Information and Communication Technologies

Google Maps API Premier: Directions for the rest of us

The Official Google Blog - 19 Mayo 2010 - 9:58pm

Businesses rely on Google’s accurate routing engine to bring customers from their homes to company stores, from company headquarters to customer sites, and more. This is important on any platform, including mobile devices, and within increasingly-complex uses of map data.

But sometimes, technology has gotten in the way of the right user experience. No more. With today’s announcement, Google is delivering the most requested Maps API feature: a Directions web service. This new addition lets you couple the Static Maps API with the Directions API, letting users both visualize and get route directions through a simple HTTP interface.

Driving, walking, and biking directions are all included so regardless of your mode of transport, Google Maps API Premier has you covered!

Look for another blog post tomorrow with more exciting launches at Google I/O. Click here to learn more about using Maps API Premier.

Posted by Daniel Chu, Product Manager, Google Enterprise Maps/Earth

Categorías: Information and Communication Technologies

Announcing Autocompletions for Google Site Search

The Official Google Blog - 19 Mayo 2010 - 8:50pm

One of our most popular feature requests has been to add autocompletion of queries to Google Site Search. In recent months, many top websites have begun to provide search suggestions as you type, an innovative feature users are coming to expect as part of a quality search experience. Today, we announced at Google I/O that you can now enable query autocompletions for your search engine.
Travelocity.com is one of the first Google Site Search customers to implement autocompletions on their website. By doing so, they have provided an easy way for Travelocity users to explore and discover new destinations by suggesting the most popular queries based on the first few letters the user inputs.

To turn this feature on, please check the "Enable autocompletions" option in the Basics tab of your search engine. It may take several hours to start seeing autocompletions once you enabled them in the control panel.
For more information about how to turn on autocompletions for your Google Site Search engine, see our autocompletions Help Page.
Autocompletion is compatible with other new Google Site Search features including themes and mobile search capabilities – which can significantly enhance your users’ mobile experience. As with all Google Site Search features, every new development is rolled out free of charge for all customers.
You can learn more about these and other exciting new features by joining an upcoming webinar:
Google Site Search: 10 New Features to Put to Work on Your SiteTuesday, June 15, 201010:00 a.m. PDT, 1:00 p.m. EDT, GMT 06:00Register here
Posted by Clay Maffett, Enterprise Search team

Categorías: Information and Communication Technologies

Hotmail's New Security Features

NY Times Technology News - 19 Mayo 2010 - 8:47pm

Microsoft's new version of its Hotmail service has new, improved security features.

Categorías: Information and Communication Technologies

Germany Asks Google to Surrender Private Data

NY Times Technology News - 19 Mayo 2010 - 8:08pm

The demand by a German regulator increased pressure on the company over its collection of private data from unsecured home wireless networks.

Categorías: Information and Communication Technologies

Buy or build, with more choice for your business

The Official Google Blog - 19 Mayo 2010 - 5:24pm

Google Apps is built for the web, with open standards and APIs that enable our customers to extend and integrate Google’s expanding suite of web-based applications with other services – whether those services are offered by software vendors through the Google Apps Marketplace or built by their own IT departments. Today, we’re excited about two important developments: Google App Engine for Business now enables customers to deploy their own internal apps on Google’s cloud infrastructure, and our collaboration with VMware on cloud portability gives enterprises the ability to build apps using familiar tools and deploy them to their cloud of choice or to on-premise infrastructure.


With Google App Engine for Business, companies can build and host applications on Google’s scalable cloud infrastructure. New enterprise-level capabilities include centralized administration, premium developer support, a 99.9% uptime Service Level Agreement (SLA), simple and predictable monthly pricing, and – coming later this year – access to premium features like cloud-based SQL and SSL. Read our post on the Google Code blog to learn more and sign-up for a preview.

