Posted by Vanessa Krumb, Account Strategist

At work, we never stop collaborating within our own team and across teams internationally. This is where Google Docs & Spreadsheets are highly valuable. We use a shared document to update information as it evolves. People across the office, and the world, can be updating the same document at the same time, and even chat to each other in the document's discussion window while doing so.Read More

Posted by Vanessa Krumb, Account Strategist

At work, we never stop collaborating within our own team and across teams internationally. This is where Google Docs & Spreadsheets are highly valuable. We use a shared document to update information as it evolves. People across the office, and the world, can be updating the same document at the same time, and even chat to each other in the document's discussion window while doing so.

At home, I have an old, but well loved Mac. At work, I use a Windows based laptop. My husband has a new Mac. Rather than transferring files between machines, I use Google Docs & Spreadsheets to create and store my documents online. That way, I can work on these documents no matter what machine I'm using, and share them with my husband as well.

We're expecting our first baby soon, and have been doing a lot of research online to figure out what we need and where to get it from. I created a document to keep track of different types of prams, baby monitors and the like. Instead of sending files back and forth as we edit them, we just share this document and add to it whenever we feel like it. Let's face it, if there's a time where we need our lives to be simplified and organised, this is it.

And like other Google products, Docs & Spreadsheets is of course free!

Now when you sign in to Docs & Spreadsheets, you'll see a brand new interface that lets you create personal folders, and drag your online documents and spreadsheets into them. On the left-hand side, you'll see a list of all the people you are collaborating with; click on any name to see all the files you're working on with them.


To read more about this great new interface, head over to the Docs & Spreadsheets blog. Available now in Australia of course!

Posted by Rob Shilkin, Head of Corporate Communications and Public Affairs

I wanted to update you with some great policy announcements that have been keeping us busy over the past week or so.Read More

Posted by Rob Shilkin, Head of Corporate Communications and Public Affairs

I wanted to update you with some great policy announcements that have been keeping us busy over the past week or so.

First, Google announced our plans to go carbon neutral worldwide by the end of 2007. You can read all about the specifics here. And you can see the video of the announcement on YouTube here.

In addition to taking part in this wide ranging global effort, Google Australia has an active self-powered commuting scheme. This scheme sees our employees rewarded for travelling to work by public transport or 'self-powered' means (such as bike, skateboard or walking) with a $100 donation to their chosen charity for every 20 days of participation.

Second, we launched a worldwide public policy blog here. This will be a great way to talk about many of the incredibly important and challenging global policy issues facing the internet - including privacy, child safety, copyright and content regulation. I really want to ensure that there are contributions by Google Australia to this forum, and would love you to post comments, as these issues affect our Australian users and the Australian community.

On that note, we have joined the Australian Information Industry Association (the Australian IT industry body) and are looking forward to very close involvement in their activities. Already, our Engineering Director, Alan Noble, has spoken at their events here and here and next week is speaking here. (In between this, and writing opinion pieces, I am assured that he does occasionally find time to work on Google products).

I'll post more updates on Google Australia policy news in future.

Posted by Alexis Battle, Software Engineer

We're always working on ways that you, our Australian users, can find what you're looking for more easily and quickly. In addition to the many things we do behind the scenes, such as constantly improving our search algorithms and crawling for more information to provide the best answer, we also look for ways to help you when you don't know what exactly to type into the search box to get to the perfect result.Read More

Posted by Alexis Battle, Software Engineer

We're always working on ways that you, our Australian users, can find what you're looking for more easily and quickly. In addition to the many things we do behind the scenes, such as constantly improving our search algorithms and crawling for more information to provide the best answer, we also look for ways to help you when you don't know what exactly to type into the search box to get to the perfect result.

This task has now become easier in Australia.

Now, when you are looking for information on a specific topic, we offer query suggestions at the bottom of the search results page that you can click on to find information faster. Sometimes, the suggestions allow you to quickly narrow down the search. We'll also present interesting related concepts that encourage you to explore further. In both cases, these algorithmically generated suggestions are shown only when they are the most helpful and useful, so you shouldn't expect them for all your queries.

