google phone number: Aralık 2012

31 Aralık 2012 Pazartesi

Japan’s political candidates hang out with voters on Google+

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Yesterday, the heads of Japan’s eight most popular political parties held eight consecutive Google+ Hangouts to engage with citizens across the country ahead of Sunday’s general election—arguably the largest (and longest) series of Hangouts with politicians ever! Each of the leaders held a Hangout, including incumbent Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda from the Democratic Party Japan and Shinzo Abe from the Liberal Democratic Party.

Voters asked questions that reflected the most pressing issues on the Japanese people’s minds: the ailing economy, social security and the future of energy programs. For instance, one 21-year old student asked a politician about welfare and economic self-reliance, in response to which the politician explained his vision to create more opportunities for young people.

After announcing these Hangouts on November 29, we invited citizens to upload their questions on to Google+ using the hashtag #政治家と話そう (“talk to politicians”). Ten participants representing a cross-section of voters across Japanese society—including a college student from Tokyo, a housewife from Mie prefecture, and a businessman from Shizuoka prefecture—were chosen to join the Hangouts. People who tuned in said that it gave them a chance to witness an in-depth conversation between politicians and voters up close, which is rare in Japan’s incredibly short and intense campaign season of 12 days.

These Hangouts are part of Google Japan’s effort to help voters get information about the candidates before they head to the polls on December 16. To help voters get access to information about more than 1,000 candidates and 12 political parties, we launched our Japan elections site, called Erabou 2012 (“Choose 2012”), at google.co.jp/senkyo. This site serves as a hub for all latest elections-related information, pulling together candidate profiles and party platforms. If you missed the Hangouts live, you can also watch the recordings there and on the Japan Politics YouTube Channel.

Posted by Mak Arima, Country Managing Director, Google Japan

Get the whole family together over the holidays, from anywhere

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‘Tis the season for tree trimming, gift giving, recipe sharing and catching up with loved ones over a cup of eggnog. For families that are spread out over cities or even countries, it can be a challenge to get everyone together during the holidays. This year, we’ve teamed up with the creators of Wallace and Gromit to add a little extra holiday magic to Google+ Hangouts with a custom invitation builder and a Holiday Effects app.

Click this link to schedule your holiday family hangout and we’ll send all your invitations out with a custom Wallace and Gromit video. Since Hangouts let up to 10 people video chat at once, right from Google+ or Gmail, you can invite the whole family to join—and maybe a few friends too.

Don’t forget to put on a Santa hat, reindeer antlers or even wear Gromit’s ears by adding the Holiday Effects app to your family hangout.

Happy holidays from the Google+ and Gmail teams!

Posted by Kevin Maguire, Product Marketing Manager

(Cross-posted on the Gmail Blog)

Explore Spain's Jewish heritage online

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You can now discover Spain’s Jewish heritage on a new site powered by comprehensive and accurate Google Maps: www.redjuderias.org/google.

Using the Google Maps API, Red de Juderías de España has built a site where you can explore more than 500 landmarks that shed light on Spain’s Jewish population throughout history. By clicking on a landmark, you can get historical information, pictures or texts, and a 360º view of the location, thanks to Street View technology. You can also use the search panel on the top of the page to filter the locations by category, type, geographic zone or date.

Toledo, Synagogue Santamaría la Blanca

Information is included on each landmark
This project is just one of our efforts to bring important cultural content online. This week, we worked with the Israel Antiquities Authority to launch the Leon Levy Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Library, an online collection of more than 5,000 scroll fragments, and last year we announced a project to digitize and make available the Yad Vashem Museum’s Holocaust archives. With the Google Art Project, people around the world can also view and explore more than 35,000 works of art in 180 museums.

Read more about this project on the Europe Blog. We hope this new site will inspire you to learn more about Spain’s Jewish history, and perhaps to visit these cities in person.

Posted by William Echikson, External Relations, Europe, Middle East and Africa

Follow Santa live on Google Santa Tracker

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The North Pole air traffic control elves have just notified us that Santa has taken off! For the next day, you can visit the Google Santa Tracker to see where Santa’s headed next and keep tabs on how many presents he’s delivered. You can also keep up with him on your smartphone and tablet with the Android app, in your browser with the the Chrome extension, and even in 3D with Google Earth and Google Earth mobile (look for it in the Tour Guide feature with the latest version of Google Earth).

