Now available with Google Apps: Google Checkout

[Cross-posted from the Google Enterprise Blog]

Editor’s note: We recently launched an improvement that makes over 60 additional Google services available to Google Apps users. This series showcases what’s new and how your organization can benefit.



Welcome to Google Checkout
With global online sales measured in hundreds of billions of dollars annually*, how does your company process its online orders? Do you worry about order path friction causing customers to drop out before completing their purchase? How do you help your customers feel secure and protected from fraud when they purchase online? Whether you don’t yet have a checkout solution or you’re looking to give your customers multiple checkout options, you now have an additional tool at your disposal that is integrated with Google Apps: Google Checkout.

Google Checkout is a fast and highly secure online checkout process that allows your customers to buy from you quickly and easily with a single login.


Not only does Google Checkout provide a flexible shopping cart and payment infrastructure that enables customers to buy from you online, but the use of Google Checkout can also bring other benefits to you as a seller. For example, Google Checkout’s fast, convenient checkout process reduces transaction friction by using customers’ existing Google accounts and has increased conversion rates by as much as 40% for some sellers. Also, our data shows that Google Checkout customers click on search advertisements 10% more often if those ads feature the Google Checkout badge, bringing more traffic to those sellers’ sites.

Most importantly, Google Checkout gives customers peace of mind when they shop online because our fraud policy offers protection against unauthorized purchase and users can use their existing Google account instead of entering their data again. Sellers also benefit directly from fraud protection with our Payment Guarantee Policy.

Best of all, it's quick and easy to add Google Checkout functionality to your website using various integration options, including Buy Now buttons, custom shopping carts, and the Google Checkout Store Gadget, which allows you to quickly set up a storefront for buyers in over 140 countries.



Google Checkout runs in Google’s cloud, so there is no hardware to maintain or software to update. And Google Checkout can be integrated with your Google Apps account, allowing you to quickly and easily insert a Checkout store gadget into a site you create with Google Sites or Blogger.

Learn more and get started
Google Checkout can be enabled by your domain administrator from the Google Apps Control Panel at https://www.google.com/a/[your_domain.com] (replace [your_domain.com] with your actual domain name). If your organization isn’t using Google Apps yet, you can learn more and sign up today at http://www.google.com/apps/more.

For more information about Google Checkout, take our product tour. You can visit our Help Center for answers to specific questions or check out our blog for the latest updates.

Share your story
Have you already started using Google Checkout at your organization, or plan to now that it’s available? Please share your story and your organization could be featured in the next Gone Google ad campaign!


Posted by Satyajeet Salgar, Product Manager, Google Checkout

Note: Google Checkout may not be available in all areas.
* Source eMarketer, 2009.

$6 million to faculty in Q4 Research Awards

Posted by Maggie Johnson, Director of Education and University Relations

We've just completed the latest round of Google Research Awards, our program which identifies and supports faculty pursuing research in areas of mutual interest. We had a record number of submissions this round, and are funding 112 awards across 20 different areas—for a total of more than $6 million. We’re also providing more than 150 Android devices for research and curriculum development to faculty whose projects rely heavily on Android hardware.

The areas that received the highest level of funding, due to the large number of proposals in these areas, were systems and infrastructure, human computer interaction, security and multimedia. We also continue to support international research; in this round, 29 percent of the funding was awarded to universities outside the U.S.

Some examples from this round of awards:

• Injong Rhee, North Carolina State University. Experimental Evaluation of Increasing TCP Initial Congestion Window (Systems)
• James Jones, University of California, Irvine. Bug Comprehension Techniques to Assist Software Debugging (Software Engineering)
• Yonina Eldar, Technion, Israel. Semi-Supervised Regression with Auxiliary Knowledge (Machine Learning)
• Victor Lavrenko, University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom. Interactive Relevance Feedback for Mobile Search (Information Retrieval)
• James Glass, MIT. Crowdsourcing to Acquire Semantically Labelled Text and Speech Data for Speech Understanding (Speech)
• Chi Keung Tang, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Quasi-Dense 3D Reconstruction from 2D Uncalibrated Photos (Geo/Maps)
• Phil Blunsom, Oxford, United Kingdom. Unsupervised Induction of Multi-Nonterminal Grammars for Statistical Machine Translation (Machine Translation)
• Oren Etzioni, University of Washington. Accessing the Web utilizing Android Phones, Dialogue, and Open Information Extraction (Mobile)
• Matthew Salganik, Princeton. Developments in Bottom-Up Social Data Collection (Social)

The full list of this round’s award recipients can be found in this PDF. For more information on our research award program, visit our website. And if you’re a faculty member, we welcome you to apply for one of next year’s two rounds. The deadline for the first round is February 1.

