In a long line of partnerships deals, designed to improve their standing – and income – within Mainland China, Google has signed a deal with China’s number one portal, Sina.com.
Continue reading Google, Sina Sign Search And Ad Deal: China
Category: Google
Google China: A View In Pictures
Sitting here in Beijing, I thought I’d give those of our readers who don’t live in China (the vast majority of you … currently :) ) a view of what Google China looks like.
Google Scoops Up FeedBurner
The hungry beast that is Google continues to pick off juicy morsels from the Internet, swallowing up ‘web feed’ firm FeedBurner as they seek to boost their ad network and Web publishing services.
Feedburner currently manages more than 763,000 “live feeds” every day, delivering content from over 400,000 publishers, ranging from small independent publishers to big name news agencies and the Chicago-based company’s tools make it easy for users to access constant updates from their favourite bloggers, news sites and podcasters through a simplified web interface.
Continue reading Google Scoops Up FeedBurner
Play YouTube Videos Within Google Search Results
The integration between YouTube and Google is becoming ever-stronger.
We were doing a bit of research on Google today and noticed that they’ve now included the ability to actually watch the videos that are coming up as search results, _within_ the Google search results.
Continue reading Play YouTube Videos Within Google Search Results
Gmail: Now 20Mb Attachments
Gmail, Google’s Web-based email service, has enlarged the size of attachments that can be sent, doubling the previous 10Mb limit to 20Mb.
On hearing this news, creators of bloated powerpoint presentations all over the city were seen to be dancing in the streets rejoicing.
Continue reading Gmail: Now 20Mb Attachments
Google Rampant: Microsoft Search Slips Up
Just when Microsoft was developing as bit of a confident man-about-town swagger about its rising search engine performance, a new report from Nielsen/NetRatings delivers a humbling slapdown in the goolies.
The figures, released yesterday, show that after gaining ground for a couple months, Microsoft lost a chunk of their search market share in April, while rivals Google and Yahoo enjoyed lengthy back-slapping sessions as traffic rose.
Continue reading Google Rampant: Microsoft Search Slips Up
Gmaps Pedometer For Walkers
We’re big fans of walking and cycling, so when we heard about gmap pedometer we donned our virtual Goretex walking boots and hiked straight over to the site.
Like many of the best Web apps, this one is dead simple to use, and uses Google’s superb mapping application to help record how far you’ve travelled.
Continue reading Gmaps Pedometer For Walkers
Attention: A Cure For Information Overload?
Information overload is a buzz phrase which has been getting a lot of use recently. It refers to the enormous amount of information which we now consume (largely because of the level of accessibility to content which the Internet gives us), and the challenges that that creates. Another important issue is the Long Tail, as recognised by Chris Anderson, and the way that relates to content. In other words, there is now far more information available which makes discoverability much harder.
Continue reading Attention: A Cure For Information Overload?
Google Developer Day Announced
All of you budding code-aholics take note, Google is hosting ten Google Developer Days in their various offices around the world on 31 May.
They’re going to have workshops, keynotes and breakout discussions on Google’s APIs and developer tools.
Google have been running a few of these already with much smaller capacity. A few have happened in Silicon Valley and a couple in London that we’re aware of, but this is on a much bigger scale.
The program is being headed up by code-fan pin-up girl Marissa Mayer, who’s Google’s Vice President of Search Products and User Experience. She was one of the first 20 people to join Google (just imagine her stock options!) and the first female engineer hired by them.
They’re rolling out some of their top talent to get the code-kids hot under the collar. Get ready for this …
Guido Van Rossum, Google software engineer and creator of the Python programming language (Beijing); Chris DiBona, Google open source programs manager (London); Mark Stahl, Google data APIs tech lead (Madrid); Bruce Johnson and Joel Webber, co-creators of the Google Web Toolkit (Mountain View); Bret Taylor, group product manager for Google developer products (Mountain View); Lars Rasmussen, Google Maps senior engineer (Sydney); and Greg Stein, Google engineering manager and chairman of the Apache Software Foundation (Tokyo).
The subjects they’ll be covering also sound pretty enticing. Here’s a cross section, “Developing with Geo: Google Maps, Google Earth and SketchUp,” “Tools for Better Web Development: The Google Web Toolkit, Open Source and Other Developer Initiatives” and “Mashups and More: AJAX, Google Gadgets and the Google Data APIs.”
What does Google get out of this?
Google’s going to be lashing all of their cash, time and resources on this, so what’s driving them?
Well, people become more familiar with how to write programs to use their applications via the published API’s, which means the potential for extra advertising income for Google.
That’s all well a good but more importantly, Google get to spot the hottest programming talent around the world and can in turn try to persuade that talent to join the Google gang. Meaning Google ends up with the best programmers, not their competition.
Smart, eh?
Locations
- Mountain View, California
- São Paulo, Brasil
- London, United Kingdom
- Paris, France
- Madrid, España
- Hamburg, Deutschland
- Москва, Россия (That’s Russia to you)
- Tokyo – Japan
- Sydney, Australia
- Beijing,China
Those who can’t make it don’t need to be left out, Google will offer live streaming webcasts from its Mountain View office and provide a YouTube™ channel with videos of Google Developer Day sessions around the world.
MyMaps Launched By Google: Add Your Bits To Maps: Mini Review
Google is bringing User Generated Content to the Google Maps, by extending it to let users add their own comments, photos and video.
Google Maps has wowed people ever since it moved to the Web from the standalone Google Earth application, letting anyone with a Web browser take a look at both the maps and satellite images of anywhere in the world.
Adding content to online maps, or geographic locations isn’t a new idea. It’s been around for ages and it’s commonly called geotagging, or less frequently Geocoding.
Google Maps has been possible for a while using a combination of Google Maps API and XML, but it wasn’t for the faint-hearted, requiring quite a lot of know-how and skill to add items. It uses an XML schema called KML, Keyhole Markup Language.
Their new version, currently available in ten counties, gets away from this by extending Google Maps to include a simple drag and drop interface.
We’ve given it a go and found it a breeze.
When people create their own MyMaps they are able to define if they are to be shared with the world – coming up in Google search results – or define if they are the remain private.
Adding placemarks is a breeze. Simply select the placemark icon and click on the map area that you want it to appear on. These can be titled and a description added, be that plain text, rich text, or HTML
There are further tools to allow lines and shapes to be draw onto the maps. Once set, these can then have their colours and attributes changed.
Adding photo and video
Photos and video can be added to the maps, as long as they’re hosted somewhere online.
Adding them requires the smallest amount of HTML skill, as they have to be added to the placemarks using HTML code. (pointers)
Once you’ve created you mapping master pieces, you can take the data from Google Maps, out via KML, to Google Earth.
Current competition
Yahoo has offered the ability to attach photographs to maps via their Flickr service for quite a while now (Bestival example) and Microsoft have also had a similar tool Via their Maps Live service.