And follow Google Maps on Google+, Facebook and Twitter to get up-to-the-minute details on Santa’s journey around the world.

Ho ho ho! Happy holidays everyone!

Posted by Brian McClendon, VP of Google Maps and Google Earth

Drop in and get a call from Santa

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(Cross posted on Gmail Blog)

With the big day right around the corner, activity in the North Pole is hitting a fever pitch. Yet, Santa will always make time to send a personalized holiday phone calls from Santa to your friends and family via his personal Google Voice line (aka Send a Call from Santa).

To send a message, find the Call Center in Santa’s Village. You will be prompted to answer a few fun questions, then Google Voice will do the rest! The system will create a tailored phone call from Santa himself, and send it to whomever you wish.

To get an idea of what to expect, listen to a sample message.

And don’t forget: If you want to keep up with Santa as he travels around the globe delivering presents on Christmas Eve, you can track his journey on Google Maps’s Santa Tracker.

Happy holidays from all of us at Google!

Posted by Patrick Glover, North Pole Operator

27 Aralık 2012 Perşembe

YouTube's New Interface, Closer to Launch

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YouTube continues to test new user interfaces, but it looks like one of these versions will be finally rolled out to everyone.

There's a new message on the experimental homepage that welcomes users to the new YouTube and explains one of the new features: "What to watch shows you new activity from your subscriptions, recommendations based on videos you've watched and your taste in videos, plus the most popular videos on YouTube". YouTube also links to a page that was used the last time when YouTube was redesigned. You can see the old page in Google's cache, but now the page returns a 404 error message.

YouTube has constantly tested new versions of the sidebar from video pages. This time there's a new sidebar section that shows other related videos. You can "get the search results, feeds, and channel videos you were just looking at". For example, you can perform a search, click one of the results and see the list of results by clicking "more results" in the sidebar, instead of going back to the search results page.

The sidebar is the most important thing about the new YouTube interface because it's always there: on the homepage, the settings page, the search results page and can be expanded when you watch videos.

To try the new YouTube interface, check the instructions from this post.

YouTube's App for iPad

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Three months after releasing an app for iPhone, YouTube updated it and added an interface optimized for iPad. The lack of a built-in YouTube app for iPad created an opportunity for other developers to come up with their own YouTube apps and some of them are pretty good.

YouTube also updated the app to fill the entire 4-inch display of the iPhone 5 and added AirPlay support. The initial version of the app didn't have AirPlay support and asked users to enable AirPlay mirroring, an inefficient method to play videos on an Apple TV. The new version supports AirPlay, but it uses a non-standard video player and videos stop playing on the Apple TV when you close the app. Another side-effect is that you still can't use the background audio trick that lets you play songs or any other videos while opening another app or after locking the device. Both features are available in Apple's old YouTube app and YouTube's mobile web app.

Obviously, YouTube's app has a lot of features that weren't available in the built-in app: recommendations, unified video history, voice search, closed captions, activity feeds. Unfortunately, the iPad app has a pretty low information density and most sections show fewer videos than Apple's YouTube app. For example, the search feature shows only 4 results at a time in the landscape mode, while Apple's app displayed 12 results. YouTube offers some advanced search options: sorting by date, ratings or view count, finding recent videos and filtering by duration, but the interface tries too hard to be consistent with the desktop interface, while ignoring that a tablet has a small screen. Apple's App Store app from iOS 6 made a similar mistake by showing a small number of results at a time.

Google Now's Research Card

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The Google Search app for Android 4.1+ has been updated with new cards for events nearby, boarding passes, walking and biking activity, birthdays.

There's also a new card for research topics. Google tries to find in your search history a list of related queries. If you've been researching a topic, it's likely that you've tried different versions of a query and you've clicked many search results. Google Now shows a card with other useful pages from the same topic. It's interesting to notice that Google can find the name of the topic and shows a page that groups results for various queries. Google also includes a "history" section with pages you've already visited.

