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From acquisition to in-app payments in less than one year
June 6, 2011
(Cross-posted on the
Commerce Blog
)
This is the latest post in our
series
profiling entrepreneurial Googlers working on products across the company and around the world. In this post, you’ll read why one team decided to sell their company to Google, and how they went from acquisition to product launch in less than a year. - Ed.
The decision to sell your company is one of the hardest an entrepreneur can make, and as the CEO of Jambool, I thought long and hard about Google’s offer to acquire us when they came calling in August 2010. Ultimately,
we decided to join Google
for two reasons: one, we shared the goal of offering consumers and merchants unified online payment solutions, and two, we realized that Google was serious about helping us integrate our technology into their digital tools by providing us with infrastructure and other support. Less than a year later, we’ve already taken a major step to help Google deliver on this vision with
Google In-App Payments
, which we announced last month at
Google I/O
. In-App Payments enable web application developers to receive payments for digital and virtual goods without the user ever leaving the application.
Me on stage at Google I/O introducing Google In-App Payments
When we first joined, we expected to spend a lot of time ramping up, meeting people and learning Google’s technology. In reality, our shared vision for the product enabled us to quickly partner with teams across the company to build out our product at scale. As a startup, you spend the majority of your time building teams from scratch to focus on functions like product, sales, marketing, operations and legal. At Jambool, I’d divide my time across operations, raising funds and meeting with outside developers. But at Google, we were able to combine our efforts with teams already in place who could manage those areas while we focused on the core product.
We set an ambitious goal of launching in-app payments nine months later at Google I/O, which motivated us to work quickly. We worked with Google’s established teams—especially Chrome, Android and Google Checkout—to build a simple API and intuitive user interface. During the last few weeks before Google I/O—when we were still working around the clock just to finish the product—we were invited to announce our launch as part of the day two keynote. That gave us even more drive to finish on time. And, thanks to the Chrome team, we found partners like Angry Birds and Graphic.ly, which really demonstrated the product’s usefulness and got developers excited about our broader vision of seamless digital payments.
As a startup, we never imagined we’d stand on a stage like the one at I/O and instantly reach consumers, businesses and developers around the world. In the first 24 hours after the announcement, thousands of developers signed up to use the API. This is something we wouldn’t have been able to do so quickly on our own, and it’s a testament to the big things a startup can accomplish by joining Google. We’re already looking forward to what the next year brings as developers around the world start to build great businesses on our platform.
If you’re interested in integrating your apps into Google’s In-App Payments API, we invite you to
sign up
and
send us feedback
.
Posted by Vikas Gupta, Head of Consumer Payments
Practical steps towards a greener, energy-efficient cloud
June 2, 2011
(Cross-posted from the
European Public Policy Blog
)
Update
June 14, 9:14am:
Videos of all the presentations at the Data Center Summit are now available on our
website
.
Data centers are very important to us—they’re critical to the cloud services we deliver. Over the last 12 years, we’ve put a lot of effort into
minimizing
the amount of energy, water and other resources we use—because it makes financial sense, and because it’s good for the environment too. That work means that today, we use
half the energy
of a typical industry data center.
Last week, we brought together more than 150 industry professionals in Zürich, Switzerland for our
second conference on data center efficiency
. Since our
first conference
two years ago in the U.S., the industry’s come a long way, with large operators now very focused on energy efficiency.
With “free cooling” we can dramatically reduce energy consumption by using the local environment to cool servers, instead of energy-intensive chillers. In our data centers we use both air cooling and evaporative cooling—and we revealed the details of the seawater cooling system we’ve custom-engineered for our new data center in Hamina, Finland.
Google is lucky enough to have the resources and experts to continually improve efficiency. But around
70% of the world’s data centers
are operated by companies that probably don’t.
That’s why we shared
five simple and low-cost steps
that any company, large or small, can use. These include using plastic meat locker curtains to separate hot and cold air, or welding your own air-conditioning chimney out of cheap sheet metal. These techniques are proven to increase energy efficiency, reduce electricity consumption and improve environmental footprint.
We also announced that we’re now participating in the European Commission’s
Code of Conduct for Data Centres
, a framework for designing and operating data centers efficiently. It ties in closely with the way we build and run our facilities, and has a robust checklist of efficiency best practices that are well worth trying out.
The main take-away was that there is no magic in data center efficiency. With the right information and a bit of creativity, anyone can make their computing infrastructure efficient. If you operate a data center or server room, please
visit our website
and make use of the techniques we’ve outlined. Videos of all the presentations from the Summit will be available on the
site
next week.
Posted by Urs Hoelzle, Senior Vice President, Technical Infrastructure
The curious guide to browsers and the web: now in 15 languages and open-sourced
June 2, 2011
When we published the illustrated HTML5 web book,
20 Things I Learned about Browsers and the Web
,
late last year
, we were excited by the positive response from teachers, web developers and many of you who shared in the joy of rediscovering how the web works.
