1. Create a link to a specific part in a YouTube video

If you want to link to a specific part of a video on YouTube, you can. For example,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PjDw3azfZWI#t=31m08s

Notice the “#t=31m08s” on the end of the url? That link will take you 31 minutes and 8 seconds into that video. Linking to a particular minute and second can be really helpful — for example, that link takes you straight to where someone asks Eric Schmidt a question about Twitter. From there, you can listen to his answer, where he says (among other things): “We’re in favor of all of these new communications mechanisms. ….”

2. Start an embedded YouTube at a certain timestamp

To do it on an embedded video, use the “start” parameter. Note that start takes seconds as a parameter, not minutes and seconds. For example, to start an embedded video 31 minutes and 8 seconds into a video, 31*60+8 = 1868 seconds, so you would use this code:
<object width=”640″ height=”385″><param name=”movie” value=”http://www.youtube.com/
v/PjDw3azfZWI&hl=en_US&start=1868″></param><param name=
“allowscriptaccess” value=”always”></param><embed src=”http://www.youtube.com
/v/PjDw3azfZWI&hl=en_US&start=1868″ type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” allowscriptaccess=”always” width=”640″ height=”385″></embed><
/object>

3. Use annotations to create links within your videos

Read more on how to create and use annotations at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDsLSFKwgFI

Did you mean to attach files? You wrote “find attached” in your message, but there are no files attached. Send anyway?

This alerted him that he missed on attaching the files.

Isn’t that really smart and creative thinking! Though a minute thing, but such small things of intelligence makes GMail (Google) an innovator at email services.

Cheers Google!

How can I change this page so that the google map is still available and users may still interact with it, but the entire page is delivered via SSL?

Google words ..

Previously, when a Google Map was embedded in an encrypted web page, users would get a pop-up message saying the page included both secure and non-secure content. No one likes pop-up messages and the extra clicks they require

Google Solution

The Google Maps JavaScript API V2, Google Static Maps API, Google Maps API for Flash, and Google Maps API HTTP services can be accessed over a secure (HTTPS) connection by Google Maps API Premier customers. If the Google Maps APIs are used with a free Maps API key on a secure site, the browser may warn the user about non-secure objects on the screen.

Other possible tweaks

The easiest way would be to proxy the connection to Google Maps. Depending on how much the user interacts with google maps, this may be really easy or a little annoying.

You can use an SSL proxy script. I did that with a client’s site which uses the Enterprise License, and the client’s Google representative confirmed for us that it is OK to do it this way. I’m not sure if it is OK to do it with the free license, but I assume it is OK too.

Use Firefox which only shows a warning in the status bar

Have a custom link or button on the page that opens the map in a separate window. In our case the users did not want to see the map all the time. Therefore, I have the link on the relevant page and they can click it to open the map when they wish. They will still see the warning but only when they have to look at the map and not every single time they load the account page.

Implement Yahoo Maps instead, which has a simple querystring-based API to pass a location in, and retrieve an XML document containing a URL to a map image. Users can’t pan/zoom, but it’s a simple compromise, they can click a button to open a full map.

The Blogger Template Designer allows you to create effectively infinite number of designs templates instead of being restricted to a limited number of rigid designs by making it easy to customize your blogs design, layout, background and much more.

At a demonstration Tuesday at Mobile World Congress, a cell phone trade show in Barcelona, an engineer shot a picture of a German dinner menu with a phone running Google Inc.’s Android software. An application on the phone sent the shot to Google’s servers, which sent a translation back to the phone.

It translated “Fruhlingssalat mit Wildkrautern” as “Spring salad with wild herbs.”

There was no word on when the software would be available.

Software that translates text from pictures is already available for some phones, but generally does the processing on the phone. By sending the image to its servers for processing, Google can apply a lot more computing power, for faster, more accurate results. The phone still won’t order for you, though — you’ll have to point at the menu.

The demonstration was part of Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s keynote speech at the trade show, the largest for the wireless industry. He said phone applications that take advantage of “cloud computing” — servers accessible through the wireless network — will bring powerful changes to the industry.

Google and Facebook are on a collision course in the increasingly competitive market for social networking services.

On Tuesday, Google introduced a new service called Google Buzz, a way for users of its Gmail service to share updates, photos and videos. The service will compete with sites like Facebook and Twitter, which are capturing an increasing percentage of the time people spend online.

