Google keeps up with his strategy to amaze ourselves constantly. Google Voice is a very interesting project that will allow you to receive all of your calls and messages in one number, and apply special rules whenever you receive these phone calls or messages.
Not convinced yet? There is more:
Integration with Gmail contacts and phones.
Recording conversations.
Manage and listen your voice mails. Including forwarding voice mails to other users.
Forward calls or messages to other six phones.
Text and phone calls within the US completely free.
Conference calls up to four members per conference.
You can set up rules to route each call to a specific number. For example, customers call -> automatically routed to my business phone; daughters call -> rings every phone; wife calling -> blocked
Google Voice can even transcript voice mail via e-mail. Yeap, that is right, you dont have time to listen your voice mails? Google Voice can send it that message as an e-mail with 90% accuracy in the transcript.
Service cost? Completely Free.
Availability? Currently available only for GrandCentral customers. But it is expected an official Google statement about general availability of this service.
Even though we dont have any confirmation about the release of this new feature, get ready because I am sure it is going to change the way you communicate.
A new tool is available for Google Apps Premier users, the sync plug-in for Microsoft Outlook. But you read it right, it’s only available for Google Apps Premier or Education accounts, the Standard and free account will have to wait (or not) to receive this tool, or you can try the Premier version for free.
Still this is a great advance for Google, the Google Apps platform had a great impact in users and enterprises; but the Outlook compatibility was one of the most requested features considering the awful performance given by IMAP and the not so convenient POP3 configurations. This plug-in will keep in sync your mail, contacts and calendar with your Microsoft Outlook in a very transparent way.
Here’s a short demo:
Some of the features:
For e-mail the plug-in uses the Offline Gmail Protocol. Avoiding the unconfortability and low performance from IMAP.
Free/Busy lookup and Global Address List functionality, which makes it easy to schedule meetings with your colleagues, regardless of whether they use Outlook’s calendar or Google Calendar.
A simple data migration tool which allows users to easily copy existing data from Exchange or Outlook into Google Apps.
There has been a lot of talk recently about Bing and what amounts of traffic and growth it has been seeing. Other blogs such as the Inquisitr have been talking about how Bing has been bringing in more traffic than Yahoo. I just wanted to run through my first impressions of Bing and the results they have sent to Crenk.
Bing is very much the same as Live.com and I really think this is a marketing ploy from Microsoft than any major changes. The search engine still delivers poor results in comparison to Google and Yahoo. However, they are now adding channel specific search engines. For example if im looking for flights Bing works this out and then delivers me to the flight specific search engine within Bing. Thus, doing search this way provides more specific advertising opportunities and deliverys more detailed results that Google just cant compete with.
With regards to results from Bing to Crenk it has been very minimal. Bing has sent Crenk 171 pageviews, while Yahoo sent 1,629 and Google 60,195 in the same period. Thus, Bing has a huge amount of work to do to bring itself up to where it needs to be.
Inside Google Code the company shares multiple applications and projects for all those interested. And for those webmasters also has very interesting tools, like Page Speed that I’m sure that you are going to find it quite useful.
Page Speed is an Firefox add-on that uses Firebug that runs several tests to measure performance on your site. Using several tests this particular scan gets the most important information from your front-end code and gives you all the hints necessary to improve the performance, having also different type of recommendations that can help you be more proactive on improving your site.
Resources for this tool, you’ll find plenty, “Using Page Speed” and even “Page Speed Community“. The Google Code it’s a great iniciative, Google shares a lot of code that is released completely as open source and you use it and modified it as you please. Cheers to that.
Google Labs has a new toy for us to play around: Google Squared. This lab it is focused on giving you, with the same results that you can find on a regular Google Search, an enhanced layout and data presentation. The results are shown in a spread sheet form with related fields to your search that can help you to receive the information that you are looking for in a quicker manner.
Let’s try it: I’ll use a simple search “mountains“. Here’s the result:
Pretty nice. On the “Description” field I can find (bold text) the name of common mounts and mountains around the planet, the “Image” section with an accurate image for each result. And here’s the catch, each search will have related fields shown in the sheet; for our case: “Height“, “Location” and “First Ascent“. Another cool thing, you can add columns to be introduced to your search.
Of course this new type of search takes about one or two seconds more than a regular Google Search, and since it is part of Google Labs, it is completely experimental for now; so you shouldn’t expect that this one could replace your common searchs.
Bing is the new search engine by Microsoft which was due to launch on the 3rd of June, but for some reason it has launched today!
After using the service for the last ten minutes or so there seems to be do real major difference between Live.com and Bing.com. Search results are still terrible and it is really only the interface that has improved and only slightly.
I cant see Bing in its current form taking any search share from Google. In fact I think in its current form it is probably going to do the opposite and give Google more share of the market. Im amazed that Microsoft cant get a good search algorhythm and that Google are just so far ahead in actually providing quality results.