To make it easier for businesses to build cloud-based apps and to give them more deployment choices, we're working with VMware, an industry leader in virtualization. Businesses can now build applications in a familiar development environment that they can easily deploy to Google App Engine, a VMware environment (in-house vSphere infrastructure, a choice of vCloud hosting partners, or VMforce), or other infrastructure such as Amazon EC2. This development environment also allows developers to more easily create data presentation widgets that run on all devices, from phones to tablets to desktops.

By enabling portability between on-premise and multiple cloud environments – including enterprise-ready App Engine for Business – we’re giving our customers more flexibility and making it easier for them to move to the cloud.

Posted by Matthew Glotzbach, Director of Product Management, Google Enterprise

Categorías: Information and Communication Technologies

Google Wave (Labs) available today to organizations using Google Apps

The Official Google Blog - 19 Mayo 2010 - 4:18pm

Google is making familiar tools like email and office applications much more collaborative than traditional software, but with Google Wave, we started with a blank slate to try new approaches to teamwork without the constraints of existing applications. Today – one year after first introducing Wave – we’re extending Google Wave (Labs) to businesses, schools and organizations to let more people try this tool and to learn how we can improve the Google Apps suite.

Since we began previewing Google Wave last fall, we’ve consistently heard that Wave shines in small group settings where teams need to discuss and debate as they create content together, like developing an engineering project plan, creating a trip itinerary or building an event invitation list. For example, you can learn how teams at Deloitte use Google Wave to build consensus around technical design documents and other content.

Google Wave has a few characteristics making it uniquely-equipped for these kinds of discussion-heavy, collaborative tasks:

Discussion in context with your content – When you have a question or suggestion about something you see in a wave, you can have a conversation right in the wave with other participants. When you reach consensus, you can clean up your wave by finalizing the content and removing the completed discussion.

Logical information structure – You can respond anywhere within a wave, not just at the very end, so you end up with an organized record that follows the flow of the conversation.

Revision playback – Wave preserves a timeline of how a wave evolved, so when someone adds you to an existing wave, you can play back the history to see how it evolved to its current state. Playback lets you see content in its logical and chronological context.

Extensions – Extensions bring rich, dynamic functionality into waves. Google provides a number of useful extensions (like voting gadgets and maps) but there's an ever-growing library of extensions created by third-party developers. Organizations can even create extensions tailored to their own needs.


Next time you need to create consensus among a small team as you create content together, consider test driving Google Wave. Starting today, Google Apps administrators have the option to let their users try Google Wave. In the administrative control panel, click 'Add more services', then click 'Add it now' to enable Google Wave.

To learn more about how your organization might find Google Wave useful, we invite you to join our webcast on Wednesday, May 26th at 9:00 am PDT. The Wave team will be on hand to share real world use case from businesses and other organizations, and to answer your questions. Register for the webcast

Posted by Greg D'Alesandre, Google Wave Product Manager

Categorías: Information and Communication Technologies

Mobile strategy gets better with Google Maps API Premier v3

The Official Google Blog - 19 Mayo 2010 - 4:08pm

I’m delighted to announce the launch of Google Maps API Premier v3 today, which includes the functionality you’ve put to use in v2 plus new features that Premier partners have requested, including:

• Support for mobile browsers such as Android and iPhone
• Optimized routing
• Support for custom Street View imagery

Support for mobile browsers We started last year completely rebuilding the Maps API in order to dramatically increase performance, especially on mobile browsers. With the proliferation of mobile platforms and operating systems, it’s become more complicated to build web applications and sites that are relatively browser/OS agnostic. Yet the pressure to have apps and sites work on mobile has only grown stronger. Development teams have needed expertise in Java, Objective C, and other languages, and have often needed to retrofit existing code to new standards. No more! With Maps API Premier v3, the same JavaScript that works in Chrome, Firefox, and IE now works in the Android mobile browser and the iPhone mobile browser.
Optimized RoutingWith the boom in geolocation and asset and fleet tracking, it’s clear that knowing the optimal route – right now – can make a huge difference in your business’ costs. Now you can take advantage of Google’s always up-to-date map data to find the best routes. Google Maps API Premier now can optimize the waypoints to give you the fastest route, saving you miles, wear and tear, and fuel. This is an easy way to move beyond distance matrices – and to stay a bit greener, too.
Custom Street View ImageryStreet View, one of the most popular and distinctive features of Google Maps, has long been useful for our Maps API Premier customers and partners, giving users the detail and feel of a location that no other type of imagery can. Now Maps API Premier customers can use their own imagery, whether it’s of their hotel rooms, houses for sale, or ski slopes, giving users this helpful perspective even in places beyond the Google Maps Street View car or trike routes.
Look for another blog post tomorrow with more exciting launches at Google I/O for Maps API Premier. Click here to learn more about using Maps API Premier.
Posted by Daniel Chu, Product Manager, Google Enterprise Maps/Earth

