Umair's Blog: 08/11/2009

Thursday 12 November 2009

Flying (and landing) in a WiFi Wonderland

Yesterday we announced an expansion of our Virgin America WiFi sponsorship to also include 47 airports. Both programs will offer free WiFi through January 15, 2010 and will cover more than 10 million passengers traveling this holiday season. There's no Google account or credit card required to log on, but we'll be offering the option to try out a Google product and also offer the chance to donate to one of three charities; we'll be matching donations up to $250,000.

We hope that this makes travel to be with friends and family that much better this holiday season.

You can learn more about the program at http://www.freeholidaywifi.com

Posted by Jeff Aguero, Product Marketing Manager

Wednesday 11 November 2009

Google Voice invitations for Blue Star Families

Military families face dozens of challenges every day. The life of a military spouse and a military family is never easy. It's a life of sacrifice and patience, but it's also one of pride and patriotism.

To help families better stay in touch with their loved ones, this Veterans Day we're partnering with Blue Star Families to give priority Google Voice invitations to the families of U.S. service members involved in the organization. Blue Star Families is a group of military spouses from all over the country who work hard to educate civilian communities and leaders about the hardships faced by military families.

Military families encounter unique challenges and frequent separations, so staying in touch is vitally important. With one Google Voice number, families won't have to worry about missing calls from service members abroad.

Google Voice can make communication one less worry for these families, and hopefully bring them a little bit closer to their loved ones.

Posted by Jason Toff, Associate Product Marketing Manager

New additions to the settings page

Earlier today we made two additions to the Google Docs settings page. The first, "Where items open," lets you pick if you want items to open in a new window (how it works today) or in the same window.

A couple weeks ago, we launched "New!" and "Viewed/unviewed" indicators in the docs list which allow you to easily spot brand new and updated items. Since not everyone loves these -- shocking, I know :-) - we also added an "Update indicators" setting, which lets you turn these indicators off.

Posted by: Vijay Bangaru, Product Manager, Google Docs

More extra storage for less

Posted by Elvin Lee, Software Engineer

When Gmail launched five years ago, it came with a gigabyte of storage space. A gigabyte doesn't seem like very much any more, and now every Gmail account comes with more than seven gigs of space (and growing). Still, some people manage to use up all of this (that's a lot of email...), so for over two years we've offered the option to purchase even more storage. This extra storage acts as an overflow that you only start using when you reach the limit of your free storage, and is shared for use between Gmail and Picasa Web Albums. Picasa has always come with a gigabyte of free storage to share photos, but people need even more storage as they start taking more pictures and moving full resolution backups of their photo collection into the cloud.

While storage costs have been dropping naturally, we've also been working hard to improve our infrastructure to reduce costs even further. Today, we're dramatically lowering our prices to make extra storage more affordable. You can now buy 20 GB for only $5 a year, twice as much storage for a quarter of the old price, and enough space for more than 10,000 full resolution pictures taken with a five megapixel camera. And if you need more than 20 GB, you can purchase up to 16 terabytes!

So if you're running out of space in your overflowing inbox, or want to keep full resolution copies of thousands of photos, visit www.google.com/accounts/PurchaseStorage to see all the plans and to buy more storage.

Google Latitude, now with Location History & Alerts

[Cross-posted from the Google Mobile Blog]

Since the launch of Google Latitude earlier this year, we've been getting a lot of feature requests. One of the most popular ideas was for Latitude to keep track of location history, allowing you (but not your friends) to see where you've been at any point in time. Another popular idea was to notify you when you're near your Latitude friends so you can easily meet up or grab lunch. Today, we're happy to introduce both Google Location History and Google Location Alerts (beta) to let you do even more with Latitude.

