What’s the best performing marketing tactic in online marketing? Whose budget got the biggest increase this year? We have the answers to those questions and more in our fifth annual ad:tech attendee survey. Five new charts with data, including:
- What gets the highest ROI
- Marketers’ No. 1 test this year
- How important is social media
Everyone seems to have friends who won’t stop talking about their iPhones. Indeed, last year’s white-hot electronic device isn’t simply a fad — it’s a game-changer for marketers who target wireless users. In our latest Special Report, we have answers for emailers, including: - How the iPhone renders email
- Is file size an issue
- How to really get an iPhone user’s attention
In the spirit of Hallmark and chocolate roses, we recently took a special interest in Valentine’s worthy tidbits about how Gmail has helped spur romance — as it did for Jordan Burleson, who told us:
“Gmail is the new Cupid. Gmail’s green chat light meant ‘go’ for love in my life. My girlfriend and I used … it for projects and homework at first, but then for flirting, pinning down a location for a first date, emoticon hearts and more.”
In other cases, email has helped maintain long distance relationships, like that of long-time Gmail user Meagan Coleman:
“My husband and I met in 2004. He’s from Macedonia and I’m from the USA…Since we met, Gmail has been archiving our long-distance relationship from the beginning! It’s very sweet to be able to read those messages that we wrote to each other 3 years ago.”
Curious about how common emailing love letters really is — and to learn more about how people use email to communicate with friends, family, and co-workers — we recently worked with Nielsen Online to conduct a national survey examining how people think about and use webmail.* The survey affirmed that email is an increasingly important part of our most intimate and personal interactions, and that younger people are leading the charge: they are more likely to use email for everything from sending love letters to ending relationships.
Love is in the inbox
Breaking up is hard to do; some get help from email
Whether you’re sending hearts this year or breaking them, we hope you have a happy Valentine’s Day.
* The online survey, commissioned by Google, was conducted by Nielsen Online from September 24th to October 15th, 2007, with a sample of 1,713 webmail users over the age of 18. “Webmail user” was defined as someone who uses AOL Mail, Gmail, Hotmail, or Yahoo! Mail.
Several ambitious plans around the world envision green cities, but such projects raise as many questions as they promise to answer
We just announced on our Research Blog that we’re holding the second scalability conference in Seattle on Saturday, June 14. We had a hunch we weren’t the only ones who liked to sit around and brainstorm solutions for hard problems, and it turns out we were right. We met so many great people at the 2007 gathering that we’ve decided to do it again.
If you work with scalable systems and would like to give a presentation at this year’s conference, we’d love to hear from you. Visit our Research blog for more details on how to submit a proposal.
The Google 2008 International Model Your Campus Competition is now live! Here’s another opportunity for you to show off your 3D modeling skills, and this time students around the world can compete. You can team up with other students, or take the project on yourself. Just model your school’s campus buildings in Google SketchUp, geo-reference them in Google Earth and submit them by uploading to the Google 3D Warehouse. You may enter this competition if you’re a student at a higher education institution almost anywhere in the world.
Entries are due by June 1st, 2008. Check out what last year’s winners modeled to get inspired, then visit the competition site to register. Good luck and happy modeling.
Starting this month, we’re enabling developers to make their social applications available to orkut users. We’ll start ramping up to more than 50 million people over the next few weeks.
To prepare for this growth, we’re now accepting social applications. For a while now, developers have been able to write, test, and play with applications on orkut. Later this month, however, we’re going to start rolling them out to orkut users. OpenSocial developers can submit their completed applications (deadline: Feb. 15).
To help developers ready their applications, we’re offering engineering support and training. We’ve scheduled orkut hackathons on Feb. 14-15 from 10 am-6 pm at the Googleplex in Mountain View and via videoconference in New York. For more information or to RSVP, please email hackathon.rsvp@gmail.com. If you can’t attend, we hope to see you in the OpenSocial forums or on chat (irc://irc.freenode.net/opensocial).
Over the course of centuries, engineering of all kinds has transformed our lives — and the field continues to have the potential to improve the quality of life for every person on the planet.
This coming Friday (February 15), the US National Academy of Engineering will post a list of “grand engineering challenges” for the 21st century on a special site, which has already garnered many comments from the public. To create the list, the Academy assembled a special committee that includes some of the most innovative names in engineering, including our own Larry Page.
I think we will see on the list such things as renewable, sustainable and affordable energy, reduction of dependence on petroleum, desalinization, vastly improved food production, greenhouse gas reduction, and affordable and sustainable housing — but these are just my guesses. No matter which challenges are selected, we know that attention to detail and daring goals are the twin drivers of innovation.
Please visit the site, contribute your ideas and have a look February 15 to see what the experts have decided are the grandest of the grand challenges for engineering in this century.
Of course, I hope “Internet for Everyone” makes it onto the list, but if it doesn’t, it’s still on mine :-).
