja - G Aus - G NZ - Adwords - Analytics -Picasa - G China

Friday, August 27, 2010


Easier way to schedule event in google calendar

In the next day or so, you'll start to see some changes to the event page in Google Calendar which should make scheduling events easier. We've made the style more consistent with other Google apps, put information that's most commonly used at the top of the screen, simplified the layout, and added some functionality.

A new repeating event editor
The old interface for creating recurring events was clumsy and took up too much space on the screen. Now you'll see only a summary of your recurring event on the main event page; if you want to edit it, you can use a window that opens when you select the "Repeats" checkbox.


A new tool to help you find a time for your event
You'll notice a new tab on the event page that should make it easier to find a good time to schedule an event. When your friends or coworkers give you permission to see their calendars, you can click this tab to see a preview of their schedules and hover over their events to see what conflicts they might have. This should make scheduling a tad easier, especially for events with large numbers of guests. For Google Apps users, the new schedule preview can also show data from other calendar services using our Google Calendar Connectors API.


Changes under the hood
As browsers and other technologies both within and outside of Google have evolved, we've found it necessary to occasionally make structural code changes in order to keep up. These visible changes are only the surface; underneath we've added a new model for how we represent calendar events in the browser and a new mechanism for how we make sure those events get properly saved. We've paid special attention to performance, consistency, and extensibility. In the short term, you'll hopefully notice that the event page opens slightly faster than it did before.

Thursday, August 26, 2010


Google Finance for your smartphone

Brian Shih, (Product Manager) Say's

Here on the Google Finance team, we're always looking for new ways to help you access the finance data, charts, and reports that you need in the blink of an eye. But all the data in the world won't help if you can't access it when you need it most. Since many of us are on the run throughout the day and don't always have our computers in front of us, it came as no surprise that one of users' most frequently requested features was a fast, easy-to-use mobile website for Google Finance.
We heard your feedback and are please to announce we've launched the new Android/iPhone edition of Google Finance for mobile! The markets don't stop when you leave your desk, so we're bringing the markets to you. Our new design gives you a unified experience across desktop and Android or iPhone phones, offering nearly all the same features and functionality on both. You can easily access the new site when you do a Google search for stock tickers or company names on your mobile device, or when you tap the "Finance" tab on the Google mobile homepage.



Now no matter where you are, you can keep up with your portfolio, the latest market news, and the sectors you care about, with real time quotes and data -- all at a glance.

Prefer it in app form? Android users can also get the Google Finance app in Android Market.

As always, if you have feedback on this or other topics, please share it on our Google Finance survey or visit our Product Ideas site where you can share and vote on ideas.

For more tips and tricks on Google Finance, follow us on Twitter.



Start your Phone Calls from Gmail

Gmail voice and video chat makes it easy to stay in touch with friends and family using your computer's microphone and speakers. But until now, this required both people to be at their computers, signed into Gmail at the same time. Given that most of us don't spend all day in front of our computers, we thought, "wouldn't it be nice if you could call people directly on their phones?"

Starting today, you can call any phone right from Gmail.



Calls to the U.S. and Canada will be free for at least the rest of the year and calls to other countries will be billed at our very low rates. We worked hard to make these rates really cheap (see comparison table) with calls to the U.K., France, Germany, China, Japan—and many more countries—for as little as $0.02 per minute.

Dialing a phone number works just like a normal phone. Just click "Call phone" at the top of your chat list and dial a number or enter a contact's name.



We've been testing this feature internally and have found it to be useful in a lot of situations, ranging from making a quick call to a restaurant to placing a call when you're in an area with bad reception.

If you have a Google Voice phone number, calls made from Gmail will display this number as the outbound caller ID. And if you decide to, you can receive calls made to this number right inside Gmail (see instructions).

We're rolling out this feature to U.S. based Gmail users over the next few days, so you'll be ready to get started once "Call Phones" shows up in your chat list (you will need to install the voice and video plug-in if you haven't already). If you're using Google Apps for your school or business, then you won't see it quite yet. We're working on making this available more broadly - so stay tuned!

For more information, visit gmail.com/call.