Today, we've made this web book available in 15 languages, including Bahasa Indonesia, Brazilian Portuguese, Czech, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Russian, Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), Spanish, and Tagalog. If you have family members and friends around the world who speak these languages, you can point them to the translated guidebook at
www.20thingsilearned.com
, where illustrator Christoph Niemann brings to life topics ranging from
什麼是網際網路？
(“what is the Internet?) to
so schützen moderne browser vor malware und phishing
(“how modern browsers protect you from malware and phishing”) and
otevřený zdrojový kód a prohlížeč
(“open source and browsers”).
For those of you who want to tinker with the code and build your own web books, you can now dive into the HTML5, JavaScript and CSS used to build
20 Things I Learned
with the fully
open-sourced code
. In developing this web experience, we took inspiration from the things we love about books and extended them to the world of bits and bytes with the capabilities of modern web technologies. We paid special attention to finding the right balance and weight in the cover and page flips; making the book available offline, easily searchable, as well as bookmarkable by allowing you to pick up where you previously left off; and implementing a "lights-off" mode to simulate reading with a flashlight under the covers.
20 Things I Learned
was celebrated this year as an Official Honoree at the
15th Annual Webby Awards
in the categories of
Education
,
Best Visual Design (Function)
and
Best Practices
. To learn more about the technical details behind some of the most-loved features of the book, see our post on the
Google Code blog
.
We hope you’ll continue to find this curious guide to browsers and the web useful and informative.
20 Things I Learned
is best experienced in
Chrome
or any up-to-date, HTML5-compliant modern browser. For those of you who’ve previously read this web book, don’t forget to hit refresh on your browser to see the new language options.
Posted by Cory Ferreria, Localization Lead, Google Chrome Team
Introducing schema.org: Search engines come together for a richer web
June 2, 2011
(Cross-posted on the
Inside Search Blog
)
Today we’re announcing
schema.org
, a new initiative from Google, Bing and Yahoo! to create and support a common vocabulary for structured data markup on web pages. With
schema.org
, site owners and developers can learn about structured data and improve how their sites appear in major search engines. The site aims to be a one stop resource for webmasters looking to add markup to their pages.
Search engines have been working independently to support structured markup for a few years now. We
introduced rich snippets
to Google search in 2009 to help people find better summaries of
reviews
and
people
, and since that time we’ve expanded to new kinds of rich snippets, including
recipes
and
events
. We’ve been thrilled to see content creators across the web—from
stubhub.com
to
allrecipes.com
—add markup to their pages, and today we’re able to show rich snippets in search results more than 10 times as often as when we started two years ago.
We want to continue making the open web richer and more useful. We know that it takes time and effort for webmasters to add this markup to their pages, and adding markup is much harder if every search engine asks for data in a different way. That’s why we’ve come together with other search engines to support a common set of schemas, just as we came together to support a common standard for sitemaps in 2006. With
schema.org
, site owners can improve how their sites appear in search results not only on Google, but on Bing, Yahoo! and potentially other search engines as well in the future.
In addition to consolidating the schemas for the categories we already support,
schema.org
also introduces schemas for more than a hundred new categories, including movies, music, organizations, TV shows, products, places and more. As webmasters add this markup to their sites, search engines can develop richer search experiences. With webmaster feedback, we’ll be able to regularly publish new schemas for sites to use and, in turn, expand the list of queries with rich results. For webmasters who have already added microformats or RDFa currently supported by rich snippets, their sites will still appear with rich snippets on Google. You can learn more on our
Webmaster Central Blog
,
Help Center
and on
schema.org
.
Schema.org provides a wide variety of vocabularies webmasters can use to mark up their pages.
While this collaborative initiative is new, we draw heavily from the decades of work in the database and knowledge representation communities, from projects such as Jim Gray’s
SDSS Skyserver
,
Cyc
and from ongoing efforts such as
dbpedia.org
and
linked data
. We feel privileged to build upon this great work.
We look forward to seeing structured markup continue to grow on the web, powering richer search results and new kinds of applications.
Posted by Ramanathan Guha, Google Fellow
Ensuring your information is safe online
June 1, 2011
The Internet has been an amazing force for good in the world—opening up communications, boosting economic growth and promoting free expression. But like all technologies, it can also be used for bad things. Today, despite the efforts of Internet companies and the security community, identity theft, fraud and the hijacking of people’s email accounts are common problems online.
Bad actors take advantage of the fact that most people aren’t that tech savvy—hijacking accounts by using
malware and phishing scams
that trick users into sharing their passwords, or by using passwords obtained by hacking other websites. Most account hijackings are not very targeted; they are designed to steal identities, acquire financial data or send spam. But some attacks are targeted at specific individuals.
Through the strength of our cloud-based security and abuse detection systems*, we recently uncovered a campaign to collect user passwords, likely through phishing. This campaign, which appears to originate from Jinan, China, affected what seem to be the personal Gmail accounts of hundreds of users including, among others, senior U.S. government officials, Chinese political activists, officials in several Asian countries (predominantly South Korea), military personnel and journalists.
