Archive for April, 2008

Posted by Mano Marks, Geo APIs Team

The Google Geo APIs are all about building powerful tools to share geo information with the world. We've been really interested in seeing the way that KML has been used all across the web to express geographic content, and today we're very excited to announce that the Open Geospatial Consortium has announced its acceptance of KML 2.2 as an official OGC Standard. That means that KML is not just a Google Earth standard, it's not even just a Google standard. It is now an official standard for presenting geographic data. Read more about this great news on the LatLong blog.

Posted by Mano Marks, Geo APIs Team

The Google Geo APIs are all about building powerful tools to share geo information with the world. We've been really interested in seeing the way that KML has been used all across the web to express geographic content, and today we're very excited to announce that the Open Geospatial Consortium has announced its acceptance of KML 2.2 as an official OGC Standard. That means that KML is not just a Google Earth standard, it's not even just a Google standard. It is now an official standard for presenting geographic data. Read more about this great news on the LatLong blog.

The Microsoft.com Operations Team is pleased to announce the launch of our new Microsoft.com Engineering Operations TechCenter . This site ids designed with the ITPro/Systems Engineer in mind. We get to work on some cutting edge technologies and our goal...(read more)

For me, life moves pretty fast, and with so much stuff going on it's easy to have things fall through the cracks. The other day I missed an important meeting because I forgot to open up Google Calendar after restarting my browser (don't tell my manager). Sometimes I just need a little help to stay on top of all the information that breezes by.

Our new experimental release of Google Talk helps solve this problem - it's called Google Talk, Labs Edition. It has all the features of the Google Talk gadget (but runs outside a browser), plus it adds new desktop notifications that remind you of appointments and alert you the moment messages arrive. There are notifications for Google Calendar appointments, Orkut scraps, Gmail messages, and Talk chats (of course). My favorite part? The snooze feature on Calendar notifications! Now I can put off that reminder for a few extra minutes without worrying about forgetting the meeting.

Give Google Talk, Labs Edition a try and let us know what you think!

Jonathan McPhie
Associate Product Manager

Congratulations to Tracey, Jane and Leo for winning this month's FAB pub quiz. They were one of only two teams who knew that the 'mullitia' refers to a group of photographers who risk harming themselves by taking photos of people with mullet haircuts. Check out the 'mullitia' at work - http://www.mulletsgalore.com.

Posted by Mano Marks, Google Geo APIs Team

Valery Hronusov has created a cool visual interface for his Text to Image service. This service allows you to easily create a text image, control its color, add shadow effects, and then place it on directly a map. It outputs to KML, Maps API JavaScript code, or just a plain URL to an image. This is really useful to creating, for instance, road labels or text based ScreenOverlays. All you have to do is copy the output into your own code. The interface is pretty simple:

Here's a sample of the KML output:

<GroundOverlay>
  ...
     <Icon>
             <href>http://text2image.ning.com/TextToImage.php?text=San+Francisco%2C+here+we+come%21&LabelType=2&FontSize=24&casing=asis&alignment=1&font=arial&fontStyle=bold&LabelLocation=topleft&dX=11&dY=0&FontColor=00ff00f9&ShadowColor=00000000&depth=3&effect=0&LabelHeight=35&LabelWidth=438&IconHeight=18&IconName=http://maps.google.com/mapfiles/kml/shapes/shaded_dot.png</href>
     </Icon>

Here's a sample of the JavaScript code it creates:

var pointCenter = new GLatLng(37.775196,-122.419204);
var map = new GMap2(document.getElementById("map"));
map.setCenter(pointCenter, 10);

var pointSW = new GLatLng(37.741743,-122.470044);
var pointNE = new GLatLng(37.786659,-122.272387);

var groundOverlay = new GGroundOverlay(
   "http://text2image.ning.com/TextToImage.php?text=San+Francisco%2C+here+we+come%21&LabelType=2&FontSize=24&casing=asis&alignment=1&font=arial&fontStyle=bold&LabelLocation=topleft&dX=11&dY=0&FontColor=00ff00f9&ShadowColor=00000000&depth=3&effect=0&LabelHeight=35&LabelWidth=438&IconHeight=18&IconName=http://maps.google.com/mapfiles/kml/shapes/shaded_dot.png", 
   new GLatLngBounds(pointSW, pointNE));

map.addOverlay(groundOverlay);

And here's what it looks like:

Here at Google, we're committed to helping build a clean energy future and reducing our carbon footprint. And now Google Talk is part of the solution. We don't know about you, but we were surprised to learn the inconvenient truth that every character (byte) we send in a message results in about 0.0000000000000000034 metric tons* of CO2 being released into the atmosphere! So if we can reduce the number of characters we send when we chat with all our friends, we can help the environment at the same time.

Teenagers (and some adults) must be aware of this, because they already reduce their character usage by abbreviating words and dropping vowels when they send IM and SMS (text) messages. We think this is a great idea. If all our millions of users started using IM-speak, we'd save hundreds of millions of wasted (and environmentally damaging!) characters.

For example, if we want to say:
As far as I'm concerned, you can give me the twenty dollars you owe me when I see you later.

You could save more than 50% in wasted characters by saying:
AFAIC, U can gve me the 20 $$ YOM whn I CUL8R.

In honor of Earth Day (3 weeks from today: April 22, 2008), on that day our Google Talk servers will start automatically sending your conversations using IM-speak instead of normal words. But you can help save some computing power (and more wasted energy!) by shortening your conversations yourself.

We know you'll all want to practice your IM-speak, so we're helping by introducing a new translation bot, en2im@bot.talk.google.com, which will translate your conversations into IM-speak, to help you get used to the new lingo. Add this user to your roster, or use our convenient new chatback feature to start a conversation with the bot by clicking the badge below:



You'll be doing your part to help the environment. If you get a message with an abbreviation you don't understand, send just that abbreviation to the bot and it will translate it back. And parents: as a side bonus you'll finally understand what your kids are saying! Kp on chttng, & CUL8R!

The Google Talk Team


* It takes about 2.5 Watts to power a 1Gb/s link [1]. 2.5 Joules/s / 1Gb/s = 2.5e-9 J/b * 8 b/byte = 2e-8 Joules/byte. The average emissions cost of electricity in the United States is 0.605 metric tons of CO2 per MWh [2]. 1MWh is 3.6e9 Joules. So to produce 2e-8 Joules, we emit about 3.36e-18 metric tons of CO2.

[1] C Gunaratne, K Christensen, B Nordman. Managing energy consumption costs in desktop PCs and LAN switches with proxying, split TCP connections, and scaling of link speed. Internation Journal of Network Managment, 15(5), September 2005. See slides

[2] US Department of Energy. Electric Power Annual 2006. Table ES (Divide
total CO2 emissions by total electricity generated.)