Posts Tagged ‘Google’

When’s the last time you got an email from a stranger asking, “Are you sure you meant to send this to me?” and promptly realized that you didn’t? Sometimes these little mistakes are actually quite painful. Hate mail about your boss to your boss? Personal info to some random guy named Bob instead of Bob the HR rep? Doh!

“Got the wrong Bob?” is a new Labs feature aimed at sparing you this kind of embarrassment. Turn it on from the Labs tab under Gmail Settings, and based on the groups of people you email most often, Gmail will try to identify when you’ve accidentally included the wrong person — before it’s too late.

If you normally email Bob Smith together with Tim and Angela, but this time you added Bob Jones instead, we’ll warn you that it might be a mistake. Note that this only works if you’re emailing more than two people at once.

While we were at it, we also changed the name of “Suggest more recipients” to “Don’t forget Bob” — the two related Labs features just kind of went together better this way.

If you want to test “Got the wrong Bob?” out, try faking a mistake like this:
1) Think of three people you often email together.
2) Compose a message to two of them.
3) Start typing the third member of the group (for help you can use one of the people we suggest in “Don’t forget Bob”), but then auto-complete on the wrong name.

If you have suggestions please let us know. And if “Got the wrong Bob?” happens to save you from making a really bad mistake, we want to hear about that too.

Source :

http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2009/10/new-in-labs-got-wrong-bob.html

The initial hype for Google Wave invitations was massive and ended up leaving those who were left out of the first 100,000 disappointed. The good news is that Google has started to send out a larger volume of invitations again after having slowly trickled them out since the launch.

Google Wave’s Steph Hannnon tells us that they are sending out a bunch of invites.

(Credit: Twitter

Google Wave’s Stephanie Hannon tweeted Sunday that Wave had overcome some of its stability issues over the weekend and that they were sending out a lot more invitations. As of Tuesday, “Google Wave” is the top trending topic on Twitter and the results are filled with users (including myself) bragging about receiving their invitations and not surprisingly, others begging for one.

The eBay economy for Google Wave invites has been pretty healthy, with some fetching upward of $80 to $100. This big influx of new invitees, all with 8 invitations each, will probably eliminate a lot of the demand for Wave invites on eBay, much like what happened with Gmail invites.

Full story :

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13515_3-10373785-26.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20

In 2008, Google got its logo on the rocket launching the GeoEye-1 satellite for collecting space-based imagery. This year, it’s Microsoft’s turn.

The Bing logo appeared on the side of a Boeing Delta II 7920 rocket that launched DigitalGlobe’s new WorldView-2 satellite last week from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. But where Google got sole online rights to the GeoEye-1 imagery, Microsoft will be sharing access to WorldView-2 images with Google, a Digital Globe representative said.

Bing and Nokia sponsored the rocket launching DigitalGlobe’s newest imaging satellite.

(Credit: Bill Hartenstein, Boeing

Another sponsor of the rocket is Nokia, whose Navteq subsidiary also supplies digital maps.

Bing today offers aerial and satellite imagery that looks straight down on some locations and a birds’-eye view that gives an angled view. Still, Microsoft touted its DigitalGlobe partnership as greatly expanding what’s available online.

“We now have access to one of the highest resolution global satellite imagery and aerial photography collections (460 million sq. km. + 1 million sq. km. per day moving forward) through a deal we’ve just struck with DigitalGlobe,” said Microsoft’s Chris Pendleton in a blog post. “We’ll finally be able to backfill areas around the world where people have come to my blog and complained about Virtual Earth not having good imagery or photos in their countries–Poland, Hungary, Russia, Taiwan, Mexico, to name a few–I’ve heard you loud and clear. And, now, we’re fixing that problem.”

Google, which already had a DigitalGlobe partnership, was more understated, merely offering congratulations on the launch in a blog post Monday.

DigitalGlobe expects WorldView-2 will double the company’s capacity to collect imagery. The satellite’s top resolution can detect features as small as 0.46 meter, though U.S. government regulations permit general commercial sales of imagery only of 0.5-meter resolution.

Ball Aerospace built the satellite and, as with GeoEye-1, ITT’s Space Systems Division supplied its image sensor.

Launching satellites is an expensive business, but there’s at least some funding available: GeoEye secured $400 million in a sale of debt last week.

Source with video :

http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-10373891-264.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20

With a new display ad exchange developed by its DoubleClick subsidiary, Google is hoping to give its one-trick pony another act.

Google has turned into one of the Internet’s largest and most influential companies on the popularity of its search engine and the profitable text ads it sells alongside those search results. This business generates the vast majority of its revenue and profits and gives Google the resources to tackle a variety of other projects from Google Apps to Chrome OS to Google Books.

But like just about anything, that business can only grow so fast. Google will need another profitable, growing business to maintain its spot atop the Internet world, hence the motivation for its $3.1 billion purchase of DoubleClick a year ago and the launch of the DoubleClick Ad Exchange Friday.

The DoubleClick Ad Exchange is sort of like a stock exchange, where buyers and sellers meet to haggle over prices for display ads, such as banner ads or video ads. Companies that sign up to participate in the exchange can search for open spaces in which to place their ads and bid on that space just like Google’s text-ad auction system for search keywords. It will also plug into Google’s existing infrastructure for AdWords–ads sold on Google search results pages–as well as AdSense–ads hosted by Google but displayed on third-party Web sites, giving those customers another option for their marketing campaigns.

