A whole new world to explore

Posted by Peter Birch, Product Manager, Google Earth

On the Google Earth team, we're big fans of Earth Day, so much so that we couldn't hold out until it arrives next week to release our latest labor of love: Google Earth 4.3. With this version, we have completely rethought how you might interact with the 3D world. We've redesigned the navigation to make it much easier to fly from the heavens down to the streets of your town. And with all of the great user-created buildings in the 3D Warehouse, we wanted to make it easy for you to get right up close to see the rich detail.



Here's a sample of what you'll find in this release:

• New navigation - We've improved the zoom control so you can swoop down from outer space to street level in a single seamless motion. And with the addition of the "look" joystick, you can look up at buildings or across a mountain range.

• More, faster 3D buildings - It's more fun to navigate through a lot of new 3D content. Besides adding thousands of buildings contributed by people around the world, we've added dozens of photo-textured cities and towns in the U.S. and elsewhere.

• Street View - The popular Google Maps feature makes its Google Earth debut.

• Sunlight feature - Never seen the sunrise over the Alps? Now you can.

• New languages - There are 12 new languages, including Danish, English (UK), Spanish (Latin American), Finnish, Hebrew, Indonesian, Norwegian, Portuguese (PT), Romanian, Swedish, Thai, and Turkish.

Check out the Lat Long blog for all the details, or head over to our website at earth.google.com. And stay tuned for more details about Earth Day coming soon.

KML, the HTML of geographic content

Posted by Michael Weiss-Malik, KML Product Manager

HTML has completely transformed our world. Through the web, a previously inconceivable amount of information is now just a few keystrokes and mouse clicks away. What makes this possible is the fact that web browsers, web servers, and many other pieces of Internet infrastructure all speak the same language. Because of Internet standards like HTML, any web browser can view any web page. Internet standards are what makes the web a flourishing marketplace.

Today, a new standard was born: The Open Geospatial Consortium has announced its acceptance of KML 2.2 as an official OGC Standard. KML started as a file format for Google Earth, a way to save out the list of restaurants or parks or hiking trails that you might have drawn as a custom map. It's since matured into something much larger, and is supported on a wide variety of mapping platforms produced by a range of companies. You can even view KML on your cell phone! There are tens of millions of KML files available online -- a testament to just how much user-generated content is now map-based information.

Mapping has come a long way from the origami paper creations of the past. Our choice to give KML to the OGC is part of our strong commitment to open standards. It's our belief that KML's standardization will do much to make more geographic-based content accessible online.

There's more on KML's standardization on the Lat Long blog.

Building software tools to find child victims

Posted by Shumeet Baluja, Research Scientist

Since it was founded in 1984, the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) has reported more than 570,000 child exploitation leads to law enforcement agencies and assisted with more than 140,900 missing child cases, resulting in the recovery of more than 124,500 children.

The advent of the Internet has unfortunately provided child predators with a new avenue to exploit children. In August 2006, we joined NCMEC's Technology Coalition Against Child Pornography, teaming up with other tech industry companies to develop solutions that hinder predators' ability to use the Internet to exploit children or traffic in child pornography.

In an outshoot of that industry initiative, I discovered some other areas where I thought Google could help the staff at NCMEC. For instance, to date, NCMEC analysts have reviewed more than 13 million child pornography images and videos to assist law enforcement agencies working to identify and rescue children. This task has been time-consuming, and NCMEC analysts were simply getting overwhelmed by all of the data they had to sift through.

One of our core strengths here at Google is our ability to manage and organize immense amounts of information -- whether it's text, image, audio, or video -- and make it more useful and accessible for users. As a member of Google's research group, I realized that NCMEC had an immediate need for some of our research-stage technology. They needed help organizing and making sense of the enormous number of images and videos sent to them every week through their CyberTipline and from law enforcement officers nationwide.

So we went into overdrive. I recruited some fellow engineers to help me build tools that NCMEC might find useful. Throughout 2007, using our 20% time, we created innovative software tools to help NCMEC track down child predators through video and image search. With these tools, analysts will be able to more quickly and easily search NCMEC's large information systems to sort and identify files that contain images of child pornography. In addition, a new video tool we built streamlines analysts' review of video snippets.

The keys here were organization, scalability, and search. In particular, the tools we provided will aid in organizing and indexing NCMEC's information so that analysts can both deal with new images and videos more efficiently and also reference historical material more effectively. We hope the tools we've built for NCMEC will help its analysts make the important and often time-sensitive work of investigating child predators faster and more efficient.

For me, working with NCMEC provided an incredible opportunity. It allowed us to immediately deploy some of our latest research in image and video analysis in a real-world setting. On a personal note, I've been truly inspired by the entire NCMEC team's dedication and diligence in completing such a heart-wrenching mission.

You always hope that your work will eventually be used do some good in the world, and this was an amazing chance to make that hope real by creating tools that have the potential to aid investigations of child predators, find child victims and reduce the flow of child pornography on the Internet.