Wednesday, August 25, 2010


All formulas in Google Docs

Matt Ziegelbaum, (Software Engineer) Say's

Finding cells that include formulas in them can sometimes be a bit like looking for something in the dark. To help you illuminate your spreadsheet surroundings, we're introducing the ability to reveal all formulas with one click.



When you're comparing formulas with one another or trying to figure out where your formulas aren't working, showing all formulas should help you out. You can turn this feature on from the formula bar by selecting the "Show All Formulas" button, selecting "Show All Formulas" in the View menu or hitting Ctrl `.

Flip the switch in your spreadsheets to try it out.



Its New: Analytics Introducing Weighted Sort

Linus Chou, (Google Analytics Team) Say's

Have you ever sorted a report by bounce rate and seen nothing but entries with a 100% bounce rate? Have you then noticed that these entries only have 1 visit? Not only is this useless and frustrating, but it obscures the real data points that you care about behind pages of garbage.

Well fret no more! We are pleased to announce a new sorting algorithm called weighted sort. Now when you sort on a computed metric, you can weight that sort by the number of data points, bringing you the most interesting and actionable rows first. For instance, in our example weighted sort will weight the computed value bounce rate by the number of visits. Let's take a look at some screen shots that will make this effect more obvious.


Tuesday, August 24, 2010


Tips: Using Socialize to distribute your feed on social networks

The FeedBurner Socialize service makes it easy to distribute your content to interested subscribers or followers on social networks using any FeedBurner feed you already have. The Socialize service currently supports distribution on Twitter.

The Socialize service offers the following options:

Select Account

At this time, the Socialize service only supports Twitter. You may have one or several Twitter accounts associated with your Google account (which is shared by FeedBurner and other Google products), but each feed may only post to one Twitter account at a time. If for some reason you need the same feed to post to multiple Twitter accounts, you may create a copy of your feed and have that version post to a separate Twitter account.

Formatting Options

You may format your feed for Twitter with a number of options. In all cases, the formatting must fit within the 140 character limit imposed by Twitter. If the options you choose create messages longer than 140 characters, FeedBurner will automatically truncate your messages into 140 character tweets.

Post Content
You may post the feed title, title and body, or just the body as the tweet. If you choose to include a link to the feed item, your feed item permalinks will be rewritten as a shortened URL by Google on the goo.gl domain. These links redirect to your normal FeedBurner URLs so that analytics tracking will not be affected. If you select "Leave room for retweets" we will truncate the message to leave room for rewteeting using the many Twitter clients that support this function.

Hash Tags
Hash tags are the way that Twitter supports tagging or labeling tweets so that they can easily be grouped by Twitter clients that allow sorting and filtering by these tags. By default, the Socialize service does not add any hash tags to your tweets, however if you select "Create hash tags from item categories" we will automatically create hash tags in the tweet according to any <category> elements attached to the feed item. These categories may be added by your blogging platform or CMS publishing system. In Blogger, these are called "Labels" so if you label your posts in Blogger, these labels will get added as hash tags in Twitter.

Additional Text
You may choose to add a custom message preceding or following the message that is created from your feed item to add more context. As an example you may choose to prepend "From my blog:" to the beginning of the tweet so that Twitter followers can see which messages you are tweeting directly versus posting links from your long form blog.

Item Selection

Item Limit
As your feed updates throughout the day, FeedBurner picks up your feed and looks for new items. The Socialize service will detect these new items and post up to 5 of them to twitter at a time. Note that the speed with which feed updates can get to FeedBurner will affect this service. To ensure your feed updates in near real time, make sure you ping us immediately after your feed updates and that your blog platform is configured to use PubSubHubub. If none of these options are used for making your feed near real time, the Socialize service will look for and update with any new feed items every 30 minutes.

Keyword Filter
You may choose to only send certain feed items to Twitter, filtered either by the Category, or text in the title, body, or the entire item. To enable this filter enter text, with terms separated by commas, and then choose where you would like Socialize to look for these keywords. If this service is enabled, an item will only be tweeted if one of the filtered terms is found.

Preview

Preview lets you see how your tweets will look in your feed as you change Socialize options. If your feed content is not available, the preview uses its own sample text. Note that Preview uses the existing items in the feed, but only new feed items published after the service is activated will actually get posted to Twitter.

