With the new version of the app, people can conduct a Google search by simply speaking their query into their iPhones. “Voice Search” uses speech recognition technology to transform spoken words into text and then runs the query through Google web search as if it had been typed manually. Additionally, to provide an even faster and more natural experience, when the app is turned on, Voice Search will detect the phone’s movement and activate automatically when you want to do a search. This feature allows you to naturally bring the phone up to your ear and speak your search into the phone, just as if you were talking on the phone.

This update to the Google Mobile App also uses the iPhone’s location detection to further personalize your search results. Now you can just type (or speak) a query like “pizza,” “movies” or “weather” and you will receive results tailored specifically to your current location, without having to include a city or zip code in the search.

The voice and location features add to Google Mobile App’s existing tools that allow people to access all of Google’s mobile services from their phone. To learn more, please visit www.google.com/mobile or download the app from the iPhone App Store by searching for “Google Mobile App.”

While the implementation of the services agreement with Google would have enabled Yahoo! to accelerate its investments in its top business priorities through an infusion of additional operating cash flow, this deal was incremental to Yahoo!’s product roadmap and does not change Yahoo!’s commitment to innovation and growth in search. The fundamental building blocks of a stronger Yahoo! in both sponsored and algorithmic search were put in place independent of the agreement.

Yahoo! continually optimizes its algorithmic and sponsored search, and we have, in 2008 alone, developed and launched hundreds of improvements all designed to enhance search quality and deliver a more relevant search experience to the company’s users. To that end, Yahoo! has benefited from strong revenue per search (RPS) gains in the U.S. as discussed on the Q3 earnings call. Furthermore, Yahoo! continues to make substantial progress against its Open Strategy and in the deployment of its game changing APT from Yahoo! display advertising platform.

Going forward, Yahoo! plans to continue to provide the cutting-edge advances in products, platforms and services that the industry needs and expects, and intends to be the destination of choice for advertisers and publishers who want to reach one of the largest and most engaged populations of consumers on the web.

To continue to fuel the growth of online games for users and as part of our ongoing efforts to develop new ways for publishers to earn revenue, Google announced today the availability of AdSense for Games^TM, a program that integrates video advertisements into web-based games, complemented by text and image ads. The program helps advertisers reach its audiences in new ways. Google is working with select game developers and publishers including Konami, Playfish, Zynga, Demand Media, games network Mochi Media, as well as beta advertisers such as Esurance, Sprint, and Sony Pictures.

With this program, advertisers can now reach the growing number of gamers who are engaged in online play. For instance, in anticipation of a sporting event, an advertiser can use the technology of AdSense for Games to feature its logo within that sports event’s accompanying online game and reach its relevant demographic as a result.

AdSense for Games delivers video ads based on intended placements, as well as image or text ads based on contextual targeting with keywords and tags supplied by developers and publishers. Advertisers are charged on a cost-per-impression or cost-per-click basis, and ad revenue is split between Google and game developers or publishers.

AdSense for Games gives game developers a new way to monetize their games and advertisers additional tools to reach their audiences, ultimately benefiting users by spurring innovation in the online gaming space. AdSense for Games is currently available in beta to select partners in the U.S.

For more information, please see: http://adsense.blogspot.com/ and http://www.google.com/ads/games

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.

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.”

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.

The acquisition of Begun will give advertisers access to a broader network of sites to advertise on, and publishers will benefit from a wider set of adverts to run on their sites. Users will see more relevant advertising across a much wider set of websites. Google will bring its advertising expertise and experience to Begun’s network of websites.

“Google is very committed to giving Russian users, advertisers and partners the best possible service and experience,” said Mohammad Gawdat, Managing Director Emerging Markets, Google. ”This agreement will result in better search results and more relevant advertising for our Russian users and publishers.”

“Begun is an excellent business which can fully develop its potential under Google’s ownership,” said Mark Opzoomer, Chief Executive Officer of Rambler Media. “Google has the technological and financial capacity to improve Begun’s established advertising service in Russia.”

“The entire industry will benefit from this transaction as there is a high potential for synergies,” said Alexey Basov, General Director of Begun “It brings together Google’s visionary technology and Begun’s six years of successful experience in building advertising and dealer networks and direct sales in Russia.”

The transaction remains subject to customary closing conditions and receipt of applicable regulatory approval and is expected to close in the third quarter of 2008.

Mr. Pichette brings nearly 20 years of experience in financial operations and management in the telecommunications sector, including 7 years at Bell Canada, which he joined in 2001 as Executive Vice President of Planning and Performance Management. During his time at Bell Canada, he held various executive positions, including CFO from 2002 until the end of 2003, and was instrumental in the management of the most extensive communications network in Canada and its ongoing migration to a new national IP-based infrastructure. Prior to joining Bell Canada, Mr. Pichette was a partner at McKinsey & Company, where he was a lead member of McKinsey’s North American Telecom Practice. He also served as Vice President and Chief Financial Officer of Call-Net Enterprises, a Canadian telecommunications company, from 1994 to 1996. Mr. Pichette earned a BA in Business Administration from Université du Québec à Montréal and an MA in Philosophy Politics and Economics from Oxford University, where he attended as a Rhodes Scholar. He is also chairman of the board of Engineers Without Borders (Canada).

Reporting to Google Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Eric Schmidt, Mr. Pichette will start on August 1, and he will assume responsibility for the company’s financial operations and become CFO on August 12.

“Patrick brings the expertise and track record of a successful CFO, along with the hands-on business experience of a seasoned operations executive,” said Dr. Schmidt. “This strong combination of skills and experience will be an important addition to Google’s executive management team and will support our ongoing efforts to increase value for our users, advertisers and partners.”  Schmidt added, “On behalf of all my colleagues at Google, we welcome Patrick and, once again, thank George Reyes for all that he’s done for Google.”