Keeping Google Places Up To Date

[Cross-posted from the Hotpot Community blog]

Lots of things can change about a business — it can close, move, or change operating hours. As you rate places on Hotpot, you may notice that the business information on Google Places isn’t always completely accurate. You may even find duplicate listings for the same business.

Many of you have asked how you can help us keep the information about a place up to date. As a local expert, you can tell us about outdated information, or even change it yourself on the Place page.

Edit details on an unverified listing

There are two ways to fix business information on Google Maps. For unverified listings, you can click the Edit Details or Edit this place links on the Place page to correct the address, homepage, location, phone number, or business categories of the place. Once you’ve made an edit, we’ll verify that it’s correct and make the change on Google Maps.

Report a problem on a verified listing

Where available, you can use the Report a Problem link to tell us about incorrect information in a verified listing, such as:

• Listing contains incorrect information or spam
• Place is permanently closed
• Place has another listing
• Place doesn’t exist or is private
• Some photos, reviews, or details below to a different place

Add a place

Finally, you can also use the Report a Problem link below Maps search results to add a new place. If you search for the business on Google Maps and can’t find it, click Report a Problem at the bottom of the search results. From there, choose A place is missing from Google Maps and follow the steps to add a new place to Maps. Once the place is added, you can easily rate it on the Place page.

The place editing features are not currently available in all countries. Don’t worry, we’re working hard to make this available in more places. In the meantime, if you don’t see the Report a Problem tool in your Google Maps viewport, we encourage you to get in touch

with your local data provider and request edits or updates to the information on Maps.

Thanks for helping to keep local information on Google Maps correct and up-to-date!

Posted by Cecelia Stewart, Strategist Google Places and Hotpot

Four Googlers elected ACM Fellows this year

Posted by Alfred Spector, VP of Research

I am delighted to share with you that, like last year, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) has announced that four Googlers have been elected ACM Fellows in 2010, the most this year from any single corporation or institution.

Luiz Barroso, Dick Lyon, Muthu Muthukrishnan and Fernando Pereira were chosen for their contributions to computing and computer science that have provided fundamental knowledge to the field and have generated multiple innovations.

On behalf of Google, I congratulate our colleagues, who join the 10 other ACM Fellows and other professional society awardees at Google in exemplifying our extraordinarily talented people. I’ve been struck by the breadth and depth of their contributions, and I hope that they will serve as inspiration for students and computer scientists around the world.

You can read more detailed summaries of their achievements below, including the official citations from ACM—although it’s really hard to capture everything they’ve accomplished in one paragraph!

Dr. Luiz Barroso: Distinguished Engineer
For contributions to multi-core computing, warehouse scale data-center architectures, and energy proportional computing

Over the past decade, Luiz has played a leading role in the definition and implementation of Google’s cluster architecture which has become a blueprint for the computing systems behind the world’s leading Internet services. As the first manager of Google’s Platforms Engineering team, he helped deliver multiple generations of cluster systems, including the world’s first container-based data center. His theoretical and engineering insights into the requirements of this class of machinery have influenced the processor industry roadmap towards more effective products for server-class computing. His book "The Datacenter as a Computer" (co-authored with Urs Hoelzle) was the first authoritative publication describing these so-called warehouse-scale computers for computer systems professionals and researchers. Luiz was among the first computer scientists to recognize and articulate the importance of energy-related costs for large data centers, and identify energy proportionality as a key property of energy efficient data centers. Prior to Google, at Digital Equipment's Western Research Lab, he worked on Piranha, a pioneering chip-multiprocessing architecture that inspired today’s popular multi-core products. As one of the lead architects and designers of Piranha, his papers, ideas and numerous presentations stimulated much of the research that led to products decades later.

Richard Lyon: Research Scientist
For contributions to machine perception and for the invention of the optical mouse

In the last four years at Google, Dick led the team developing new camera systems and improved photographic image processing for Street View, while leading another team developing technologies for machine hearing and their application to sound retrieval and ranking. He is now writing a book with Cambridge University Press, and will teach a Stanford course this fall on "Human and Machine Hearing," returning to a line of work that he carried out at Xerox, Schlumberger, and Apple while also doing the optical mouse, bit-serial VLSI computing machines, and handwriting recognition. The optical mouse (1980) is especially called out in the citation, because it exemplifies the field of "semi-digital" techniques that he developed, which also led to his work on the first single-chip Ethernet device. And more recently, as chief scientist at Foveon, Dick invented and developed several new techniques for color image sensing and processing, and delivered acclaimed cameras and end-user software. A hallmark of Dick’s work during his distinguished career has been a practical interplay between theory, including biological theory, and practical computing.

