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What U.S. immigration policies mean to Google

Posted by Pablo Chavez, Policy Counsel Our experience with American immigration policy dates back to one of our founders: when he was six, Sergey Brin's parents fled the Soviet Union in 1979 and settled in the United States. Today, there are literally hundreds of examples of immigrants and non-immigrant foreign workers playing a vital role in our company. In particular, employees who are holders of H-1B visas -- which allow foreign-born workers with specialized skills to work in the U.S. on a temporary basis -- have helped lead the development of Google News and orkut. Immigrants from countries like Canada, Iran, and Switzerland now lead our business operations, global marketing, global business development, and data infrastructure operations. Without these talented employees and many others, Google would not be where it is today. As Congress grapples with various immigration reform proposals, Laszlo Bock, our Vice President of People Operations, testified today before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration about the practical impact that the U.S. immigration system has on Google. (Laszlo's mother Susan, who fled Communist Romania when Laszlo was a child, was there too. She was welcomed by Rep. Zoe Lofgren, the chair of the committee, and she received an ovation from everyone present at the hearing.) In his testimony, Laszlo said that, due to limits on the number of H-1B visas, Google is regularly unable to pursue highly qualified candidates. This year, an estimated 133,000 visa applications were filed by H-1B candidates in the first two days of the filing period for only 65,000 available spots. Over the last year alone, the artificially low cap on H-1B visas has prevented more than 70 Google candidates from receiving H-1B visas. Therefore, Laszlo said, "We would encourage Congress to significantly increase the annual cap of 65,000 H-1B visas, to a figure more reflective of the growth rate of our technology-driven economy." He also urged Congress to address the backlog of employment-based green cards for highly skilled workers. Check out the <a href="http://services.google.com/blog_resources/Laszlo_Bock_immigration_testimony.pdf">full text</a> of Laszlo's testimony or watch the video of his opening remarks to the committee below. <object height="350" width="425"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/-rAFmSYY6uE"></param><param name="wmode" value="transparent"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/-rAFmSYY6uE" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" width="425" height="350"></embed></object>

What U.S. immigration policies mean to Google

Posted by Pablo Chavez, Policy Counsel Our experience with American immigration policy dates back to one of our founders: when he was six, S...

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Adding more flare

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 <a href="http://blogs.feedburner.com/feedburner/archives/2007/06/its_truegle.php">FeedBurner</a>. 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 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_feed">web feed</a> 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 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS">RSS</a> 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 <a href="http://services.google.com/blog_resources/2007_06_11_GoogleFeedburner.mp3">audio file</a> of our press call today with FeedBurner CEO Dick Costolo. (It takes a minute to load.)

Adding more flare

Posted by Susan Wojcicki, VP, Product Management As you know, we're constantly looking for ways to identify and offer new tools for cont...

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29 hours of code

Posted by Andrew Bowers, Developer Programs <a href="http://code.google.com/">Google Code</a>, that is. <a href="http://code.google.com/events/developerday">Google Developer Day</a> has officially kicked off in Sydney, Australia, beginning our 29-hour marathon of developer activities around the world. Approximately 5,000 developers will join us today in ten countries to talk about Google's developer products, ask questions, and share their thoughts with Google engineers. For those who can't make it, we're webcasting the <a href="http://code.google.com/events/developerday/webcast-schedule.html">sessions from London and California</a> live, and posting recorded sessions from all locations on the website. A deep dive into technical sessions, free food, swag -- what more could a developer ask for? Well, a few new products would be a good start, and that's what we're providing. First up is <a href="http://code.google.com/apis/gears">Google Gears</a>, an open source browser extension for enabling offline web applications. Now developers will be able to create web applications that don't need a constant Internet connection to work. Users, meanwhile, can interact with Gears-enabled websites anywhere, whether they're on the couch or on an airplane. With this early release, we hope the community will provide feedback and move towards an industry standard for offline web applications. Read more on the new <a href="http://gearsblog.blogspot.com/">Gears blog</a>. An experimental product debuting today is the <a href="http://editor.googlemashups.com/" title="Google Mashup Editor">Google Mashup Editor</a>, an online editor that enables developers to create, test, and deploy mashups and simple web applications from within a browser. Now developers can turn out those weekend projects more quickly. We've also launched a new <a href="http://googlemashupeditor.blogspot.com/" title="Google Mashup Editor blog">blog</a> where you can learn more about the Google Mashup Editor and get the latest news. Finally, we released <a href="http://www.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/mapplets/index.html" title="Google Mapplets">Google Mapplets</a> yesterday at the <a href="http://conferences.oreillynet.com/where2007/" title="Where 2.0 conference">Where 2.0 conference</a>. Mapplets are mini-applications that any developer can build on top of Google Maps so that users can easily discover the creative genius and usefulness of the mashup development community. You'll find more about Mapplets <a href="http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2007/05/mashup-of-mashups.html" title="here">here</a>. And we're also quite excited about the interest that has been shown in Google Web Toolkit (GWT). Since its launch last May, there have been over 1 million downloads. You can read more <a href="http://googlewebtoolkit.blogspot.com/2007/05/gwt-reaches-1-million-downloads.html">on the GWT blog</a>. Between Developer Day, the product launches, and GWT's activity, we hope to keep developers around the world busy for a while. But if you run out of things to build, you can always find more ideas on <a href="http://code.google.com/">Google Code</a>.

