Fresh Perspectives about People and the Web from Think Quarterly

Posted by Allison Mooney, Christina Park, and Caroline McCarthy, The Think Quarterly Team

There’s a lot of research, analysis and insights—from inside and outside Google—that we use in building our products and making decisions. To share what we’ve learned with our partners, we created Think Quarterly. It’s intended to be a snapshot of what Google and other industry leaders are talking about and inspired by right now.

Today we’re launching our second edition, the “People” issue, exploring the latest technologies connecting us and the big ideas driving society forward. It also includes some of the research and analysis that helps us shape our strategies.

For those who love data as much as we do, here are a few articles worth reading:

• “Following Generation Z,” in which Google research scientist Ed Chi details what he’s learned from monitoring the course of digital innovation and mapping patterns of digital technology use in the future

• “Predicting the Present,” by chief economist Hal Varian, about how publicly available search tools can help anyone gain valuable insights into the behavior of web users and predict what they might do next

• “Power to the People,” by Meg Pickard, anthropologist turned head of digital engagement at Guardian News and Media, about tracking the influence and power of online communities

• “From Cash to Contentment,” about the use of happiness as a measurable metric of success, with insights coming from Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz

Click here to read all the articles, and if you have a suggestion for our next issue please tell us here. We hope you enjoy (and +1) it!

Trying on the new Dynamic Views from Blogger

Posted by Alison Powell, Google Research Team

As you may have noticed, the Google Research blog looks a lot different today. That’s because we—along with a few other Google blogs—are trying out a new set of Blogger templates called Dynamic Views.

Launched today, Dynamic Views is a unique browsing experience that makes it easier and faster for readers to explore blogs in interactive ways. We’re using the Magazine view, but you can also preview this blog in any of the other six new views by using the view selection bar at the top left of the screen.



We’re eager to hear what you think about the new Dynamic Views. You can submit feedback using the “Send feedback” link on the bottom right of this page.

If you like what you see here, and we hope you do, we encourage you to try out the new look(s) on your own blog—read the Blogger Buzz post for more info.

Google Apps highlights – 9/23/2011

This is part of a regular series of Google Apps updates that we post every couple of weeks. Look for the label “Google Apps highlights" and subscribe to the series. - Ed.

It’s back-to-school season, and we’ve made Gmail, Google Docs, Calendar and Sites easier to use and more powerful for students and non-students alike—including some important accessibility improvements to help blind users be productive in our apps.

Multiple sign-in and other new preferences in Gmail for mobile
On Wednesday, we added some helpful new features for people who use Gmail on a mobile browser. You can now sign in to more than one Gmail account at a time, and toggle between them easily from the account switcher menu at the bottom of the mobile inbox. This can be a good time saver if you have multiple accounts or share a mobile device with family members. Gmail for mobile also now enables you to set up mobile-specific email signatures and create vacation responders right from your phone to let people know when you won't be available by email.

Calling credit auto-recharge
Now you can automatically add international calling credits for phone calls in Gmail when your balance gets low. Just visit the "Billing" area of the Google Voice settings page and click "Add credit" to put your account on cruise control.

Allow people to comment but not edit in documents
Sometimes, you might find yourself in situations when you’d like to share a document for feedback, but don’t want to make the document's content fully editable. The comment-only level of access launched last week is a nice option for these scenarios. You can let others discuss and add their thoughts to your document—without allowing them to change your work. You can allow document comments from specific individuals or groups, from anyone belonging your organization or from the general public.

Format painter, Fusion Tables, drag & drop images and vertical cell merge
Comment-only access isn't all that we've added to Google Docs over the last few weeks. Other notable improvements include a text format painter in documents, which is a fast way to copy and paste font, size, color and other text styling. Spreadsheets now support vertically merged cells (in addition to horizontal merges). In drawings, you can drag images from your desktop to the drawing canvas, then continue editing your graphic. We also added Fusion Tables as a new document type in the documents list. Fusion Tables are a powerful way to gather, visualize and collaborate on large data sets that might be unwieldy in a typical spreadsheet.

Fusion Table data visualized on an interactive map

Accessibility improvements in Google Calendar, Docs and Sites
We think technology can do a better job getting out of people’s way and helping you be more productive with less complexity and fewer frustrations. In this spirit, we’ve recently made a series of improvements to make our applications more accessible to blind users. We have more work to do, but Google Calendar, Docs and Sites now offer better support for screen readers and improved keyboard shortcuts. We hope these changes make our applications more useful to all users.