Google Location History
Whether you're taking a road trip across the country, backpacking across Europe, or just going out for a night on the town, it's fascinating to look back at where you went, and for how long you stayed. Enable Google Location H istory to store, view, and manage your past Latitude locations. You can visualize your history on Google Maps and Earth or play back a recent trip in order. Of course, you can always delete selected history or your entire location history at any time. While working on Location History, I found myself going back in time to discover things that would have otherwise been impossible. For example, I stopped at an awesome BBQ place on my way back from Lake Tahoe this summer, but I couldn't remember the name when my friend was asking about it a few months later. I pulled up my location history for that weekend, found where I was stationary on the drive home, and the restaurant name showed up in Google Maps: Drooling Dog Bar BQ. Check it out below:

Google Location Alerts (beta)
People also want to know when their friends were nearby, but it's not always convenient to keep checking Latitude to see if a friend has recently shown up near you. After working on this for a while, we realized it wasn't as straightforward as sending a notification every time Latitude friends were near each other. Imagine that you're Latitude friends with your roommate or co-workers. It would get pretty annoying to get a text message every single time you walked in the door at home or pulled into work. To avoid this, we decided to make Location Alerts smarter by requiring that you also enable Location History. Using your past location history, Location Alerts can recognize your regular, routine locations and not create alerts when you're at places like home or work. Alerts will only be sent to you and any nearby friends when you're either at an unusual place or at a routine place at an unusual time. Keep in mind that it may take up to a week to learn your "unusual" locations and start sending alerts.

To enable these features, go to google.com/latitude/apps. You must first be an existing Google Latitude user; if you're not already, sign up here. You must explicitly enable each feature, and of course, you can disable it at any time. Learn more in the Help Center about Location Alerts and Location History, suggest and vote on ideas in the Mobile Product Ideas page, or report problems in the Mobile Help Forum.

Posted by Posted by Chris Lambert, Software Engineer, Google Mobile

Tuesday 10 November 2009

Announcing Our First Product Search Marketplace Partners: Etsy, eCrater, and eBid

Today, we're excited to launch the Product Search Marketplace Partner program with our initial partner marketplaces eBid, eCrater, and Etsy. These marketplaces will submit product data for their sellers frequently and with all relevant attributes, so online shoppers get the up-to-date information they need to make smart buying decisions. Additionally, these marketplaces are a great solution for merchants who don't have a standalone retail website because they provide online visibility for the merchants' products. You can learn more about the program and our partners here.

Posted by Vivek Tata, Product Marketing Manger, Google Product Search

Trike finalists announced!

Last month we asked you to submit nominations for places that you want our Street View Trike to visit. We were inundated with more than 25,000 suggestions across all categories, with university campuses making up 44% of all suggestions.

Starting today, you can cast your vote for your favorite place within each category to tell us which locations you'd most like to see on Google Maps. The finalists in each category are... drumroll please:

University Campuses

Arizona State University

Michigan State University

Princeton University

Rochester Intitute of Technology

Stanford University

Parks & Trails

Boulder Creek Bike Path, CO

Capital Crescent Trail, MD/DC

Centennial Trail, WA

Schuylkill River Trail, PA

Stevens Creek Trail, CA

Pedestrian Malls

Faneuil Hall Marketplace, Boston, MA

Navy Pier, Chicago, IL

Pier 39, San Francisco, CA

Landmarks

Alcatraz Island, San Francisco, CA

Central Park, NY

Millenium Park, Chicago, IL

Kennedy Space Center, FL

National Mall, DC

Theme Parks & Zoos

Bronx Zoo, NY

Busch Gardens, VA

Detroit Zoo, MI

Lincoln Park Zoo, Chicago, IL

San Diego Zoo, CA

Universal Studios, FL

Visit www.google.com/trike to vote! You can vote as many times as you like until the deadline at 11:59pm PST on Monday, November 30th. We'll then work on getting all the winners into Google Maps, and of course we'll work closely with the relevant organizations to collect images of any privately-owned locations. It takes a bit of time to ride a 250-pound bike around the country, but we're excited to see which locations get your votes.

If you're anxious to see some new places in Google Maps right now, you happen to be in luck! Today we've added imagery of my home state Hawaii, making it the 50th state featured in Street View. In honor of this launch, we've created an online gallery to showcase some of the amazing new imagery from Hawaii, as well each state capitol building from across the United States. You can read more about today's launch on the Official Google Blog. To get you started exploring this amazing new imagery, here's an image from Kailua Beach - I first learned to surf at the island offshore:

View Larger Map

You'll find much more waiting for you to explore in the Street View Gallery. You'll notice it also has a collection of locations photographed by the Trike -- you can help determine which places will be included in the future by submitting your vote!

Posted by Laura Melahn, Product Marketing Manager