Don't miss this chance to prove yourself

Posted by Jeanne Williams, Staffing Programs

There are only 5 days left until registration closes for Google Code Jam 2006. So far, about 16,000 competitors have signed up to show off their programming skills -- and perhaps win an all-expenses paid trip to our New York City engineering office to compete in the finals on October 27. The winner gets $10,000 and global bragging rights: people have registered in huge numbers not only from the U.S., but from India, China, Canada, Brazil, the Russian Federation, Poland, Pakistan, Iran, Australia, the U.K., Germany, Singapore, Japan, Hungary -- you get the idea.

The top 100 finalists will be flown to NYC to show us what they've got. Have you got what it takes to Code Jam? Then by all means register here.

Download the classics

Posted by Adam Mathes, Associate Product Manager, Google Book Search

Starting today, you can go to Google Book Search and download full copies of out-of-copyright books to read at your own pace. You're free to choose from a diverse collection of public domain titles -- from well-known classics to obscure gems.

Before the rise of the public library -– a story chronicled in this 1897 edition of The Free Library – access to large collections of books was the privilege of a wealthy minority. Now, with the help of our wonderful library partners, we're able to offer you the ability to download and read PDF versions of out-of-copyright books from some of the world’s greatest collections.

Using Google Book Search, you can find The Free Library and many other extraordinary old books, such as:

* Ferriar's The Bibliomania
* A futurist from 1881's 1931: A Glance at the Twentieth Century
* Aesop's Fables
* Shakespeare's Hamlet
* Abbott's Flatland
* Hugo's Marion De Lorme
* Dunant's Eine Erinnerung an Solferino
* Bolívar's Proclamas
* Dante's Inferno

To find out-of-copyright books that you can download, simply select the "Full view" radio button when you search on books.google.com. (Please note that we do not enable downloading of any book currently under copyright. Unless we have the publisher’s permission to show more, we display only small snippets of text –- at most, two or three sentences surrounding your search term -– to help you determine if you’ve found what you’re looking for.)

Of course, this is just the beginning. As we digitize more of the world's books -- whether rare, common, popular or obscure -- people everywhere will be able to discover them on Google Book Search.

Get your people talking

Posted by Raju Gulabani, Product Manager, Google Apps for Your Domain

Back in February, we blogged about an experiment called "Gmail for your domain" that enabled IT administrators to power their custom domain email with Gmail with 2GB of storage, powerful search tools, and other Gmail features to all of their users. Since then, we've been listening to feedback from thousands of small businesses, K-12 schools, non-profits, universities, even families with their own websites, and based on what they've suggested, we've added so many features that the original name just didn't describe the service accurately any longer.

So say hello to Google Apps for Your Domain, a service available at no cost to organizations of all shapes and sizes.

We think we may be on to something here: all the functionality of Gmail, Google Talk and Google Calendar wrapped up with tools to make them work for your organization, plus Google Page Creator for designing and publishing your website. There's no hardware or software required, and you can customize the user interfaces with your branding and color scheme, so they look and feel like your own.

Things have come a long way in the last six months, and we're still working on the service. If you're from a larger business or university with more advanced needs for communications and sharing, please get in touch regarding premium versions of the service, due out later this year.