Google seems to be in the news every day. Techmeme today has lots stories with Google or Android in the headline. It is nearly impossible for anyone to keep up with everything Google is doing, even for Google employees like me. Many times these stories are rumors, not official statements from the company. Other times they are stories about things we already knew about.
Google is innovating every day in so many areas it is truly amazing. And, most of what is going on isn't reported in the press until much later when it is officially announced. Reading the headlines today it struck me just how big and innovative Google really is. Here is a synopis of today's headlines, rumors, and official announcements.
Meet Cloud Picker, Google's stealthy new storage product - Techcrunch rumor, nothing official from the company.
Can we talk? Better speech technology with Phonetic Arts - From the official Google blog - We’ve recently made some strides with speech technologies and tools that take voice input: for example, we launched Voice Search, Voice Input and Voice Actions for mobile phones, allowing you to speak web searches, compose emails by voice, ask your phone to play any song, and more. And last year we started automatically transcribing speech to produce captions on YouTube videos. But what about when the computer speaks to you—in other words, voice output? There are already places you can hear this in action today—for example, Google Translate “speaks” translated text in multiple languages, and you can listen to navigation instructions as you drive—but there’s still a lot to do. That’s why we’re pleased to announce we’ve acquiredPhonetic Arts, a speech synthesis company based in Cambridge, England. Phonetic Arts’ team of researchers and engineers work at the cutting edge of speech synthesis, delivering technology that generates natural computer speech from small samples of recorded voice.
50 percent of smartphones sold in China last quarter run Android - All Things Digital story - "The smartphone market in China is growing at an extraordinary rate, largely thanks to Google’s Android OS. Chinese consumers purchased 8 to 10 million smartphones last quarter, up from an estimated 2 to 3 million in the same period last year. And according to Morgan Keegan analyst Tavis McCourt, the bulk of them ran Android."
Techcrunch story on Google's social plans - Rumor, nothing official from the company.
Google to buy New York City office building - Wall Street Journal article, no comment from Google - The story reports that Google has signed a contract to buy the 2.9 million square foot office building in NYC for close to $1.9B.
Google Maps & Label Readability - story by 41 Latitude about Google Maps design and ease of readability compared to other competitors.
Introducing Google Earth Engine - official announcement from Google. - Today, we launched a new Google Labs product called Google Earth Engine at theInternational Climate Change Conference in sunny Cancun, Mexico. Google Earth Engine is a new technology platform that puts an unprecedented amount of satellite imagery and data—current and historical—online for the first time. It enables global-scale monitoring and measurement of changes in the earth’s environment. The platform will enable scientists to use our extensive computing infrastructure—the Google “cloud”—to analyze this imagery.
US General Services Administration going Google - official announcement from Google - The U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) today announced its decision to move 17,000 employees and contractors to Google Apps for Government. GSA oversees the business of the U.S. federal government, providing real estate and building management services as well as acquisition and procurement assistance to other federal agencies.
Android OS 2.x upgrade picks up steam - Fortune/CNN article - tracks the growth of Android and adoption of new versions.
Google upgrades its cloud platform -ComputerWorld story on Google App Engine cloud platform reporting on an official announcement from Google.
Now available with Google Apps: Google Translator toolkit - official announcement from Google. Translator Toolkit is a web based translation editor that makes it easier and faster to translate documents.
It is daunting to try and stay on top of everything Google is doing. These are just the Techmeme headlines for today. Tomorrow there will be others. As a Google employee it is inspiring and humbling at the same time.
Google has over 2,000 job openings in lots of interesting areas. Read this post to learn more about the jobs and interview process.
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