Microsoft really seems to just lack originality when it comes to search and the majority of their online products. MSN has never really done too much, Windows media player is completely outdated and hotmail needs a revamp but never seems to change much, now bing is the search engine that couldnt.
It would be great to hear your thoughts on the new Bing search engine. The best example of the results is that I searched ‘Crenk’ and the our own website came up 9th! Terrible!
It’s likely that a lot of us have moved towards cloud computing for storage of our files.
Documents, spreadsheets, powerpoint presentations, a lot of these creations are now held in applications like Google Documents, Zoho Writer, or even placed in an application like Drop Box. This transition has left a great many of our thumb drives collecting dust on our desks, or lost in a drawer.
Portable Apps is just one way to bring life to your thumb drive, especially if you like your applications set up a certain way and you’re moving from computer to computer throughout your day. Portable Apps allows you to bring applications such as video viewers, word applications, browsers set up to your liking with your bookmarks, games, and other productivity applications that you may want to carry with you as opposed to having to start from the ground up as you change computers.
Portable virus scanners, portable zip applications, portable image editing software, and even portable coding applications allow a user to increase their productivity as a professional without the fear of downloading software onto another computer, especially if it’s forbidden in areas such as your work computer or a library setting.
Portable Apps promotes itself as “Convenient, Open, and Free.” Your entire life can be portable and your experience can remain the same no matter what computer you are on. Give it a try, dust those thumb drives off and never worry if a computer has the applications you need or if there is a compatibility issue.
Google’s I/O conference it’s just around the corner, this developers gathering will be held in San Francisco, Moscoe Center, within the next few days May 27 – 28.
There are over 100 speakers announced officially (of course the disclaimer of “subject to change” is present as always), that represents many companies (around 80% are Google’s, of course) like Apple, IBM, Mozilla, Facebook, MySpace, Yahoo and many many others.
The main topics will be AJAX, APIs & Tools, Chrome, Google Web Toolkit, Geo and Mobile. To check on the complete schedule check this link.
If you check the confirmed conferences so far, some that could caught your attention: “Mastering the Android Media Framework”, “Google Friend” topics, “Developing Extensions for Google Chrome”, V8 JavaScript Engine, Eyes-Free interaction with Android, Cloud services and Google.
Here’s a small intro for Ryan Barret’s conference “Transactions Across Datacenters”.
Ticket’s pricing? $400. More than interesting if you ask me.
Hope that we can read a lot of feedback from these conferences, since last year’s event showed us one of the first demonstrations of Google’s Android mobile phone OS.
I have attached a new video that Google has released in which Larry Page and Eric Schmidt talk about Google and moving forward. Towards the end of the discussion Sir Richard Branson also joins in. Enjoy!
Google.org continues working around their mindset “aspires to use the power of information and technology to address the global challenges of our age”. This time presenting PowerMeter, software to measure and control the electricity you are using/consuming at your place.
Today’s technology demands “green compliance”. Starting with hardware and green labels, including thousands of reports to achieve a green datacenter (mainly pushing virtualization technologies). You’ll see that most of the capacity planning tools offered considers as an important variable the power consumption of your datacenter.
Check this short video (1min 10s):
“Unfortunately, many of today’s smart meters don’t display information to the consumer. We consider this unacceptable. We believe that detailed data on your personal energy use belongs to you and should be available in a standard, non-proprietary format.”
It’s a good idea, but of course, this project will need (and already has a few) several partners to deploy the utility among the users.
Any little step towards a green environment, like having a small gadget showing you the power consumption, always sounds like a great idea. Cheers to that.
For the last few days I have been seeing a lot of new reports about Google’s new Chrome ad in Japan. Im not really sure why this is now big news, because this ad has been running since January! If you want to read more about the ad then head to Techcrunch, Mashable and Startupmeme.
Admob – AdMob is the world’s largest mobile advertising marketplace, offering solutions for discovery, branding and monetization on the mobile web. Mobile devices are a critical media platform and we are building the tools to let every business on earth leverage mobile.
Jumptap – Jumptap leverages its mobile search technology and operator relationships to deliver advanced targeting intelligence for advertisers seeking the highest return on their ad spend. Our network of premium mobile sites combines high quality content with targeted advertising to create an experience that appeals to the mobile consumer.
Google Adsense – Google Adsense has to be the world most well known and popular advertising networks for publishers. Google offers their Adsense solution now for mobile devices. The ads are majority CPC but have also some limited CPM campaigns.
Third Screen Media – Third Screen Media is Platform-A’s mobile ad-serving platform and network that enables advertising on mobile devices. Its mobile solutions link advertisers, publishers and carriers on a common platform to buy and sell mobile advertising. Offering one of the world’s most-respected mobile advertising networks, Third Screen Media offers best-in-class content, including AOL’s popular consumer brands and mobile applications; the largest availability of carrier on-deck mobile inventory; and a mobile network of more than 70 premium publishers representing 100+ sites.
A new tool is available for 
Inside 
Google Labs
Google’s I/O
