Put your photos on a map, and Picasa on your phone

6/26/2007 06:54:00 PM

Posted by Ping Chen and Joel Onofrio, Software Engineers

If you've ever seen a great picture and wondered where it was, wished you could visit that exact spot yourself, or found yourself itching to share a great photo with somebody -- but you were away from a computer, we've got two new features on Picasa Web Albums to help you out. First, we're excited to let you know about 'Map My Photos' -- it lets you show exactly where you took your favorite snapshots. When you share an album with friends, they can see your best photos arrayed on a map (or even Google Earth). It's the perfect way to showcase a memorable road trip or a globe-trotting vacation.

Here's how to get started: when you create a new album, just fill in the optional 'Place Taken' field. You can even drag and drop individual photos directly onto a map, and use built-in Google Maps technology to pinpoint exactly where each was shot. For a quick peek at what the results look like, check out our test gallery.

But wait! There's more. We're also launching the first version of Picasa Web Albums built specifically for mobile devices. You already have a couple of pictures stuffed in your wallet, and maybe even a few wallpapers stored on your phone. But what about all those snapshots you can't carry around? With Picasa Web Albums for mobile devices, your favorite pictures are always with you. So next time you're at a loss for words when describing just how awesome, cute, or beautiful something really was, just grab your phone for visual backup.

Of course, the mobile version of Picasa Web Albums lets you keep track of photo updates from friends and family, too. Just click 'My Favorites' from the main screen to see the latest photo albums that your contacts have posted to Picasa Web Albums -- you can even post a quick comment on their photos, using your phone. Thumbnails and photos are automatically re-sized for your device's screen, so pictures look good and download fast. All you need to get started is a phone with a web browser and a data plan; learn more here.

As you enjoy your summer travels, remember to take plenty of snaps, and share the most beautiful places in the world (and don't forget to use your phone to show off pics from back home!).

More organizing tools

6/26/2007 06:32:00 PM

Posted by Darren Delaye, User Experience Designer

We collaborate using Google Docs & Spreadsheets so often at work that I now have more than 300 online documents. My project teams create shared documents and spreadsheets for everything: taking notes in meetings, planning product launches, analyzing usability studies, and much more. I also share docs with friends at work to plan baseball outings, and my fiancée and I are using a shared spreadsheet to help manage the guest list for our upcoming wedding. In other words, I'm one of many with a desperate need to organize all my online documents. Thankfully, I got the chance to design a new interface for Google Docs & Spreadsheets that includes folders and some convenient ways to quickly manage and access all my documents (and if you're like me, your own collection of online docs and spreadsheets is growing daily).

Now when you sign in, you'll see a new interface that lets you create personal folders for each of your projects, and drag your online documents and spreadsheets into them. On the lefthand side, you'll see a list of all the people you are collaborating with; click on any name to see all the files you're working on with them. To read more about this new interface, head over to the Docs & Spreadsheets blog.

The wedding planning continues -- but at least all the docs I need are now easier to find in a folder. Hope your own organizing is easier now too.

Spice up your schedule with the Google Calendar gallery

6/07/2007 06:02:00 AM

Posted by Peter Colijn, Software Engineer

Don't you think that calendars should be more than lists of appointments and meetings? Well, we think an online calendar should be filled with what interests you most, which is why we just unveiled the Google Calendar gallery. Those of you with Google accounts and your friends (who might not have one) can create, share and save your favorite upcoming events directly in Google Calendar. Now you can find all sorts of interesting schedules to add to yours, like these:

Atlantic Records - See your favorite musical artist's concert schedules.
Cordless Records - Find out where the latest independent artists are playing.
TLC - Keep up to date on new shows on the TLC Channel.
Disney - Plan your family vacation around special events at Disneyland.
Eventful - Track fun events in your local area.
Jambase - Know which live music acts are coming to your area.
NBA - Follow your favorite basketball team, and never miss a game.
Netflix - Find out when your favorite new movies are available on DVD.
Orbitz Deals - See special travel deals next to your personal calendar.
Zvents - Gather ideas for things to do this weekend.

