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Hello, Pittsburgh
February 28, 2008
Posted by Andrew Moore, Engineering Director
On Tuesday, March 4, the
Google Pittsburgh office
will open its doors to the technical community for a special evening. We'll kick things off with some mingling over beer, wine and snacks, and then transition into a tech talk with one of our local engineers, Pat Stephenson.
Pat will discuss the implementation of Dapper, a low-overhead system for monitoring the performance of large, distributed applications at Google, and the tools his team has built to analyze the data in a talk titled "Dapper: It's 11 p.m. and do you know where your RPC is?"
We hope to create a collegial atmosphere where members of the technical community can learn from and get to know one another.
If you're in the Pittsburgh area, please
join us
. Space is limited, however, so hurry and register.
Bringing it all together
February 28, 2008
Posted by Scott Johnston, Senior Product Manager (former VP of Products at JotSpot)
Many of you have been waiting for JotSpot to re-emerge, integrated into Google -- and now it's happening. Here's the story:
In the last 10 years, the way all of us work has changed. We've grown accustomed to always being connected through email and instant messaging. Consequently, people are working together in teams more often, with larger groups, and with others who may be in different parts of the country or the world. We are shifting our focus from personal to team productivity. It's less about "you" and more about "us."
But with this explosion in collaboration, how do you bring together everything your team needs to work? How do you take information, whether it is on your desktop or online, and share it with specific groups of people -- your team, the company, the public?
Meet Google Sites, the newest addition to the Google Apps product suite. It was designed to allow you to easily create a network of sites and share them with whomever you choose. Google Sites lets you pull together information from across Google Apps by embedding documents, spreadsheets, presentations, videos, and calendars in your sites. Of course, we also harness the power of Google search technology so your search results are always fast and relevant.
What does it take to start using Google Sites? Just a click of a button -- that's it. Here's an overview with more detail:
We're just finishing up the code to migrate existing JotSpot customer wikis to Google sites, so if you're already a JotSpot customer, you'll be hearing from us soon on how to make the switch.
If you aren't a Google Apps customer yet and want to use Google Sites, sign up at
http://sites.google.com
.
Google Health, a first look
February 28, 2008
Posted by Marissa Mayer, VP, Search & User Products
It's been a busy week for the Google Health team. Last week we
announced
our partnership and pilot with the Cleveland Clinic. This week, the team has been at the
HIMSS
(Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society) conference in Orlando, Florida, where Eric Schmidt gave the closing keynote. Eric's keynote marks the first time we've talked publicly about the product we've been designing and building. His talk also offered a deeper view into our overall health strategy. (
Watch the video.
)
Google Health aims to solve an urgent need that dovetails with our overall mission of organizing patient information and making it accessible and useful. Through our health offering, our users will be empowered to collect, store, and manage their own medical records online.
For the healthcare industry, online personal health records (PHRs) aren't a new idea and, in some cases, online PHRs already exist for patients. Here's what we think sets Google Health apart:
Privacy and Security
- Due to the sensitive and personal nature of the data that will be stored in Google Health, we need to conduct our health service with the same privacy, security, and integrity users have come to expect in all our services. Google Health will protect the privacy of your health information by giving you complete control over your data. We won't sell or share your data without your explicit permission. Our privacy policy and practices have been developed in thoughtful collaboration with experts from the
Google Health Advisory Council
.
Platform
- One of the most exciting and innovative parts of Google Health is our platform strategy. We're assembling a directory of third-party services that interoperate with Google Health. Right now, this means you'll be able to automatically import information such as your doctors' records, your prescription history, and your test results into Google Health in order to easily access and control your data. Later, this platform strategy will mean that you will be able to interact with services and tools easily, and will be able to do things like schedule appointments, refill prescriptions, and start using new wellness tools.
Portability
- Our Internet presence ultimately means that through Google Health, you will be able to have access and control over your health data from anywhere. Through the Cleveland Clinic pilot, we have already found great use-cases in which, for example, people spend 6 months of the year in Ohio, and 6 months of the year in Florida or Arizona, and will now be able to move their health data between their various health providers seamlessly and with total control. Previously, this would have required carrying paper records back and forth. With Google Health, the user can simply import the data from each medical facility and then choose to share it with the other facilities. It's advances in data portability like this that we think can really make a difference in the quality of healthcare. The clearer and more comprehensive the information regarding your health becomes, the better your care will be.
User focus
- We aren't doctors or healthcare experts, but one thing Google can create is a clean, easy-to-use user experience that makes managing your health information straightforward and easy. We're still iterating and testing our user interface, but here is what the welcome screen looks like:
Here is a screenshot deeper in the application:
We're proud of the product that we've designed and are continuing to build, but recognize that we are just at the initial stages of our "launch early and iterate" strategy. We look forward to the feedback we will receive from our Cleveland Clinic pilot, from all of you, and from the initial users of our service when we make it publicly available in the coming months.
Update:
Added link to video of Eric's talk; refreshed second screenshot.
Project CARE in San Francisco
February 27, 2008
Posted by Craig Walker, Senior Product Manager
As we
mentioned last fall
, GrandCentral's Project CARE initiative, which provides permanent telephone numbers and voicemail services to the homeless, has partnered with San Francisco's
Project Homeless Connect
(PHC) to support the city's homeless as they get back on their feet.