Dr. S. Muthukrishnan: Research Scientist
For contributions to efficient algorithms for string matching, data streams, and Internet ad auctions

Muthu has made significant contributions to the theory and practice of Internet ad systems during his more than four years at Google. Muthu's breakthrough WWW’09 paper presented a general stable matching framework that produces a (desirable) truthful mechanism capturing all of the common variations and more, in contradiction to prevailing wisdom. In display ads, where image, video and other types of ads are shown as users browse, Muthu led Ad Exchange at Google, to automate placement of display ads that were previously negotiated offline by sales teams. Prior to Google, Muthu was well known for his pioneering work in the area of data stream algorithmics (including a definitive book on the subject), which led to theoretical and practical advances still in use today to monitor the health and smooth operation of the Internet. Muthu has a talent for bringing new perspectives to longstanding open problems as exemplified in the work he did on string processing. Muthu has made influential contributions to many other areas and problems including IP networks, data compression, scheduling, computational biology, distributed algorithms and database technology. As an educator, Muthu’s avant garde teaching style won him the Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching at Rutgers CS, where is on the faculty. As a student remarked in his blog: "there is a magic in his class which kinda spellbinds you and it doesn't feel like a class. It’s more like a family sitting down for dinner to discuss some real world problems. It was always like that even when we were 40 people jammed in for cs-513."

Dr. Fernando Pereira: Research Director
For contributions to machine-learning models of natural language and biological sequences

For the past three years, Fernando has been leading some of Google’s most advanced natural language understanding efforts and some of the most important applications of machine learning technology. He has just the right mix of forward thinking ideas and the ability to put ideas into practice. With this balance, Fernando has has helped his team of research scientists apply their ideas at the scale needed for Google. From when he wrote the first Prolog compiler (for the PDP-10 with David Warren) to his days as Chair at University of Pennsylvania, Fernando has demonstrated a unique understanding of the challenges and opportunities that faced companies like Google with their unprecedented access to massive data sets and its application to the world of speech recognition, natural language processing and machine translation. At SRI, he pioneered probabilistic language models at a time when logic-based models were more popular. At AT&T, his work on a toolkit for finite-state models became an industry standard, both as a useful piece of software and in setting the direction for building ever larger language models. And his year at WhizBang had an influence on other leaders of the field, such as Andrew McCallum at University of Massachusetts and John Lafferty and Tom Mitchell at Carnegie Mellon University, with whom Fernando developed the Conditional Random Field model for sequence processing that has become one of the leading tools of the trade.

Finally, we also congratulate Professor Christos Faloutsos of Carnegie Mellon, who is on sabbatical and a Visiting Faculty Member at Google this academic year. Professor Faloutsos is cited for contributions to data mining, indexing, fractals and power laws.

Update 12/8: Updated Dick Lyon's title and added information about Professor Faloutsos.

Now available with Google Apps: Google Analytics

[Cross-posted from the Google Enterprise Blog]

Editor’s note: We recently launched an improvement that makes over 60 additional Google services available to Google Apps users. This series showcases what’s new and how your organization can benefit.



Welcome to Google Analytics
In today’s world, it is increasingly important for organizations to have a presence on the web. But once your organization has invested time and resources in a website, how do you measure the impact of this investment? Where is your traffic coming from and what is it doing when it gets to your site? Which pages on your site are the most engaging and which pages have the most user dropouts? All of these questions can be answered with Google Analytics, Google’s enterprise-class web analytics service, which is now available for free with your Google Apps account!

Google Analytics provides data about your web properties, including traffic volume, number of visitors, and time spent on your site, in a straightforward and easy to understand way.


Google Analytics also makes it easy to track where your traffic comes from, both in terms of referring sources as well as geographic location.


Google Analytics is designed to be easy to use for everyone in your organization, from the product manager to the chief of marketing. Even though it’s simple to use, Google Analytics offers advanced features such as custom reports, segmentation, e-commerce capabilities, API access, and onsite search for power users that want to construct a more tailored experience. Google Analytics delivers easily-digestible insights that can be used across your organization to increase website traffic and engagement, and to improve the return on your web investment.

Just like other Google Apps services, Google Analytics runs in Google’s cloud so it delivers all of the world-class reliability and scalability that you have come to expect from Google Apps. Also, sharing Analytics data and delegating access to colleagues in your organization is simple using their existing Google Apps accounts. And, because the documents, spreadsheets and sites that you create using Google Apps live in the cloud and have unique web addresses, you can use Google Analytics to track traffic to your domain’s docs in addition to your website.

Learn more and get started
Google Analytics can be enabled by your domain administrator from the Google Apps Control Panel at https://www.google.com/a/[your_domain.com] (replace [your_domain.com] with your actual domain name). If your organization isn’t using Google Apps yet, you can learn more and sign up today at http://www.google.com/apps/more.

