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Posted by Jonathan J. Rosenberg, Senior
VP, Product Management

We live in a world focused on celebrity, but there are also
luminaries — those guiding lights who actually inspire celebrities
along with the rest of us. Today there's a luminary we'd
like to call out: href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Lehrer" id="p_iz" >Tom
Lehrer. It hasn't escaped our attention that Mr. Lehrer
turned 80 last week. (We have it on good authority that his view of
numbers is such that 80 is not so different than 79, so he probably
won't mind this belated note.) We think he's great.
We're fans.

Mr. Lehrer is the Harvard mathematician turned parodist
songwriter-performer whose sense of humor, intelligence and rhythm
created a cult following that, weirdly enough, anticipated a lot of
what Google's culture tries to be about. His work is clever,
playful and fun and connects things in ways that surprises,
delights and inspires. (Consider href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WNfx0FO4hzs"
id="zs_0" >"The Element Song", his ode to the periodic
table, or his lesson on href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a81YvrV7Vv8"
id="zp:h" >"New Math".) How could we not be inspired
by someone who can craft a good laugh, a great tune, and an elegant
equation?

From href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TytGOeiW0aE"
id="h9_z" >"The Masochism Tango" to

href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FgMTAj4f_o"
id="djxr" >"Who's Next" to

href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zz-DHBiYnrc"
id="cjub" >"Poisoning Pigeons in the Park" (trust us,
you have to hear it), Mr. Lehrer's unique music carved out a
distinctive place in popular music in the 1950s and '60s. He
made his fans feel smart. An entrepreneur — and we like
entrepreneurs — he self-produced and sold his songs via mail
order. And for all the edginess in his humor, he ended up writing
some ten clever songs for the '70s public television
children's program The Electric Company, including
a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6gjvAYDZ6M" id="wdnx" >tune
about the letter 'e.'

Although Wikipedia notes that he performed only 109 shows and wrote
just 37 songs over 20 years, we think his impact and influence goes
well beyond those numbers. He was the best kind of "geek"
before the word made its way into pop culture. He's the kind of
character as comfortable teaching a university course on the
history of the musical — which he did — as running a seminar on
the nature of mathematics — which he did.

We hope that in retirement Mr. Lehrer is enjoying himself even a
fraction as much as we've enjoyed his work. We're grateful
that he's such a great example of how science, humor, music and
mathematics can be combined to create such wonderful things.

href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/blogspot/MKuf?a=RfqcD3G" > border="0" />

height="1" width="1" />

Tags: , Jonathan, ManagementWe, Posted, product, Rosenberg, Senior, VP

Posted by Jonathan J. Rosenberg, Senior
VP, Product Management

We live in a world focused on celebrity, but there are also
luminaries — those guiding lights who actually inspire celebrities
along with the rest of us. Today there's a luminary we'd
like to call out: href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Lehrer" id="p_iz" >Tom
Lehrer. It hasn't escaped our attention that Mr. Lehrer
turned 80 last week. (We have it on good authority that his view of
numbers is such that 80 is not so different than 79, so he probably
won't mind this belated note.) We think he's great.
We're fans.

Mr. Lehrer is the Harvard mathematician turned parodist
songwriter-performer whose sense of humor, intelligence and rhythm
created a cult following that, weirdly enough, anticipated a lot of
what Google's culture tries to be about. His work is clever,
playful and fun and connects things in ways that surprises,
delights and inspires. (Consider href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WNfx0FO4hzs"
id="zs_0" >"The Element Song", his ode to the periodic
table, or his lesson on href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a81YvrV7Vv8"
id="zp:h" >"New Math".) How could we not be inspired
by someone who can craft a good laugh, a great tune, and an elegant
equation?

From href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TytGOeiW0aE"
id="h9_z" >"The Masochism Tango" to

href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FgMTAj4f_o"
id="djxr" >"Who's Next" to

href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zz-DHBiYnrc"
id="cjub" >"Poisoning Pigeons in the Park" (trust us,
you have to hear it), Mr. Lehrer's unique music carved out a
distinctive place in popular music in the 1950s and '60s. He
made his fans feel smart. An entrepreneur — and we like
entrepreneurs — he self-produced and sold his songs via mail
order. And for all the edginess in his humor, he ended up writing
some ten clever songs for the '70s public television
children's program The Electric Company, including
a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6gjvAYDZ6M" id="wdnx" >tune
about the letter 'e.'

Although Wikipedia notes that he performed only 109 shows and wrote
just 37 songs over 20 years, we think his impact and influence goes
well beyond those numbers. He was the best kind of "geek"
before the word made its way into pop culture. He's the kind of
character as comfortable teaching a university course on the
history of the musical — which he did — as running a seminar on
the nature of mathematics — which he did.