29 hours of code

Posted by Andrew Bowers, Developer Programs Google Code , that is. Google Developer Day has officially kicked off in Sydney, Australia, beg...

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A picture's worth a thousand clicks

Posted by John Hanke, Director for Maps, Earth and Local I am pleased to tell you that we've agreed to purchase <a href="http://www.panoramio.com/">Panoramio</a>, a website based in Spain that links millions of photos with the exact geographical location where they were taken. (<a href="http://www.google.com/intl/en/press/annc/annc_panoramio.html">Our FAQ</a> 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 <a href="http://www.panoramio.com/photo/901470">moonscapes in Croatia</a>, <a href="http://www.panoramio.com/photo/1578881" title="http://www.panoramio.com/photo/1578881">dramatic sunsets in Australia</a>, and innovative <a href="http://www.panoramio.com/photo/91375">architecture in the United Arab Emirates</a>. 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.

A picture's worth a thousand clicks

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 ba...

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Working in the Windy City

Posted by Brian Fitzpatrick, Engineering, Google Chicago Despite the fact that we have <a href="http://www.google.com/corporate/address.html">dozens of offices</a> worldwide, whenever I tell people that I work for Google in Chicago, most of them respond "Google has an office in Chicago?" Then I proceed to tell them that yes, we have a sizeable sales office in <a href="http://maps.google.com/maps?oi=map&q=20+West+Kinzie+Street+Chicago,+IL+60610+%28Google+Chicago%29">downtown Chicago</a> (which is now in its sixth year!), and yes, we have a few engineers camped out in one corner (near the cafe and the foosball table, of course). Well, now we're decking out the office with <a href="http://www.thinkgeek.com/homeoffice/lights/59e0/" rel="nofollow">binary clocks</a> and <a href="http://www.thinkgeek.com/caffeine/accessories/5a65/" rel="nofollow">caffeinated soap</a> because Google is <a href="http://www.google.com/support/jobs/bin/answer.py?answer=57998">hiring engineers</a> here. <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjG_xGUSsAaRxK0MDhHe7mxFXC7MoaoMDwNvBBvRX6JKa9fmNO18hhNfSV_fdej4ZRlSthGkYGyo2lx_sZ2dFh3lt6aKe_vCmg4y8nDYv64r8RToxtqWkHayND0Se9U3Scc0Qe5PTdKOoPQ/s1600-h/ChicagoGooglersBig.JPG" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5068352102851397394" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjG_xGUSsAaRxK0MDhHe7mxFXC7MoaoMDwNvBBvRX6JKa9fmNO18hhNfSV_fdej4ZRlSthGkYGyo2lx_sZ2dFh3lt6aKe_vCmg4y8nDYv64r8RToxtqWkHayND0Se9U3Scc0Qe5PTdKOoPQ/s320/ChicagoGooglersBig.JPG" style="cursor: pointer;"></a> Our Chicago engineers are currently working on Open Source and developer tools, and we're ramping up other interesting data-centric projects now. So if you're an innovative engineer who likes to launch early and often, build world-class software, and be a part of a small upstart team, then <a href="http://www.google.com/support/jobs/bin/answer.py?answer=57998">we want you</a><a>. </a>