For instance, when I was looking for information on netball (we probably need to practice to beat eBay), I got query suggestions for netball rules, netball drills, as well as an interesting related search on basketball.

Here are some other examples: national parks, scuba diving and Powderfinger.

So let us help you when you don't know quite what you're looking for!

Posted by Ali Rush, AdWords Associate

Are you one of the many Australian or New Zealand small businesses without a website? We have a product that can really help. Today we launched AdWords Business Pages in Australia and New Zealand.Read More

Posted by Ali Rush, AdWords Associate

Are you one of the many Australian or New Zealand small businesses without a website? We have a product that can really help. Today we launched AdWords Business Pages in Australia and New Zealand.

An AdWords Business Page is a small, free web page that you can create for your business when you sign up for an AdWords Starter Edition account.

You can create a business page to help potential customers learn about your products and services. AdWords Business Pages are quick and easy -- no knowledge of HTML or programming is required. You control your own business pages, and can edit the information on your page at any time through your AdWords account.

This feature has been really popular in the US. Here's what a very simple Business Page looks like:


And here's a testimonial of a small business that has used AdWords Business Pages to expand their customer base and business.

We hope that Business Pages will help Australian and NZ small businesses reach new customers here and overseas. (You can also get a free listing in Google Maps through the Local Business Centre.)

Happy page creating!

Posted by Diana Starmer, Account Associate

Ed: We thought the blog was a great place to start announcing the monthly "top gaining searches" on Google Australia

Last month saw a curious mix of search terms gaining ground on the Google Australia Zeitgeist.Read More

Posted by Diana Starmer, Account Associate

Ed: We thought the blog was a great place to start announcing the monthly "top gaining searches" on Google Australia

Last month saw a curious mix of search terms gaining ground on the Google Australia Zeitgeist.

Hype began to build around the Socceroos playing in the upcoming Asian cup behind star defender Lucas Neill. We also had NFL fever and Kevin Sheedy’s troubles at essendon football club featured in the headlines.

Popstar Pink hit our shores for her huge national tour and all across Australia, fans went online in search of pink concert dates and ticket information. Tickets for xavier rudd also went on sale in May ahead of the release of his new album White Moth.

But it wasn’t all sport and music, Australians began to feel the end of the financial year approaching, turning their thoughts to their tax file number and interest rates at the RBA (Reserve Bank of Australia).

On the celebrity front, Home and Away starlet indiana evans along with American actress and wrestler stacy keibler occupied our hearts and minds. Celebrity blogger Perez Hilton’s visit to Sydney had us searching for our Hollywood gossip, but there was a nod to higher culture when an Andy Warhol painting broke new records at auction.

And finally… for the school holidays is everyone planning to go to seaworld? Maybe we’ve put two and two together to make five but these two were certainly popular search terms.

For breaking news and obscure information alike, Australians are searching on Google! What follows is a summary of Google Australia Zeitgeist results for the top gainers on Google.com.au in the month of May.

For more information, visit the Google Zeitgeist and Google Trends.

Top Google.com.au Gainers for May:

1. lucas neill
2. pink concert
3. rba
4. nfl
5. wireless broadband
6. indiana evans
7. tax file number
8. perez
9. concept cars
10. Mars
11. wheat
12. xavier rudd
13. childhood obesity
14. street fighter
15. stacy keibler
16. burberry
17. Andy Warhol
18. essendon football club
19. seaworld
20. school holidays

Posted by Joel Stanley, Summer of Code participant

My name is Joel, and I'm a 21 year old student, studying Computer Systems Engineering at the University of Adelaide, South Australia.Read More

Posted by Joel Stanley, Summer of Code participant

My name is Joel, and I'm a 21 year old student, studying Computer Systems Engineering at the University of Adelaide, South Australia.

At the start of this year I attended a conference in Sydney. There, while kneeling in the back row of a talk on Linux kernel hacking, I saw it with my own eyes for the first time:

The XO-1; laptop of the One Laptop Per Child Organisation. A '$100' laptop for the world's children, enabling them to teach and learn, to explore, experiment and express themselves. Read more about that at laptop.org.

