Archive for June, 2008

Now that Windows Server 2008 has been released earlier this year many enterprises are assessing the value proposition of moving to the Windows Server 2008 and IIS 7.0. As an IT Pro or decision maker in this process you want real world working proof to...(read more)

It wouldn't be a British Summer Party if it didn't rain.

I was glad so many people braved the weather to attend the Flag and Bell Summer Party on board the Queen Mary and The Yacht Club ships along Victoria Embankment on Tuesday night. Thanks for coming along.

Congratulations to the 'Mary's Queens' team for achieving a perfect score on the quiz this month. This is a Flag and Bell first. Well done to Rima, Matt and Peter.

Thanks again to PCR Recruitment for sponsoring drinks at the first bar. Details for the event on the 1st of July coming soon.

Check out the new Develop on SharePoint site that launched Monday at TechEd/Developer.  The site has a wealth of resources from Virtual Labs, Webcasts, short videos and whitepapers. Topics include Web Parts, Data Lists, Event Handlers, Workflow, Silverlight integration, page navigation, page branding, web services, customer content types and user management. Check back in the upcoming weeks as we fill out more of the content at this site.

Scott

Posted by Ken Harrenstien, Software Engineer

Those of you interested in closed captioning may have noticed a new feature on this front- the ability to search only for closed-captioned videos. Naturally this is very useful for people like myself who can't hear the audio, but of course there are many others who either want the sound off or who can understand the writing better than the speech.

If you go to the "Advanced Video Search" page you'll see a new constraint called "Subtitles: Search only closed captioned videos". Try clicking on that check-box and doing an otherwise normal search; the results will include those videos that are known to have captions. Fun example: to see a list of all captioned videos on Google Video, check that box and restrict the domain to "google.com".

It's still not quite as sophisticated as we want it to be - it currently only knows about videos in Google Video, and doesn't yet allow you to specify a language of interest. Nevertheless it's another small step that we hope will encourage greater awareness and use of captions.

A related feature of interest that you may not have noticed is the ability to jump directly into a video at the point where captions of interest appear. If your search results include caption snippets, there will be a link called "Start playing at search term", which is extremely handy for long videos. In order to see it, you also have to select "List View" (the middle icon in the Results menu bar).

Here's a nice example - search for ["that's a tremendous gift"] . Make sure you've selected List View, and you should see a video featuring Randy Pausch. Clicking on the "Start playing at search term (50:16)" link will take you to a point slightly before the appearance of that caption.

Back in December, we released translation bots for Google Talk. While machine translation isn't 100% accurate, the idea of reducing language barriers with automated chat translations appealed to many people, and we received a lot of positive feedback. So when Google Translate recently added new languages, we decided to create chat bots for these languages.

The new bots speak Bulgarian (bg), Croatian (hr), Czech (cs), Danish (da), Finnish (fi), Hindi (hi), Norwegian (no), Polish (pl), Portuguese (pt), Romanian (ro), Swedish (sv) and Traditional Chinese (zh-hant).

There are 26 new bots: bg2en, cs2en, da2en, en2bg, en2cs, en2da, en2fi, en2hi, en2hr, en2no, en2pl, en2pt, en2ro, en2sv, en2zh-hant, fi2en, hi2en, hr2en, no2en, pl2en, pt2en, ro2en, sv2en, zh-hant2en, zh-hant2zh, zh2zh-hant. For reference you can also check out the full list of supported language combinations. To add one of these bots to your contacts, remember to use the following format [from language]2[to language]@bot.talk.google.com.

Toivon, että pidät siitä!

For those that don't know Finnish...



Jonas Lindberg
Software Engineer

Posted by Christian Yee, Product Marketing Manager

Whether you're traveling to far-off locales or relaxing at home, save on items for your summer adventure with Google Checkout. You can shop with one login across the web and track all your orders in one place. And starting today, over 50 Google Checkout stores will be offering savings of $10 off purchases of $60 or more to Checkout buyers through June 23rd. Learn more about Google Checkout summer offers.

We've been spending a lot of time working on improving the back-end of Bloglines, but we wanted to share some fun for you Blogliners out there.

More and more of our feeds have embedded video, so it was a no-brainer to offer greater video support. We've cleared over 30 different video sites to stream video through Bloglines. It's a broad list including Blip.tv, Break.com, Brightcove, Cnet, CNN, CollegeHumor.com, Dailymotion.com, Metacafe, Myspace, Revver, Videoegg, and oh yeah, YouTube, among others.

Here's an example where I'm about to watch Jake and Amir of College Humor. The video is embedded in the Silicon Alley Insider feed inside using the Vimeo player.

Have Fun!

- Eric Engleman and the Bloglines Team