The Fighting Irish: a Google Apps Education success story

We love hearing from schools using Google Apps Education Edition, especially when it's helped them save money, gain back time or make students happy. University of Notre Dame is a perfect example (PDF) of one school that's seen great results by "going Google" to help make on-campus communication and collaboration easier.

When this Indiana university migrated its 15,000 students and 150,000 alumni to Google Apps Education Edition about a year ago, they were hoping to improve their outdated email system. What they actually got was better than they expected: Not only were they able to improve student satisfaction by 36% according to a poll conducted on campus, but making the switch to Apps also enabled them to save over $1.5 million that they have since been able to reallocate to new IT services for students and faculty.

Sure, it's all good to hear this from us, but you'd probably like to hear it from them, right? Well now you can. We're hosting a free webinar with Notre Dame on Thursday, August 13th at 10 a.m. PDT where you can learn about their experience deploying Google Apps and find out if this solution might be right for you. Whether you go to school, went to school or run a school, we encourage you to consider life in the cloud. Who knows what results you might see?

Posted by Miriam Schneider, Google Apps for Education Team

A speedier, spiffier beta for Google Chrome

Since our last major update of Google Chrome in May, we've been hard at work improving some of its most used and loved features. Today, we're releasing a new beta for you to try. Not only is it speedier than ever, but we've also given the browser a little bit of design whimsy that we hope will bring some color and delight to your day.

This new beta is fitted with a customizable New Tab page, an improved Omnibox and a few basic themes that allow you to deck out your browser with colors, patterns and images. We've also built HTML5 capabilities into this release, as well as a few other nifty technical improvements that will help Google Chrome make the most of your network connection.


You can learn more on the Google Chrome Blog, or download the beta version of Google Chrome to give these new features a whirl. Being on the beta channel gives you a sneak preview of things to come with occasional rough edges, but it's a great way for us to quickly churn out new features and get your feedback.

Posted by Brian Rakowski, Product Manager, and Min Li Chan, Associate Product Marketing Manager, Google Chrome team

Innovation in video on the web

Today, video is an important part of many people's everyday activities on the Internet and a big part of many Google products.

Because we spend a lot of time working to make the overall web experience better for users, we think that video compression technology should be a part of the web platform. To that end, we're happy to announce today that we've signed a deal to acquire On2 Technologies, a leading creator of high-quality video compression technology.

The deal is still subject to approval by On2 Technologies' stockholders and review by relevant regulatory authorities, including the SEC, but we expect it to close in Q4.

Although we're not in a position to discuss specific product plans until after the deal closes, we are committed to innovation in video quality on the web, and we believe that On2 Technologies' team and technology will help us further that goal.

We'll update everybody when we're able to share more information. In the meantime, nothing will change for On2 Technologies' current and prospective customers.

Update on Feb 19, 2010: On2 has been acquired by Google.

Posted by Jeremy Doig, Engineering Director - Video, and Mike Jazayeri, Group Product Manager

Caution Concerning Forward-Looking Statements
This document includes certain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, including statements regarding the expected timing of the acquisition, Google’s and On2’s ability to close the acquisition, Google’s ability to integrate On2’s technology and employees, and the expected benefits of the acquisition, including that the acquisition will further Google’s goal to enhance the web experience with video. These statements are based on the current expectations or beliefs of managements of Google Inc. and On2 Technologies, Inc., and are subject to uncertainty and changes in circumstances. Actual results may vary materially from those expressed or implied by the statements herein due to (1) changes in economic, business, competitive, technological and/or regulatory factors, (2) failure to receive the required stockholder and regulatory approval for the acquisition, (3) failure to compete successfully in this highly competitive and rapidly changing marketplace, (4) failure to retain key employees, and (5) other factors affecting the operation of the respective businesses of Google and On2. More detailed information about these and other factors that may affect current expectations may be found in filings by Google or On2, as applicable, with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including their respective most recent Annual Report on Form 10-K and Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q. Google and On2 are under no obligation to, and expressly disclaim any such obligation to, update or alter their respective forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise.