We hope that in retirement Mr. Lehrer is enjoying himself even a
fraction as much as we've enjoyed his work. We're grateful
that he's such a great example of how science, humor, music and
mathematics can be combined to create such wonderful things.

href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/blogspot/MKuf?a=RfqcD3G" > border="0" />

height="1" width="1" />

Tags: , Jonathan, ManagementWe, Posted, product, Rosenberg, Senior, VP

Posted by Jonathan Rosenberg, Senior
VP, Product Management

This week Israel observed href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yom_Hashoah" id="u3.v" >Yom
HaShoah, the Holocaust Remembrance Day, a holiday inaugurated
in 1959 to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust. This is an
especially important day to id="omu9" >Yad Vashem, the Jerusalem-based
center for remembering the Holocaust's victims and survivors. I
was fortunate to tour Yad Vashem's href="http://www1.yadvashem.org/new_museum/overview.html" id="gc22"
>New Museum with my family last summer, and
was moved and inspired by the experience. Our guide told us an
anecdote about a visitor, a survivor of the camps, who recognized
an item in one exhibit and was able to explain its context to
museum curators and fellow visitors. This is why Yad Vashem is so
important: it's a place that preserves the horrible history of
the Holocaust and puts it in context for all of us.

But a lot of people, including many survivors, aren't able to
visit Yad Vashem. How can they discover and share stories? How can
they see an artifact or a photo and say, I recognize that item or
person because I was there? The answer, of course, is the
Internet.

We're proud to report that Yad Vashem has just launched two new
YouTube channels, href="http://www.google.com/url?sa=D&q=http://www.youtube.com/user/YadVashem"
id="gh7u23" >one in English, the href="http://www.google.com/url?sa=D&q=http://www.youtube.com/user/yadvashemarabic"
id="gh7u24" >other in Arabic. They feature
testimonies from Holocaust survivors, historians' lectures on
key issues related to the Holocaust, and footage of events big and
small ( id="o1kw" >Pope John Paul
II's visit in 2000, a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ucu94QAi4dA" id="f3-o"
>touching family reunion). More
importantly, they are a way for Yad Vashem to surpass its physical
boundaries and reach out to an audience worldwide. This is the
promise the Internet holds: to inform and connect the globe, to
remember stories, to teach us. As href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elie_Wiesel" id="gh7u17"
>Elie Wiesel said in href="http://www.google.com/url?sa=D&q=http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=D_kuKXRLEnY"
id="gh7u18" >his speech at the opening of the
museum: "If we decided to tell the tale, it is because we
wanted the world to be a better world, just a better world, and
learn and remember."

href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/blogspot/MKuf?a=owTaBH" > border="0" />

height="1" width="1" />

Tags: , Jonathan, ManagementThis, Posted, product, Rosenberg, Senior, VP

Posted by Jonathan Rochelle & Nir
Bar-Lev, Product Managers

Whenever we're asked "how do people use Google
spreadsheets?", we always struggle with where to start.
It's not that we can't think of examples, it's just
that the examples are all so different, so unique. Sure, there are
definitely favorite themes — sports, finance and, yes, href="http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=psOu1MxOSLMOrN6GBsmAUGA"
id="ocpt" >knitting — but then the examples
become so particular to the people and groups who are using them:
The href="http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pD0NlEE-rv7zcUYxvGlpHOA"
id="b2tt" >beer taster's results.
The nursery school class schedule. The href="http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=poRB3Tn-uVkEIuh4pU-OpAg&gid=4"
id="d2b7" >biker's riding
log. The family reunion plan. The ski-trip sign-up form.
Endless examples, all of which, to spreadsheet junkies like us, are
interesting.

But while we've always wanted to give people more options to
view and use their information in Google Docs, we knew that trying
to build all of these one at a time would simply serve too few
people, given all the different ways people use and share
spreadsheets.

So today we're starting a new path to better enable developers
to customize and build on top of Google Docs with two new tools we
are releasing today: Gadgets-in-Docs and the href="http://code.google.com/apis/visualization" id="w:te"
>Visualization API.

Instead of delivering just one or two new types of reports, or a
new visual map mashup (can you ever get enough of those?), we
decided to deliver a platform on which anyone, not just Google,
could build the next best thing. We even invited a few developers
to try this with us, and they join us in this launch by featuring
just a few of their creations, like Panorama's pivot table, or
Viewpath's Gantt Chart, or InfoSoft's Funnel Charts — all
great tools for the student and enterprise user alike. We also
built a few early gadgets ourselves which you might find
useful.

onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"
href="http://bp3.blogger.com/_Ap14FtNN91w/R-EuT1hR4XI/AAAAAAAAA3s/dvIu-gDrqBQ/s1600-h/Gadgets_spreadsheets.gif" >
alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5179471964771836274"
border="0" />

We borrowed the Gadgets-in-Docs concept from the iGoogle team, so
it's only fitting that you can also publish your spreadsheet
gadgets to iGoogle, where you can see your data-based-Gadget right
next to all that other stuff that's important to you (even if
it is just a picture of your dog).