“Google is a great company with a phenomenal brand and an outstanding management team,” said Pichette. “As an avid user of Google products, I’ve admired the company for many years and am excited about working with my new colleagues in Mountain View and around the world.”

In addition, Yahoo! and Google agreed to enable interoperability between their respective instant messaging services bringing easier and broader communication to users.
“This commercial agreement provides Yahoo! with the opportunity to deliver more relevant ads to users and provide advertisers and publishers with better advertising technology to help them succeed in their own businesses,” said Eric Schmidt, Chairman and CEO of Google. “This agreement will preserve the competitive and dynamic online advertising space.”

As a result of the agreement, Yahoo! will be able to complement its own advertising program with Google’s advertising technology. As a result, advertisers will be able to better reach consumers, and Yahoo! and its current publisher partners can generate more revenue. Yahoo can use Google’s advertising technology on as many or as few of its search results and content pages as it chooses.

This non-exclusive agreement allows Yahoo! to enter into similar agreements with other advertising providers. In addition, Yahoo! will maintain relationships with its own advertising customers and will continue to rely exclusively on its own advertising program outside of the U.S. and Canada. The agreement has a term of up to ten years: a 4-year initial term and two 3-year renewals at Yahoo!’s option. Financial terms between the two companies were not disclosed.

Although Google and Yahoo are not required to receive regulatory approval of the arrangement before implementing it, the companies have voluntarily agreed to delay implementation for up to three and a half months to give the U.S. Department of Justice time to review the arrangement.

Google’s developer products are devoted to making it easier for developers to build for the web. In particular, Wednesday’s keynote speech will explore three areas of Google investment that — in close collaboration with the larger web community — aim to enable increasingly innovative and rich web applications:

• Making clouds of computing power more accessible to all developers
• Making the client — i.e., the browser — more capable and more powerful
• Ensuring the connectivity that enables the client and the cloud to work in harmony

“After years of competition among platforms, the web has won because it’s open, because it’s ubiquitous, and because there’s a passionate community working together to move it forward,” said Vic Gundotra, vice president of engineering for developer products at Google. “Openness is great for developers and for users because it knocks down hurdles to building great applications, and because it speeds the next wave of innovation by letting good ideas be shared. The web doesn’t depend on any one API or tool or product, from Google or anyone else. What makes the real difference is the aggregate effect of us all working together, with open standards and open source.”

Google App Engine: Making It Easy to Build, Maintain, and Scale Web Apps

Google App Engine™ enables developers to build their web apps on the same infrastructure that powers Google’s own applications. So developers eager to build highly scalable web apps will be especially pleased with the following piece of Google I/O news: Google App Engine is announcing open sign-ups. More than 150,000 developers have joined the product’s waiting list over the past 6 weeks; on Wednesday, Google App Engine will be available to everyone — no waiting required.

Google App Engine is also announcing its pricing plans (effective later this year) for purchasing additional computing resources; this is something developers have been asking for ever since the initial launch. The product will be free to get started, and in the current preview release apps will continue to be restricted to that free quota. Later this year, once the preview period has ended, developers can expect to pay:

• Free quota to get started: 500MB storage and enough CPU and bandwidth for about 5 million pageviews per month
• $0.10 – $0.12 per CPU core-hour
• $0.15 – $0.18 per GB-month of storage
• $0.11 – $0.13 per GB outgoing bandwidth
• $0.09 – $0.11 per GB incoming bandwidth

Lastly, and likewise in response to developer feedback, Google App Engine will provide two new APIs in the coming weeks. The image-manipulation API enables developers to scale, rotate, and crop images on the server, and the memcache API is a high-performance caching layer designed to make page rendering faster for developers.

More information about Google App Engine is available at http://code.google.com/appengine/.

Building more powerful, faster AJAX applications: Google Web Toolkit 1.5 Release Candidate

With Google Web Toolkit™, developers can develop and debug web applications in the familiar Java programming language, and then deploy them as highly optimized JavaScript. In doing so, developers sidestep common AJAX headaches like browser compatibility, and enjoy significant performance and productivity gains. Google Health is one recently launched application to use Google Web Toolkit.

Google Web Toolkit Release Candidate 1.5 will be available later this week and includes Java 5 language support so that developers can enjoy using the full capabilities of the Java 5 syntax. These capabilities include Java generics, enumerated types, annotations, auto-boxing, variable parameter lists, and more. The compiler in Google Web Toolkit 1.5 produces faster code than ever, delivering performance gains big enough for end users to notice; indeed, it is often the case that the compiler produces faster JavaScript than a person would write by hand in JavaScript. Google Web Toolkit 1.5 accomplishes this by performing deep inlining, better dead code elimination, and other forms of enhanced static analysis.

Google Web Toolkit also continues to provide a rich and growing set of libraries that help developers build world-class AJAX, including thoroughly-tested reusable libraries for implementing user interfaces, data structures, client/server communication, internationalization, testing, and accessibility. More information about Google Web Toolkit is available at http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/.

Innovation in the Open: At the Event

Google I/O will include a mix of practical, hands-on advice for building web apps as well as opportunities to learn about and discuss emerging trends. Sessions with top Google engineers will cover tools developed both inside and outside of Google. Topic areas will include:

• AJAX & JavaScript
• APIs & Tools
• Social
• Mobile
• Maps & Geo

More information about Google I/O is available at http://code.google.com/io/. Google will be accepting online registrations until the evening of May 27th and on-site the day of the event.