Recent updates from Google:
Google - Blogger - Gmail - GMobile - Docs - Chrome - GEarth - Orkut - Wave - Youtube - G Korea - G Ja - G Aus - G NZ - Adwords - Analytics - Picasa - G China


Orkut celebrate Raksha Bandhan!

Sagari Venkata, (orkut operations team) Say's

One of the most powerful things about orkut is the way it's able to strengthen the bonds between friends. With scraps, photos, chat, video chat, and much more, we do our best to make it simple and easy to keep in touch with the people you care about.

That's why when we learned about Raksha Bandhan, a festival taking place today, celebrating the love, affection and protection of siblings and close friends, we thought it would be a fun thing to highlight to the orkut community.

Popular in parts of India and other countries around the world, tradition has it that women tie "rakhis," or charm bracelets, on the wrists of the men they think of as brothers (whether they're related or not). We designed a special doodle to celebrate:


Regardless of whether you plan on celebrating Raksha Bandhan, it's always nice to have a reminder of how important friends and family are in all of our lives. Take a moment to send a scrap to someone you care about– they'll appreciate it!


Recent updates from Google:
Google - Blogger - Gmail - GMobile - Docs - Chrome - GEarth - Orkut - Wave - Youtube - G Korea - G Ja - G Aus - G NZ - Adwords - Analytics - Picasa - G China

Monday, August 23, 2010


New Ad format for iPad Application

Dan Waylonis, (Software Engineer for Google AdSense for Mobile Applications) Say's

In the short time since Apple released their tablet device, developers have rushed to create thousands of iPad apps. To support this need, we are thrilled to announce a new feature to Mobile for AdSense applications. The new feature allows developers who are based in US and Canada and are participating in our beta program to monetize their iPad applications.

The new iOS SDK supports ad serving in iPad apps using three of the most common online ad formats, instantly making it easier for developers to grow their businesses and for advertisers to expand their presence to the iPad.


new ad format options for the iPad

Advertisers whose campaigns run on the Google Display Network and include text or image ads in the above sizes can now show ads within iPad applications – provided their campaigns are targeting mobile devices or specifically the iPad.


Remember that in order to begin monetizing iPad applications, you'll need to participate in our AdSense for Mobile Applications beta program. Current AdSense for Mobile Applications beta partners will automatically have access to this new feature in their latest iOS SDK build.

If you are interested in participating in the AdSense for Mobile Applications beta program, here's how you can apply to get started:

  1. Sign up for free to become an AdSense partner or log in to your existing
    AdSense account at
    www.google.com/adsense.
     

  2. Within your AdSense Setup tab, select AdSense for Mobile Applications
    and follow the steps to complete the application for the beta program.


  3. Once your application is approved, you'll receive a confirmation email
    with instructions on how to access your developer toolkit.
     
We are excited that iOS developers now have the opportunity to earn money by displaying relevant Google ads within any application, across any device. For more information about the latest AdSense for Mobile Applications SDK release, be sure to check out the release notes.

Recent updates from Google:
Google - Source - Blogger - Gmail - GMobile - Docs - Chrome - GEarth - Orkut - Wave - Youtube - G Korea - G Ja - G Aus - G NZ - Adwords - Analytics - Picasa - G China

Saturday, August 21, 2010


This week highlights from Google Apps

Over the last few weeks, we made it easier to find more kinds of information in Gmail as well as use multiple Gmail accounts at once. Google Docs and Google Sites both added new features, and we released improved tools to move existing data to Google Apps.

Find docs and sites quickly from Gmail
On Wednesday we cooked up our newest Labs feature in Gmail—a more powerful version of Gmail's search feature. Now, not only can you search for messages and chats, you can also search for information in Google Docs and Google Sites from your inbox. This is a big time-saver when you don't remember where the information you're looking for is saved. We also recently added the ability to drag attachments from Gmail to your desktop if you use Google Chrome.

Use multiple Gmail accounts at once
Life is now easier for people with multiple Gmail accounts. With the new multiple sign-in feature, you can toggle back and forth between accounts, or even have Gmail open in two tabs with different accounts. To learn more about this feature for advanced users, head over to the Gmail Blog.

