Google Adsense College

Posted by Wesley Chan, Product
Manager

We're pleased to announce that we have acquired href="http://www.grandcentral.com/" >GrandCentral
Communications, a company that provides services for managing
your voice communications. GrandCentral is an innovative service
that lets users integrate all of their existing phone numbers and
voice mailboxes into one account, which can be accessed from the
web. We think GrandCentral's technology fits well into
Google's efforts to provide services that enhance the
collaborative exchange of information between our users.

GrandCentral offers many features that complement the phone
services you already use. If you have multiple phone numbers (e.g.,
home, work, cell), you get one phone number that you can set to
ring all, some, or none of your phones, based on who's calling.
This way, your phone number is tied to you, and not your location
or job. The service also gives you one central voice mailbox. You
can listen to your voicemails online or from any phone, forward
them to anybody, add the caller to your address book, block a
caller as spam, and a lot more. You can even listen in on voicemail
messages from your phone while they are being recorded, or switch a
call from your cell phone to your desk phone and back again. All in
all, you'll have a lot more control over your phones.

We're really excited to welcome the GrandCentral team to
Google. While we're moving their technology over to
Google's network, a limited number of invitations will be
available to register for a GrandCentral beta account. If you have
a U.S. telephone number, you can sign up for an invitation at href="http://www.grandcentral.com/" >www.grandcentral.com.
Current GrandCentral customers will continue to have uninterrupted
access to the service. height="1" width="1" />

Tags: , announce, Chan, ManagerWere, pleased, Posted, product, Wesley

Posted by Alex Kinnier, Group Product
Manager

We're always experimenting and testing ways to deliver relevant
and new kinds of ads, and as part of that, we recently started
running a test of an ad serving technology that will help us
understand online ad serving better, and allow us to experiment
with some new approaches to privacy for third-party ad servers. The
privacy features we'll test in these experiments follow some
recently-announced policies, such as a href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/07/cookies-expiring-sooner-to-improve.html"
id="h-8r" >shorter expiration date for the cookie set on your
computer and href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/06/how-long-should-google-remember.html" >
anonymization of the logs data after 18 months.

In our ad-serving tests, we're introducing an href="http://www.google.com/ads/gcc_privacy.html" >opt-out
mechanism so people can opt out of the test ad-serving cookie
if they wish. In addition, we’re going to experiment with ways the
industry could provide improved transparency for consumers and
providing users with additional controls over the data gathered by
ad servers. Some of the ideas we're exploring include:

using "crumbled" cookies, so that the data typically
associated with one unique identifying number or "cookie
ID" will be broken up among multiple different cookies and
diffuse the ad history of individual users;

providing better forms of notice within ads, to help users
understand who is serving the ads they see, and what data is being
collected; and

giving users the ability to provide feedback to us about the
ads they like and don't like.

Like all experiments, these ideas may or may not work out. And they
won't be effective unless the industry adopts them — we are
not likely to implement these ideas alone. But we are excited to
start innovating in this area for our advertising customers and for
our users. We welcome your href="mailto:testadserving@google.com" >feedback. height="1" width="1" />

Tags: , Alex, always, group, Kinnier, ManagerWere, Posted, product