Archive for September, 2008
Today, we are excited to announce that Google Maps will feature route and schedule information from New York’s Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA), the largest public transportation agency in the United States. Figuring out how to get around the metropolitan area on subways, buses and regional rail is now just clicks away in Google Maps.
Users will now be able to access station and schedule data for every service provider overseen by the MTA: New York City Transit (which includes subway and bus service), Long Island Rail Road, Long Island Bus, Metro-North Railroad, and the MTA Bus Company. Other connecting services also provide data via Google Maps, including NJ Transit (commuter rail, light rail and bus), Staten Island Ferry, and The Port Authority of New York & New Jersey (PATH Rail, AirTrain JFK, and AirTrain Newark). The trip planner can create trips across multiple agencies.
Being able to plan public transit trips in Google Maps makes it easier than ever to take advantage of all that New York has to offer. With this new partnership, users can get detailed itineraries that utilize any MTA services across its 5,000-square mile service area. Itineraries will include three routing options, complete with station locations, schedule times, transfer information, total trip time, and step-by-step walking directions. Icons for MTA train and bus stops will now be visible on Google Maps which heightens awareness of the availability of public transit options for users who are exploring an area; when clicked, the icons will display the routes serving the stop and upcoming departures. Additionally, when a user searches for driving directions within the MTA service area, a public transit itinerary will appear as an alternative. Need directions while on-the-go? Transit routing is also available on many mobile phones via Google Maps for mobile.
The MTA joins more than 75 other transit agencies spanning 12 countries that have joined the Google Transit program. To learn more about today’s announcement, head to maps.google.com/nyc.
September 24th, 2008
As part of its continuing effort to offer innovative advertising solutions to its clients, NBC Universal (NBCU) will join forces with Google to form a strategic multi-year advertising, research and technology partnership. The two companies will work together to develop more effective advertising metrics, attract non-traditional advertising partners to NBCU and incorporate self-service buying opportunities through the Google TV Ads™ advertising platform.The announcement was made today by Mike Pilot, President, NBC Universal Sales and Marketing and Tim Armstrong, Google’s President of Advertising and Commerce, North America.
On the national level, NBCU will offer advertising time from several of its cable networks to Google’s TV Ads platform. Inventory from Sci Fi, Oxygen, MSNBC, CNBC, Sleuth, and Chiller will be made available to Google in the coming months, with potential to expand onto other NBCU properties in the future. With the addition of NBC Universal inventory, advertisers using the Google TV Ads platform can reach NBCU Cable’s national audience and gain access to viewership data at an unprecedented scale. With this data, advertisers can better understand what consumers are responding to and make real-time adjustments to their campaign to maximize their ROI.
“We’re extremely pleased to join forces with Google on this effort, which will help us develop better accountability and ROI metrics for our advertisers and attract an entirely new group of clients to television advertising,” said Pilot. “This is another step in our commitment to trying innovative advertising approaches and testing new technologies that can help benefit our clients.”
“The Google TV Ads platform is making television advertising more accountable and measurable and we’re pleased with our progress to date,” said Armstrong. “Our partnership with NBCU will help us bring the power of television to a broader set of advertisers as well as give our current advertisers increased reach through our system.”
On the local level, NBCU and Google have also agreed to work jointly on adapting the Google TV Ads platform for local market use.
“This is a great way to reach clients who are interested in buying television advertising but may not have previously had the resources or ability to do so,” said Frank Comerford, President, Platform Development and Commercial Operations, NBC Local Media. “A self-service ad platform will be a great complement to our existing sales efforts and help us further connect our clients to their customers.”
As part of the agreement, NBC Universal will maintain its direct relationships with agencies and advertisers and can set parameters around the purchase of the available ad time. NBCU will also gain access to the large base of advertisers using Google’s AdWords™ online advertising program, many of whom are not currently television advertisers. The two companies will share in all ad revenue and explore innovative ways to expand the partnership in the future, including adapting the platform to add local inventory.
As part of their effort to help drive value for advertisers, NBCU and Google will also collaborate on a series of custom marketing and research projects using the Google TV Ads platform. Through its partnership with DISH Network, the Google TV Ads platform can report second-by-second set top box data allowing advertisers to measure viewership of their ads more precisely than ever before. The two companies will also take advantage of joint research that will help advertisers and agencies better understand their media mix and optimize their ad campaigns.
“We’re pleased that NBCU will make some of its inventory available on Google’s TV Ads platform,” said Laura Desmond, CEO of Starcom MediaVest Group. “The partnership will generate real value for our clients by providing us with a more measurable–and actionable–understanding of how consumers engage with content.”
September 17th, 2008
Google today launched Google ChromeTM, a new open source browser intended to create a better web experience for users around the world. Available in beta in more than 40 languages, Google Chrome is a new approach to the browser that’s based on the simplicity and power that users have come to expect from Google products.
In the early days of the Internet, web pages were frequently little more than text. But today the web has evolved into a powerful platform that enables users to collaborate with friends and colleagues through email and other web applications, edit documents, watch videos, listen to music, manage finances and much more. Google Chrome was built for today’s web and for the applications of tomorrow.
“We think of the browser as the window to the web – it’s a tool for users to interact with the web sites and applications they care about, and it’s important that we don’t get in the way of that experience,” said Sundar Pichai, Vice President of Product Management, Google Inc. “Just like the classic Google homepage, Google Chrome has a simple user interface with a sophisticated core to enable the modern web.”
Making the web experience better for users
Google Chrome was designed to make it easy for users to search and navigate the web for the content they’re looking for.
- A combined search and address bar quickly takes users where they want to go, often in just a few keystrokes.
- When users open a new tab in Google Chrome, they’ll see a page that includes snapshots of their most-visited sites, recent searches and bookmarks, making it even easier to navigate the web.
Google Chrome was engineered to deliver a seamless web experience for users. At its core is a multi-process platform that helps provide users with enhanced stability and security.
- Each browser tab operates as a separate process; by isolating tabs, should one tab crash or misbehave, others remain stable and responsive, and users can continue working without having to restart Google Chrome.
- Google also built a new JavaScript engine, V8, which not only speeds up today’s web applications, but enables a whole new class of web applications that couldn’t exist on today’s browsers.
Contributing to the innovation of browsers through openness
“While we see this as a fundamental shift in the way people think about browsers, we realize that we couldn’t have created Google Chrome on our own,” said Linus Upson, Director of Engineering, Google Inc. “Google Chrome was built upon other open source projects that are making significant contributions to browser technology and have helped to spur competition and innovation.”
To further advance the openness of the web, Google Chrome is being released as an open source project under the name Chromium. The intent is that Google will help make future browsers better by contributing the underlying technology in Google Chrome to the market, while continuing to develop additional features.
How to get Google Chrome
Google Chrome can be downloaded at www.google.com/chrome. It is being released in beta for Windows in over 100 countries in the following languages: Chinese (Traditional), Chinese (Simplified), Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese (Portugal), Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, Spanish, Spanish (Latin America), Turkish, English (US), English (UK), Arabic, Czech, Danish, Hebrew, Hindi, Norwegian, Polish, Swedish, Indonesian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian, Catalan, Croatian, Filipino, Finnish, Greek, Hungarian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Romanian, Serbian, Slovakian, Slovenian, Thai, Vietnamese, and Estonian.
Google Chrome for Mac and Linux users will be available in the coming months. For more information on the open source project, Chromium, visit www.chromium.org.
September 3rd, 2008
