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Its Google 13th anniversary. Google is celebrating its 13th anniversary with a beautiful Google Birthday Doodle.




Google was started as a research project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were PhD Students in January 1996 at Stanford University in California.

The domain name for Google was registered on September 15, 1997, and the company was incorporated on September 4, 1998. The search engine officially celebrates its birthday on September 27.

Since then Google surpassed 1 billion mark for number of unique visitors in May 2011.

Google has been delivering many innovative products since the launch and no one stands in competition with this search engine giant.

We wish a very Happy Birthday to Google.

Please leave your comments as memories for this great company.

Cheers,
Team

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DailyDeal.de has been acquired by Google, according to official news from DailyDeal site.

DailyDeal is a Berlin based company founded in December 2009 by brothers Fabian and Ferry Heilemann.

It is one of the recognized site to find local deals for favorite restaurants, travel destinations, entertainment venues and retail outlets throughout Germany, Austria and Switzerland.





Announcement was made on their official site in a statement titled as"Google: Our best deal yet."

Part of statement:

"We’re excited to announce that we’ve been acquired by Google! What began as a two-person startup less than two years ago has transformed into a trusted platform to connect businesses with consumers. By combining our expertise with the Offers team at Google, we hope to expand our efforts to provide even greater deals to consumers."

The DailyDeal team

Google hasn’t yet announced or confirmed the acquisition.

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Team

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U.S. News released their 2012 rankings for Colleges. Among Top 100 Universities, 61 choose Google Apps for Education.


US News released rankings of 1,600 schools including National University Rankings, Liberal Arts College Rankings, Best Value Schools and others. Among these rankings Google revealed in a official posts on their blog that out of Top 100 Universities, 61 choose to use Google Apps for Education.

Tom Mills, Director of Education, Google wrote,

We’re thrilled that 61 of this year’s top 100 universities have chosen Google Apps for Education to help improve communication and collaboration on campus. We’re proud to see such historic institutions moving to the world of 100% web."

Some of the top Universities that uses Google Apps are:

Yale University # Ranked third among National University Rankings
Brown University # Ranked Fifteenth among National University Rankings
Vanderbilt University # Ranked Seventeenth among National University Rankings
Boston University # Ranked Fifty Third among National University Rankings

Free Access, Courtesy to Google

To show the appreciation to these great schools, and to help students better explore and evaluate their college options, a free offer of one year access to the U.S. News complete rankings is now available for anyone who registers before Friday, September 16.

To Register for free access follow the link below:
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/store/college_compass_google_deal.htm
or click here - link

That's great, so many top universities uses Technology as a part of Education. Blend use of Technology with Education is doing wonders around the world.

Also Read | The Big Piture, Google Green

We just hope that more and more Universities uses Tech as their integral part of teaching.

Do post comment as your views.

Cheers,
Team

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Google Docs has just received an important update as a feature where you can share doc and allow viewers to comment on it with no edit option.


Sarah Wu, Software Engineer, Google informed about this new feature in a post on the official blog and said,

"Over the next several days, we're releasing a new sharing option so that you can let people view and add comments to your documents without giving them edit access."

When you want to use the "Comment-Only" feature, while sharing, you can choose the option accordingly. Three of the sharing options are avalaible "Can edit, Can comment and can view" with different levels of restriction.


Official shared Image

The new feature provides more privacy to user and allow user to get feedback from viewers. Its a very handy move by the team of Google Docs and we hope that they keep on coming with some brilliant ideas like this.

Share your views on this feature from Google Docs.

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Team

[via Google Docs Official Blog]

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Google has added a new section called “The Big Picture” to their Google Green site with numbers on their annual energy use and carbon footprint.



As reported earlier "Gmail, YouTube Are More Energy Efficient " in a post, shows the honest attempt of Google to make the environment green. To add to this Google has announced an addition to their Google Green site, “The Big Picture”.

Urs Hoelzle, Senior Vice President, Technical Infrastructure in a post on their blog wrote,

"We’ve worked hard to reduce the amount of energy our services use. In fact, to provide you with Google products for a month—not just search, but Google+, Gmail, YouTube and everything else we have to offer—our servers use less energy per user than a light left on for three hours. We’ve learned a lot in the process of reducing our environmental impact, so we’ve added a new section called “The Big Picture” to our Google Green site with numbers on our annual energy use and carbon footprint."

According to Google Senior Vice-President Urs Hoelzle, the company has maintained a carbon-neutral imprint since 2007.

From Google Green
Energy Efficient Data Centers
Google data centers are some of the most efficient in the world. Specifically, data centers use only 50% of the energy of most other data centers.