Improvements to documents, spreadsheets and drawings in Google Docs
We rolled out a rapid-fire string of useful features for Google Docs over the last couple weeks, including alternate page sizes and resizable tables in documents, spell checking in spreadsheets, and a new curve rendering tool in drawings. All these features make creating and collaborating with others in real-time on documents, spreadsheets and drawings easier.


New site navigation choices in Google Sites
Google Sites got in on the action this week too, with the ability to add horizontal navigation buttons, tabs or links to your sites. We also added the option to include a site-wide footer on your pages, and made it easier for people to open embedded documents in a new tab where users with access can make edits.


App Tuesday: Nine new additions to the Apps Marketplace
For organizations, a key advantage of Google Apps is immediate access to productivity-enhancing innovations from third-party software companies. This month, nine new applications were added to the Apps Marketplace. Instead of struggling with patches and updates each month, Google Apps customers can activate new functionality with just a couple clicks.

Who's gone Google?
We have a long list of new customers to share who have recently switched to Google Apps. A warm welcome goes out to Roberto Cavalli, HÔM Real Estate Group, Luna & Larry's Coconut Bliss, Bergelectric, the cities of Westerville and Wooster in Ohio, as well as the State of Maryland, which will be making Google Apps available to all 1.4 million of its K-12 and higher education students.

If your business or school is ready to "go Google", we're happy to report that making the switch is even easier with new data migration options. In addition to our existing tools to migrate email, contacts and calendar data from Microsoft Exchange, hosted Exchange and Lotus Notes, last week we simplified the process to migrate from IMAP systems and PST data files.

I hope these updates help you or your organization get even more from Google Apps. For details and the latest news in this area, check out the Google Apps Blog.

Recent updates from Google:
Google - Blogger - Gmail - GMobile - Docs - Chrome - GEarth - Orkut - Wave - Youtube - G Korea - G Ja - G Aus - G NZ - Adwords - Analytics - Picasa - G China

Friday, August 20, 2010


Easily find good extension for chrome

Koh Kim, (Associate Product Marketing Manager) Say's

A few months ago, we launched several categories of featured Chrome extensions to help you find the right one. Today, in addition to updating these pages with new extensions, we are also launching more categories to enhance your web experiences in News and weather, Photos, Productivity, Search tools and Social.




If you have a busy life online and offline, extensions in the Productivity category can help you be more efficient and productive on the web. With Start! or Incredible Start Page, you can customize your New Tab page to quickly access your favorite sites. Extensions like StayFocusd and Time Tracker can help you keep track of your time spent on various web sites.

Chrome extensions can also help you view, edit and share photos and images easily. You can take screenshots of web pages using Awesome Screenshot and Webpage Screenshot. You can also transform your favorite photo sites into slideshows with iSlide or scroll through images on an infinite 3D wall with Cooliris.

For those who use social networking services like Twitter, Facebook and Google Buzz, there are extensions to help you stay connected with your family and friends. With Shareaholic for Google Chrome or AddThis, you can share web pages to your social networks, email and blogs. For Twitter users, TweetMeme to retweet any article you find on the web. There are also full-featured Twitter extensions like Chromed Bird or Chrowety that allows you to follow and send tweets, retweets and direct messages from your Google Chrome browser.

I hope you enjoy these new categories of extensions. We are working to make the categories in the gallery more dynamic so you can easily find the Chrome extensions you want.


Recent updates from Google:
Google - Blogger - Gmail - GMobile - Docs - Chrome - GEarth - Orkut - Wave - Youtube - G Korea - G Ja - G Aus - G NZ - Adwords - Analytics - Picasa - G China


Good news for Linux users! so you can start video chat now.

) Say's

If you've been wanting to use voice and video chat on Linux (our top video chat request), then we have good news for you: it's now available! Visit gmail.com/videochat to download the plugin and get started. Voice and video chat for Linux supports Ubuntu and other Debian-based Linux distributions, and RPM support will be coming soon.

Recent updates from Google:
Google - Blogger - Gmail - GMobile - Docs - Chrome - GEarth - Orkut - Wave - Youtube - G Korea - G Ja - G Aus - G NZ - Adwords - Analytics - Picasa - G China