For more information about how Google Analytics can help you track engagement with your website take a look at our product tour or read some customer stories to learn how Google Analytics has had an impact on an organization like yours. Or, check out the Google Analytics blog for the latest news and tips and tricks.

Share your story
Have you already started using Google Analytics at your organization, or plan to now that it’s available? Please share your story and your organization could be featured in the next Gone Google ad campaign!


Posted by Jeff Gillis, Google Analytics team

Note: Google Analytics may not be available in all areas.

Part 2: Tell Us What You Wish for Your Business Online in 2011

Last week on the Google Small Business blog, we kicked off our conversation about your wishes for your small business in 2011. We received some great responses about your general business needs and we really appreciate learning about your thoughtful and heartfelt wishes. Your optimistic entrepreneurial spirit came through -- from increasing revenue and sales to banding together to help fellow business owners and following your passions.

Now, we’d like to focus the conversation more specifically on your business’ online presence. So we’re asking you: If you had one wish for improving your business’ online presence 2011, what would it be? Think big and creative. It doesn’t have to be related to Google products.

This is all part of a project we’re working on to help small businesses succeed in 2011, and understanding your aspirations for the coming year will inform this project. We are studying your responses and will share the common themes with you.

Just complete the form below. Or, tell us on Facebook or Twitter using the hashtag #Wish2011. We will be publishing some of the specific wishes so If you'd like us to share your wish (not anonymously) on our blog, provide us your email, We’ll be in touch If your wish is chosen to be featured.

Spread the word and tell your friends -- the more we hear from you, the better we can plan for helping small businesses in 2011.

Tell us...

The one wish I have for improving my business’ online presence in 2011 is…

Email addressPlease provide your email address if you're willing to share your specific wish publicly.

Powered by Google DocsReport Abuse - Terms of Service - Additional TermsOur online conversation about your wishes is intended to be viral with shared responses. Your response in this blog form will be used anonymously and will be kept anonymous. We may share your publicly posted Tweets and Facebook updates by re-tweeting or sharing your update. In those cases, the public usernames on your Twitter and Facebook posts will be included in our retweets and status updates, however, we are only looking at responses to identify common themes to share with everyone. Let’s keep the conversation focused on your 2011 wish for your business.We would like to share some of the specific wishes that we hear from businesses. If you'd like us to share your wish (not anonymously) on our blog, please provide us your email and we'll be in touch. We will only use your data as indicated above - please see our privacy policy for more information.Posted by Leslie Hernandez, Product Marketing Manager, Google Small Businesses Team

New tools to grow your business globally

Imagine you’re a men’s tailor in Bangkok, and you sell custom suits to travelers passing through Thailand. You start a website to sell your suits online and begin to notice that the majority of your website traffic comes from overseas. How do you respond to this international demand?

Businesses of all sizes face a number of obstacles when they want to expand internationally. First, they must identify the right market to sell their products or services, such as custom men’s suits. Then they have to create versions of their website and ad campaigns in the language of the market they want to reach. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, they need to reach new customers who may be interested in their products and services.

Starting today, businesses can access a number of new resources from Google to help them overcome these obstacles and start growing internationally. We’re launching a new website, called Google Ads for Global Advertisers, which will serve as a central hub for Google’s tools and tips for businesses looking to expand to foreign markets. This website pulls together resources for businesses to find the right market for their products and services, translate their websites and ad text, find new customers with relevant online ads, and understand options for international payment, shipping and customer service.

We’re also introducing Global Market Finder, a new free tool to help businesses identify markets with high demand for their products or services. The Global Market Finder automatically translates your keyword — for example, business suit — into 56 languages and then uses Google search trends data to see where in the world people search for your product or service. It helps businesses evaluate new markets by showing the volume of local searches, estimated price for keywords and competition for each keyword in each market. With this tool, businesses can answer questions like “how competitive is this market?”, “how does demand in one country compare to demand elsewhere in the world?” and “how much would it cost to start advertising in this new market?” You can read more about these new tools on the Inside AdWords blog.

Google has already helped hundreds of thousands of businesses reach customers in foreign markets. From a mosaic company in Lebanon to a bespoke shoe retailer in Sydney, a tech support company in India and a bed and breakfast in Poland, tools like AdWords have helped businesses reach new customers and drive traffic to their websites. We think our new website and tools will encourage even more businesses to expand internationally, whether you’re a small business testing a single market for the first time or a mid-size company advertising your products to an entire region.

After all, there are more than 1.9 billion consumers online. Wouldn’t you like to add some of them as customers?

Posted by Michael Galvez and Srinidhi Viswanatha, Global Advertisers team