Sunday, December 10, 2006
Saturday, December 9, 2006
Opening my eyes to a whole new world
Every once in a while you come across a piece of technology that instantly grabs you and you can't stop saying "Oh my god!" When I bought my 12" Mac Powerbook, for instance, just opening the box was an experience. Each item was laid out perfectly -- everything I pulled out was well designed from the power connector with the glowing ring to the pulsating light next to the latch that made it look like it was breathing.
I recently went to the Tech Museum Awards, and one of the laureates, Mohammed Bah Abba, had created a refrigerator that requires no electricity -- basically uses two clay pots with wet sand in between them. This device helped keep food fresh longer in poor rural areas in Africa. And the group FogQuest uses these big meshes that collected potable water from fog (yes, the white stuff that hangs around in the air) for people in Central and South America. Simple, elegant technologies that have a huge impact to help with basic human needs.
Due in large part to the community of people who use Google Earth, it has also become one of those technologies. Having worked on it for almost 7 years, you would think the magic would have worn off for me by now, but amazingly enough, it hasn't. Every once in a while we add a new feature -- and it's like I was looking at it for the first time. Hours pass by without me noticing.
The new Geographic Web layer we released today is one of those features. We've taken the rich data of Wikipedia, Panoramio, and the Google Earth Community and made a browsable layer in Google Earth. Now you can fly anywhere in the world and see what people have written about it, photographed, or posted. I went hopping around from the southern tip of South America to the mosques in the Middle East to the Maldives Islands, immersed in a wealth of information, and I really felt like I was visiting each place through eyes of people who had been there. It was really engaging to compare, say, the Grand Canyon through the photos in Panoramio to the view from Google Earth, where I could follow the Colorado River through each.
To experience this for yourself, all you need to do is start Google Earth and explore the world. As of today you will see new icons -— the Wikipedia globe, the Panoramio star, or the information “i” of the Google Earth Community —- so just click on any of them to explore information about a place. You can also easily turn it off in the Layers panel on the lower left.
This is by far one of my most favorite layers we've ever done, and I really hope you enjoy it. To use our founding group's tagline, Happy travels!
Weekend Babe: Cute Hong Kong Model Doris
Wow! Can you believe it?! Only 3 more weekends before 2007! Amazing how time flies.
Weekend babe this week is the cute and petite Hong Kong Model Doris. I was doing my 'research' and I stumbled upon this cutie. Nothing much about her tough. Anyone have any idea?
Anyways, have a good one!
Thursday, December 7, 2006
Share your photos in more languages
Have you been waiting to share your photos on Picasa Web Albums in a language other than English? We don't want you waiting a minute longer, so today our team in Santa Monica is very happy to give you the ability to create web albums in 18 additional languages: English (UK), English (US), Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Taiwanese, and Turkish. If you've already got a Picasa Web Albums account in English, click the "Settings" link to change your language.
For the fastest and easiest uploading to Picasa Web Albums, get Picasa. If you don't use Windows or you have another photo management tool, use your browser to upload your pix. Either way, your photos will be easy to arrange in a clean, uncluttered web gallery where you can add captions and share them. Take a look at our test gallery to see what it looks like.
The Google 2007 Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship
Dr. Anita Borg (1949-2003) devoted her life to revolutionizing the way we think about technology and dismantling the barriers that keep women and minorities from entering the computing and technology fields. As part of our ongoing commitment to Anita’s vision, we're pleased to announce the 2007 Google Anita Borg Scholarship. A group of women undergraduate and graduate students studying in the U.S. will each receive a $10,000 scholarship for the 2007-2008 academic year. The selected scholars will also be invited to attend an all-expenses paid trip to our Mountain View headquarters.
Tell your friends or apply yourself – the deadline for U.S. applications is Monday, January 15, 2007.
And this year, we're also pleased to expand the scholarship program to women students in Europe. These recipients will each receive a €5,000 (or equivalent) scholarship for the 2007-2008 academic year, and are invited to a retreat at the Google office in Zurich, Switzerland. Applications for the Google Europe Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship are due Friday, January 12, 2007.
We hope this program will encourage students to excel in their studies, inspire them to become role models and leaders, and help remove the financial barriers for women wishing to pursue an engineering degree. Here's a bit of testimony from two Anita Borg Scholars who have since joined us:
"I remember mailing in my application by FedEx overnight because I had decided to apply at the last minute and I really didn't think I had much of a chance. I'm glad I applied because through the scholarship, I met some amazing women who became good friends of mine. I got a chance to go to the Grace Hopper conference for Women in Computer Science and probably the most important thing I learned from the experience is nothing ventured, nothing gained."-- Rose Yao, Associate Product Manager, and 2004 Anita Borg Scholar
"One of the greatest things about the scholarship is the opportunity to meet other women and form a network -- I have kept in touch a lot of the other women that received the scholarship the same year and over the last 2 years this has been invaluable to me. These are women I can rely on and even though we don't see each other frequently, the bond we formed is strong."-- Gaby Aguilera, Software Engineer-Testing, and 2004 Anita Borg Scholar
Thoughts on health care, continued
As I indicated in my post last week, I've been interested in the issue of health care and health information for a while. I just spoke at a conference about some of the challenges in the health care system that we at Google want to tackle. The conference, called Connecting Americans to Their Health Care, is a gathering focused on how consumers are transforming health care through the use of personal health technologies.
This speech will give you some insight into the problems that we believe need our attention. There are, of course, other challenges in health care that we plan to work on, and we'll share more information with you about the solutions we're trying to develop as this work advances.
Wednesday, December 6, 2006
Chatting with Lotus Sametime
Mary Himinkool, New Business Development
When Google Talk launched, we expressed our commitment to open standards in the belief that real-time communication should be as open as possible. We hoped that people would have their choice of service provider, but still be able to chat with other networks using their preferred client. With our support for XMPP federation, hundreds of services are connecting to Google Talk via this open standard.
Today, we're excited that IBM is announcing support for XMPP with the release of Sametime 7.5. This means that Google Talk and Lotus Sametime IM users can simply invite one another to chat, bringing together enterprise and personal IM users around the world. If you use Lotus Sametime at the office and have colleagues who use Google Talk, now you can chat with them. Similarly, if you're a Google Talk business user you can now add professional contacts who use Lotus Sametime to your Friends list -- just some of the benefits of interoperability.
It's great to see such momentum around open communication. With so many networks supporting XMPP you can now chat with your buddies on LiveJournal, various universities, at home, and, of course, at work. Welcome, IBM!
When Google Talk launched, we expressed our commitment to open standards in the belief that real-time communication should be as open as possible. We hoped that people would have their choice of service provider, but still be able to chat with other networks using their preferred client. With our support for XMPP federation, hundreds of services are connecting to Google Talk via this open standard.
Today, we're excited that IBM is announcing support for XMPP with the release of Sametime 7.5. This means that Google Talk and Lotus Sametime IM users can simply invite one another to chat, bringing together enterprise and personal IM users around the world. If you use Lotus Sametime at the office and have colleagues who use Google Talk, now you can chat with them. Similarly, if you're a Google Talk business user you can now add professional contacts who use Lotus Sametime to your Friends list -- just some of the benefits of interoperability.
It's great to see such momentum around open communication. With so many networks supporting XMPP you can now chat with your buddies on LiveJournal, various universities, at home, and, of course, at work. Welcome, IBM!
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