Salesforce for Google Apps

Posted by Scott McMullan, Google Apps Partner Lead, Google Enterprise

A little less than a year ago, we partnered with Salesforce.com to create Salesforce Group Edition featuring Google AdWords. It combines Salesforce.com’s CRM applications with AdWords to make it easier for businesses to generate leads, track, and close them.

Since then, people have offered up a constant stream of requests to streamline even more of the CRM process. At the top of list are everyday tasks like improved efficiency sending and sharing account emails, easier ways to create and share documents and presentations, and simpler ways to schedule meetings and events.

To address these requests, we set out to collaborate on another product integration. Live today, we're happy to unveil Salesforce for Google Apps, a new product for all of those using Salesforce.com available at no additional charge. It brings the collaboration and communications features of Google Apps directly into the user experience of Salesforce.com, and is focused on streamlining the activities most frequently requested by our users. (There's more detail on our Enterprise Blog.)

Here's a quick look at the problems we're trying to solve with Salesforce for Google Apps:



Regarding improvements, we'd like to remind developers that these new features -- as well as those announced today by our partners Astadia and Appirio -- were created using our respective open APIs. We share with Salesforce.com a commitment to make the web the best platform for application innovation.

Thanks to everyone for your good ideas so far. We hope you'll continue to share your thoughts about what you like and what can be improved.

The Spelman College CS Olympiad

Posted by Marcus Mitchell, Engineering Director

We're always interested in supporting computer science education, and in encouraging top talent from diverse backgrounds. Which is why we've just sponsored the Sixth Annual Spelman College Computer Science Olympiad for the second consecutive year. In all, 16 teams from eight Historically Black Colleges & Universities (HBCUs), or Association of Computer/Information Sciences and Engineering Departments at Minority Institutions (ADMI) participated.

These teams competed in five computer science-related events. One of these was a Google Gadgets competition, where the assignment was to build an interactive, creative and useful Google Gadget. Students brought their semi-completed gadgets and got troubleshooting advice and tips at a hack session, where Googlers and students worked together into the night to perfect them. The following day, each team presented their gadget to our panel of three judges (myself and 2 other Googlers).

We chose first, second and third place winners, whose gadgets will be uploaded to the iGoogle Directory soon:

• First place: Morehouse College Team 2 (Lawrence Forrester, Kevin Walton, Mark Slade, Michael Davis)
• Second place: Old Dominion University Monarchs (Duc Nguyen, Cesar Barbieri, Darrin Lee, Nicole Jackson)
• Third place: Spelman College YOMamaBoards (Jonecia Keels, Jazmine Miller, Paige McReynolds, Arielle Baine)

It was inspiring to see the energy, enthusiasm, and skill of these future computer scientists -- our congratulations to all the teams that participated.

First-place winner.

Sharing gadgets just got better

Posted by Jeff Regan, Engineer

Have you ever wanted to tell a friend about a really great game gadget on iGoogle or help someone set up a gadget exactly the way you have it? You can do those things on iGoogle using the Share menu, but what you couldn't do before today was share a gadget and collaborate with your friends on the same gadget data. This means you can now view and edit gadgets just like Google Docs.

A simple gadget to share is one for sticky notes. Enter a grocery list, share it with family members, and everyone can see and edit the same list. If you like crosswords, but like me need plenty of help, just share your crossword with a friend and they can work on it with you.

Here's how in three steps:

Step 1: Click the triangle on the gadget you want to share and click "Share this gadget."


Step 2: If you're a Gmail user, just pick the friends you want to share with or type in their email addresses.


Step 3: Decide whether you want to let your friends edit your gadget content or just view it on their iGoogle page and click "Send invites." Your friends will get an email from you and they will be able to see a preview of the gadget in the email and add it to their own iGoogle page.


So go ahead, check out the full list of gadgets with this feature and give it a try. We've enabled this feature for some of our more popular gadgets to encourage collaboration, but of course it doesn't make sense for every gadget. For example, you can share a weather or movie listings gadget with a friend, but data sharing is not enabled - your friend gets an independent copy of the gadget, as before.

Developers, check out the Gadgets API Blog to learn how to incorporate this feature in your gadget with one line of code.

We would love to know what you think.

Last call for scalability papers

Posted by Andrew Schwerin, Software Engineer

As an engineer in Seattle, I can't wait for summer to arrive. This year, I'm not just looking forward to the beautiful weather, but also the Seattle Scalability Conference. It takes place on Saturday, June 14th.

Conference planning is underway, and the deadline for our call for papers is this Friday, April 11th! If you have an interesting approach for building and maintaining scalable systems, this is the perfect gathering to share it. Send a 500-word abstract of your 30-minute presentation to scalabilityconf at google.com -- and plan on enjoying the long-awaited Seattle sunshine with me this June.

Here are some of the topics that interest me (but I'm open to more ideas):

Scalable algorithms:

• Parallelization techniques (fully automatic or programmer-assisted)

• Algorithms that are robust in the face of system failures (flaky hardware, OS bugs, network failures)

Scalable systems:

• Managing large, evolving data stores

• Languages and tools for organizing high-throughput data processing systems

• Handling partial failure (automatic failure detection/diagnosis/repair)

We'll be posting more information for conference attendees soon.