Friday 15 January 2010

Tip: More omnibox power tools

We've already seen a few things you can do with the omnibox, but it turns out there are even more capabilities you might not have known about.

First, you can create a desktop shortcut for the page you're on by simply highlighting the text in the omnibox, and then dragging that text onto your desktop.



If this is too fussy for you, you can drag the Star button next to the omnibox to the desktop to do the same thing (Note: this only applies to Google Chrome for Windows).

Second, if you've gotten a web address in an email or other document, and it isn't actually clickable, you can easily open it in the omnibox. Just select the link (even if it's broken across multiple lines!), copy it to your clipboard, and then right click (or on the Mac, ctrl-click) on the omnibox and select "Paste and go".

This will navigate to the link immediately. It works for things other than links too -- if you have some text on your clipboard, you can "Paste and search" to do the same thing as dragging the text to the omnibox.


Upload and store your files in the cloud with Google Docs

We're happy to announce that over the next few weeks we will be rolling out the ability to upload, store and organize any type of file in Google Docs. With this change, you'll be able to upload and access your files from any computer -- all you need is an Internet connection.

Instead of emailing files to yourself, which is particularly difficult with large files, you can upload to Google Docs any file up to 250 MB. You'll have 1 GB of free storage for files you don't convert into one of the Google Docs formats (i.e. Google documents, spreadsheets, and presentations), and if you need more space, you can buy additional storage for $0.25 per GB per year. This makes it easy to backup more of your key files online, from large graphics and raw photos to unedited home videos taken on your smartphone. You might even be able to replace the USB drive you reserved for those files that are too big to send over email.

Combined with shared folders, you can store, organize, and collaborate on files more easily using Google Docs. For example, if you are in a club or PTA working on large graphic files for posters or a newsletter, you can upload them to a shared folder for collaborators to view, download, and print.

You can also search for document files you've uploaded or that have been shared with you just like you do with your Google documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and PDFs. And you'll be able to view many common document file types with the Google Docs viewer.

To learn how businesses can take advantage of this new functionality, check out the post on the Enterprise Blog.

As always, we’d love your feedback and if you have any questions, please check out our help page. This feature will be enabled for your account over the next couple of weeks — look for the bubble notification when you sign in to Google Docs.



Default https access for Gmail

Posted by Sam Schillace, Gmail Engineering Director

In 2008, we rolled out the option to always use https — encrypting your mail as it travels between your web browser and our servers. Using https helps protect data from being snooped by third parties, such as in public wifi hotspots. We initially left the choice of using it up to you because there's a downside: https can make your mail slower since encrypted data doesn't travel across the web as quickly as unencrypted data. Over the last few months, we've been researching the security/latency tradeoff and decided that turning https on for everyone was the right thing to do.

We are currently rolling out default https for everyone. If you've previously set your own https preference from Gmail Settings, nothing will change for your account. If you trust the security of your network and don't want default https turned on for performance reasons, you can turn it off at any time by choosing "Don't always use https" from the Settings menu. Gmail will still always encrypt the login page to protect your password. Google Apps users whose admins have not already defaulted their entire domains to https will have the same option.

To read about other steps you can take to protect your accounts and your computers, visit google.com/help/security.

Note: If you use offline Gmail over http currently, the switch to https is likely to cause some problems. Learn more about this known issue and how to work around it.

Make Google Place Pages your business' megaphone


If you're a local business owner, we've just added two new features that can help you reach existing and potential customers even more effectively on your business' Place Page. Both of these features are available by claiming your business through Google Local Business Center.

Post to your Place Page

Holding a special event today? Want to post a coupon for 5-7pm tonight? Have a new product in stock? You can now get the word out by posting to your Place Page directly from your Local Business Center dashboard. Once you've logged in and are on your business' dashboard, post an update and it will go live on your Place Page in just a few minutes.

To see an example, check out the Place Page for Mission Mountain Winery which posted to introduce a new wine.


Badge for Your Claimed Place Page

We are also introducing a badge for listings that have been claimed in the Local Business Center. This helps our users identify listings that have been updated and improved by their business owners, helping them to trust that the information about your business is as accurate as possible. We are also making it even easier to claim your listing directly from the Place Page by following the "Business owner?" link.



We're excited about how Place Pages can help business owners connect with the large number of new and existing customers who visit these pages each day. These users come to Place Pages to easily find basic information, photos, and reviews about your business, as well as a map, Street View photos, and nearby transit information to help them get to your doorstep.

If you haven't been keeping up with our latest improvements for business owners, you may also want to check out the new mobile coupons feature in Local Business Center as well.

