Since then, we’ve taken it to a lot of conferences, built Liquid Galaxies in Google offices all over the world and even put one in the Tech Museum in San Jose, Calif. We love watching people try it for the first time. Almost everybody wants to see their own house first; but then they start to explore, and we can never guess where they’ll choose to go next.
But we just couldn’t bring it to enough people—we could only go to so many conferences, and only friends and family of Googlers could try out the Liquid Galaxies in our offices.
So we decided to put the features that make Liquid Galaxy possible into the latest release of Google Earth, and open-source all the supporting work, from our Ubuntu sysadmin scripts to the mechanical design of our custom frames.
Not everyone will have the know-how to network computers together and get view synchronization working, but we tried to make it as easy as possible. If you think you’re up to the challenge, check out our Quick Start page. You can also contact our supplier End Point if you’d rather buy than build (or just need some professional assistance). Here’s a video they made that shows Liquid Galaxy in action:
Liquid Galaxies don’t have to be made from eight big LCD screens; the view sync features scale just fine from two to dozens of screens. And they can run more than just Google Earth; we’ve had success playing video in sync in our Liquid Galaxies, and even modified a Free Software video game for after-hours fun. We’ve daydreamed about making panoramic movies, head tracking or even real-time video from distant panoramic cameras. Read more on the Liquid Galaxy page at earth.google.com, and show off your creations in the liquid-galaxy discussion group. We’re excited to see what you come up with!
Posted by Jason Holt, Software Engineer, Liquid Galaxy 20% Team
Update 12:01PM: To clarify, the Street View imagery for Antarctica includes panoramas of an area called Half Moon Island—such as this view of penguins and this one of the landscape. The blue dots you see throughout the continent when dragging the pegman are user-contributed photos.
We introduced Street View back in May 2007, enabling people to explore street-level imagery in five U.S. cities. We were excited to share a virtual reflection of the real world to enable armchair exploration. Since then, we’ve expanded our 360-degree panoramic views to many more places, allowing you to check out a restaurant before dining there, to explore a neighborhood before moving there and to find landmarks along the route of your driving directions.
Three years later, we’re happy to announce that you can now explore Street View imagery on all seven continents, with the addition today of Brazil, Ireland and Antarctica. You can now see images from around the world spanning from the beaches of Brazil, to the moors of Ireland, to the icy terrain in Antarctica.
We often consider Street View to be the last zoom layer on the map, and a way to show you what a place looks like as if you were there in person—whether you’re checking out a coffee shop across town or planning a vacation across the globe. We hope this new imagery will help people in Ireland, Brazil, and even the penguins of Antarctica to navigate nearby, as well as enable people around the world to learn more about these areas.
For example, as summer winds down here in Mountain View, Calif., the famous beaches of Copacabana, Brazil are an enticing virtual travel destination.
The Ring of Kerry in Ireland, with its picturesque rolling landscape, is another favorite new place in Street View.
Speaking of travel, my wife BethEllyn and I embarked on the Minerva for an expedition to Antarctica in late January. We enjoyed stunning vistas, and I found that any minute not spent on deck was a spectacular view missed. Fortunately, we’d planned to take some Street View photos, and are now able to share with you the incredible visuals from Half Moon Island, Antarctica.
Here is a group of Chinstrap penguins we saw on the island.
And this is one of my favorite views. You can see part of the crescent shape that gives the island its name.
I’m very proud of the worldwide Street View team and thrilled that everyone can now see places from all seven continents, including the amazing landscapes and natural beauty I saw in Antarctica, through the street-level images in Google Maps and Google Earth. To see more highlights from Street View around the world, visit the Street View gallery and start exploring!
Posted by Brian McClendon, VP of Engineering, Google Earth and Maps
In 2000, Antoine Assi founded Middle Eastern export website www.aldoukan.com—it was one of the first e-commerce businesses in the Middle East. He was just 20 years old and he made time to develop the business in between computer science classes at his university. He needed a way to advertise his website from the comfort of his own dorm room, so he decided to test out Google AdWords.
His friends didn’t believe him when Antoine said he was going to sell and advertise traditional Middle Eastern foods and goods online. However, by 2004, his business had grown so rapidly that he decided to take leave from school to run it full-time. He then started his second company, www.mosaicmarble.com, which sells handcut decorative tiles online internationally.
Antoine believed there was a gap in the mosaic market and he wanted to share these artistic and historic decorations abroad. He knew there was a market for these tiles internationally—he just didn’t quite know where the opportunity existed. To identify these international growth opportunities, Antoine built on his knowledge of AdWords: He ran several AdWords campaigns, each targeted at the location and language of the test country.
From there, Antoine measured sales and percentage of website traffic from each country and campaign. He ended campaigns for countries with low sales volume and invested in campaigns for countries with higher sales volume and greater return on investment. Where he saw steady product sales, Antoine even had the company website translated into the language of the successful host country. As you can imagine, translating the site to the language of a country in which he’d already seen success only further promoted sales in that location.
Antoine refers to his AdWords campaigns as his hidden treasure, telling us that “the second month we started advertising on Google, we started feeling overwhelmed by the orders and the inquiries... We had to hire new employees on a weekly basis.”
