Smaaz’s Blog

Google Launches Tool For Creating Offline Web Applications

Google today announced at Google Developer Day 2007 that it is providing developers with Google Gears, an open source technology for creating offline web applications. This new browser extension is being made available in its early stages so that everyone can test its capabilities and limitations and help improve upon it. The long-term hope is that Google Gears can help the industry as a whole move toward a single standard for offline capabilities that all developers can use.Google Gears marks an important step in the evolution of web applications because it addresses a major user concern: availability of data and applications when there’s no Internet connection available, or when a connection is slow or unreliable. As application developers and users alike want to do more on the web—whether it’s email or CRM or photo editing—enhancements that make the browser environment itself more powerful are increasingly important.

“With Google Gears we’re tackling a key limitation of the browser in order to make it a stronger platform for deploying all types of applications and enabling a better user experience in the cloud,” said Eric Schmidt, Chief Executive Officer of Google. “We believe strongly in the power of the community to stretch this new technology to the limits of what’s possible and ultimately emerge with an open standard that benefits everyone.”

Google is offering Google Gears as a free, fully open source technology in order to help every web application, not just Google applications. As a first example of what is possible, the Google Readerâ„¢ feed reader (http://reader.google.com) is available today with Gears-enabled offline capabilities.

Industry support
Google will be working closely with all members of the web community to converge upon a standard so developers have one consistent API for offline functionality.

“We’re very excited to be collaborating with Google to move the industry forward to a standard cross-platform, cross-browser local storage capability,” said Kevin Lynch, senior vice president and chief software architect at Adobe. “The Gears API will also be available in Apollo, which enables web applications to run on the desktop, providing developers with consistent offline and local database solutions.”

“This announcement is a significant step forward for web applications,” said Brendan Eich, CTO at Mozilla Corporation. “We’re pleased to see Google working with open source and open standards bodies on offline web applications.”

“Opera and Google share the common goal of making Web applications richer and more robust,” said HÃ¥kon Wium Lie, CTO, Opera Software. “Developers have long desired the functionality and flexibility Google Gears can offer browsers. Because Opera has always prioritized giving our users what they want, we’re excited to work with Google to extend the reach and power of Web applications.”

Another tool in the application development toolbox
Google Gears builds on the web’s existing programming model by introducing new JavaScript APIs for sophisticated data storage, application caching, and multi-threading features. With these APIs, developers can bring offline capabilities to even their most complex web applications. Google Gears works with all major browsers on all major platforms: Windows, Mac and Linux.

Google Gears is available now at http://gears.google.com.

Add comment May 31st, 2007

eBay Acquires StumbleUpon

eBay today announced it has acquired StumbleUpon, an early-stage company that helps people discover and share content online, for an aggregate transaction value of approximately $75 million. This acquisition will provide eBay with in-depth exposure to a fast-growing community-based service with approximately 2.3 million users. StumbleUpon gives people a new way to discover relevant and entertaining content based on personal preferences and community recommendations.

Driven by word-of-mouth, the StumbleUpon community has grown 150 percent year over year and delivers approximately five million new recommendations a day to its large, highly engaged user base. StumbleUpon allows people to discover Web sites, people, videos, product information, communities and other online content based on personal interests. By allowing its community to rate the content, StumbleUpon gets smarter as it is used and provides an increasing level of relevance over time.

eBay senior director - Michael Buhr will serve as general manager of StumbleUpon effective immediately. StumbleUpon’s current founders and management team will remain in their respective positions and will work with Buhr to enhance the user experience, evolve its unique product and grow the community.

Add comment May 31st, 2007

Google Announces New Mapping Innovations

This morning at the Where 2.0 conference in San Jose, John Hanke, Director of Google Earth & Maps, announced new innovations for Google Maps that offer a whole new perspective on search: Street View and Mapplets. Available on Google Maps at maps.google.com, Street View and Mapplets further Google’s commitment to provide users with the most innovative maps available online and developers with new tools for creating and sharing geographic content.

Street View is a new feature of Google Maps that enables users to view and navigate within 360 degree street level imagery of various cities in the US. Street View provides users with a rich, immersive browsing experience directly in Google Maps, enabling greater understanding of a specific location or area. Street View imagery will initially be available for maps of the San Francisco Bay Area, New York, Las Vegas, Denver and Miami, and will soon expand to other metropolitan areas. By clicking on the “Street View” button in Google Maps, users can navigate street level, panoramic imagery. With Street View users can virtually walk the streets of a city, check out a restaurant before arriving, and even zoom in on bus stops and street signs to make travel plans.

Google also announced the launch of Mapplets, a powerful new tool for developers and consumers alike. Mapplets enables third party developers to create mini applications that can be displayed on Google Maps, much like Google Gadgets are displayed on iGoogle. These Mapplets contain a variety of information, from housing listings to crime data, and tools like distance measurement. Users can select from a wide range of Google and third party Mapplets to display on the Map, essentially creating their own “mashup of mashups” directly on the Google Maps site, while still enjoying the built-in functionality of Google Maps, such as local search and driving directions. A number of our partners, including WeatherBug, Booking.com and Platial have already created Mapplets. This feature is available at http://maps.google.com/preview.