The new Google Calendar gallery makes it easy to fill your days with events that you care about and don't want to forget. So take a look around and see if there's something that interests you. Maybe you can even find a perfect excuse to duck out of the office a bit early on Friday. We won't tell!

Feeds on a plane!

6/06/2007 03:35:00 PM

Posted by Chris Wetherell, Software Engineer

With last week's launch of Google Gears, we're happy to let you know that Google Reader is the first Google web application made for online and offline viewing. If you're not familiar with Google Reader, it's a feed reader for getting updates from your favorite blogs and news sites.

Now, you can read these updates whether you're on or offline. It's easy to read today's financial news from the New York Times on the train, or catch up on your favorite blog while on a plane 35,000 ft. above the Atlantic.

Once you've installed Google Gears, you can download your latest 2,000 items so they're available even when you don't have an Internet connection.



To get started, simply click the "Offline" link in the top right of Google Reader.

Please note, though, that the current version of Google Gears is a developer release, which means you may notice a few kinks here and there. We'll be working hard to iron those out over the coming months, and as always, we welcome your feedback and suggestions as we look to make Google Reader better every day.

Adding more flare

6/01/2007 11:05:00 AM

Posted by Susan Wojcicki, VP, Product Management

As you know, we're constantly looking for ways to identify and offer new tools for content creators and website publishers. Likewise, we constantly aim to give AdWords advertisers broader distribution to an even wider audience of users. For these reasons, we're very pleased to tell you that we've just acquired FeedBurner.

For those of you who aren't bloggers, podcasters, or feed creators, Chicago-based FeedBurner is a leading provider of feed distribution and management tools. A web feed is a way for online publishers to syndicate their content and deliver it straight to readers. Each day, FeedBurner delivers feeds to millions of users around the world and offers unique and useful tools for publishers to analyze, optimize, and monetize their content. Further, FeedBurner offers a feed advertising platform for advertisers to reach engaged feed readers through targeted in-feed ads and innovative techniques like RSS feed-driven ads.

We're excited to continue offering the exceptional tools of FeedBurner to content creators throughout the world, and our teams will work together to improve the experiences of feed users, advertisers, and publishers. You can sign up for FeedBurner's services and take advantage of their feed tools and features immediately.

Update: If you're interested, listen to the 45-minute audio file of our press call today with FeedBurner CEO Dick Costolo. (It takes a minute to load.)

A picture's worth a thousand clicks

5/30/2007 04:05:00 PM

Posted by John Hanke, Director for Maps, Earth and Local

I am pleased to tell you that we've agreed to purchase Panoramio, a website based in Spain that links millions of photos with the exact geographical location where they were taken. (Our FAQ has all the details.)

Panoramio is a community photos website that enables digital photographers to geo-locate, store and organize their photographs -- and to view those photographs in Google Earth. Other users can search and browse Panoramio photos and suggest edits to the metadata associated with the photos. Panoramio also offers an API that enables web developers to embed Panoramio functionality into their websites.

Those of you already using Google Earth have no doubt noticed Panoramio's striking images documenting settings from all over the world, like moonscapes in Croatia, dramatic sunsets in Australia, and innovative architecture in the United Arab Emirates.

We've been working with Panoramio for some time -- its photos have been a default layer in Google Earth since the beginning of the year. This layer will remain in place as our teams work together toward further integrating this amazing content, generated by many, into our mapping technologies.

Bigger attachments in Gmail

5/24/2007 04:40:00 PM

Posted by Anna-Christina Douglas, Associate Product Marketing Manager

It can be frustrating to find out that the photos you're trying to share, or the presentations you're trying to send at the last minute, are too large for your email's attachment limit. Some of you have pointed out that we recently increased the allowable attachment size in Gmail from 10MB to 20MB. We think the higher limit will help make the storage in your Gmail account a little more useful. So the next time you've got to send a PDF that's a bit on the larger side, relax. You've got some more room to spare.