Additional Information and Where to Find It
Google plans to file with the Securities and Exchange Commission a Registration Statement on Form S-4 in connection with the transaction, which will include a Proxy Statement of On2 that also constitutes a Prospectus of Google. On2 will mail the Proxy Statement/Prospectus to its stockholders in connection with the transaction. The Registration Statement and the Proxy Statement/Prospectus will contain important information about Google, On2, the transaction and related matters. Investors and security holders are urged to read the Registration Statement and the Proxy Statement/Prospectus carefully when they are available. Investors and security holders will be able to obtain free copies of the Registration Statement and the Proxy Statement/Prospectus and other documents filed with the SEC by Google and On2 through the web site maintained by the SEC at www.sec.gov and by contacting Google Investor Relations at 650-253-7663 or On2 Investor Relations at 518-881-4299. In addition, investors and security holders will be able to obtain free copies of the documents filed with the SEC on Google’s website at investor.google.com and on On2’s website at www.on2.com.

Participants in the Solicitation
Google, On2 and their respective directors and executive officers may be deemed to be participants in the solicitation of proxies in respect of the proposed transaction. Information regarding Google’s executive officers and directors is included in Google’s definitive proxy statement, which was filed with the SEC on March 24, 2009, and information regarding On2’s executive officers and directors is included in On2’s definitive proxy statement, which was filed with the SEC on April 7, 2009. The Proxy Statement / Prospectus for the proposed transaction will provide more information about participants in the solicitation of proxies from On2 stockholders, which participants may have interests different from On2 stockholders generally. You can obtain free copies of these documents from Google or On2 using the contact information above.

Leave the math to us: Advertisers increase their profits using Conversion Optimizer

This post is the latest in an ongoing series on The Power of Measurement. Previous topics have covered ways to make your website as successful as possible through tools such as Analytics and Website Optimizer. – Ed.

If you're an old-school AdWords advertiser, you may remember that you originally set bids based on ad impressions (cost-per-impression, or CPM). Later, AdWords transitioned to a new model where bids were set based on ad clicks (cost-per-click, or CPC). Now, as technology has become even more advanced, we’re seeing the next phase of search engine advertising.

What if we told you that you could bid for ads simply based on conversions? (A conversion is a goal set by an advertiser, such as a website visitor purchasing a product or filling out a form.) With Conversion Optimizer, Google does all the heavy lifting and complicated analysis, letting you bid simply based on how much a conversion is worth to your business (cost-per-acquisition, or CPA). By using Conversion Optimizer, advertisers are not only seeing an increase in profits but have more time to devote to the rest of their business.

We’re excited to announce that this AdWords transformation is well underway: advertisers are already using the Conversion Optimizer to manage approximately $1 billion in spend annually.* This new shift benefits two areas Google cares deeply about: showing our users the most relevant ads and helping our advertisers increase their profits.

So how does it work? Each and every time someone types in a search query, AdWords runs a new keyword auction. Advertisers who are still bidding on a cost-per-click basis will be using the same bid in many different auctions, so sometimes their bid may be too high or too low. However, for advertisers using Conversion Optimizer, we'll automatically adjust the bid for each of these auctions so that it can hit the sweet spot more often, helping the advertiser to make more money.

For example, suppose you're advertising an online shoe store and you purchase ads using the keyword "shoes." Because your clicks come from many different types of people who have different intentions, Conversion Optimizer takes many factors into account to optimize your ad performance. If you don't ship internationally, Conversion Optimizer will learn that clicks from international users don't convert and will eliminate traffic from outside the United States. It might also learn that when customers include the word "cheap" in their query, they are particularly likely to convert because your prices are very competitive. Essentially, Google does the detective work — you tell us how much a conversion is worth and our algorithms make it happen.