Categorías: Information and Communication Technologies

What We're Reading: A New Flash, and Less Money

NY Times Technology News - 19 Mayo 2010 - 2:16pm

The reading list of the tech editors and reporters of The New York Times included articles about the new version of Flash and about Apple's chief executive.

Categorías: Information and Communication Technologies

Video Site Blip.tv Raises $10 Million

NY Times Technology News - 19 Mayo 2010 - 1:27pm

Blip.tv, the video site, raises another $10.1 million in funding. The company shares ad revenue with video producers.

Categorías: Information and Communication Technologies

For Children, a Social Network With Training Wheels

NY Times Technology News - 19 Mayo 2010 - 12:51pm

A new site called Togetherville strives to be a safe place for 6- to 10-year-olds to learn the ropes of social networking.

Categorías: Information and Communication Technologies

Searching for Hidden Treasure

NY Times Technology News - 19 Mayo 2010 - 12:13pm

For young geocachers, a handheld device and a free app for an iPhone.

Categorías: Information and Communication Technologies

Q.&A.: Updating Vista for Updates

NY Times Technology News - 19 Mayo 2010 - 12:04pm

How to get security updates on Windows Vista.

Categorías: Information and Communication Technologies

CBS Sitcom Inspired by Justin Halpern’s Twitter Page

NY Times Technology News - 19 Mayo 2010 - 5:27am

Justin Halpern’s Twitter page, on which he records his dad’s quips, has inspired a sitcom.

Categorías: Information and Communication Technologies

Profit Rises and Outlook Improves at Hewlett-Packard

NY Times Technology News - 19 Mayo 2010 - 4:50am

Profit increased for a third straight quarter as sales rose 13 percent to $30.8 billion.

Categorías: Information and Communication Technologies

A Data Center Power Supply That Moos

NY Times Technology News - 19 Mayo 2010 - 4:31am

A study by Hewlett-Packard shows how waste from cows on a dairy farm and heat from a data center nearby could be used profitably to produce electricity to run the data center.

Categorías: Information and Communication Technologies

Softbank to Help Twitter Get Even Bigger in Japan

NY Times Technology News - 19 Mayo 2010 - 4:30am

The cellphone carrier Softbank announced new handsets designed to link to the micro-blogging site, part of a concerted effort to get a piece of America’s tech savvy.

Categorías: Information and Communication Technologies

Symantec Is Said to Agree to Buy VeriSign Unit

NY Times Technology News - 19 Mayo 2010 - 3:19am

A deal for the business, which provides security technology for online payments, could be reached this week.

Categorías: Information and Communication Technologies

S.E.C. Rules Would Limit Trading in Volatile Market

NY Times Technology News - 19 Mayo 2010 - 3:12am

The Securities and Exchange Commission will try circuit breakers that will pause trading in stocks if their price moves by 10 percent or more in a five-minute period.

Categorías: Information and Communication Technologies

Yahoo to Buy a Freelance Site, Associated Content

NY Times Technology News - 18 Mayo 2010 - 11:30pm

Financial terms of the deal, which will bolster Yahoo’s news coverage with advice and how-to reviews, were not disclosed.

Categorías: Information and Communication Technologies