Google announced today that it has signed an agreement with Rambler Media to acquire ZAO Begun , a leading Russian context advertising service, for $140 million, subject to customary adjustments. This agreement emphasizes Google’s commitment to improving the service it offers users, partners and advertisers in Russia, where digital advertising is currently experiencing rapid growth.
The acquisition of Begun will give advertisers access to a broader network of sites to advertise on, and publishers will benefit from a wider set of adverts to run on their sites. Users will see more relevant advertising across a much wider set of websites. Google will bring its advertising expertise and experience to Begun’s network of websites.
“Google is very committed to giving Russian users, advertisers and partners the best possible service and experience,” said Mohammad Gawdat, Managing Director Emerging Markets, Google. ”This agreement will result in better search results and more relevant advertising for our Russian users and publishers.”
“Begun is an excellent business which can fully develop its potential under Google’s ownership,” said Mark Opzoomer, Chief Executive Officer of Rambler Media. “Google has the technological and financial capacity to improve Begun’s established advertising service in Russia.”
Source- Google Press Release
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Google Lively is a free, browser-based virtual environment with tight integration to social networks like MySpace, Facebook and OpenSocial, as well as Google gadgets like Picasa and YouTube. Unlike some previous integration’s of virtual worlds and social networks, Lively helps users’ friends lists, feeds, and logins to tie directly to the social network. Google’s platform will run in a browser, differentiating it from client-centric worlds like Second Life and can be embedded in a Web site.
There isn’t any currency used in Lively, so users will be able to add objects from Lively’s catalog to their rooms free of charge. With all these features and more rolling out later, Lively is likely to give Second Life and other popular virtual worlds a run for their money. Like most Google products, Lively is free.
While some have compared Lively to Second Life, the better comparison is with IMVU. The core of Lively content are avatars, rooms and catalog. This is true for IMVU as well, though IMVU offers home pages, groups, forums and more. In particular, Lively chose the IMVU-like metaphor of the virtual “room” instead of a sprawling virtual world or land like Second Life. However, Lively is currently a free offering, while IMVU charges for each accessory used and Second Life charges a flat fee, with the basic version provided free.
The minimum hardware requirement for running Lively is, Pentium III 800 MHz System with 512 MB RAM, a 32 MB 3D graphics card such as GeForce 2 or above and a broadband connection. Currently, Lively only runs in IE and Firefox on Windows XP and Vista machines, though the company has said that a Mac OS X client is a priority for the future.
Source- RTTNews
http://www.lively.com
It’s raining with features in the experimental version of Blogger, available at http://draft.blogger.com. To try these new features, it’s a good idea to visit Draft Blogger and temporarily enable "Make Blogger in Draft my default dashboard" at the top of the page.
Probably the most important new feature is the inline commenting system, that lets you post comments without opening a new page. This year, I tried using a pop-up window for the comment form, but it’s still inconvenient to post comments. The new option, which can be added in the Draft Blogger by going to Settings > Comments > Comment Form Placement, uses an iframe to display a textarea and a list of authentication options.
Blogger has a new post editor that borrows a lot of new tricks from Google Page Creator. You can move the images inside a post and dynamically choose between different sizes of the image. The new editor is smart enough to no longer replace newlines with <br> tags when you add tables, lists, styles, scripts and objects. There’s also an improved preview option that uses your template to style your content. Unfortunately, the new editor lacks many features currently available: auto-save, spell checking, video upload and the toolbar for editing HTML.
Blogs that use the new layouts can add star ratings to get feedback from readers, but I’m not sure if this is a useful feature. There’s also an option that integrates Blogger with Google Webmaster Central: you can automatically add all your Blogger blogs with a single click.
This is one of the biggest updates to Blogger and many of the new features are long overdue. If everything goes well, all these features will soon be available in the standard Blogger interface.
Source: GoogleSystem Blog
Google Inc. announced today that registration is now open for Google Code Jam 2008. Programmers ready to use their coding skills, creativity, and ingenuity to solve a series of challenges can register at http://code.google.com/codejam. The top 500 contestants will win an all expenses paid trip to the semifinals at regional Google offices, with the top 100 advancing to the grand final at Google’s Mountain View headquarters.
"Google Code Jam is an incredible opportunity for the most talented computer scientists in the world to come together and compete on an international stage," said Vic Gundotra, Vice President, Engineering. "Google is proud to support these coders as they take on some of the world’s most challenging programming problems, and we’re pleased to have the chance to introduce them to our research and offices around the world."