As more advertisers transition to Conversion Optimizer, we look forward to showing more relevant ads and, in doing so, helping our advertisers achieve better results. Learn more about Conversion Optimizer and get started using it with your AdWords campaigns.

* Annualized figures based on Q2 sales

Posted by Andrew Silverman, Product Manager, Conversion Optimizer

Audio care packages for service members with Google Voice

(From time to time we invite guests to blog about initiatives of interest and are pleased to have Sergeant Dale Sweetnam join us here. SGT Sweetnam is working with Google's communications team this year through the U.S. Army's "Training with Industry" Program. -Ed.)

It's not easy to stay in touch with friends and family when you're fighting in a country thousands of miles from home. I spent 13 months in Iraq as an Army journalist where I flew in Black Hawks over Balad and Baghdad working to generate news coverage about my fellow soldiers. The whole experience was physically and emotionally draining, but it was especially difficult when I called home at the end of the day and nobody was there to answer.

For servicemen and women who are constantly on the move, having a single number and an easy way to retrieve messages from loved ones can be invaluable. To help our service members communicate with their loved ones and show our support to those serving our country, Google is launching a new program. Starting today, any active U.S. service member with a .mil email address can sign up for a Google Voice account at www.google.com/militaryinvite and start using the free service within a day.

When you deploy, your life is put on hold. While you live and work in a different world, everyone else moves on with life back home. Your family and friends keep moving, and this sometimes means it's just not possible for them to stay awake until 2 a.m. to receive a phone call. Calling Iraq or Afghanistan is seldom an option.

Google Voice provides a solution to some of these problems. Service members can set up an account before they deploy. Or if they're already deployed, families can now set up an account for their service member. Loved ones can call to leave messages throughout the day, and then when that service member visits an Internet trailer, all the messages are right there. It's like a care package in audio form.

I signed up for an account when I came to Google, and it's already making communications much easier here in the States. I know when I return to combat, Google Voice will help make life a little more manageable.

Posted by U.S. Army SGT Dale Sweetnam, Army Fellow

Two views from the 2009 Google Faculty Summit

(Cross-posted from the Google Research Blog)

We held our fifth Computer Science Faculty Summit at our Mountain View campus last week. About 100 faculty attendees from schools in the Western hemisphere attended the summit, which focused on a collection of technologies that serve to connect and empower people. Included in the agenda were presentations on technologies for automated translation of human language, voice recognition, responding to crises, power monitoring and collaborative data management. We also talked about technologies to make personal systems more secure, and how to teach programming — even using Android phones. You can see a more complete list of the topics in the Faculty Summit Agenda or check out my introductory presentation for more information. 

I asked a few of the faculty to provide us their perspective on the summit, thinking their views may be more valuable than our own: Professor Deborah Estrin, a Professor of Computer Science at UCLA and an expert in large-scale sensing of environmental and other information, and Professor John Ousterhout, an expert in distributed operating systems and scripting languages.

Professor Estrin's perspective:

We all know that Google has produced a spectacular array of technologies and services that has changed the way we create, access, manage, share and curate information. A very broad range of people samples and experiences Google’s enhancements and new services on a daily basis. I, of course, am one of those minions, but last week I had the special opportunity to get a glimpse inside the hive while attending the 2009 Google Faculty Summit. I still haven't processed all of the impressions, facts, figures and URLs that I jotted down over the packed day and a half-long gathering, but here are a few of the things that impressed me most:

• The way Google simultaneously launches production services while making great advances in really hard technical areas such as machine translation and voice search, and how these two threads are fully intertwined and feed off of one another.
• Their embrace of open source activities, particularly in the Android operating system and programming environment for mobiles. They also seed and sponsor all sorts of creative works, from K-12 computer science learning opportunities to an the open data kit that supports data-gathering projects worldwide. 
• The company’s commitment to thinking big and supporting their employees in acting on their concerns and cares in the larger geopolitical sphere. From the creation of Flu Trends to the support of a new "Crisis Response Hackathon" (an event that Google, Microsoft and Yahoo are planning to jointly sponsor to help programmers find opportunities to use their technical skills to solve societal problems), Googlers are not just encouraged to donate dollars to important causes — they are encouraged to use their technical skills to create new solutions and tools to address the world's all-too-many challenges.