We hope you find these features useful in reaching out to your customers and providing them with even more relevant and timely information about your business.



Helping Haiti respond to the earthquake

If you haven't yet read the post on the Official Google Blog about how you can contribute to relief efforts in Haiti as they respond to this week's catastrophic earthquake, here's more information about how Google is working to help and how you can get involved.

In order to help the people of Haiti respond to this catastrophe, Google is donating $1 million to organizations on the ground that are rescuing those still trapped and providing clean water, food, medical care, shelter and support to those affected. We'd like to make it easy for anyone moved by the tragedy to respond as well, so we've included a link on our homepage to information, resources and ways you can help, including information on how to donate to organizations including: Direct Relief, Yele Haiti, Partners in Health, Red Cross, World Food Program, Mercy Corps, Save the Children,Lambi Fund, Doctors Without Borders, The International Rescue Committee.

You can also use the below buttons to donate to UNICEF or CARE.

Donate to CARE
$
Donate to UNICEF
$
In addition, Map Maker data has been made available to U.N. organizations and the team is working with the Map Your World Community to encourage Map Maker users with on the ground knowledge to help update the map of Haiti with disaster response data. We've received requests from relief organizations and our users to publish recent satellite imagery of the country. One of our imagery partners, GeoEye, has provided us with post-earthquake imagery from Haiti. You can check our Lat Long blog for further updates.

We've also reached out to the YouTube community for help. A Spotlight on the homepage and a ticker across the entire site drives traffic to videosfrom Oxfam and the American Red Cross, where you can make donations to relief efforts. We're also keeping a running playlist of the video footage coming out of Haiti on Citizentube; you can find a broad collection of citizen reports, news wire clips and personal stories of some of the victims.

Posted by Jacquelline Fuller and Prem Ramaswami for the Google Crisis Response Team

Tuesday 12 January 2010

Using Google Docs to facilitate patient flow in a community health center

Guest post: David Margolius is a medical student at Brown University. He is spending the year in San Francisco as a research fellow and recently began working with Southeast Health Center to improve access, patient care, and clinic flow. He changed patient management at the clinic by using a shared Google Doc to make it easy for staff and providers to communicate in real time, without walkie-talkies, pagers, and interruptions.

Southeast Health Center is a community-oriented primary care clinic in San Francisco. Through Healthy San Francisco, a program created by the City of San Francisco, Southeast and other clinics make health care services accessible and affordable for uninsured residents. The program offers a new way for San Francisco residents who do not have health insurance, to have basic and ongoing medical care.

At Southeast, all of this work can make it difficult to keep track of which patients are in which rooms, how many patients are in the waiting room, and how far the doctors are falling behind with their patients for the day. Up until about a month ago, when patients checked in, the front desk would page the medical assistant who would then escort the patient to a room when one was free. The assistant would then let the doctor know that the patient was available. If patients were late, canceled their appointments, or the waiting room was overflowing, the doctor would be the last to know. All in all, communication was linear, uncoordinated, and difficult.

The medical director asked me try to figure out something better…anything better. After observing clinic flow for a few days, my first thought was to build some sort of intra-office communication device with switches and LED lights. I found an intra-office light communication system online and with the director's permission was ready to spend some big time money on it, but a friend of mine ruined all of my crazy ideas by saying: “Why can’t you just do that in Google Docs?”

A few days later, Southeast Health Center fully incorporated the “Check-in Tracker”, a shared spreadsheet on Google Docs, into their clinic flow which you can see a sample of below:



When a patient checks in at the front desk, the clerk types “a” into the slot where that patient was scheduled. Using the “change color with rules” function, that slot turns orange to let everybody in the clinic know that Dr. Mark’s 8:15 AM patient has arrived. If the 8:55 AM patient arrives at 9:15 AM, the front desk types in “L 9:15” into that slot and the slot turns pink. Dr. Mark can look at the Google spreadsheet and type an “x” if he is unable to see the late patient or “ok” if he has time to see the patient. Patients in rooms turn green and indicate which room number. Discharged patients turn blue.

Everybody communicates in real time, because we are all signed into the same account. Medical assistants, doctors, providers, clerks, and nurses are communicating with each other more efficiently. It is pretty incredible to see.

Google Docs has made this all possible, no mechanical engineers or big time money required. Check out this template in the Google Docs template gallery to try it out yourself.



Using Google Docs to facilitate patient flow in a community health center

Guest post: David Margolius is a medical student at Brown University. He is spending the year in San Francisco as a research fellow and recently began working with Southeast Health Center to improve access, patient care, and clinic flow. He changed patient management at the clinic by using a shared Google Doc to make it easy for staff and providers to communicate in real time, without walkie-talkies, pagers, and interruptions.