For some reason, the pages generated by Google return an error messages if you try to open them using a desktop browser. You need to change the user-agent to open pages with URLs like https://www.google.com/now/topics/t/LONGID.

"The research topics card appears when your recent Web History includes several searches related to a single topic – such as a trip you're planning – and Google detects relevant webpages that you may not have found yet. For this card to appear, you must have Web History turned on for the account you use with Google Now. To explore more links that may be relevant to the topic, touch Explore at the bottom of the card. From the list of links, touch the History tab to view a summary of your recent Web History related to this topic," informs Google.

YouTube's New Interface

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After so many posts about YouTube's experimental interfaces, it's time for the public release. The new interface is rolled out to everyone and you no longer have to change your YouTube cookie to try it.

"On YouTube video always comes first, and with this new design the site gets out of the way and lets content truly shine. Videos are now at the top of the page, with title and social actions below. Also, playlists have been moved up, so you can easily browse through videos while you watch. Now when you subscribe to your favorite channels, we will add them to your Guide and make them available on every page of the site, and on your mobile device, tablet, and TV," explains YouTube.

The guide is actually a sidebar that's now available on every YouTube page and lets you check your subscriptions, your playlists and the video history. You can also see a list of other videos from the previous page, so you can quickly watch another search result, a different video from the same channel or another video from the homepage.

Google's Card-Style OneBoxes

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Google updated the desktop OneBoxes for definitions and local time to match the card layout from Google Now. The same layout is also used in the mobile search UI for most Google OneBoxes.

What's unique about the cards? They're much bigger, they include a lot more information, more white space and more distinctive headers. They stand out more and they're harder to ignore.

{ Thanks, Milivella, Arpit, Mikhail. }

20 Aralık 2012 Perşembe

“In the beginning”...bringing the scrolls of Genesis and the Ten Commandments online

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A little over a year ago, we helped put online five manuscripts of the Dead Sea Scrolls—ancient documents that include the oldest known biblical manuscripts in existence. Written more than 2,000 years ago on pieces of parchment and papyrus, they were preserved by the hot, dry desert climate and the darkness of the caves in which they were hidden. The Scrolls are possibly the most important archaeological discovery of the 20th century.

Today, we’re helping put more of these ancient treasures online. The Israel Antiquities Authority is launching the Leon Levy Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Library, an online collection of some 5,000 images of scroll fragments, at a quality never seen before. The texts include one of the earliest known copies of the Book of Deuteronomy, which includes the Ten Commandments; part of Chapter 1 of the Book of Genesis, which describes the creation of the world; and hundreds more 2,000-year-old texts, shedding light on the time when Jesus lived and preached, and on the history of Judaism.

The Ten Commandments. Photo by Shai Halevi, courtesy of Israel Antiquities Authority

Part of the Book of Genesis. Photo by Shai Halevi, courtesy of Israel Antiquities Authority
Millions of users and scholars can discover and decipher details invisible to the naked eye, at 1215 dpi resolution. The site displays infrared and color images that are equal in quality to the Scrolls themselves. There’s a database containing information for about 900 of the manuscripts, as well as interactive content pages. We’re thrilled to have been able to help this project through hosting on Google Storage and App Engine, and use of Maps, YouTube and Google image technology.

This partnership with the Israel Antiquities Authority is part of our ongoing work to bring important cultural and historical materials online, to make them accessible and help preserve them for future generations. Other examples include the Yad Vashem Holocaust photo collection, Google Art Project, World Wonders and the Google Cultural Institute.

We hope you enjoy visiting the Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Library, or any of these other projects, and interacting with history.

Posted by Eyal Miller, New Business Development, and Yossi Matias, Head of Israel Research and Development Center

Count down to Christmas Eve with Google Santa Tracker

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While millions of people eagerly await Christmas Day, Santa and his elves are keeping busy at the North Pole. They’re preparing presents, tuning up the sleigh, feeding the reindeer and, of course, checking the list (twice!) before they take flight on their trip around the world.

While we’ve been tracking Santa since 2004 with Google Earth, this year a team of dedicated Google Maps engineers built a new route algorithm to chart Santa’s journey around the world on Christmas Eve. On his sleigh, arguably the fastest airborne vehicle in the world, Santa whips from city to city delivering presents to millions of homes. You’ll be able to follow him on Google Maps and Google Earth, and get his stats starting at 2:00 a.m. PST Christmas Eve at google.com/santatracker.