Teachers rock our world

5/24/2007 01:30:00 PM

Posted by Cristin Frodella, Manager, K-12 Education Programs

Yesterday we hosted our third Google Teacher Academy, this time in sunny Santa Monica. More than 50 innovative K-12 educators from across Southern California joined us to share and learn new methods of incorporating online tools and collaborative techniques into their classroom experiences. Elementary, middle, and high school teachers spent time hearing from experts and one another about subjects like lesson-plan development, group projects, and on-demand publishing using Google and non-Google tools. Carol Anne McGuire, who teaches blind and visually impaired students in Orange Unified School District, delivered the keynote along with some of her students. She brought to life "Rock Our World," an international project in which kids across continents work together online to make movies, tell stories, and compose music.

After previous Google Teacher Academies in our Mountain View and New York City offices, we consider ourselves fortunate to have a cadre of 150+ Google Certified Teachers nationwide. These "graduates" continue to inspire their students: for instance, Jerome Burg created GoogleLitTrips, a way to journey along some of literature's most classic roadtrips via Google Earth, and Cheryl Davis engages her students in the presidential election and local history through podcasts such as "Candidate Watch" and "Postcards from the Past."

We started this education program last October to support teachers, empower students and expand the frontiers of human knowledge. To say we're inspired by what we've seen is an understatement.

Calendar for mobile devices

5/24/2007 11:45:00 AM

Posted by Devesh Parekh, Software Engineer, Google Calendar team

We realize that more people in the world have mobile phones than have computers, and people take their cell phones with them everywhere. Since one of our main goals on the Calendar team is to make planning your events and maintaining your schedule as easy as possible, starting today, you can access your Google Calendar account from your cell phone!

Just visit calendar.google.com from your phone, and you'll see your agenda of upcoming events, complete with details like date, time, location, description, and guest list.

Cingular BlackBerry 8800 has Google Maps and GPS

5/23/2007 09:33:00 AM

Posted by Steve Lee, Product Manager, Google Maps for mobile

Some of us have a great sense of direction, and others find themselves, well, a little lost at times. For those in the latter camp, you can thank Cingular for launching the BlackBerry® 8800, the latest open GPS-enabled device from a major U.S. carrier. That means that when you use Google Maps for mobile, your location automatically shows up on the map.

When you download Google Maps for mobile and fire it up, you'll notice something quite unusual: a blinking blue dot showing you exactly where you are! You can use your auto-detected location to get directions and perform local searches without even entering your location -- instead of "pizza 94043", just enter "pizza" -- and we'll automatically know you want pizza in the zip code "94043."

So here's a great big hats off to Cingular -- this BlackBerry® 8800 with GPS is awesome!

Getting it done with Google Apps

5/22/2007 01:11:00 PM

Posted by Jeremy Milo, Product Marketing Manager

As you might have heard recently, in addition to search and advertising, we're focused on a third key area of innovation: powerful applications that run on the web and that let you collaborate and communicate in new ways. Not only do we offer email, calendaring, and document creation and collaboration services (and more!) for individuals, but with Google Apps, businesses, schools and other organizations can customize these tools and use them as their own internal systems.

More than 100,000 organizations large and small have started using Google Apps to deliver powerful services to employees, students and members, and since there's no hardware or software to install or maintain, getting up and running is a snap. We're hearing great stories from users, and we're getting exciting feedback from journalists, analysts and other industry experts. And just this week, PC World named Google Apps Premier Edition #1 on their list of The 100 Best Products of 2007.

We're honored to be recognized by PC World this way -- and are more inspired than ever to expand what's possible for groups of people to do using the power of the web.

Google Apps Partner Edition

5/18/2007 08:42:00 AM

Posted by Hunter Middleton, Product Manager

From the beginning, we envisioned making Google Apps available to any organization that might want to offer this innovative set of services to its employees, customers, students, members, or any other associates of the organization. Today, we're excited to take another step in that direction by releasing a version of Google Apps specifically designed for ISPs, portals, and other service providers, whether you have a few thousand subscribers or over a million. This new version, which we're calling the Partner Edition, makes it easy for large and small service providers to offer your subscribers the latest versions of powerful tools, like Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Docs & Spreadsheets, without having to worry about hosting, updating, or maintaining any of the services yourself. All you have to do is point and click in the easy admin control panel and figure out what branding you'd like to layer on top of the products in order to create a customized look and feel. You can quit spending your resources and time on applications like webmail -- and leave the work to our busy bees at the Googleplex.

