Archive for November 12th, 2009
How do you like free things? How do you like fabulous bits of furniture? How much do think people would enjoy a free stool exhibit? That being an installation art exhibit where people are allowed to take the exhibit home with them? That’s what’s happening right now until early next year at the Landes Gallery with Thomas Feichtner’s “Linz Hocker” stool! Pick one up!
The installation is more than one thousand stools all sitting in a big super-organized room. You may enter the exhibition and take one stool. As the exhibition goes on, and once the exhibition is complete, and for many many years beyond the exhibition, the show will go on! These stools will circulate basically forever or until the end of the world. How fun is that?
The stool itself is one made in blatant disregard for the rules of minimalism and functionalism. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t work. It means it feels at home at an art exhibit.
Designer: Thomas Feichtner
Did you know you can immediately discover movie times and locations by typing a simple search on Google? For example, search for [where the wild things are] and you’ll see times and places to watch the film, or try [glendale 18 los angeles] to see movies playing at your local theater. You can also click on the showtimes search result to get more complete movie listings and information.
Today, we’re making a few improvements to movie results on Google, including more detailed movie pages, genre filters and a new map view.
Click “showtimes” in your search results for more detailed information.
When you visit google.com/movies, you’ll discover a new, more comprehensive resource with all the information you need to decide what movie to see and where to see it:
- Comprehensive movie pages: Deciding what movie to see can take a few searches: What’s it about? How are the reviews? Where is it playing near me? Our new detailed layout brings together all the basic information you need with a plot synopsis, trailer, reviews and photos in the same page.
- Genre filters: The new movie pages also give you new ways to explore films by genre and find one you’re in the mood for. Sometimes, you might feel like seeing a sci-fi flick or a romance, but you’re not sure what’s out in theaters. With genre filters you can start browsing right away and quickly find the right movie for you.
- Map view: After you’ve chosen a movie, the new map view shows you nearby theaters playing that exact film. You no longer need to do a separate search to find out where you’re going.
We hope these improvements will help you spend more time at the movies and less time researching. Visit google.com/movies or click through a “showtimes” result to try them out, and treat yourself to a movie!
Posted by Dan Stokeley, Associate Product Manager
Googlers Lorenzo Colitti and Erik Kline have received the ITOJUN Service Award while attending the 76th Internet Engineering Task Force meeting in Hiroshima, Japan.
The Itojun Service Award honors the memory of Dr. Jun-ichiro “itojun” Hagino, who passed away in 2007 at the age of 37. The friends of itojun and the Internet Society (ISOC) came together to establish this award last year. The award recognizes and commemorates the extraordinary dedication exercised by itojun over the course of IPv6 development.
Lorenzo and Erik have been the spark plugs and workhorses of Google’s implementation of the IPv6 protocol that will help to carry the Internet beyond the anticipated exhaustion of the IPv4 address space in mid-2011. The two undertook, at their own initiative, to analyze the requirements and begin implementation of IPv6 throughout our networking infrastructure. Their leadership has placed us in the forward ranks of companies prepared for this important expansion. They are role models for others around the world, in the spirit of Itojun Hagino who was, himself, a model leader in this domain.
We’re all proud to be associated with Lorenzo, Erik and the others at Google who recognized this challenge and took it head on.
Posted by Vint Cerf, Chief Internet Evangelist
Today is Veterans Day, the annual U.S. holiday honoring military veterans who have served our country in the armed forces. It is also celebrated as Armistice Day or Remembrance Day in other parts of the world, falling on November 11, the anniversary of the signing of the Armistice that ended World War I in 1918. We want to take a moment to highlight a few things we’re doing at Google to reflect on the service of our veterans.
YouTube has become an important platform for current service members as well as veterans who want to share their stories. Starting today, you can visit www.youtube.com/veterans to hear from these brave men and women. In addition, on the homepage, YouTube is featuring content from some institutions and organizations that have provided much-needed support to veterans. You can read more about how YouTube is recognizing Veterans Day on the YouTube Blog.
We also launched a Google Voice partnership with Blue Star Families, a group of military spouses who work hard to educate civilian communities and leaders about the hardships faced by military families. We’re giving priority Google Voice invites to U.S. members of Blue Star Families to help bring them closer to their loved ones during deployments.
Finally, we’re commemorating Veterans Day in Google offices around the country with an event hosted by the Google Veterans Network, our employee group dedicated to veterans’ issues. The highlight of the event is a fireside chat with Google veterans discussing the values associated with military service, issues they face at Google and in the world in general, their hopes to end conflicts, similar groups at other companies and the company’s efforts to support our Googler service women and men.
We hope to make this Veterans Day a memorable one and we want to thank everyone in the armed forces for their service.
Posted by Carrie Laureno, Learning & Development Manager and Founder, Google VetNet
When we first launched public data on Google.com, we wanted to make statistics easier to find and to encourage debate based on facts rather than intuition. The day after we launched, a friend who worked at the World Bank called me, her voice filled with enthusiasm, “Did you know that the World Bank also just released an API for their data?” Excited, I checked it out, and found an amazing treasure trove of statistics for most economies in the world. After some hard work and analysis, today we’re happy to announce that 17 World Development Indicators (list below*) are now conveniently available to you in Google search.
With today’s update, you can quickly access more data with a broad range of queries. Search should be intuitive, so we’ve done the work to think through queries where public data will be most relevant to you. To see the new data, try queries like [gdp of indonesia], [life expectancy brazil], [rwanda's population growth], [energy use of iceland], [co2 emissions of iceland] and [gdp growth rate argentina]. For example, if you search for [internet users in the united states], you will see the following chart at the top of the results page:
Clicking on the result will bring you to an interactive chart where you can compare the United States with other regions around the world. We’ve also added a new feature to enable you to embed these charts in your own website or blog by clicking on the “Link” button in the upper right-hand corner of the chart page. You have the option to either embed the chart with static data, or you can also set the chart to update dynamically when new data becomes available. To give you a sense of what these charts look like, we’ve embedded the chart below comparing Internet users in the United States and South Korea:
We hope this new data and our new embedding feature will help facilitate quick and easy access to public statistics. There are still many other data sets and sources out there, and we’re excited about the possibilities for the future. If you’re a data publisher interested in making your data more easily discoverable in Google, please contact us.
* Complete list of World Bank indicators currently available: CO2 emissions per capita, Electricity consumption per capita, Energy use per capita, Exports as percentage of GDP, Fertility rate, GDP deflator change, GDP growth rate, GNI per capita in PPP dollars, Gross Domestic Product, Gross National Income in PPP dollars, Imports as percentage of GDP, Internet users as percentage of population, Life expectancy, Military expenditure as percentage of GDP, Mortality rate, under 5, Population, and Population growth rate.
Update at 11:26am: We’ve updated this post to include a better example.
Posted by Chung Wu, Software Engineer