Full story :

http://news.cnet.com/8301-30684_3-10356697-265.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20

With the ReCaptcha acquisition, Google can improve security on its sites and make its book scanning project smarter.

(Credit: Google)

Google has acquired ReCaptcha, one of those companies behind the distorted text boxes at the bottom of many Web site sign-in pages.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Google plans to use ReCaptcha’s technology both as a security measure within certain Google sites and to make its massive book-scanning project a little smarter, the company said in a blog post. ReCaptcha is an offshoot of Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science, and puts a twist on the traditional captcha: a string of letters in squiggly text meant to confuse spam bots and other nonhuman Web pests.

The idea behind a captcha is to confuse a computer, but computers are also confused by some words written in fonts used long ago. ReCaptcha offers two words, one of which is a captcha it already knows, and one of which is a word it doesn’t know. The thinking is that if you get the first word right, you’re likely a human and you’re also probably going to get the second one right.

It can then pool all the answers for the second word and declare with a reasonable amount of certainty that the second word is what most people think it is, thereby updating the vocabulary of participating book scanners. This is of obvious interest to Google, currently bent on scanning as many books as it can find.

Source :

http://news.cnet.com/8301-30684_3-10354717-265.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20

The long awaited flood of Google Android devices is about to hit the market, which should help bring more cool applications to new Android phones.

Motorola will be the next big manufacturer to announce its Android phone. The company plans to formally unveil it at an event on Thursday in San Francisco. Motorola has already been reaching out to developers to get them on board to create new applications that it hopes will drive demand for the new phones.

Mobile applications for smartphones are hot. The fact that Apple’s App Store has had more than one billion downloads after only being around for a year means that smartphone users are hungry for applications that make their phones more useful and fun. But developers, whether they are large or small, have limited resources and time, and they must choose which platforms to develop applications for first.

Full story :

http://news.cnet.com/8301-30686_3-10348863-266.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20

An important feature in Google Checkout has now been unavailable for almost a month, and some merchants are getting fed up with Google’s automated approach to their concerns.

Google’s ability to handle recurring payments, such as monthly subscriptions to a service that are automatically billed once a month, has been impaired since around the middle of August with little notice by the outside world. A customer first reported the issue in a Google Checkout forum in August, and others, such as Katie Braband, sales director at storage company Datto, are still unable to rely on Google to process anything other than one-time payments.

Braband went into Datto’s offices on September 2 to a nightmare for any small business owner: the monthly revenue from subscriptions to Datto’s off-site data backup services did not arrive as scheduled in its Google Checkout merchant account. Making matters worse, there was no way to contact a live human being at Google directly; Datto was directed to an online forum and support page where they received this response: “Our engineering team is working to resolve this as quickly as possible, though I’m not able to provide a specific timeline at the moment.”

Full story :

http://news.cnet.com/8301-30684_3-10348805-265.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20

Open source, despite its community roots, often doesn’t become mainstream until corporations get involved. There are notable exceptions–Mozilla Firefox and the Apache Web server being just two–but often it is corporate self-interest that provides the mechanism to deliver the value of community-developed open source to a mainstream audience.

While the mobile market remains highly fragmented, therefore, I take it as a very encouraging sign that Google has thrown its considerable heft behind Android, its open-source mobile operating platform.

Sure, we’ve had mobile open-source companies for years. I was part of one of the first: Lineo, an embedded Linux vendor that distributed an optimized Linux distribution for PDAs like the Sharp Zaurus. More recently, Funambol has proved popular as a mobile application server, specializing in synchronization technology.

But just as Linux’s big moment on the server came with IBM’s $1 billion commitment to fund its development and marketing, so, too, will the mobile open-source market come into its own with Google Android.

Android has recently pulled ahead of Microsoft’s Windows Mobile in the smartphone market, according to data from AdMob, hitting a global 5 percent market share (in terms of access to mobile ads, not units shipped), while continuing to grow 25 percent month over month.

While Microsoft dominates on the desktop, with even its not-yet-released Windows 7 beating Linux, according to W3C data, Linux, and increasingly Google’s Android flavor of Linux, is making a big push on smartphones.

To fuel this, Google has been upping its commitment to developers, most recently with an upgrade to its Android Market, but also pushing its handsets into an ever-widening array of handset manufacturers and wireless carriers, most recently Sprint.

I’ve suggested that the only way to beat Apple’s iPhone is with a big commitment of resources. Google appears to be doing this, but in an intelligent way: it is trying to attract a wide community of developers to share the burden of beating the iPhone.

InfoWorld’s Neil McAllister thinks it’s not working, but I’m more sanguine. So long as Google invests marketing and development resources to Android, the open-source operating platform has a good chance.

And, importantly, so long as Google remains committed to mobile, there’s a very good opportunity for other mobile open-source players to draft on its momentum. An entire open-source industry has grown up in the shadow of IBM’s original $1 billion commitment to Linux.

The same can happen in mobile, and this time it will be Google’s turn to lead.

Source :

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10346387-16.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20