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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8HnmpIFUPk]

No need for a Ticket Restro in the Google Paris Office where they work on YouTube and Chrome mostly.

Get in line behind us here.

Via Elgan
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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QG190LlSmrg]

Today Google started rolling out the calling feature that previously only allowed North American Gmail users to make phone calls to landlines and mobile phones to 38 new languages.

Last year, we made it possible for those of you in the U.S. to call any mobile phone or landline directly from Gmail and starting today, we are making this available to many more of you who use Gmail outside the U.S. by offering calling in 38 new languages.

Purchasing calling credit has also been made more accessible and can now be acquired in four currencies including U.S. dollars, Euros, Canadian dollars, and British Pounds. Also starting today, the feature will no longer include connection fees so you “only pay for the time you talk”.

In addition to the announcement, Google also confirmed they will be lowering rates in over 150 locations. You can check out a full list of rates on the Google calling rates page here.

The Gmail calling feature will start to roll out to in the new languages over the next few days. Keep an eye out for a small green phone icon in your chat list within your inbox.

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Google has updated Google Maps for Android to version 5.8, which sheds focus on Places. Users can now upload pictures of Places and add new Places that aren’t yet listed. Most interestingly, Maps now gives you the ability to favorite places in the My Places tab. Go ahead and grab it in the Market now.

What’s in this version:

1. Personalize Place pages by uploading pictures from your visit
2. Manage your starred and recently visited Places in the ‘My Places’ tab
3. See descriptive terms for Places in search results and Places pages
4. Add a new place to Places when checking in

If found in their data center’s servers, Google will now notify you if you have malware running on your computer when making a Google Search. Google announced the new feature today, and hopes to use their vast wealth of information to make this effective. Google explains:

Recently, we found some unusual search traffic while performing routine maintenance on one of our data centers. After collaborating with security engineers at several companies that were sending this modified traffic, we determined that the computers exhibiting this behavior were infected with a particular strain of malicious software, or “malware

Obliviously this won’t pick up every single piece of malware out there, but it’s a nice little addition to an already great search platform.

Google is now testing an experimental design on YouTube, called Cosmic Panda. The new design is not enabled by default, but you can use it today by enabling it in YouTube’s TestTube.

The design is totally new and focused on channels, playlists, and videos. Besides the obvious style change, other features include auto-refresh commenting, dark background on video pages, and much more. Give it a try yourself.

via The Next Web
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Google+ user Ufuk Kayserilioglu was able to use his Google Apps account in Google+ for a short time today — sorta. As he notes below, he was able to sign into Google+ with a Google Apps account with some accidental trickery.

I discovered it by accident: I was logged into Google+ with my Google Account and into my Google Apps account (on the Paralaus domain), as secondary, with multiple sign-on. For some reason Google decided to log me off all my Google accounts. At that point, I made the initial login with my Google Apps account and secondary with my Google Account. I was unaware that Google+ was open on another tab. I tried to reshare something publicly, and was confused that it was saying Paralaus where it should be saying Public. Picking that options told me that only “People on Paralaus can find and view” my post. It was then that I realized I was able to use Google+ with my Google Apps account in a hybrid mode where I was not fully logged in but some elements were available; almost as a preview. ;)

Our own Seth Weintraub would love to see this feature come to Google+, as I’m sure many of you would too. While this was just a ‘preview’, we do expect Google Apps support to come very soon.

via Google Operating System
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Mashable has learned that Google is planning to kill two of its biggest branded products and merge them into Google branded services in the next six weeks.

According to two sources familiar with the matter, Google intends to rename Picasa “Google Photos” and Blogger will become “Google Blogs.” Several other Google brands are likely to be affected, though our sources made it clear that YouTube would not be rebranded.

Mashable notes that the move isn’t without precedent – Grandcentral became Google Voice, Jotspot became Sites, etc. etc.

Blogger (co-founded by Evan Williams of Twitter) was acquired in 2003 and is one of the top 10 most visited websites in the world.  Picasa is also a very popular service acquired in 2004.

Both services will likely be tied in with Google’s new Plus Social Network.  It would be surprising to see Picnik survive as a separate product.   ‘Google Photo Editor’ anyone?