The goal of this effort seems to have been to monitor the contents of these users’ emails, with the perpetrators apparently using stolen passwords to change peoples’ forwarding and delegation settings. (Gmail enables you to forward your emails automatically, as well as grant others access to your account.)
Google detected and has disrupted this campaign to take users’ passwords and monitor their emails. We have notified victims and secured their accounts. In addition, we have notified relevant government authorities.
It’s important to stress that our internal systems have not been affected—these account hijackings were not the result of a security problem with Gmail itself. But we believe that being open about these security issues helps users better protect their information online.
Here are some ways to improve your security when using Google products:
Enable
2-step verification
. This Gmail feature uses a phone and second password on sign-in, and it protected some accounts from this attack. So check out
this video
on setting up 2-step verification.
Use a
strong password
for Google that you do not use on any other site. Here’s a
video
to help.
Enter your password only into a proper sign-in prompt on a
https://www.google.com
domain. We will
never ask you to email your password
or enter it into a form that appears within an email message. Here’s a
video
with more advice.
Check your Gmail settings for suspicious
forwarding addresses
(“Forwarding and POP/IMAP” tab, Fig. 1) or
delegated accounts
(“Accounts” tab, Fig. 2).
Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Watch for the red warnings about
suspicious account activity
that may appear on top of your Gmail inbox.
Review the security features offered by the
Chrome browser
. If you don’t already use Chrome, consider switching your browser to Chrome.
Explore other
security recommendations
and a
video with tips
on how to stay safe across the web.
Please spend ten minutes today taking steps to improve your online security so that you can experience all that the Internet offers—while also protecting your data.
*We also relied on user reports and this
external report
to uncover the campaign described.
Posted by Eric Grosse, Engineering Director, Google Security Team
The +1 button for websites: recommend content across the web
June 1, 2011
Since we started rolling out the
+1 button
in March, you’ve been able to recommend content to your friends and contacts directly from Google search results and ads.
But sometimes you want to +1 a page while you’re on it. After all, how do you know you want to suggest that recipe for chocolate flan if you haven’t tried it out yet?
Today, we’re releasing +1 buttons to the whole web. As a result, you might start seeing +1 appear on sites large and small across the Internet. We’ve partnered with a few sites where you’ll see +1 buttons in the near future:
You'll also start to see +1 buttons on other Google properties such as
Android Market
,
Blogger
,
Product Search
and
YouTube
.
+1 is as simple on the rest of the web as it is on Google search. With a single click you can recommend that raincoat, news article or favorite sci-fi movie to friends, contacts and the rest of the world. The next time your connections search, they could see your +1’s directly in their search results, helping them find your recommendations when they’re most useful.
In the meantime, we’re continuing to roll out the +1 button for English-language searches on Google.com. If you want to +1 search results and search ads earlier, you can opt in through our
experimental search site
. To see recommendations from your friends and contacts in Google search, make sure you’re signed into your
Google Account
.
If you’re a webmaster, you can get the +1 button code and learn more about implementation on our
+1 webmaster site
.
We hope you’ll agree that +1 buttons across the web make it even easier for you to recommend content to your friends and contacts, and make search results even more helpful and relevant.
Posted by Evan Gilbert, Software Engineer, +1 Button
Google Offers beta starts in Portland, Oregon tomorrow
May 31, 2011
(Cross-posted on the
Commerce
,
Places
,
Retail
and
Small Business
Blogs)
Portlanders know how to mix the urban (killer coffee, music and art) and the small-town (easy walking, biking and socializing). There’s no end to the city’s great restaurants, coffee shops, hot spots and places to explore. That’s why, when we started planning the Google Offers beta, we knew Portland was the ideal place to get it all kicked off.
Today, Google Chairman Eric Schmidt and VP of Commerce Stephanie Tilenius announced at the
D9 Conference
that we’re launching
Google Offers beta
in Portland, Ore. tomorrow.
Our first Google Offer will be from beloved local java shop
Floyd’s Coffee
. Husband-and-wife team Jack Inglis and Cris Chapman opened Floyd’s seven years ago, offering up espresso, coffee, breakfast burritos and more. They now have two convenient locations—one cozy, brick-lined shop in
Old Town
and another
Stumptown
watering-hole in
Buckman
.
With Google Offers, we’re working with great local businesses like Floyd’s Coffee,
Le Bistro Montage
,
Powell’s Books
and
Ground Kontrol Classic Arcade
to help them reach more Portlanders. We hope to bring Google Offers to other cities soon, with New York City and the San Francisco Bay area as our next stops.
You can learn more about Google Offers and sign up at
google.com/offers
. If you’re a business interested in participating in Google Offers,
you can let us know too
. Finally, if you’re at the
Portland Rose Festival
this Saturday, visit our Google booth at
CityFair
to say hello to our team and learn more about Google Offers.
Posted by Kyle Harrison, Product Manager, Google Offers
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