They say talk is cheap. With Google Talk, it’s free--and fast:

• Flexibility: Get in touch with an IM, email, or a call

• Quality: Enjoy fast file transfer and high quality voice calls

• Convenience: Convenience: Reach all your Gmail contacts, with just a click

• Pictures and themes: See pictures in your Friends list and chat sessions.

• File Transfer: With this top requested new feature, you can send unlimited files and folders to your friends through Google Talk. There is no restriction on the file type or size and the peer-to-peer transfer is fast and reliable.

• Voicemail: If your friends aren't around to answer your call, you can leave them a voicemail message instead. Just record your voice after the "Meep" and your friends will get an email to their Talk contact address with the voicemail attached as an audio file. They can play your message when they check their email and save it for as long as they want.

• Music Status and Music Trends: Listening to music while chatting on Google Talk? Now you can let your friends see what you're listening to by selecting "Show current music track" in your status menu. Your status message will change when your song does!

Google Talk is in beta and requires a Gmail username and password, and Windows XP/2000, minimum 56k (broadband recommended).

Mac and Linux users can connect to Google Talk using other other IM clients.

Download: Google Talk 1.0.0.98 Beta | Google Talk for BlackBerry devices (most commonly accessed via your BlackBerry) 

The projects are in and the mentors have filed their evaluations. In the final tally, it looks like Google's Summer of Code 2006 was a success.

The program, having just finished its second year, provides funding to students and open source organizations for project development.

In 2005, Google accepted 410 projects. In 2006, Google's Summer of Code accepted a whopping 630 projects spread across 102 mentoring organizations. In 2005, there were only 41 mentoring organizations.

Each student who successfully completed their projects over the summer were to receive $4,500 from Google, while each open source organization was to receive $500 per successful student.

Leslie Hawthorn, open source program co-coordinator at Google, told internetnews.com that the program had an 82 percent overall success rate in 2006.

For those who didn't complete the program, Hawthorn didn't see any one common thread.

"More often than not it was a 'life happens' situation when students drop out," Hawthorn said.

Hawthorn and Chris DiBona, open source program manger at Google, cited one particular student effort as being somewhat of a surprise.

Steffen Pingel was voted in as a committer for the Eclipse Mylar project as a result of his Summer of Code efforts.

"Think about it, this student went from being a college student who knew nobody in the project to becoming a peer with people from everyone from IBM to BEA to you name it in just a matter of a summer," DiBona said.

Another interesting effort cited by DiBona yielded an OpenGL GUI Widget system in Ruby.

"Being able to do that within the framework of Ruby along with OpenGL so now you can make a program in Ruby that can run on any platform that will give you a great user interface is a cool idea," DiBona said.

Google was also a mentoring organization for the Summer of Code, though students didn't necessarily work on projects directly for Google.

Full article: internetnews.com 

IDF: The search giant claims current PSU standards are outdated and harmful to the environment

Google has called for a new standard for power supply units (PSUs), claiming current units waste around a third of the electricity they consume.

In a white paper, launched at the Intel Developer Forum on Tuesday, Urs Hoelzle and Bill Weihl of Google argued that most PSUs needlessly provide multiple output voltages, a legacy of computing requirements 25 years ago but pointless today.

As a result, said the authors, the standard is outdated, particularly as manufacturers now routinely incorporate voltage regulator modules (VRMs) onto motherboards.

"Typical current efficiencies (including power supply and VRM losses) are in the 55-60 percent range today, that is, power supplies use 65-80 percent more power than necessary," said Hoelzle and Weihl.

Read more: ZDNet UK 

Watch videos from Google Video right on your desktop

Google Video player features:

• Watch videos downloaded from Google Video
• Browse scenes within a video using thumbnails
• Skip to anywhere in the video, even if that portion hasn't downloaded yet
• Sit back and watch videos in full screen mode
• Resume video downloads automatically

System Requirements:

· Windows XP or 2000
· Video card with at least 16MB of RAM
· 1GHz Pentium 3 or faster

Download: Google Video player 1.0.3.3 Beta 

 

Google Translator Interface is a free multilingual translation interface, that uses the Google translation engine. A powerful, non-invasive and easy to use assistant that satisfies your translation needs.

New feature: automatic copy-to-clipboard translation.

Google Translator Interface is Free. For Windows XP+

Download: Google Translator Interface Platinum 2.2 | Screenshot 

Google Calendar is a free online shareable calendar service. With Google Calendar, it's easy to keep track of all your life's important events – birthdays, reunions, little league games, doctor's appointments – all in one place.

Using Google Calendar, you can add events and invitations effortlessly, share with friends and family (or keep things to yourself), and search across the web for events you might enjoy. It's organizing made easy.

Seeing the big picture
• With Google Calendar, you can see your friends' and family's schedules right next to your own; quickly add events mentioned in Gmail conversations or saved in other calendar applications; and add other interesting events that you find online.

Sharing events and calendars
• You decide who can see your calendar and which details they can view. Planning an event? You can create invitations, send reminders and keep track of RSVPs right inside Google Calendar. Organizations can promote events, too.

Staying on schedule
• You can set up automatic event reminders, including mobile phone notifications, and instantly bring up anything on your calendar with the built-in search tool.

Sign in to Google Calendar 

Security problem affects the Public Service Search application, which lets institutions install Google search functions on their Web sites

Google has acknowledged the presence of a phishing hole on its Public Service Search application and has blocked access to the service until the problem is fixed.

