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Opening my eyes to a whole new world

Posted by Chikai Ohazama, Google Earth team 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. <div> I recently went to the <a href="http://www.techawards.org">Tech Museum Awards</a>, and one of the laureates, <a href="http://www.techawards.org/laureates/stories/index.php?id=131">Mohammed Bah Abba</a>, 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 <a href="http://www.fogquest.org">FogQuest</a> 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 <a href="http://earth.google.com">Google Earth</a>, 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 <a href="http://www.wikipedia.org">Wikipedia</a>, <a href="http://www.panoramio.com/">Panoramio</a>, and the <a href="http://bbs.keyhole.com/">Google Earth Community</a> 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! <a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/x/blogger/7609/900/1600/133697/Earth_Wikip_combo.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/x/blogger/7609/900/320/925614/Earth_Wikip_combo.jpg" style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" /></a></div>

Opening my eyes to a whole new world

Posted by Chikai Ohazama, Google Earth team Every once in a while you come across a piece of technology that instantly grabs you and you ca...

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Share your photos in more languages

Posted by Steve McKay, Software Engineer Have you been waiting to share your photos on <a href="http://picasaweb.google.com">Picasa Web Albums</a> 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 <a href="http://picasa.google.com">Picasa</a>. 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 <a href="http://picasaweb.google.com/tester/">test gallery</a> to see what it looks like.

Share your photos in more languages

Posted by Steve McKay, Software Engineer Have you been waiting to share your photos on Picasa Web Albums in a language other than English? ...

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The Google 2007 Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship

Posted by Meredith Carroll, Staffing Programs Coordinator <a href="http://www.anitaborg.org/about/history.php">Dr. Anita Borg</a> (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 <a href="http://www.google.com/jobs/scholarships">2007 Google Anita Borg Scholarship</a>. 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. <a href="http://www.google.com/anitaborg/">Tell your friends or apply yourself </a>– 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 <a href="http://www.google.com/anitaborg-europe/">Google Europe Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship</a> 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:<blockquote>"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." <div style="text-align: right;">-- Rose Yao, Associate Product Manager, and 2004 Anita Borg Scholar</div> "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." <div style="text-align: right;">-- Gaby Aguilera, Software Engineer-Testing, and 2004 Anita Borg Scholar</div></blockquote>

The Google 2007 Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship

Posted by Meredith Carroll, Staffing Programs Coordinator Dr. Anita Borg (1949-2003) devoted her life to revolutionizing the way we think a...

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Thoughts on health care, continued

Posted by Adam Bosworth, VP As <a href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/11/health-care-information-matters.html">I indicated in my post last week</a>, 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 <a href="http://www.phrconference.org/">Connecting Americans to Their Health Care</a>, is a gathering focused on how consumers are transforming health care through the use of personal health technologies. <a href="http://services.google.com/blog_resources/bosworth_healthcare.pdf">This speech</a> 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.

Thoughts on health care, continued

Posted by Adam Bosworth, VP As I indicated in my post last week , I've been interested in the issue of health care and health informatio...

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Chatting with Lotus Sametime

Posted by 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 <a href="http://googletalk.blogspot.com/2006/01/xmpp-federation.html">XMPP federation</a>, hundreds of services are connecting to Google Talk via this open standard. Today, we're excited that <a href="http://www.marketwire.com/mw/release_html_b1?release_id=192209">IBM is announcing support for XMPP with the release of Sametime 7.5</a>. 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 <a href="http://www.livejournal.com/">LiveJournal</a>, various universities, at home, and, of course, at work. Welcome, IBM!

Chatting with Lotus Sametime

Posted by Mary Himinkool, New Business Development When Google Talk launched, we expressed our commitment to open standards in the belief th...

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Staying informed with Google News search

Posted by T.V Raman, Research Scientist From time to time, our own <a href="http://emacspeak.sourceforge.net/raman/">T.V. Raman</a> shares his tips on how to use Google from his perspective as a technologist who cannot see -- tips that sighted people, among others, may also find useful. - Ed. In the information age, currency of information has high value. As someone who cannot see, I find having to skim many different news sites to stay caught up even more difficult than the average web user. As in most things, off-loading some of this work to the machine is the answer, and what better machine to offload the work to than <a href="http://news.google.com">Google News</a>. In addition, finding relevant news stories through Google News helps me navigate directly to the news story on the originating site. Even if the originating news site is itself visually complex, Google has done most of the hard work of surfing that site and getting me to the content I need to read. Combined with Google News finding and grouping related stories on a given topic, this is an especially effective way of staying informed. Here are some of the ways I use Google News: For topics I regularly search for, I create Atom feeds that search topics on Google News and subscribe to them via my blog reader (<a href="http://www.google.com/reader/">Google Reader</a>). Here is the Atom feed for locating news articles on <a href="http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=tus&q=xforms&scoring=d&ie=ISO-8859-1&output=atom" title="http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=tus&q=xforms&scoring=d&ie=ISO-8859-1&output=atom">XForms</a>. For topics on my watch list I create <a href="http://www.google.com/alerts">Google News alerts</a>. In addition, <a href="http://news.google.com/intl/en_us/news_feed_terms.html">Google News provides feeds</a> (RSS or Atom) for popular groupings of articles. I subscribe to the feeds for Business and Technology using Google Reader. Together, all of the above provide an effective means for me to stay caught up -- I'm usually done with all my news reading during my 40-minute daily commute to work on the Google shuttle. In addition, note that <a href="http://www.google.com/intl/en_us/mobile/news/index.html">Google News also provides a Mobile version</a> that is very speech-friendly. For the most part I use the main Google News site, primarily because news stories of interest are mostly textual, but if some of the stories come from visually complex news sites, I often hand those off to the <a href="http://www.google.com/m">Google wireless transcoder</a> so that it can present me the story in a form that is more amenable to being spoken out aloud.

Staying informed with Google News search

Posted by T.V Raman, Research Scientist From time to time, our own T.V. Raman shares his tips on how to use Google from his perspective as ...

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Teach for America and Google join forces

Posted by Victoria Grand, Corporate Communications Manager Like many college seniors, I spent the fall of my senior year in somewhat of a tailspin trying to figure out what to do next. My friends and I considered the usual options: grad school, i-banking, gigs with tech companies and consulting firms. And then there was <a href="http://www.teachforamerica.org/">Teach for America</a> (TFA), an organization dedicated to eradicating educational inequity by enlisting thousands of elite college grads to teach in under-resourced schools. I joined TFA in 1995 and went from college student to inner-city first grade teacher (of 36 students!) practically overnight. Teaching was, without a doubt, the most challenging and the most rewarding job I have ever had. TFA continues to be a popular destination for college grads today. Since the mid-90s, its enrollment has more than tripled and its applicant pool has quadrupled. As a Googler and former TFA'er, I was thrilled to hear that Google is partnering with TFA to provide two-year deferrals for students who receive offers from both institutions. Now bright, idealistic college grads don't have to choose between two exciting and worthwhile career opportunities. Our partnership enables college grads to get real-world experience and to bring the insight and experience they gain in the classroom to bear in their work at Google. By joining forces, Google and TFA will be able to attract individuals who are capable of the hard work, commitment, and creativity it takes to teach and to be a Googler. Visit <a href="http://www.google.com/jobs/teachforamerica">www.google.com/jobs/teachforamerica</a> to find out more about this great program. Update: Corrected author attribution.

Teach for America and Google join forces

Posted by Victoria Grand, Corporate Communications Manager Like many college seniors, I spent the fall of my senior year in somewhat of a ta...

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