The links shared on those social networks are also sending a growing amount of traffic to sites across the Web, potentially weakening Google’s position as the prime navigation tool on the Internet.

Separately, Facebook plans to announce on Wednesday that it is improving the live chat service on its site by allowing it to be integrated into other services like AIM, AOL’s instant messaging network, which is among the most popular in the United States.

Buzz is Google’s boldest attempt to build a social network that can compete with Facebook and Twitter. The service is built into Gmail, which already has 176 million users, according to comScore, a market research company. And Buzz comes with a built-in circle of friends, a group that is automatically selected by Google based on the people that a user communicates with most frequently in Gmail and on Google’s chat service.

Like other social services, Buzz allows users to post status updates that include text; photos from services like Google’s Picasa and Yahoo’s Flickr; videos from YouTube; and messages from Twitter. Analysts say many of its features mimic those of Facebook.

“It is a direct challenge to Facebook, in particular,” said Jeremiah Owyang, a social media analyst with the Altimeter Group.

Still, Buzz faces a struggle against Facebook, which recently announced, on the occasion of its sixth birthday, that it had 400 million users. Buzz also risks further overwhelming people who are struggling with Web services that generate ever-increasing amounts of information.

But Google executives said that, on the contrary, Buzz would help tackle the problem of information overload, as Google would apply its algorithms to help people find the information most relevant to them.

“The stream of messages has become a torrent,” Bradley Horowitz, vice president for product development at Google, said in an interview. “We think this has become a Google-scale problem.”

Sergey Brin, a Google co-founder, said that by offering social communications, which have primarily been used for entertainment purposes, Buzz would bridge the gap between work and leisure.

“Bridging those two worlds is very powerful,” Mr. Brin said at a press conference, adding that he had used Buzz to help him write an Op-Ed article for The New York Times by soliciting input from other Google employees.

Google has also woven Buzz into mobile phones, through a mobile Web site and a Google mapping application. Users will be able to see updates that friends have posted from particular spots.

Read complete story @ http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/10/technology/internet/10social.html

The iPad has the most storage, cheap 3G, the time-tested iPhone OS and its mountain of apps, and a serious amount of Apple marketing juice behind it. But it’s also famously lacking features common to the other tablets, such as webcam and multitasking (only first party apps like music and email can multitask). The Notion Ink Adam is perhaps the most interesting of the bunch, with its dual-function transflective screen from Pixel Qi: It can be either a normal LCD or, with the flick of a switch, an easy-on-the-eyes reflective LCD that resembles e-ink. Its hardware is also surprisingly impressive—but it remains to be seen if Android is really the right OS for a 10-inch tablet.

Source : gizmodo.com

• Using Google Transliteration: http://www.google.com/transliterate
• Using Google Transliteration Bookmarklet:
  http://t13n.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/blet/docs/help_hi.html
• Using an IME. Common IME’s include those from Google, Microsoft Bhasha and Baraha. These require a download and install of client software.

In order to continue to improve our products and deliver more sophisticated features and performance, we are harnessing some of the latest improvements in web browser technology. This includes faster JavaScript processing and new standards like HTML5. As a result, over the course of 2010, we will be phasing out support for Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 as well as other older browsers that are not supported by their own manufacturers.

We plan to begin phasing out support of these older browsers on the Google Docs suite and the Google Sites editor on March 1, 2010. After that point, certain functionality within these applications may have higher latency and may not work correctly in these older browsers. Later in 2010, we will start to phase out support for these browsers for Google Mail and Google Calendar.

Made by HTC, Google has co-branded the phone. Google is retailing this phone in a way that it knows best, on the web. Available through www.google.com/phone, the phone is available for $529 as an unlocked version and $179 with two year contract with T-mobile (with a $79.99 monthly data plan) in the United States. It is also available for delivery in UK, Singapore and Hong Kong. So, yes, you cannot buy it in India yet, nor get it shipped here.

The looks of the phone are pretty similar to the iPhone but have a few more buttons that then Apple device. The bottom of the screen houses four touch sensitive buttons for Back, Home, Menu and Search unlike the iPhone that has just the one button to go back to the home screen. Below the buttons is a tri-color illuminated trackball. The color of the trackball changes depending on the kind of notification being received on the phone.

Read More @ http://www.google.com/phone/