Southeast Health Center is a community-oriented primary care clinic in San Francisco. Through Healthy San Francisco, a program created by the City of San Francisco, Southeast and other clinics make health care services accessible and affordable for uninsured residents. The program offers a new way for San Francisco residents who do not have health insurance, to have basic and ongoing medical care.

At Southeast, all of this work can make it difficult to keep track of which patients are in which rooms, how many patients are in the waiting room, and how far the doctors are falling behind with their patients for the day. Up until about a month ago, when patients checked in, the front desk would page the medical assistant who would then escort the patient to a room when one was free. The assistant would then let the doctor know that the patient was available. If patients were late, canceled their appointments, or the waiting room was overflowing, the doctor would be the last to know. All in all, communication was linear, uncoordinated, and difficult.

The medical director asked me try to figure out something better…anything better. After observing clinic flow for a few days, my first thought was to build some sort of intra-office communication device with switches and LED lights. I found an intra-office light communication system online and with the director's permission was ready to spend some big time money on it, but a friend of mine ruined all of my crazy ideas by saying: “Why can’t you just do that in Google Docs?”

A few days later, Southeast Health Center fully incorporated the “Check-in Tracker”, a shared spreadsheet on Google Docs, into their clinic flow which you can see a sample of below:



When a patient checks in at the front desk, the clerk types “a” into the slot where that patient was scheduled. Using the “change color with rules” function, that slot turns orange to let everybody in the clinic know that Dr. Mark’s 8:15 AM patient has arrived. If the 8:55 AM patient arrives at 9:15 AM, the front desk types in “L 9:15” into that slot and the slot turns pink. Dr. Mark can look at the Google spreadsheet and type an “x” if he is unable to see the late patient or “ok” if he has time to see the patient. Patients in rooms turn green and indicate which room number. Discharged patients turn blue.

Everybody communicates in real time, because we are all signed into the same account. Medical assistants, doctors, providers, clerks, and nurses are communicating with each other more efficiently. It is pretty incredible to see.

Google Docs has made this all possible, no mechanical engineers or big time money required. Check out this template in the Google Docs template gallery to try it out yourself.

Posted by: David Margolius, Clinic Coach, Southeast Health Center, Margolius@gmail.com

Latin America Mapping Competition Winners

When we launched the Latin America Mapping Competition at Campus Party in Mexico City on November 14, 2009, we weren't sure what to expect. This was Google's first ever mapping competition, after all. When the competition closed on December 15, 2009, we were impressed with the results. For example, mapping activity increased more than 1000% in some areas of Latin America.

Timelapse of Rosario, Argentina where most roads were mapped in one day for the Latin America mapping competition.

Hundreds of mappers entered the competition. Here are the winners:

Individual Prize
Winner: Daniel Mugaburu
"I've mapped several cities in Peru (my country of origin) because I know it very well, and a lot of areas need urgent updates. I've been mapping for almost one year already and I plan to keep on doing it. My motivation has always been helping others to find streets, hospitals, etc... in order to increase their life quality."
Born and raised in Peru, Daniel currently lives in Connecticut, USA.

Team Prize
Winner: The "Ukrainian Team" consisting of 8 mappers in Austria, France, Peru and the Ukraine who used Gmail, Google Wave and Google Docs to coordinate their mapping efforts.

City Prize
Winner: Lima, Peru
La Universidad Mayor de San Marcos will receive the 100 laptop donation.

Congratulations to all the Latin America Mapping Competition winners, and we invite mappers everywhere to participate in the Global Mapping Competition benefiting UNICEF that runs through January 31st.



Monday 11 January 2010

Find us at the National Retail Federation Big Show in NYC next week


Shoppers are increasingly turning to Google.com and Google Maps to find, learn about, map, and get directions to retail locations. We offer several tools that help retail businesses connect with these shoppers, such as
Local Business Center to make sure your listings are accurate and contain many relevant details, and embeddable Google Maps to power your online store locator.

That’s why several of us from Google will be attending, presenting, and demonstrating products next week at
NRF 2010, the National Retail Federation’s annual convertion and expo at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in New York City. We’ll be speaking at a session on Tuesday (January 12) at 11:30am (EXPO Hall, 3D04) called Helping Shoppers Find You.

We’ll also have a booth in the Expo Hall (Booth #365) so attendees can chat with us directly about Google Maps and Local Business Center. Any question is fair game! Look for the Google logo on our booth wall and a big map of Manhattan at the floor of the booth. We hope to see you there.



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