Google makes health service publicly available
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
Google Translate adds 10 new languages
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 Apps extends protection to web surfing and remote workers
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
Google Maps Street View now available in driving directions
Starting today, finding your way around town will be easier than ever: Street View is now integrated into Google Maps driving directions. In the regions across the country where Google Maps Street View imagery is available, users will see camera icons next to each step of their directions, which will open a Street View image of the location, along with an arrow showing the action to be taken. Users can click through their entire route through Street View, and when the journey is complete a green marker will indicate arrival at their destination.
By viewing Street View images alongside directions, drivers have visual context for intersections and action points along their route, enabling them to be aware of landmarks and other factors such as tolls, speed limits, size of the road, and the availability of parking at their destination.
Street View, originally launched in May of 2007 in 5 cities, now provides interactive 360-degree street-level imagery in 44 regions across the country. Integrating Street View with driving directions provides those living in or traveling to these regions with another powerful, useful tool to help them easily navigate their surroundings. Street View was also recently made available through the Google Maps API, allowing developers to utilize Street View functionality to enhance their services.
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Google Launches Developer Sandbox for iGoogle
Today, Google opened a sandbox for developers to help them build richer gadgets for iGoogle, which will offer users more powerful and interactive features. To ensure developers get the most out of their gadgets, we’ve also launched an updated developer website which guides developers through building and distributing gadgets to iGoogle’s growing audience.
iGoogle’s new features will include left navigation, a maximized or "canvas view" option for gadgets, and social features for gadgets using the OpenSocial APIs. These social features for gadgets will include a friends list and activities displayed through a special updates gadget. The features and functionalities as they appear in the sandbox are meant for development purposes only, and may not reflect the end consumer experience.
Developers are an important part of Google’s innovation ecosystem and we’re always striving to provide tools to help them innovate in new directions that will ultimately make the web richer for all users. By building more powerful and interactive gadgets for iGoogle, developers will have an opportunity to share their gadgets with the tens of millions of iGoogle users.
To see the video for developers on the iGoogle sandbox, please see:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6KVwATfCdM
Source- Google Press Release
Google’s Website Optimizer is now available
Today at the ad:tech conference in San Francisco, Google Website Optimizer™ launched out of beta as an independent product. Formerly a feature within the Google AdWords™ advertising service only, this free website-testing tool is now accessible through its own website (http://www.google.com/websiteoptimizer) as well.
Google Website Optimizer helps improve user experience on the Web by showing its users what their visitors want to see. Rather than debating or guessing how a webpage might look best, users can continually test different combinations of website content, such as images and text, to see which one yields the most sales, sign-ups, leads or other goals.
Google Website Optimizer provides value "beyond the click" as part of Google’s suite of advertising tools offering heightened precision, accountability and scale. Together with Google AdWords, which drives traffic to your website, and Google Analytics™, which measures that traffic, Google Website Optimizer further helps you convert your traffic into customers.
The product is available in 27 languages worldwide: Czech, Danish, Dutch, English (Australia, UK & U.S.), Finnish, French, German, Hebrew, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil & Portugal), Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Tagalog, Thai and Turkish.
Check Out the Latest Google Earth 4.3 Beta
Google Earth lets you fly anywhere on Earth to view satellite imagery, maps, terrain, 3D buildings and even explore galaxies in the Sky. You can explore rich geographical content, save your toured places and share with others.
Here are the highlights:
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New navigation — We’ve created a new navigational experience so users can better take advantage of the 3D environment in Google Earth. The navigation takes the traditional pan-and-zoom approach associated with mapping programs and incorporates a first-person, ground-level perspective commonly used in video games.
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More, faster 3D buildings — Version 4.3 also includes dozens of photo-textured cities and towns, as well as thousands of user-contributed buildings around the world. We’ve significantly enhanced our approach to rendering 3D data to greatly improve performance and realism of 3D data.
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Street View — The well-known Google Maps feature gets added to Google Earth with version 4.3. Street View is a popular, engaging feature that allows people to easily find, discover, and plan activities relevant to a location.
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Sunlight feature — This new addition is a playful way to control the sun’s location relative to the Earth. When zoomed out to a view of the Earth, you can control a time-lapse view of sunlight moving across the Earth. While zoomed into a given city, you can watch the sunrise and sunset.
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Image acquisition date — One of our most requested features, 4.3 now includes an image acquisition date, which shows you on what date a given area of imagery was taken.
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New languages — Version 4.3 includes twelve new languages, including Danish, English (UK), Spanish (Latin American), Finnish, Hebrew, Indonesian, Norwegian, Portuguese (PT), Romanian, Swedish, Thai, and Turkish.
Download: http://dl.google.com/earth/GE4/GoogleEarthWin.exe
Home page: http://earth.google.com/
Salesforce.com and Google Introduce Salesforce for Google Apps
Salesforce.com ,the market and technology leader in Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Google today expanded their global strategic alliance to make it easy for companies of all sizes to run their business in the cloud with Salesforce for Google Apps. The combination of the Google Apps™ suite of productivity applications and the Salesforce suite of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) applications enables businesses to effectively communicate and collaborate without any hardware or software to download, install or maintain. Salesforce for Google Apps also leverages the Force.com Platform and Google’s open APIs, opening up even more development opportunities for developers and partners.
"Google and salesforce.com have always had similar models and philosophies about delivering innovations made possible by the Internet," said Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google. "Salesforce.com was a pioneer in Software-as-a-Service and a year ago we joined them in this mission to bring the benefits of cloud computing to businesses of all types. Together, we are making more applications and services available online so customers can focus on building their core business rather than the applications that support it."
Source- Google Press Release