This was my second Google Faculty Summit — I previously attended in 2007. I was impressed by the 2007 Summit, but not as deeply as I was this year. Among other things, this year I felt that Googlers talked to us like colleagues instead of just visitors. The conversations flowed: Not once did I run up across the "Sorry, can't talk about that... you know our policy on early announcements". I left quite excited about Google's expanded role in the CS research ecosystem. Thanks for changing that API!

Professor Ousterhout's perspective:

I spent Thursday and Friday this week at Google for their annual Faculty Summit. After listening to descriptions of several Google projects and talking with Googlers and the other faculty attendees, I left with two overall takeaways. First, it's becoming clear that information at scale is changing science and engineering. If you have access to enormous datasets, it opens up whole new avenues for scientific discovery and for solving problems. For example, Google's machine translation tools take advantage of "parallel texts": documents that have been translated by humans from one language to another, with both forms available. By comparing the sentences from enormous numbers of parallel texts, machine translation tools can develop effective translation tools using simple probabilistic approaches. The results are better than any previous attempts at computerized translation, but only if there are billions of words available in parallel texts. Another example of using large-scale information is Flu Trends, which tracks the spread of flu by counting the frequency of certain search terms in Google's search engine; the data is surprisingly accurate and available more quickly than that from traditional approaches.

My second takeaway is that it's crucial to keep as much information as possible publicly available. It used to be that much of science and engineering was driven by technology: whoever had the biggest particle accelerator or the fastest computer had an advantage. From now on, information will be just as important as technology: whoever has access to the most information will make the most discoveries and create the most exciting new products. If we want to maintain the leadership position of the U.S., we must find ways to make as much information as possible freely available. There will always be vested commercial interests that want to restrict access to information, but we must fight these interests. The overall benefit to society of publishing information outweighs the benefit to individual companies from restricting it.

Posted by Alfred Spector, Vice President of Research and Special Initiatives

"Going Google" with Google Apps

Every morning, millions of people wake up to a very refreshing experience at work. They don't see "mailbox is full" errors in their email. They don't worry about backing up their data. They can get to any file they need from any computer, anywhere with Internet access and a browser. They can all access and edit the same documents and spreadsheets at the same time as their colleagues. They use Gmail and Google Calendar at work as fluidly and easily as they use their personal Gmail accounts. They video, voice and text chat with their peers globally as naturally as they send email.

The IT people at these companies and organizations don't waste time or money buying, installing or managing email servers. They focus on the smart, innovative stuff they want to work on, because they never have to bother with expensive and painful software upgrades, hardware compatibility issues or managing data centers. They have left many IT frustrations and costs behind and moved on to something better.

Here at Google, we have a term for the moment a company realizes there's a better way and goes for it: "going Google." Over 1.75 million businesses, schools and organizations have gone Google — including Motorola, University of Notre Dame, the Mercy Corps and many more — and each day, 3,000 more organizations join them. We want every organization to understand the benefits of going Google, so today we're telling the story in a new way. We're kicking off a series of outdoor billboards in four cities — Boston, Chicago, New York and San Francisco — that will change every weekday for the next four weeks. The billboards tell the story of an anonymous IT manager who gets so fed up with the typical IT status quo that his company eventually — you guessed it — goes Google. Here's a preview:



Visit www.google.com/appsatwork to get more information about the benefits of going Google. Already gone Google? Tweet your story and check out our tools to help spread the word.

Posted by Andy Berndt, Managing Director, Google Creative Lab