More Greener
Google is working to buy electricity directly from wind farms near their data centers.


Process of getting to Zero
Google says that they are working very hard to make sure that their operations use as little energy as possible.

More use of Renewable Energy
Large solar panel installation at our Mountain View campus and two wind farms to power data centers.

Watch video:



More Carbon Offsets
To eliminate impact on climate change, Google invest in projects that reduce carbon emissions at another source outside of Google.

Watch video:



Also Read | Gmail, YouTube Are More Energy Efficient
The use of cloud computing and renewable resources is getting a lot of appreciation in order to make the world a better place to live in.

Green computing hold the key in future projects for all major companies. The practice should be such that the complete design, manufacture and dispose unit for computers and server systems adhere minimal or no impact on the environment.

Chip makers Intel and AMD have made significant strides in improving the energy efficiency of their processors, and new vendors are building servers based on low-power processors.

These efforts from Google should encourage other companies to use techniques that help in reducing the carbon emissions. Green IT needs to be encouraged more and for that big companies have to make some big steps.
We just hope more and more efforts are made in this area from other companies too.

Read More | Top 61 Universities Uses Google Apps For Education

Do you use energy efficient resources for your use? Please share your views on making environment more green. Post Comments.


Cheers,
Team

[via Google Green]

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Google announced that it has acquired Zagat, the world's leader in restaurant reviews.


Marissa Mayer, VP, Local, Maps and Location Services announced via a post on their official blog about the acquirement news.
She wrote,

"So, today, I'm thrilled that Google has acquired Zagat. Moving forward, Zagat will be a cornerstone of our local offering—delighting people with their impressive array of reviews, ratings and insights, while enabling people everywhere to find extraordinary (and ordinary) experiences around the corner and around the world. With Zagat, we gain a world-class team that has more experience in consumer based-surveys, recommendations and reviews than anyone else in the industry."
Zagat via an announcement

"ZAGAT GOT GOOGLED - This may be the most important announcement in our 32 years of business: We have been acquired by another great company, Google. "

Zagat was founded back in 1979, and, according to the company, now includes ratings and reviews submitted by 350,000 ‘surveyors’ around the world.

Its a great news for all the Google lovers.

More Power to Google
Share the information with your friends and do post comments.

Cheers,
Team

[via Google Official]

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Cloud Computing impact is immense and this time Google explained how Gmail and YouTube are more energy efficient than other services.

Cloud computing is a phenomenon of computing as a service rather than a product, whereby shared resources, software and information are provided to computers and other devices as a utility over the Internet.

Cloud computing is secure, simple, keeps you productive and saves you money. But the cloud can also save energy.

Google always say that they are committed to make the environment more Greener and this time they shared details how they are different from some other services.

David Jacobowitz, Program Manager, Green Engineering and Operation in a post on their official wrote,

"Switching to Gmail can be almost 80 times more energy efficient (PDF) than running in-house email. This is because cloud-based services are typically housed in highly efficient data centers that operate at higher server utilization rates and use hardware and software that’s built specifically for the services they provide—conditions that small businesses are rarely able to create on their own. "


Google ran similar calculations YouTube and found: the servers needed to play one minute of YouTube consume about 0.0002 kWh of energy. According to reports three straight days of video on YouTube is equal to energy required to manufacture, package and ship a single DVD.


IMAGES SHARED BY GOOGLE
Cloud computing is a natural evolution of the widespread adoption of virtualization, service-oriented architecture, autonomic, and utility computing. The Characteristics of Cloud computing is such that if used efficiently, it can reduce carbon emissions to a great extent. So it also important for us to use energy efficient services to help make our environment Greener.

Also Read | The Big Picture, Google Green
The figures shown by the Google are impressive shows how valuable is to use Cloud Computing.

MAKE EFFORTS IN MAKING ENVIRONMENT A SAFE PLACE

Share the thought and feel free to post comments.

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Team

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With the increase in power of +1 button from Google Plus, we will now witness +1 button for users on mobile web.


Punit Soni, Lead Product Manager, Google+ Games and Mobile wrote in a post on Google+ "The +1 button helps people around the web get recommendations from their friends, and we want to make sure you can make recommendations on the go. To help, we’ve made the +1 button available on the mobile web. Now you can tap to +1 directly from your mobile phone or tablet."

The button will automatically be visible to anyone on Android 2.1+ and iOS 4.0+ browsers. When you +1 something, it will be displayed publicly across the Web as an annotation on the content you +1’d.

Popularity of +1 button is increasing rapidly as it has been noticed that daily many sites integrate the +1 button with their content.