To try it out, go into >Google Docs and open up a spreadsheet.
Click on the chart icon, and click 'Gadget…'. Pick your
gadget, customize it to fit your data, and then publish it out to
iGoogle or to any webpage.

If you're a developer and want to reach millions of people with
your latest creation, check out the href="http://code.google.com/apis/visualization/" >Google
Visualization API, courtesy of our visualization team
engineers. The Visualization API provides a platform that can be
used to create, share and reuse visualizations written by the
developer community. It provides a common way (an API) to access
structured data sources, the first being Google spreadsheets.

Tags: , Bar, Jonathan, Lev, Nir, Posted, product, Rochelle

Posted by Jonathan Matus, Product
Marketing Manager

A few years ago, my younger brother won a car in a raffle. He
wanted to share this good news with the entire family, so he
decided to keep it a secret until we were all together at
dinnertime. But good news is hard to keep; he couldn't wait,
and by lunchtime we all knew about our new car. And now we have
some exciting news of our own that we just can't contain any
longer.

Many of you explored href="http://labs.google.com/" id="poor" >Google Labs and
discovered a local business info service that's totally free.
It's called GOOG-411 and it helps callers find and connect with
local businesses just by dialing 1-800-GOOG-411. It's a
voice-based local search service, which means it uses
speech-recognition algorithms to recognize what a caller is saying
and then finds the local business information he or she is looking
for. These algorithms had to be trained with real utterances, much
like how a baby learns language by listening to its parents. Since
its unveiling in April, GOOG-411 has successfully served millions
of callers. And we owe a big thanks to everyone who took our speech
recognition algorithms from infancy to adulthood!

People have been spreading the word about GOOG-411 to their friends
and families. And now we're happy to report that our local
business info service has officially graduated from Labs. To mark
the occasion, we're celebrating with a href="http://www.google.com/goog411/index.html" >brand new
website that includes this fun video:

When you watch the video, pay extra attention to the people you
meet at the end. One of them is the real voice behind GOOG-411.
Think you can guess who it is? When you call 1-800-GOOG-411, listen
closely and see if you can identify which team member shown in the
video is the voice. Then, post your answer as a comment on href="http://youtube.com/watch?v=cN0q8SvlQAk" >our YouTube
page. height="1" width="1" />

Tags: , few, Jonathan, manager, Marketing, Matus, Posted, product

Posted by Jonathan Rochelle, Product
Manager

Many of you must be wondering, “Whatever happened to 2Web
Technologies?" Um - no? Anybody? Well, if you're
wondering, we joined Google's New York City office last year to
come up with a solution to a problem we understood all too well:
how to quickly and easily share information in real time.
Spreadsheets were a clear target. They can have real power, but
there are equally real drawbacks to collaborating and sharing them.
This fact led our little team to explore making spreadsheet
software, and the spreadsheets themselves, available on the web.
And now, Google Spreadsheets is available as a limited test on href="http://labs.google.com" >Google Labs. Even when it was
only partly developed, we used Google Spreadsheets (alpha!) to
manage our task lists, our feature lists, our bandwidth estimates,
our storage estimates, even our complex team event voting ;). We
now know the true meaning of "share."

Now when I say “share,” I don’t mean “send group email,” and I
certainly don't mean "time-share". (That’s actually
the root of the problem we are trying to solve: multiple
out-of-sync versions that are email attachments.) I do mean “use and update the same
spreadsheet.” When I use Google Spreadsheets to organize events
with the other parents at my kids' school, we’ll be looking at
the same details at the same time. If I change the agenda of next
Friday’s teacher’s meeting, the other parents will see that change
immediately. When my brother-in-law’s bike club uses Google
Spreadsheets to track rides, they’ll be in sync — and if I change
the time of next week's ride, the other riders may actually
show up.

So don’t be surprised if you are soon invited by someone to share a
spreadsheet. (We're rolling this out as a href="http://www.google.com/googlespreadsheets/try_out.html" >limited
test.) Your kid's sports coach, your aunt in Omaha trying
to organize a major family reunion, your friend who promised to
compile a list of all your favorite hiking trails (and now wants
you to help), or your project team which now has a way to keep
tasks and status in one place for all to see.

Tags: , Jonathan, ManagerMany, Posted, product, Rochelle, Whatever, wondering