Who’s gone Google?
Organizations are moving to Google Apps for a diverse set of reasons—including cost savings, streamlined teamwork and better mobile access. We’ve even started hearing from schools and businesses who have made the switch to reduce their impact on the environment. No two organizations choose Google Apps for the exact same reasons, but in total, the momentum of Google Apps keeps growing.

We recently shared the news that 61 of the top 100 universities ranked by U.S. News and World Report have gone Google. On the business side, there are now more than 4 million companies using Google Apps, and businesses are joining at a rate of over 5,000 per day. In all, there are more than 40 million users that regularly use Google Apps in their organizations.

I hope these product updates and customer stories help you and your organization get even more from Google Apps. For more details and the latest news, check out the Google Apps Blog.

Posted by Jeremy Milo, Google Apps Marketing Manager

Ask us your Google Places for business questions

A little more than a year ago, we collected your questions and feedback on Google Places for business via a Google Moderator page. You sent us some great feedback, and we had a blast responding! Check out our video responses here on YouTube, covering things like features of a listing, Report a problem and ranking.

It's important to us to continue hearing your great feedback — and we suspect you've had a lot of questions and ideas throughout the past year — so let's fire up another Moderator page. Starting today and for the next two weeks, you can submit your questions and ideas, as well as vote up other submissions from users. We'll answer some of the more popular questions directly on the page and post a new video or two to the Google Places YouTube channel.

Start sharing your ideas right now, and stay tuned to us here on the Small Business Blog to see a roundup of responses.

Posted by Vanessa Schneider, Google Maps and Places community manager

Sorting Petabytes with MapReduce - The Next Episode

Posted by Grzegorz Czajkowski, Marián Dvorský, Jerry Zhao, and Michael Conley, Systems Infrastructure

Almost three years ago we announced results of the first ever "petasort" (sorting a petabyte-worth of 100-byte records, following the Sort Benchmark rules). It completed in just over six hours on 4000 computers. Recently we repeated the experiment using 8000 computers. The execution time was 33 minutes, an order of magnitude improvement.

Our sorting code is based on MapReduce, which is a key framework for running multiple processes simultaneously at Google. Thousands of applications, supporting most services offered by Google, have been expressed in MapReduce. While not many MapReduce applications operate at a petabyte scale, some do. Their scale is likely to continue growing quickly. The need to help such applications scale motivated us to experiment with data sets larger than one petabyte. In particular, sorting a ten petabyte input set took 6 hours and 27 minutes to complete on 8000 computers. We are not aware of any other sorting experiment successfully completed at this scale.

We are excited by these results. While internal improvements to the MapReduce framework contributed significantly, a large part of the credit goes to numerous advances in Google's hardware, cluster management system, and storage stack.

What would it take to scale MapReduce by further orders of magnitude and make processing of such large data sets efficient and easy? One way to find out is to join Google’s systems infrastructure team. If you have a passion for distributed computing, are an expert or plan to become one, and feel excited about the challenges of exascale then definitely consider applying for a software engineering position with Google.

Inc. Magazine and Google want to hear your online success story

In my role at Google, I am constantly impressed by the innovative and entrepreneurial ways that small business owners take their ideas or passions, and turn them into thriving businesses. One of my favorite business success stories is of a small boutique in New York City called Loopy Mango. For over a year, their storefront was covered by a scaffolding due to delays in renovation of the building next door. To overcome this challenge, they relied on online advertising to find customers and share what their unique lifestyle boutique had to offer.







Does your business have a unique online marketing story? In partnership with Inc. Magazine, we're now asking businesses across the country to share with us how they've used online marketing tools to improve their business. The three most impactful stories will receive tickets to the Inc. 5000 conference in the Washington, D.C. metro-area on September 22-24, 2011.



Inc. Magazine is taking submissions here. Please share your story with us by September 7, 2011 for a chance to win. Winners will be notified via email by September 10, 2011. Also, visit Google@Inc on Inc.com to learn more tips and tools from experts about how to grow your business online.



Posted by Ria Tobaccowala, Small Business Marketing Team