Mobile web access is increasing day by day and this add-on from Google will increase the user experience to a great extent.

Watch the video below to know more about +1 button:



Know more about +1 button, click here.

Have you tried this as yet?
Share your views with us, post comments and share this with your friends.

Cheers,
Team

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Google announced that to make things simpler for user they will be shutting down a number of products and merging others into existing products as features.

Google in a post "A fall Spring-clean" on their official blog revealed that "Over the next few months we’ll be shutting down a number of products and merging others into existing products as features. Technology improves, people’s needs change, some bets pay off and others don’t. So, as Larry previewed on our last earnings call, today we’re having a fall spring-clean at Google."

According to Google the sole motive for this cleaning is that they can now devote more resources to high impact products—the ones that improve the lives of billions of people. All the Googlers working on these projects will be moved over to higher-impact products.

Here’s a quick overview of where a number of products and features are headed:

Aardvark: An experiment in a new kind of social search, it helped people answer each other’s questions.

Desktop: Will be discontinued on September 14, including all the associated APIs, services, plugins, gadgets and support.

Fast Flip: Fast Flip was started to help pioneer news content browsing and reading experiences for the web and mobile devices.

Google Maps API for Flash: The Google Maps API for Flash was launched to provide ActionScript developers a way to integrate Google Maps into their applications.

Google Pack: People will still be able to access Google’s and our partners’ software quickly and easily through direct links on the Google Pack website.

Google Web Security: Much of the web security functionality are integrated directly into existing Google products, such as safe browsing in Chrome. Although their previous sales channel will be discontinued, they’ll continue to support our existing customers.

Image Labeler: Although it will be discontinued, a wide variety of online games from Google are still available.

Notebook: Google Notebook enabled people to combine clipped URLs from the web and free-form notes into documents they could share and publish. All notebook data will be exported to Google Docs .

Sidewiki: Discontinued to focus instead on our broader social initiatives.

Subscribed Links: Subscribed Links enabled developers to create specialized search results that were added to the normal Google search results on relevant queries for subscribed users. Developers will be able to access and download their data until September 15, at which point subscribed links will no longer appear in people's search results.

There was an interesting point to be noted from the post, Google says "We’ve never been afraid to try big, bold things, and that won’t change. We’ll continue to take risks on interesting new technologies with a lot of potential."

It been always pointed out that Google always keep on experimenting new things some got huge success and some are still to be recognized by major portions of users. We saw a recent example of Google TV.

Also Read | Google Acquires Zagat Rated

This is a brave move from Google to clean its house with some of minor projects to focus on big things.

Please share your views with us on this.

Cheers,
Team

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Google has awarded free calls to home for all U.S. service members via GMAIL.


Ilya Frank, Senior Software Engineer posted on the official blog and informed "We understand that it’s not always easy or affordable for our troops serving overseas to call friends and family at home, so starting today we’re making it completely free for all uniformed military personnel with valid United States Military (.mil) email addresses to call the United States, right from Gmail."

To start making free calls just follow these steps from Gmail:

1. Add your valid .mil email address to your Google Account.

2. Click on the Call phone link at the top of the Gmail chat roster and install the voice and video Gmail plugin if you haven’t already.


Google has been always on their toes to provide something unique and new to all the users and this time its like an award to all U.S. service members do that they don't pay to call back home. Its a very healthy way to attract the users and increase the demand of Voice service from Gmail.

What you have to say about this?
Please share with friends and don't forget to post comments.

Cheers,
Team

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Google posted a video on their blog explaining how Google makes improvements in its search algorithm.


Amit Singhal a Google Fellow posted on their blog "Another look under the hood of search" and said "We wanted to give people an even deeper look inside search, so we put together a short video that gives you a sense of the work that goes into the changes and improvements we make to Google almost every day. While an improvement to the algorithm may start with a creative idea, it always goes through a process of rigorous scientific testing. Simply put: if the data from our experiments doesn’t show that we’re helping users, we won’t launch the change. "

They also said "In the world of search, we’re always striving to deliver the answers you’re looking for. After all, we know you have a choice of a search engine every time you open a browser. As the Internet becomes bigger, richer and more interactive it means that we have to work that much harder to ensure we’re unearthing and displaying the best results for you. "

Here is the video:



Video contains an example too about what Google calls ‘Full Page Replacement’. This improvement is about when Google Algorithm looks at your query, decides you’ve misspelled it, and then presents the results for the correct spelling, rather than just suggesting the proper spelling and displaying the results for the misspelled results.

Google has been posting a series of blog posts to share the methodology and process behind our search ranking, evaluation and algorithmic changes.