Mosaic Marble quickly grew from two employees and eight artists to more than 40 employees and 120 artists. And the company’s website is now available in seven languages: Arabic, English, Finnish, German, Italian, Portuguese and French.
In addition to helping him expand his business, these international campaigns helped Antoine and his colleagues share these cultural icons with a larger part of the world. There are now homes and public spaces adorned with these ancient Greek creations in more than 50 countries worldwide. “Due to Google,” says Antoine, “we have customers such as the President of Congo, the Dubai Minister of Internal Affairs, the Princess of Jordan, and the Royal Music Academy of London.”
Added security with two-step verification Google Apps Premier, Education, and Government Edition customers can now boost the security of Google Apps by letting users take advantage of two-step verification. With this feature, signing in requires a password (something you know) and a one-time verification code provided by a mobile phone (something you have). In the coming months, we’ll be bringing the option for two-step verification to Google Apps Standard Edition users as well as hundreds of millions of individual Google users.
App Tuesday: 12 new additions to the Apps Marketplace With the help of third-party software developers around the world, we were able to continue to increase the number of applications available in the Google Apps Marketplace. This month, we added 12 new applications to the now more than 200 installable apps available, making the Apps Marketplace an even more useful resource for organizations using Google Apps to find new functionality that complements what we offer our customers ourselves.
More apps for Google Apps accounts Speaking of new applications for our customers, we’re making good on our commitment to allow dozens of additional Google applications to work with Google Apps accounts. This means that businesses, schools and organizations can start using services like Google Voice, Picasa, Blogger, Google Reader and much more. Most Google Apps customers can begin transitioning their organization’s Google Apps accounts immediately, and those who don’t meet the current eligibility requirements will be able to start converting soon, too.
Who’s gone Google? This week we hit some big customer milestones: more than 3 million businesses—and 30 million people within those businesses and other organizations—are using Google Apps to communicate and collaborate with Gmail and our other web-based tools.
We hope these updates help you and your organization get even more from Google Apps. For details and the latest news in this area, check out the Google Apps Blog.
Posted by Jeremy Milo, Google Apps Marketing Manager
Today we celebrate the eighth birthday of Google News. Not long after the tragic events of September 11, 2001, we started building and testing Google News with the aim of helping you find current events from a wide variety of global and political perspectives. On September 22, 2002, Google News rolled out to all English-language readers, with a dedicated News tab on Google.com.
Over the years we’ve made thousands of changes to deliver more news to more users—faster, and with enhanced customization, sharing and serendipity. We’ve added video, local news, custom sections, scanned newspaper archives and a redesigned homepage. We’ve grown from 4,000 sources to more than 50,000, and from one English edition to 72 editions in 30 languages.
We’d like to take this opportunity to thank our loyal users and the news publishers working hard to keep you informed. Thousands of stories are made more discoverable through Google News each day. Based on the number of articles indexed by Google News, here are the largest news stories from each of the last eight years:
The 2008 election of President Obama takes the cake as the biggest news story since Google News was born.
This year, as we blow out our candles we’ll make one wish: that we serve you—our users and publishing partners—better than ever before in the years to come.
Posted by Krishna Bharat, founder and engineering head, and Chris Beckmann, product manager, Google News
Consolas and Corsiva Consolas joins Courier New as the second monospaced font in Google Docs. It’s a modern monospaced font with character proportions that are similar to normal text. Finally, Corsiva is our first italic font with embellished characters and an elegant style.
Right now our font support covers most Latin and Western European character sets. However, we’ll be adding web fonts for other languages (like Hebrew and Greek) soon. If you don’t see the new fonts in your documents, check that web fonts are supported in your language and that the document language is set correctly from the File -> Language menu.
This is just the beginning of fonts in Google Docs. We added six new fonts today and we’re already testing our next batch. You’ll see many more new fonts over the next few months. And because Google Docs uses web fonts, you’ll never need to install a new font: when you load your document, the latest set of fonts will always be there, ready to use.
Finally, adding web fonts is just one of the challenges that the Google Docs team has been working on. If you’re interested in learning more about the challenges of building a collaborative application, check out the first post of a three-part series on collaboration posted on the Google Docs Blog.
Posted by Jeremie Lenfant-Engelmann, Software Engineer
Update Jan 11, 2011: The Transparency Report is now available in each of the 6 U.N. languages—Arabic, Chinese (Simplified), French, Russian, Spanish and English.
Posted by David Drummond, SVP, Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer
It’s been a busy summer. More than 23,000 videos, from 91 countries across the world, were submitted for YouTube Play, and the Guggenheim has picked 125 to make up the shortlist.
It’s now down to the YouTube Play jury to pick up to 20 videos for a special presentation at the Guggenheim Museum on October 21. Here is one of the jurors, Japanese artist Takashi Murakami, to explain why he thinks YouTube is important in the art world today:
The videos selected by the jury will be on view to the public from October 22 through 24 in the Tower 2 Gallery of the Guggenheim Museum in New York, at kiosks at the Guggenheim Museums in Bilbao, Berlin and Venice, and available to a worldwide audience on the YouTube Play channel.
Update 9/21: Added/fixed link to one of the videos.
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