This year marks the first year with regional semifinal playoffs in over ten countries. "It’s an incredible opportunity to introduce the best of the programming world to our offices across the globe and demonstrate the incredible diversity of experiences that Google offers engineers worldwide," said Nelson Mattos, Vice President, Engineering, EMEA.
This year’s Google Code Jam will be powered by tools created by a 20%-time team that includes previous Code Jam winners, and will allow contestants to program in any language.
In addition to the trip to local engineering offices and Mountain View, finalists will also divide over $80,000 in prize money:
- Grand Prize:$10,000
- 2nd place:$5,000
- 3rd place:$2,500
- 4th-10th place:$1,500 each
- 11th-30th place:$1,000 each
- 31st-50th place:$750 each
- 51st-75th place:$500 each
- 76th-100th place:$250 each
Participants can register throughout the qualification round, which ends July 17.
Source- Google Press Release
Google is getting ready to welcome more than 2900 developers to the Moscone Center in San Francisco for Google I/OTM, the company’s largest developer event of the year. The event opens with a keynote speech on Wednesday, May 28, and runs through Thursday, May 29, with nearly 100 in-depth technical sessions about Google’s own developer products, and general web application development.
Google’s developer products are devoted to making it easier for developers to build for the web. In particular, Wednesday’s keynote speech will explore three areas of Google investment that — in close collaboration with the larger web community — aim to enable increasingly innovative and rich web applications:
- Making clouds of computing power more accessible to all developers
- Making the client — i.e., the browser — more capable and more powerful
- Ensuring the connectivity that enables the client and the cloud to work in harmony
"After years of competition among platforms, the web has won because it’s open, because it’s ubiquitous, and because there’s a passionate community working together to move it forward," said Vic Gundotra, vice president of engineering for developer products at Google. "Openness is great for developers and for users because it knocks down hurdles to building great applications, and because it speeds the next wave of innovation by letting good ideas be shared. The web doesn’t depend on any one API or tool or product, from Google or anyone else. What makes the real difference is the aggregate effect of us all working together, with open standards and open source."
Source- Google Press Release
Google Inc. is now offering the general public electronic access to their medical records and other health-related information.
The Mountain View, Calif.-based Web search leader announced the public launch of Google Health during a Webcast on Monday. It lets users import records from a variety of care providers and pharmacies.
Google tested the service by storing medical records for a few thousand patient volunteers at the not-for-profit Cleveland Clinic.
"It’s a really exciting day for us. We’re really happy to be able to offer this service to all our users," Marissa Mayer, the Google executive overseeing the health project, said in the Webcast.
Source: Google Health
Language is one of the biggest challenges we have in making information universally accessible. As part of the machine translation team within Google Research, I’m happy to report we’ve been hard at work to overcome this challenge. We’ve recently added translation capabilities for 10 new languages to Google Translate, bringing the total to 23 languages. The newly featured languages include Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Finnish, Hindi, Norwegian, Polish, Romanian and Swedish.
In addition, you can now translate text and web pages as well as perform cross-language searches between any two languages that we offer. For example, we now support Chinese translation to/from any of our languages (e.g., Chinese to French). So for those of you who will be following or attending the Olympics in Beijing this fall, you’ll be able to more easily find and access content from local sources.
We’ve also added a "Detect Language" option to help you automatically identify the language of the text you’re trying to translate. Keep in mind that the longer the text, the more accurate it will be. And for those of you who have embedded the Google Translate My Page gadget in your website to give it global reach, these new languages will automatically appear. Developers can also take advantage of these new languages in our AJAX language API.
Source- Google Press Release
Google today announced a web security product that makes it easy and affordable for companies of all sizes to provide Internet security to users in any location. Google Web Security™ for Enterprise provides real-time malware protection and URL filtering with policy enforcement and reporting. An additional feature extends the same protections to users working remotely on laptops in hotels, cafes, and even guest networks.
"One of the benefits of Google Apps is the protection it provides for communication and collaboration within businesses," said Scott Petry, director of product management, Google. "Now companies can extend that protection to more of their users’ Internet activities, whether they’re surfing the web at the office or the airport."
Google Web Security allows companies to secure their networks from web-based malware; enforce Internet use policies at the user, workgroup or company level; and receive comprehensive reporting on all web activities. Since employees are most vulnerable when they’re working outside the office, companies have the option of adding protection for off-network users. And because the product is delivered as a service, those remote workers get the protection wherever they are, without having to sign on to their corporate network.
The product is Powered by Postini™ with technology from ScanSafe, and accessible from the same administration console used for Google Apps security and compliance messaging services. Google Web Security is available in North America and Europe. Go here for more information.
Source- Google Press Release
Ankur Mittal | July 18, 2008