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At this point, it seems pretty obvious that Google means business with the Google Plus platform. Besides all of the other areas Plus has engulfed, it looks like Google is heading into the gaming realm.  The following code snippet was found in the web page code

“have sent you invites and more from Google+ Games”

So now Google is taking on Microsoft’s Xbox and Apple’s Gamecenter. Perhaps Google might want to lower the barrier to entry..
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Our invites came in and we’re up and running.  Here’s the initial reactions:

The first annoying thing is that Google hasn’t allowed Apps for Domains in yet.  They are “working on it”.  If you are like me and have your life in a Google Domain account this is a major pain.  I’m going to have to reconnect to everyone and they are going to have to put me in their circles all over again.  Bad start.

Once signed in, the interface is very “Facebook feeling” Google has found a lot of people who know me or are in my contacts so adding them to circles is easy.  Unfortunately my gmail.com account has a lot of people from school (when I used it last) and not a lot of the people I deal with on a day to day basis.

Friends seem to be coming in from way back in history – very Facebook like.

It will be interesting to see how Google keeps people coming in and more importantly coming back.

Because I can’t stay logged into this and my normal Apps Google account at the same time, it won’t get used very much.  I imagine there are a lot of power users in this exact same boat.  I wonder what Google’s plan for this is.  I’m hoping there is going to be a merge button at some point in the future.

Overall, I have to say that the product feels very good…like if all of my Facebook Friends came in, I’d probably leave Facebook immediately.  But how do I use both at the same time?

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Google I/O attendees can now cllaim their Samsung Series 5 Chromebooks. Interestingly, Google and Samsung are giving out the 3G models which retail for $500. Also interesting, they come via Amazon – you get a promo code to redeem at the end.  Start here once you get your code.

Yes, ours is on the way, you have a week to claim them!

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The folks at Fusible have been doing some sleuthing on the possibility of Google putting together a social network based on photos.  They found that Google has trademarked the name Photovine with the following under the following areas:

Goods and Services IC 009. US 021 023 026 036 038. G & S: Computer software
IC 038. US 100 101 104. G & S: Communication services, namely, transmission of visual images and data by telecommunications networks, wireless communication networks, the Internet, information services networks and data networks

IC 042. US 100 101. G & S: Non-downloadable computer software

IC 045. US 100 101. G & S: On-line social networking services

Additionally, a company who uses MarkMonitor to anonymously register domain names has bought photovine.com from a private holder.  Google is one of the companies that uses MarkMonitor.

Clearly that spells out a photo-sharing social network.

So, are Picasa/Picnik online services about to get more social under a new brand name?  All signs point to ‘yes’.

(Google Weddings, a mashup of similar Google services pictured above)
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One thing that keeps people on Excel is the ability to use Pivot tables.  Google today eliminated one more barrier to migrating to apps by implementing pivot tables today in Google Spreadsheets.

In essence, a pivot table does just that — it allows you to “pivot” or rotate data, thus looking at it from different angles and seeing a variety of patterns which may not be immediately obvious. Let’s take a very simple example of a list of students. This list includes a number of students and some information about them, including gender, class level, and major.

Updates to Spreadsheets are rolling out now.
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Over at Fortune, I profiled the the two new guys presenting at Google I/O on Android yesterday.  It turns out that Matt Hershensen and Joe Brit aren’t actually new (though they are new at Google) in the smartphone scene.  They actually founded Danger with Andy Rubin and were working at Microsoft (which bought Danger) less than a year ago.

At Google, they’ve been charged with starting up the Android hardware division which is putting together reference designs for the new accessory interfaces that will be built with the ADK.

Here’s their 2004 talk on founding Danger:

http://ecorner.stanford.edu/swf/player-ec.swf
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Google announced its second favicon change this year after having the same favicon for the past 8 years. Why is this so important?

Google Favicon, its most important 256 pixels

Google.com gets over 150 million hits a day. Every time someone visits Google in their search bar, they’ll see these pixels. This image also accompanies Google in your bookmarks and page history. Browsers that support a tabbed document interface typically show a page’s favicon next to the page’s title. The Microsoft Windows Shell also uses favicons to represent “Internet shortcuts” to web pages. If you save a Webpage to your iPhone, it will be represented by the favicon.

Google’s favicon is looked at millions of times every hour by Google’s customers all over the globe. You’d better believe those 256 pixels are important to Google and they’ve obviously spent some time thinking about it. Have you considered your most important 256 pixels?
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