This is another attempt to let user know what Google cooks daily for users to give them what is best.

Please do share your views about this video with us.

Cheers,
Team

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Google+ has started rolling out "Verified name" tag/badge for the user profiles, verifying them as genuine.


To make ensure the real name policy of Google+ is followed and taken seriously by the users, Google+ makes an statement via issuing the badge. This effort will also help Google+ to reduce the number of spams on the network.

Wen-Ai Yu from Google informed users about the update in a post on Google+. She said "We’re starting to roll out verification badges on profiles so you can be sure the person you’re adding to a circle is who they claim to be."


She also said "For now, we’re focused on verifying public figures, celebrities, and people who have been added to a large number of Circles, but we’re working on expanding this to more folks."

She also posted a video to show users how the "Verification Badges" look like.

Watch the video here:



Google has been suspending account of users whom profile name does not goes with the policy. Many of the celebs were issued the "verified name" tag.

Still were are not sure how Google+ is issuing the tag.
Many of the blogs posted pointing out that many of the celebs and public figures like Mark Zuckerberg, Kevin Rose and Tom Anderson were not issues the tag.

Why so? Mark has one of most number of followers(around 469014) on Google+, still not badge for him?

There are lot of questions to be answered about the policy. Are you satisfied with this roll-out from Google+?

Please share your views with us.

Cheers,
Team

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Combination will Supercharge Android, Enhance Competition, and Offer Wonderful User Experiences.


In a recent update, Google Inc. today announced that they have reached a agreement with Motorola Mobility Holdings Inc. under which Google will acquire Motorola Mobility Holdings, Inc. for about $12.5 billion or $40.00 per share in cash.
According to Google, the move will help Google to create awesome user experiences that supercharge the entire Android ecosystem for the benefit of consumers, partners and developers everywhere.

A few years ago, Motorola bet its future in the mobile devices market by going full Android, launching the “Droid” – initially on the Verizon network – on November 6, 2009. The “Droid X” and “Droid 2″ followed in 2010.


In a blog post, Google co-founder and CEO Larry Page writes that "Google has acquired Motorola not only because of its strength in Android smartphones and devices, but also for being a market leader in the home devices and video solutions business. I look forward to welcoming Motorolans to our family of Googlers.”

Quotes from Android partners

“We welcome today’s news, which demonstrates Google’s deep commitment to defending Android, its partners, and the ecosystem.”

– J.K. Shin
President, Samsung, Mobile Communications Division

“I welcome Google‘s commitment to defending Android and its partners.”

– Bert Nordberg
President & CEO, Sony Ericsson

“We welcome the news of today‘s acquisition, which demonstrates that Google is deeply committed to defending Android, its partners, and the entire ecosystem.”

– Peter Chou
CEO, HTC Corp.

“We welcome Google‘s commitment to defending Android and its partners.”

– Jong-Seok Park, Ph.D
President & CEO, LG Electronics Mobile Communications Company


Please Share your views will this move from Google will be a success??

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Team

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To take the Google+ user experience to a new level and match up with the Facebook, Google launched games in Google+ project today. To make users spend more time on the new social network and make playing games online as fun as conversations, several games are launched and available now to play on Google Plus


Some of the launch games include Rovio’s Angry Birds, PopCap’s Bejeweled Blitz, and Zynga’s Poker. It’s a tiny collection compared to what’s offered on Facebook, which has made a booming business by offering social games that players can click away at while remaining within the social network’s walls.

According to Google engineering director David Glazer, the initial batch of games was intentionally kept small so as to "get the kinks out of our APIs". Glazer said Google would be adding more developers and features "in small steps" ahead of a public release.

The release comes just a few weeks after a Google+ help page cropped up detailing a “Games Stream.” Before that, snippets of site code were discovered that mentioned game invites, along with a Google Games logo that was being hosted behind the scenes. In addition, a Google job posting sought a product manager for a “brand-new business” called “Games at Google.”


When you’re ready to play, the Games page is waiting—click the games button at the top of your stream. You can see the latest game updates from your circles, browse the invites you’ve received and check out games that people you know have played recently. The Games page is also where your game accomplishments will appear. So you can comfortably share your latest high score—your circles will only see the updates when they’re interested in playing games too.

If you’re not interested in games, it’s easy to ignore them. Your stream will remain focused on conversations with the people you care about.

Google has posted a promotional video of the new gaming portion of Google+. It demos how games show up on the service and how users can post information from those games to their circles.

You can watch the video here:



And If you are a developer interested in building games for Google+ project, visit the Google+ developer blog to know more details.

Please share your comments with us.

Cheers,
Team