Simulating Santa's path across the world—see it live Dec 24
In addition, with some help from developer elves, we’ve built a few other tools to help you track Santa from wherever you may be. Add the new Chrome extension or download the Android app to keep up with Santa from your smartphone or tablet. And to get the latest updates on his trip, follow Google Maps on Google+, Facebook and Twitter.

Get a dashboard view of Santa's journey on Google Maps
The Google Santa Tracker will launch on December 24, but the countdown to the journey starts now! Visit Santa’s Village today to watch the countdown clock and join the elves and reindeer in their preparations. You can even ask Santa to call a friend or family member.

We hope you enjoy tracking Santa with us this year. And on behalf of everyone at Google—happy holidays!

Posted by Brian McClendon, VP of Google Maps and Google Earth

Explore Spain's Jewish heritage online

Toledo, Synagogue Santamaría la Blanca

Cloud computing enabling entrepreneurship in Africa

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In 2007, 33-year-old Vuyile moved to Cape Town from rural South Africa in search of work. Unable to complete high school, he worked as a night shift security guard earning $500/month to support his family. During the rush hour commute from his home in Khayelitsha, Vuyile realized that he could earn extra income by selling prepaid mobile airtime vouchers to other commuters on the train.

In rural areas, it’s common to use prepaid vouchers to pay for basic services such as electricity, insurance and airtime for mobile phones. But it’s often difficult to distribute physical vouchers because of the risk of theft and fraud.

Nomanini, a startup based in South Africa, built a device that enables local entrepreneurs like Vuyile to sell prepaid mobile services in their communities. The Lula (which means “easy” in colloquial Zulu), is a portable voucher sales terminal that is used on-the-go by people ranging from taxi drivers to street vendors. It generates and prints codes which people purchase to add minutes to their mobile phones.

Today, Vuyile sells vouchers on the train for cash payment, and earns a commission weekly. Since he started using the Lula, he’s seen his monthly income increase by 20 percent.

Vuyile prints a voucher from his Lula
Nomanini founders Vahid and Ali Monadjem wanted to make mobile services widely available in areas where they had been inaccessible, or where—in a region where the average person makes less than $200/month—people simply couldn’t afford them. By creating a low-cost and easy-to-use product, Nomanini could enable entrepreneurs in Africa to go to deep rural areas and create businesses for themselves.

In order to build a scalable and reliable backend system to keep the Lula running, Nomanini chose to run on Google App Engine. Their development team doesn’t have to spend time setting up their own servers and can instead run on the same infrastructure that powers Google’s own applications. They can focus on building their backend systems and easily deploy code to Google’s data centers. When Vuyile makes a sale, he presses a few buttons, App Engine processes the request, and the voucher prints in seconds.

Last month, 40,000 people bought airtime through the Lula, and Nomanini hopes to grow this number to 1 million per month next year. While platforms like App Engine are typically used to build web or smartphone apps, entrepreneurs like Vahid and Ali are finding innovative ways to leverage this technology by building their own devices and connecting them to App Engine. Vahid tells us: “We’re a uniquely born and bred African solution, and we have great potential to take this to the rest of Africa and wider emerging markets. We could not easily scale this fast without running on Google App Engine.”

To learn more about the technical implementation used by Nomanini, read their guest post on the Google App Engine blog.

Posted by Zafir Khan, Google App Engine

Tips for getting the most from Google Maps on iPhone

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We hope you’ve had a chance to try the new Google Maps app for iPhone (announced last week and available for download in the Apple App Store). The app is designed to be simple—just to work whenever you need it. Still, we have a few tips to make finding things with Google Maps even faster and easier. All the tips are collected on our site but here a few of my favorites:

Swipe to see more. In Google Maps a wealth of information is often just a swipe away. Whether you’re looking at search results or directions, you can swipe the bottom info sheet left and right to see other options. To get more details on any of the results, swipe that info sheet upward (or just tap it—that works too). Even with the info sheet expanded, you can swipe to see those other results.

