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Get your people talking in more languages
October 31, 2006
Posted by Will Smit, Google Apps for Your Domain team
Somewhere in the neighborhood of three out of four people on Earth don't speak English, so to better serve more Earthlings, we aim to make our products available and useful in lots of native languages other than English. Recently I've been working with translators and other linguistic experts to support 17 new languages in
Google Apps for Your Domain
.
This product is our way of letting entire organizations give their users powerful communication and collaboration tools: private-label versions of Gmail for custom domains, Google Calendar and Google Talk. The service is free, there's no hardware or software required, and organizations can tailor the user interface with custom logos and colors. So now anyone with a domain can provide essential, customized apps to all of their users, without spending a cent. (Or as the case may be, without spending a rupee, a krone, a won, a Eurocent, a yen, a centavo or a kopek.)
Here's the full list of languages Google Apps for Your Domain now supports:
French, Italian, German, Spanish, Norwegian, Dutch, Finnish, Swedish, British English, Polish, Turkish, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, Chinese (Traditional), Chinese (Simplified), Japanese, Korean and US English. (Your browser's language preference determines which version of the site you'll see.)
What Joe said
October 31, 2006
Posted by Salar Kamangar, VP Product Management
We'd like to
welcome Joe, Graham, and the rest of the JotSpot team
to Google. They've truly pioneered do-it-yourself application publishing, enabling anyone from individuals to small businesses and large enterprises to use wikis for online collaboration. Since we're just getting started on a long and exciting road in online collaboration for both consumers and our enterprise customers, joining forces with the JotSpot team comes at a great time.
After all, information created by a single user becomes exponentially more valuable when it's shared and combined with information from other people or places. We've been tackling this step by step for awhile now, including enabling people to move their calendars, photos and documents onto the web -- unlocking them from one PC or one piece of paper to open up a wide range of possibilities for working, planning, socializing, organizing, and so on.
Please stay tuned, and we'll tell you more as soon as we can.
Spot on
October 31, 2006
Posted by Joe Kraus, JotSpot
OK, I can finally blurt it out:
JotSpot is now part of Google
, and I couldn't be more excited.
Three years ago my friend Graham Spencer and I set out to start a new company. We'd both recently left Excite, which we co-founded, and we had spent a few years starting a nonprofit together. We brainstormed scores of ideas, debated late into the night and ultimately exchanged a mountain of email and documents. We realized we needed a tool to help us organize our thoughts or we'd quickly become overwhelmed. So Graham set up a wiki. I was hooked because it immediately changed the way we worked together. Everything was kept in one place, not locked in email threads or on different computers. We could both make changes to the same document, without having to know HTML (well, without
me
having to know HTML). After twenty minutes of using a wiki, I was convinced that they were like the Internet in 1993 -- useful, but trapped in the land of the nerds (which both Graham and I proudly inhabit). So we set out to start JotSpot as a way to bring the power of wikis to a much broader audience.
As we built the business over the past three years Google consistently attracted our attention. We watched them acquire Writely, and launch Google Groups, Google Spreadsheets and Google Apps for Your Domain. It was pretty apparent that Google shared our vision for how groups of people can create, manage and share information online. Then when we had conversations with people at Google we found ourselves completing each other's sentences. Joining Google allows us to plug into the resources that only a company of Google's scale can offer, like a huge audience, access to world-class data centers and a team of incredibly smart people.
Our first order of business is to move JotSpot to Google's software architecture. While we're doing so, we've turned off new registrations. But if you're interested,
sign up for our waitlist
and we'll keep you posted.
Finally, I feel a deep sense of gratitude for the support, feedback, grumbles and praises of our users and customers. Thank you. That's the only way great products are built.
The Domino Effect
October 30, 2006
Posted by George Strompolos, Google Video Team
A good viral video sets off a chain reaction that continues until nearly everyone has seen it, including your mom. The mad scientists known as
EepyBird
know a thing or two about chain reactions. They first rocketed into viral video fame by turning the explosive act of mixing Diet Coke and Mentos into an art form. Today they're back with a chain reaction like none other: 500 liters of Diet Coke and 1500+ Mentos, all triggered by the pull of one string.
Don't miss
The Domino Effect
-- a Google Video exclusive. In addition to being very fun, it demonstrates another interesting application of our Sponsored Video program -- this time with user-generated content. This helps producers like EepyBird earn revenue by pairing them up with our advertising partners.
We're excited to help compensate these independent producers for their creativity, and we can't wait to see who the next stars will be. If you have very compelling videos and are interested in this program,
please get in touch
.
This year's CodeJam
October 27, 2006
Posted by Craig Nevill-Manning, Engineering Director
What took 6 weeks, required sizzling brainpower, and drew a global audience of programmers? The fourth
Google CodeJam
, that's what. More than 21,000 coders from 100 countries registered in early September and have competed two rounds (they could code in Java, C++, C#, Python or VB.NET). Today was the grand finale, which just ended at our New York City office. The 100 finalists convened in New York to play this last round together. Screens glowed, fingers flew, and gears spun. Our top three winners are:
Petr Mitrichev, Russia - $10,000
Ying Wang, China - $,5000
Andrey Stankevich, Russia - $5,000
Additional cash prizes went to all the finalists, who represent 24 different countries. (Here's
the full release
.) This is the fourth annual Global Code Jam, which we produce in conjunction with TopCoder. Our best wishes, congratulations and thanks to everyone who celebrates the joys of coding.
Update:
Ying Wang is studying in the U.S., but comes from China.
About those outages on Blogger
October 26, 2006
Posted by Pete Hopkins, Blogger engineer
You might have noticed some unexpected downtime on Blogger this week --
here's the story
.
On the alert for bloggers
October 26, 2006
Posted by Naga Sridhar Kataru, Software Engineer
So many interesting blogs and so little time! If you're anything like me, you like to pick and choose what posts you read on any given blog. You may only want to read a post about a topic of your interest, or perhaps you only want to read blog posts by a particular writer or two. Hence the new Blog Alert, which notifies you about new blog search results. We've also added a Comprehensive Alert, which can show results from multiple sources (including Google News, the web, and blogs) so you get fuller information whenever your favorite topics appear online. Here are a few examples to get you going:
-- You want to know when anyone
blogs about global warming
.
-- You like to track all
Google mentions on Slashdot
.
-- You're a bit obsessed with
chocolate recipes on food blogs
.
-- You need to know when
RottenTomatoes covers Will Ferrell
.
-- That well-known search pundit
John Battelle seems to have a lot to say
.
And now, it's your turn to
make some of your own
.
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