Today, Mayor Gavin Newsom will announce plans to give every homeless person in San Francisco a local phone number and voicemail account through Project CARE. We're thrilled to be a part of this effort, and as a first step towards simplifying the process of setting up a phone number and voicemail, we're rolling out a website where shelters and agencies across the city can create new accounts. Project CARE will also be visiting both city-owned and private shelters to help introduce this new system, assist the staff in familiarizing with the process, and answer any questions.
We're firm believers in the power of technology to improve the daily lives of individuals and communities as a whole, and we recognize that access to phone and voicemail services is one way that GrandCentral can help San Francisco's homeless stay connected with family, friends, social workers, health care providers, and potential employers.
While we're excited to bring this technology to our local Bay Area community, our ultimate goal is to provide these invaluable services to cities and shelters across the country.
If you're in San Francisco and would like to learn more about Project CARE's work with PHC, please join us at today's Project Homeless Connect 21 at the Billy Graham Civic Auditorium. If you can't make it to the event, check out Project Homeless Connect's
website
.
Searching right to left
February 26, 2008
Posted by Josh Daniel, Software Engineer
Many of us in the English-searching world don't realize that a large portion of the world's population writes (and types) right-to-left. For the Arabic, Hebrew, and other right-to-left searchers of the world, searching just got a little easier. If you're searching from a supported local interface (e.g.
google.co.il/
or
google.com.eg/
) we now dynamically detect the direction of your query.
Enter a query like [
افرض مثلآ
] or [
מכבי חיפה
] and your query will align right so you can type to the left. Enter a query like [
2008 world cup soccer
] or [
(5 - 3) * 32
] and it will align left so you can type to the right. Enter a mixed query like [
SMS משלוח
] and we'll set the alignment and overall direction based (roughly) on the first word.
We've enjoyed learning about bidirectional issues. Enabling applications for bidirectionality is especially tricky because any sentence or phrase may contain a mix of left-to-right text (e.g. English, numbers), right-to-left text (e.g. Arabic, Hebrew), and neutral text (e.g. punctuation). The rules for displaying the direction of characters in individual words are different from the rules for displaying the direction of words in a phrase. Things are further complicated due to widely varying limitations across web browsers.
We hope you'll enjoy the improved search experience!
A renewed wish for open document standards
February 25, 2008
Posted by Zaheda Bhorat, Open Source Programs Manager
The subject of open document standards grows in importance not only for the technically- minded, but for anyone who uses a computer to work on editable documents. Across the board, standards are crucial. They ensure that the devices and technology you use today will continue to work tomorrow, that your DVDs will play in your player, that your calls will go through to any network, and that your documents will be accessible from whichever system you choose today and in the future.
Google supports open document standards and the
Open Document Format - ODF
, the recognized international standard (
ISO 26300
). ODF is
supported
and
implemented
across the globe, and its communal
creation and iteration
has helped ensure the transparency, consistency and interoperability necessary in a workable standard.
Currently, the technology industry is evaluating a proposed
ISO
standard for document formats. Given the importance of a workable standard, Microsoft's submission of Office Open XML (
OOXML
) as an additional international standard has caught the attention of many. In September 2007, the original request to ISO was
defeated
. After further technical analysis of the specification along with all the additional data available on OOXML, Google believes OOXML would be an insufficient and unnecessary standard, designed purely around the needs of Microsoft Office.
We join the
ODF Alliance
and
many
other
experts
in our belief that OOXML doesn't meet the criteria required for a globally-accepted standard. (An
overview of our findings
and
sample technical issues unresolved
are posted
here
.)
As
ISO Member bodies
around the world work on possible revisions of their vote
previously submitted
, the deadline of March 30th approaches fast. I invite you to pay close attention, and heed the call of many for
unification
of OOXML into ODF. A document standards decision may not matter to you today, but as someone who relies on constant access to editable documents, spreadsheets and presentations, it may matter immensely in the near future.
About the Unity bandwidth consortium
February 25, 2008
Posted by Francois Sterin, Manager, Network Acquisitions
As more and more people conduct online searches and interact with applications like Gmail, Google Earth and YouTube, we've had to think outside the box to create a more scalable, affordable and easy to manage network that meets our users' needs worldwide. One of the biggest challenges we face is staying ahead of our broadband capacity needs, especially across Asia.
One of the ways we are addressing this is by working with five other international companies to create a consortium. Collectively we just signed an agreement to build a new high-bandwidth subsea cable system linking the U.S. and Japan (more detail in the
press release
). This cable system, named Unity, will address increasing broadband demand by providing more capacity to sustain the unprecedented growth in data and Internet traffic between Asia and the U.S. Our participation in building Unity ultimately helps provide our users with faster and more reliable connectivity.
If you're wondering whether we're going into the undersea cable business, the answer is
no
. We're not competing with telecom providers, but the volume of data we need to move around the world has grown to the point where in some cases we've exceeded the ability traditional players can offer. Our partnership with these companies is just another step in ensuring that we're delivering the best possible experience to people around the world.
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