Add comment May 30th, 2007

Google Leaps Over Language Barriers

Google announce the arrival of a new cross-language search feature that allows users across the world to find and view search results on foreign language web pages in their own native language. Now, more content on the web is accessible to more users, regardless of what languages they speak. This means, for example, that if an Arabic speaker is searching for restaurants in New York, he/she can now conduct a search in Arabic, and Google will translate the results (most of which are from English language websites) and provide the most relevant search results in their native language.

This new feature is available in the following languages: English, Arabic, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Japanese, Korean, Chinese (Traditional), and Chinese (Simplified).

Google uses machine translation, or automated language translation, to enable users to search and view foreign language web content. A user simply needs to visit http://translate.google.com/translate_s, enter a query in their language, select the language they want to find results in, and issue a search. Behind the scenes, Google translates the query, performs a search, and translates the results so that users can click on the results of interest to view. And while machine translation is not perfect, it can be a very useful tool for users who want to access and obtain a gist of content written in a language that they do not know or know well.

This new Google Translate feature was previewed last Wednesday at Google’s Mountain View, CA campus during Searchology, a media event focused completely on search. You can watch Udi Manber, VP of Engineering, unveil the cross-language search tool at the following link: http://www.google.com/press/podium.html.

Add comment May 25th, 2007

May 2007 Yahoo! Search Index Update

Yahoo! announced a Search Index Update on the Yahoo! Search Blog today:

“We just rolled out a new search index last night. So, as usual, you may see some changes in ranking as well as some shuffling of the pages that are included in the index throughout this process. This update should be complete very soon.

Thank you to all that have submitted spam reports through Site Explorer. These reports are continuously being included in our index updates. We’ve received some very high-quality feedback and have found these useful to keep spam out of our results.”

Add comment May 24th, 2007

IETF Approves DKIM as Proposed Internet Standard

In a combined effort to help combat e-mail forgery, phishing and other types of online fraud, technology industry leaders Yahoo!, Cisco, Sendmail and PGP Corporation today announced that the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), the group responsible for technical standards on the Internet, has approved DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) as a proposed standard, RFC 4871. DKIM is an e-mail authentication framework that uses cryptographic signature technology to verify the domain of the sender.

According to the Anti-Phishing Working Group, close to 24,000 phishing scams were reported in the U.S. in February 2007 alone, with more than 100 top brands being forged. DKIM provides businesses with heightened brand protection by providing message authentication, verification and traceability to help determine whether a message is legitimate. It also provides additional information to ISPs and consumers to help determine whether a message’s point of origin is legitimate. DKIM is the result of collaboration among numerous organizations. Now that DKIM has been approved as a proposed Internet standard, these companies will work closely with leading ISPs, enterprises, e-commerce organizations, financial institutions and the open source community to facilitate rapid adoption of the specification and its incorporation into future products and offerings.

Add comment May 23rd, 2007

Google Trends Shows List of Top-Rising Searches

On Monday night, Google launched Hot Trends, a new feature on the Google Trends report. Hot Trends enables users to see a list of the current top 100 fastest-rising Google search queries in the U.S. Users can also select specific dates to see what the top-rising searches were at a given point in time.

For years, Google has produced a manually compiled list of popular searches called the Google Zeitgeist. Hot Trends takes this list to a new level, providing an up-to-date snapshot of what’s on our collective mind – from current events to daily crossword puzzle clues to the latest celebrity gossip. For each Hot Trends result, the associated Google News, blog searches and Google web search results appear, giving users greater context for each result. For example, the #2 Hot Trends result on Tuesday, May 15^th was a cryptic phrase: “I who have nothing.” The associated news articles and blog results showed that this is in fact the title of a song that was performed on American Idol that night. And the associated web search results reveal this was originally a song made popular by Shirley Bassey. Mystery solved.

In addition to Hot Trends, there are a few other new changes to Google Trends to make it more informative and user-friendly. Now, in addition to viewing the top countries and cities that searched for a term, users can view the top “sub regions” (e.g. states within the U.S.) across more than 70 countries. Users can now compare the leading presidential candidates around the country, for instance, or find out what region in France is crazy about cognac. Hot Trends is Google’s newest tool for users who want to keep their finger on the pulse of what the world is searching for.

To try out Hot Trends and the new features in Google Trends, go to www.google.com/trends.

Add comment May 22nd, 2007

Google Apps Partner Edition

Today, Google released a new version of Google Apps specifically designed for ISPs, portals, and other service providers, whether they have a few thousand subscribers or over a million. This new version, which is called Partner Edition, makes it easy for large and small service providers to offer your subscribers the latest versions of powerful tools, like Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Docs & Spreadsheets, without having to worry about hosting, updating, or maintaining any of the services yourself. All you have to do is point and click in the easy admin control panel and figure out what branding you’d like to layer on top of the products in order to create a customized look and feel.

Add comment May 21st, 2007