Oh, the places you'll go....

5/17/2007 07:55:00 AM

Posted by Tammy McLeod, Software Engineer, Picasa Web Albums

If all you ever wanted to do is direct, now's your chance. You can use our free photo sharing service, Picasa Web Albums, to create nifty portable Flash slideshows that you can easily embed in any blog or web page. Check out this slideshow of our new Hollywood-themed office in Santa Monica.



The playback controls are built right in -- just roll over the slideshow to reveal them -- and it just takes a quick click for friends to get started on creating their own masterpiece.

Calendar on the go

5/03/2007 05:40:00 AM

Posted by Aarati Parmar Martino, Software Engineer, Google Calendar team

Many people schedule their day on the fly, and are often away from their computers when they need to run to their next event. With Google Calendar, you don't have to be online to be alerted about upcoming events—all you need is a mobile phone. Now you can set up mobile SMS (text message) reminders that will be sent to your mobile phone.

In fact, now you can schedule reminders for events on your personal calendar or any other calendar to which you're subscribed. Whether it's your favorite baseball team's schedule, a family calendar, or any other calendar to which you have access, you can set up mobile reminders.

This feature is available in all the 18 languages we support.

New 3-D layers from AIA on Google Earth

4/24/2007 06:23:00 AM

Posted by RK Stewart, FAIA, President 2007, American Institute of Architects

Architects are pretty passionate about architecture -– no surprise there. However, we've come to find that the American public is too. Starting today, there are two new Google Earth layers with which to explore architecture’s most popular structures and take away some ideas to help enhance the communities we live in. As president of The American Institute of Architects (AIA), I’m ecstatic to announce our partnership with Google Earth to launch these new layers in celebration of our the 150^th anniversary.

Check out this video on YouTube to watch us navigate these layers from Google headquarters.

Fly to America’s Favorite Architecture, a layer featuring the American public’s favorite architecture (as selected though a national poll announced earlier this year). View all 150 structures, including many with just created 3-D models of the buildings, ballparks, bridges, and memorials that characterize architecture in the eyes of Americans. And then explore the second layer, Blueprint for America. Blueprint is a community service effort funded by the AIA, in which AIA members donating their time and expertise are collaborating with community leaders and local citizens to enhance the quality of life in their community. You’ll be able to track the progress of these projects on Google Earth as they unfold over the next year and, we hope, become inspired to take action where you live.

We're expecting

4/17/2007 12:01:00 PM

Posted by Sam Schillace, Engineering Director

Well, we tried to keep it a secret as long as we could, but to be honest, we've been dying to tell you about the bun we've got in the oven. We'll soon be welcoming a new addition to the Google Docs & Spreadsheets family: presentations.

First of all, we want to welcome the team from Tonic Systems to Google. Tonic, which we've just acquired, is based in San Francisco and Melbourne, Australia. They have some great technology for presentation creation and document conversion, and it will be a great addition as we add presentation sharing and collaboration capabilities to Google Docs & Spreadsheets.

We've already freed those of you working in teams from the burdens of version control and email attachment overload when going back and forth on word processing and spreadsheets. It just made sense to add presentations to the mix; after all, when you create slides, you're almost always going to share them. Now students, writers, teachers, organizers, and, well, just about everyone who uses a computer can look forward to having real-time, web-based collaboration across even more common business document formats.

Our due date is this summer. We promise to share family photos just as soon as we can.

Blogger: Now in more languages

4/12/2007 04:20:00 PM

Posted by Eric Case, Product Manager

Today Blogger is available in eight new languages! Check it out in Nederlands, Dansk, suomi, Norsk, Svenska, Đ Ń?Ń?Ń?кий, TĂĽrkçe and ภาษาไทย, which brings us to 19 total. Blogging is clearly a global phenomenon, and we're incredibly excited to help bring it to ever more people around the world. With Blogger, you can:

• easily set up a weblog with just a few clicks
• share writing and photos for free
• customize your blog's layout with different fonts and colors
• only show your blog to friends and family

We have more languages in the works too -- stay tuned!

