Wednesday, 8 November 2006
Checkout offers free holiday season processing
To celebrate the holidays, we're offering merchants free transaction processing using Google Checkout through the end of 2006. Read more here.
Tuesday, 7 November 2006
History is cool for school
You might be thinking most kids are only interested in celebrities and the next cool thing -- but not 15,000 British kids. This lot, between the ages of 4 and 18, ditched celebrity-watching in favour of good old-fashioned historical figures when they sent in their drawings to our Doodle 4 Google competition. (You may recall our informal name for this contest was "Day Off for Dennis.") Given the theme of ‘My Britain’ as their inspiration, school children up and down the UK got creative with the Google logo, hoping to see their entry on the Google homepage. Nearly half (45%) of their entries included monuments and historical figures from Big Ben to the Blackpool tower, and from the Queen to Shakespeare. Everyone at the London Googleplex was really impressed with how passionate the kids were about Britain, not to mention their talent.
And though some of you may laugh about British food, we were proud to see that a quarter of entries featured fish and chips, proving what we all already knew – that you can’t beat traditional British grub!
On Monday and Tuesday, we met thousands of children whose entries made it into the finals at the Science Museum in London. The wrapup gave them a chance to check out each others' designs and talk about their Doodles -- and of course it gave us the exciting job of announcing and congratulating the fantastic winner, 13-year-old Katherine Chisnall, from the South West of England. Aside from her day of fame on the Google.co.uk homepage, Katherine and her family will be soon be visiting our world headquarters in Mountain View, California. The whole event was great fun, and who knows? Maybe we've identified some rising stars for Dennis' crew.
Thursday, 2 November 2006
Gmail mobile client is live
The new Gmail for mobile client launching today began life as a challenge: What if we could develop a Gmail application for cell phones that was as powerful and as easy to use as the desktop version? What if it ran on hundreds of different mobile devices -- and made it possible to compose, read, and respond to conversations with a bare minimum of clicking and scrolling? What if it enabled you to do things like search your inbox, view your attachments (including pictures and PDF files), and click to call your Gmail contacts? And what if the app were designed to make the whole experience as fast and as seamless as possible?
Team stalwarts Jimmy Shih, Joanne McKinley, Derek Phillips and others worked hard to answer these questions, and the result is Gmail for mobile devices. It's a small download, but one that might make you look at email on your phone in a different way -- maybe like Gmail did for email when that first appeared. Download it now and decide for yourself!