Students: Get your gadget on

Posted by Samantha Crow, Product Marketing, Google Gadgets

When was the last time you tried to write HTML, build your resume and strut your stuff all at once? Well, now's your chance. We recently launched the Google Gadget Awards, a program designed to challenge U.S. college students to create clever Google Gadgets. It's easy for anyone with even a little bit of web design experience to create one. They can be fun (like one of my personal favorites, this radio gadget), useful (like this to-do gadget), or just really, really simple (like this facts and trivia gadget). And anyone can add the gadgets to their Google personalized homepage or to Google Desktop.

If you're not a university student in the U.S., you can still create Google Gadgets. Although they won't be entered in the Awards, if they're clever enough you just might find them on Google homepages around the world.

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Congratulations, Luis von Ahn

Posted by Alan Eustace, VP Engineering

Today our warmest congratulations go out to a notable young computer scientist, Dr. Luis von Ahn of Carnegie Mellon University. Based on his work in cryptography, AI, and natural intelligence, Luis has just been recognized as a Fellow by the MacArthur Foundation, which has granted him a "genius" award.

A major thread of his research is about human computation that can't currently be emulated by computers. (Together with colleagues he developed the CAPTCHA system, which has of course found widespread commercial application in preventing automated-generated spam.) He also works in the area of cryptography known as steganography. Unlike standard encrypted communications, a steganographic message disguises the fact that it contains a secret; one example is a text message subtly embedded in the bits that encode a digital photograph. He's also developing systems for characterizing visual images in ways that can vastly improve their searchability, and which help to build a rich database for exploring human visual cognition. (We've developed the Google Image Labeler based on his groundbreaking work in this area.)

Around here, we like to quote Isaac Newton's phrase about "standing on the shoulders of giants." Clearly, Luis is one of these.

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Bigger and better search appliance

Posted by Nitin Mangtani, Product Manager, Google Search ApplianceTeam

We hear you, we hear you -- your company has more documents than ever. That's why today there's a new version of the Google Search Appliance that can handle even more documents, and offers some cool new features to boot. The GB-8008 now searches up to 30 million documents (if you need more, just let us know). And we've added date and number range search plus support for 16 languages. There's more on the enterprise blog.

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Time travel

Posted by Mike Samuel, Software Engineer

For a while now, it's been rumored that Google has been working on time travel. Unfortunately, I have to lay these rumors to rest: we've really been working on having "organizing-your-time" travel.

Back in April, we released Google Calendar to the world in English. But that wasn't good enough. So now it's available in 17 new languages: French, Italian, German, Spanish, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Japanese, Korean, Dutch, Portuguese (Brazilian), Russian, Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish, Danish, Polish, and English (UK).

We hope this means people in countries across the world will want to organize their daily lives with a fast, easy to use online calendar. Perhaps even better, you can now share calendars and events with people who speak and use Google Calendar in different languages. Schedule calls with your Tokyo office, or schedule that call to your relatives in Amsterdam or Seoul. Changing the language is as easy as a few clicks on your settings page.

As for time travel, maybe someday. After all, we're already on the moon.

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Picasa goes online, gets new features too

Posted by Michael Herf, Picasa Engineer

I have 80,000 photos in Picasa, Google's free photo organizer, but most of my friends haven't had a chance to see them yet. That's why I'm so excited about the new version of Picasa that came out today. It has a feature called Picasa Web Albums that lets you post and share your photos online for free with just one click. You can show the world (or just your friends and family) what kinds of pictures you've been taking. And best of all, you can even download your friends' online photos right back to Picasa.

I run around at parties and take photos of people, and now my friends can see the pictures online as soon as I post them. Rather than bugging me all the time to email them around (which I'm too lazy to do), now they're asking to have the bad shots deleted instead. Some of them even add online comments right to the photos themselves.

We've also fixed a whole bunch of things in Picasa. Folders finally work as you'd expect, so people who've kept their photos meticulously organized in folders and subfolders can see them displayed the same way in Picasa. And we've added a shiny new feature to photo-editing: Save. Your Picasa edits can now be preserved when using other programs. The save feature is even undoable, so you never lose your original files.

And there's more -- you can import into any folder you like, make time-lapse sequences into movies, search by color, create a screensaver with beautiful visual effects, and even re-arrange Picasa's buttons. Oh, and we also made Picasa work with Google Earth, so you can put information about where you went on vacation into the photos themselves, and then, view your shots on a 3-D globe. Try it all out for yourself at picasa.google.com.

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The best stories on Earth

Posted by Rebecca Moore, Google Earth team

Everyone knows that Google Earth imagery and 3D terrain are unbelievably cool and fun to explore. But while you're flying around, have you ever wondered what is actually going on "down there" -- on the real earth? That narrative of living on this planet is portrayed in the new Featured Content for Google Earth. Accessible from the "Featured Content" folder in the Google Earth Layers sidebar, these new layers contain images, audio, video, stories and information about events unfolding around the globe.

In our September installment, follow the daily exploits of "Flirt" and her kindred Tanzanian chimpanzees in The Jane Goodall Institute's "geoblog"; fans have called this a "Chimp Soap Opera." Or go on a virtual safari in South Africa's Kruger Park -- or maybe you'd like to learn about how the locals in Reykjavik, Iceland relax in molten-lava-heated pools. Explore more than 10,000 miles of trails (in full 3D) in the U.S. National Parks, and find an idyllic lakeside camping spot in the backcountry of Yosemite. Visualize the global story of the earth itself, and how our environment has changed over the past 30 years -- or travel back in time to the Valley of the Kings in Egypt to discover the gold treasures of King Tut's tomb.

This first installment of Featured Content features six of the world's seven continents. (We fully expect that Antarctica will have a story or two coming up.)

By some accounts, nearly half of the information on the web actually relates to a place on earth. We'd like to help you find the best of that information and place it in the visually compelling context of our beautiful planet.

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UNCF Google Scholarship Program

Posted by Emily Nishi, Diversity Program Manager

As part of Google's ongoing commitment to advancing computing and technology, we're pleased to tell you that the United Negro College Fund and Google have partnered to create the UNCF/Google Scholarship Program. We hope this program will encourage students to excel in their studies, inspire them to become role models and leaders, and help remove the financial barriers for African-American students wishing to pursue an engineering degree.

On the strength of candidates' academic background and demonstrated leadership, we'll be awarding $5,000 scholarships. Students must be enrolled in their junior year of undergraduate study at a UNCF Member College or University or at a participating Historically Black College or University (HBCU), and pursuing a Computer Science or Computer Engineering major.

Tell your friends, or apply yourself -- the deadline for applications is Friday, October 6.

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