Hikes on the fly

4/12/2007 03:19:00 PM

Posted by Larry Fox, Business Development, Trimble Outdoors

Many of you reading this may already know that Trimble Outdoors has partnered with Google to provide Google Earth viewers with GPS-based interactive hiking information. We’re very excited about being able to share all the great GPS content we’ve developed over the years and through partnerships with magazines including Backpacker, Bicycling and Mountain Bike. It’s an outstanding resource for outdoors enthusiasts, or really, anyone who wants to do a little research before setting out on a hike. You can access lots of multimedia info on fitness and outdoor adventures, including routes, points of interest, pictures, video segments and even audio clips. Essentially, anytime, anywhere you can launch Google Earth, you can view hundreds of hikes that have already been logged and completed, and view personalized web content. Then, through the convergence of Trimble Outdoors’ technology and Google Earth, you can click one button, and the exact trail route is exported to your GPS-enabled phone.

This partnership between Google Earth and Trimble Outdoors is designed to support the community of outdoor enthusiasts with exciting new ways to explore the earth and share adventure stories online.

Now you can blog in Hindi

4/12/2007 11:48:00 AM

Posted by Anupama Dutta and Nitin Arora, Software Engineers

Ever wondered how cool it would be if you could type "Haal kaisa hai janaab ka" in your usual chatting style and the words actually got converted automagically to "हाल कैसा है जनाब का"? We have now made that possible with the new Blogger transliteration feature. Now you can easily publish your thoughts, experiences and even your favourite Bollywood songs in Hindi.

Enabling the transliteration option allows you to type out Hindi words using phonetically equivalent English script, and see the words getting transformed into the corresponding Devanagari script. The plus is that you now don't need to learn complicated mappings from English alphabet combinations to Hindi letters. That means you really don't need to worry about WeiRD UpPerCasEing to get the right Hindi spellings. Just type as you would naturally do, in your own style, and let Google read your mind :) Well, not really, but close. We realised that everybody has their own unique way of spelling Hindi words in English -- so we have a personalization mechanism in place that enables us to remember your writing style. Correct once, and get the word right every time after that!

We use machine learning technology in the background to give you the most satisfactory transliteration. This way, you can focus on the writing and comfortably express yourself in a language close to your heart. Go creative, try it out, and discuss it here. We're sure you will enjoy it as much as we enjoyed creating it!

Map-making: So easy a caveman could do it

4/05/2007 06:01:00 AM

Posted by Jess Lee, Product Manager, Google Maps

Humans have been making maps since the Stone Age. In fact, map-making predates written language by several millenia. Nowadays, people make maps online using tools like the Google Maps API -- but using an API isn't as easy as scribbling on a cave wall.

That's why we're announcing My Maps, a new feature that makes it quick and easy to create your own custom Google Maps just by pointing and clicking. You can add placemarks, draw lines and shapes, and embed text, photos and videos -- all using a simple drag and drop interface. Your map automatically gets a public URL that you can share with your friends and family, or you can also publish your map for inclusion in Google Maps search results. We'll continue to show organic local search results with red pushpins; user-generated results will have blue pushpins. The user-created results include KML as well as maps made through My Maps.

To give you a better idea of what kind of maps you can make, here are some examples that Googlers created after we released the feature internally. (We ran a contest and gave a Nintendo Wii to the best map-maker.)

• America's Highway: Oral Histories of Route 66: A glimpse into life on the legendary (and now-decommissioned) highway, and what drivers will find there today
• Around Japan in 28 Days: Catalogs a trip across Japan that can be done in 3 weeks
• 2004 Presidential Election: Red states, blue states, and election stats for each
• The World of Hello World: A map of programming languages and rough locations in the world where they were created
• Olympic Host Cities: Cities that have hosted the Olympic Games with links to related Wikipedia information
• The Googleplex: A photo essay on life at the Google headquarters in Mountain View
• Monster Sightings: Locations of monster sightings across the globe

And the list goes on. We've seen maps for housewarming parties, marathons, band tour schedules, blogs, and even resumes. Since customizing maps has become this easy, we encourage you to create your own to share with friends and family. Have fun!