Place a pin. Get more information about any location by just pressing and holding the map. The info sheet that pops up tells you the address, lets you save or share the place, and best of all, brings up...

Street View. By far the easiest way to get to Street View is placing a pin. Tap the imagery preview on the info sheet to enter into Street View, then explore! I recommend the look-around feature (bottom left button) which changes what you’re looking at as you tilt and move your phone.

Want to learn more? See the rest of our tips on the site. And as you explore the app on your own, share your own tips using #googlemaps. Most of all, enjoy discovering your world.

Posted by Vicky Tait, Consumer Operations, Google Maps

16 Aralık 2012 Pazar

Understanding Google

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Fortune has an interview with Larry Page, Google's CEO. There are many questions about Apple, competition, managing the company, but some of the most interesting answers revolve around the word "understand".

"If we're going to do a good job meeting your information needs, we actually need to understand things and we need to understand things pretty deeply," says Larry Page. That's why Google has a single privacy policy for most of its services, that's why Google Search uses SSL when you're logged in, that's why Google experiments with combining data from multiple services, that's why Google+ was built and that's why Google values data so much. To understand things deeply.

"What you should want us to do is to really build amazing products and to really do that with a long-term focus. Just like I mentioned we have to understand apps and we have to understand things you could buy, and we have to understand airline tickets. We have to understand anything you might search for," continues Larry. There's a long list of things Google needs to understand, but your preferences help Google return better results and even anticipate your searches.

"I think in order to make our products really work well, we need to have a good way of sharing. We had 18 different ways of sharing stuff before we did Plus. Now we have one way that works well, and we're improving." If there's an easy way to share things online, this helps Google understand your preferences.

"We see the opportunity to build amazing products that are more than any of those parts. So one of my favorite examples I like to give is if you're vacation planning. It would be really nice to have a system that could basically vacation plan for you. It would know your preferences, it would know the weather, it would know the prices of airline tickets, the hotel prices, understand logistics, combine all those things into one experience. And that's kind of how we think about search," concludes Larry.

The search engine that returned the same results for all users is now a thing of the past. This worked for simple questions, for navigational queries, but it doesn't work for complex questions, for vague queries, for recommendations. Instead of showing the same results for [italian restaurant], Google can personalize them based on your location, your favorite food, your reviews and the reviews written by your friends, your Latitude check-ins.

The new Google tries to understand you and that's the secret behind Google+. Obviously, it's still about search, but it's a deeply personalized search. Google also goes beyond keywords and tries to understand concepts and the relation between them. The Knowledge Graph and the Social Graph define the new Google.

Google Maps App for iPhone

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Apple stopped using Google's maps service in iOS6 and switched to other providers. The new application added cool features like turn-by-turn navigation and vector maps, but the coverage isn't that great. There are many countries with incomplete databases of streets and points of interests, a lot of mistakes, poor geocoding accuracy, outdated maps and empty spots. Even Apple admitted that the app is not good enough.

After a few months of waiting, Google finally released a native maps app for iPhone. It requires iOS 5.1 and it's not optimized for iPad yet. The application has all the features of the old maps app and many new features: integration with Google Accounts, vector maps with 3D views, turn-by-turn navigation, Google+ Places integration, search suggestions and online search history. It doesn't have all the features from the Android app, but it's only the first version.

The interface is completely new and you need some time to get used to the new gestures. Google opted for a non-standard interface with few buttons and native controls so that you can see more of the map. "The app shows more map on screen and turns mobile mapping into one intuitive experience. It’s a sharper looking, vector-based map that loads quickly and provides smooth tilting and rotating of 2D and 3D views," explains Google.

Google also released a SDK for iOS apps. "With the Google Maps SDK for iOS, developers can feature Google Maps in their applications on the iPod Touch, iPhone, and iPad. Also, the SDK makes it simple to link to Google Maps for iPhone from inside your app, enabling your users to easily search and get directions."

New SafeSearch Settings for Google Image Search

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Google tried to simplify a feature using some clever algorithms, but made some people unhappy. Google's SafeSearch settings have always been difficult to understand and Google replaced the three options that were available (strict filtering, moderate filtering - default, no filtering) with only two options (filter explicit results, don't filter explicit results - default).