The problem went public when blogger Eric Farraro posted details on Thursday on his software development blog. Farraro said that the customisable code in Google's Public Service Search, which enables nonprofit institutions such as universities to install ad-free Google search functions on their Web sites at no cost, could be used to create a page hosted on the google.com domain.

Scammers could then use this to build fraudulent Google pages to lure people into handing over personal information, Farraro noted. He demonstrated this by creating a false "Gmail Plus" page: When unsuspecting visitors to the page tried to use their Gmail password to log in, the site delivered a "You (could have) gotten served!" message.

Read more: ZDNet UK 

Google has begun providing closed captions for selected videos in its Google Video database, internetnews.com has learned.

The service went live last night, a Google spokesperson confirmed.

The videos with close captioning range from content produced by Nova to user-created media, typical to Web 2.0's video platforms.

Now the hearing impaired can enjoy the intricacies of such titles as "motocross crash at greenvalleys extreme park."

The measure to increase accessibility to Google content comes a little more than a month after the company announced Google Accessible Search, a way for the visually impaired to find Web sites friendly to their needs.

But the service could also provide Google some differentiation from rivals amid an explosion of video over the Web, not to mention user-generated video sites.

Read more: internetnews.com 

Picasa is software that helps you instantly find, edit and share all the pictures on your PC. Every time you open Picasa, it automatically locates all your pictures (even ones you forgot you had) and sorts them into visual albums organised by date with folder names you will recognise. You can drag and drop to arrange your albums and make labels to create new groups. Picasa makes sure your pictures are always organised.

Picasa also makes advanced editing simple by putting one-click fixes and powerful effects at your fingertips. And Picasa makes it a snap to share your pictures – you can email, print photos home, make gift CDs, and even post pictures on your own blog.

Download: Picasa 2.5.0 Build 32.94 

Analysis: The search giant has been at war with a German venture capitalist over the right to use the term 'Gmail'

Google's free Web email offering may be available for correspondence in 40 languages, but efforts at worldwide expansion using the moniker "Gmail" continue to face complications.

Last October, the search giant grabbed headlines — and miffed some British users — when it voluntarily renamed its service "Google Mail" in the UK, following an out-of-court trademark dispute.

The woes don't end there. Across western Europe, a quiet battle rages on between Google and Daniel Giersch, a German-born venture capitalist who insists he'll never relinquish his six-year-old trademark registration of "G-mail...und die Post geht richtig ab" (translation: G-mail... and the mail goes right off).

"Google's behaviour is very threatening, very aggressive and very unfaithful, and to me, it's very evil," he said in a recent telephone interview with ZDNet UK’s sister site CNET News.com from his part-time Los Angeles home.

A Hamburg district court has already handed Giersch victories at both the preliminary and final stages of the litigation. Dismissing Google's arguments that the two names are not confusingly similar, it ordered the company earlier this year to remove all "Gmail" references from its German service and to cease handing out gmail.com aliases to users within the geographic area.

Full story: ZDNet UK 

The idea is simple. It’s a globe that sits inside your PC. You point and zoom to anyplace on the planet that you want to explore. Satellite images and local facts zoom into view. Tap into Google search to show local points of interest and facts. Zoom to a specific address to check out an apartment or hotel. View driving directions and even fly along your route. We invite you to try it now.

Google Earth is free for personal use. No registration is required. You may (optionally) choose to upgrade to Google Earth Plus.

Features:

• Free for personal use.
• Sophisticated streaming technology delivers the data to you as you need it.
• Imagery and 3D data depict the entire earth - Terabytes of aerial and satellite imagery depict cities around the world in high-resolution detail.
• Local search lets you search for restaurants, hotels, and even driving directions. Results show in your 3D earth view. Easy to layer multiple searches, save results to folders, and share with others.
• Layers show parks, schools, hospitals, airports, shopping, and more.
• KML – data exchange format let your share useful annotations and view. thousands of data points created by Google Earth users.

Use it for:

-Planning a trip
-Getting driving directions
-Finding a house or apartment
-Finding a local business
-Exploring the world

Download: Google Earth 4.0.2093 Beta Windows 2000/XP, Mac OS X, Linux 

Tesseract code unearthed from the HP crypt

Google has re-released an open source version of optical character recognition (OCR) software originally produced by HP.

The Tesseract program was developed by HP between 1985 and 1995 and in its final year was in the top three OCR packages in a competition organised by the University of Las Vegas (UNLV) in Nevada.

Google said in a statement that, although some people might wonder why the search giant was interested in OCR technology, it fitted in with the company's plans to make information available online.

"We are all about making information available to users, and when this information is in a paper document, OCR is the process by which we can convert the pages of this document into text that can then be used for indexing," said Eric Case on the official Google Code blog.

Read more: vnunet.com 

Bigger share in Europe than in the US

Google-owned websites represented the largest proportion of sites visited by European surfers in July.

Statistics released by web monitor ComScore revealed that Google properties attracted 156.3 million unique visitors during the month.

In comparison Microsoft sites racked up 144.1 million visitors, while the Yahoo network managed 99.5 million.

In addition to topping the charts, Google also had a higher share of surfers in Europe than the US.

"Google sites were visited by a greater proportion of the online population in Europe [75 per cent] than in the US [60 per cent]," said Bob Ivins, managing director of ComScore Europe.

During July, Google and Microsoft sites often vied for the first and second positions in 13 of 15 European countries, according to ComScore.

Read more: vnunet.com