Here are the old filtering options:

- "Strict filtering filters sexually explicit video and images from Google Search result pages, as well as results that might link to explicit content."

- "Moderate filtering excludes sexually explicit video and images from Google Search result pages, but does not filter results that might link to explicit content. This is the default SafeSearch setting."

- "No filtering turns off SafeSearch filtering completely."

The new filtering options are even more difficult to understand. The default option is supposed to disable filtering, but it's actually a combination of "moderate filtering" and "no filtering", depending of the query. For innocent queries like [sherilyn fenn movies] Google switches to moderate filtering since it's not very likely that you're asking for explicit content. If you add some unambiguous keywords like "xxx" to the query, Google actually disables filtering.

Here's how Google describes the new settings: "In the SafeSearch Filtering section, click the checkbox to filter sexually explicit video and images from Google Search result pages, as well as results that might link to explicit content. If you choose to leave it unchecked, we will provide the most relevant results for your query and may serve explicit content when you search for it." So Google may show explicit images, but only if it's obvious that you're searching for it. No algorithm is perfect, so you'll probably find many examples when this doesn't work as intended.

A Google representative told CNet: "We are not censoring any adult content, and want to show users exactly what they are looking for - but we aim not to show sexually-explicit results unless a user is specifically searching for them. We use algorithms to select the most relevant results for a given query. If you're looking for adult content, you can find it without having to change the default setting - you just may need to be more explicit in your query if your search terms are potentially ambiguous. The image search settings now work the same way as in Web search."

For now, Google only changed how SafeSearch works for google.com, so the old settings are still available at google.co.uk and other country-specific Google sites.

Chromebooks, Best-Selling Laptops

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Who said that Chromebooks aren't popular? If you look at Amazon's list of the best sellers in the "Laptop computers" category, you'll find 4 Chromebooks in the top 11:

#1: Samsung Chromebook (57 days in the top 100) - out of stock
#5: Samsung Chromebook 3G (57 days in the top 100) - out of stock
#9: Samsung Series 5 550 Chromebook (199 days in the top 100)
#11: Acer C7 Chromebook (6 days in the top 100)

What other notebooks are constantly in the top 10? Apple's MacBook Pro and MacBook Air, which are also the top-rated laptops. Samsung's ARM Chromebooks are the #9 and #10 top-rated laptops, after a long list of MacBook models.

Samsung's ARM Chromebook is also the best-selling laptop at Amazon UK:

What about France, Germany, Spain, Italy? Google says that "Chromebooks are currently sold out. We are working on getting more devices available for you soon."

Google Sync, Discontinued for Gmail Accounts

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After dropping support for the free Google Apps edition, Google continues to disappoint non-paying users. The sync service powered by Exchange ActiveSync will no longer be available for Gmail users and for free Google Apps users, but the existing connections will continue to work.

"Google Sync was designed to allow access to Google Mail, Calendar and Contacts via the Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync® protocol. With the recent launch of CardDAV, Google now offers similar access via IMAP, CalDAV and CardDAV, making it possible to build a seamless sync experience using open protocols. Starting January 30, 2013, consumers won't be able to set up new devices using Google Sync; however, existing Google Sync connections will continue to function. Google Sync will continue to be fully supported for Google Apps for Business, Government and Education," informs Google.

Three other services and apps will no longer be available: Google Calendar Sync (the download link has been removed, but the app continues to work for existing users), Google Sync for Nokia S60 (no longer supported from January 30, 2013) and SyncML (will stop syncing on January 30, 2013).

While Android owners aren't affected, those who use iPhones, Windows Phones and other mobile devices will have to rely on IMAP, CalDAV and CardDAV. Sure, they are standard protocols, Google doesn't have to pay licensing fees, but Google's implementation doesn't support push. If Apple's iCloud, Yahoo Mail and AOL Mail have push support, why can't Google add it? The Gmail app for iOS has push notifications, but some people might like to use the standard mail client.

If you've already enabled Google Sync on a device, it will continue to work. Unfortunately, you won't be able to enable Google Sync on a new device starting from January 30.

31 Aralık 2012 Pazartesi

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