Being an Electrical Engineering student means I have a keen interest in the hardware side of comptuers, as well as software. I found the XO fascinating in both these aspects, and wanted to learn more. The first step was taken when I was given a beta - a test version - of the laptop by Jim Gettys, who works for OLPC on it's software systems. The second step was taken when I applied to work for OLPC through the Google Summer of Code.

The Summer of Code is a project where Google sponsors students from around the world to work on Free and Open Source Software; Firefox, Linux and OpenOffice are all examples of FOSS. Not only could students apply to work on pieces of software, but they could also work for organisations who used this software, such as the BBC, Nokia (through maemo) and, interestingly for me; OLPC.

I am thrilled to be given the chance to work for OLPC, to be mentored by the LCD-inventing, Electrical Engineering degree holding CTO of OLPC; Mary Lou Jepsen, as well as Richard Smith; an engineer who works on the low level programming of the laptop's systems.Working along side me will be Rafael Enrique Ortiz Guerrero, a fellow Electrical Engineering student from Colombia.

My project is to revolve around the power systems of the XO laptop, specifically the gang chargers - large recharging units that can replenish up to 16 laptop batteries at once, running off mains or solar power by the way of an internal lead-acid battery. I will also work on the 'tinderbox'; an XO laptop with it's insides hanging out, connected to a multichannel voltmeter that logs the power usage on the XO's power rails.

Since being accepted into the SoC, I have been offered an internship at OLPC headquarters on MIT's campus in Boston, Massachusetts. I will join the team for three months, starting this July, thanks to the sponsorship of OLPC, and Google's Open Source Programs Office. I am still short on funds, so if you would like to support a young Australian free and open source software contributor and advocate, please get in touch.

I look forward to not only the technical challenges that this experience will provide, but also the humanitarian aspect. A good friend once told me she almost chose to study medicine over engineering, because she wanted to help people who were disadvantaged around the world and believed that being a doctor was the only way to do this. However, she decided that through her civil engineering degree, she could ”build bridges” for those who needed help. Like her, I would have never thought that an engineering degree, in particular one that focused on electronics, could enable me to do similar things; this is one of the many fascinating aspects of the OLPC project.

I plan on updating everyone back home on my progress while working at MIT; if you're interested, I have a blog: Welcome to Chaos.

Posted by Julian Sonego, Consumer Marketing Manager

Couldn't make it to Developer Day yesterday?

The speeches are now all on YouTube, with the sessions in San Jose having just wrapped up, to complete a great 29 hours that started in Syd-a-ney ...Read More

Posted by Julian Sonego, Consumer Marketing Manager

Couldn't make it to Developer Day yesterday?

The speeches are now all on YouTube, with the sessions in San Jose having just wrapped up, to complete a great 29 hours that started in Syd-a-ney!

Engineering Director Alan Noble's keynote address, which kicked it all off worldwide, is below:



A fuller wrap-up of the Sydney activities is here. If you came along, thanks so much for making it such a great day and please fill out the survey form!

Posted by Alice Boxhall, Software Engineer

One of the highlights of Developer Day in Australia was the "speedgeeking" final. (I'm not sure why we chose that name - I might ask someone in our Events team).Read More

Posted by Alice Boxhall, Software Engineer

One of the highlights of Developer Day in Australia was the "speedgeeking" final. (I'm not sure why we chose that name - I might ask someone in our Events team).

We showcased 6 of the best Australian Google Maps "mashups", with everyone in attendance voting for the winner. (For the uninitiated, a Google Maps "mashup", is a website or application that uses the free Google Maps API, and other data, to present information on Google Maps).

Voting on the Finalists

The 6 finalists, chosen from hundreds of great Australian mashups, were all fantastic. The 6 sites deliver innovative and useful content to worldwide audiences. Some have commercial application, others are just great fun. Each mashup was displayed on a large screen, with attendees able to explore and interact with the site via a laptop.

When the voting was all said and done, the winner was PropertyGuru.

Properties for sale in Dianella, WA on PropertyGuru

As described by its creators:

PropertyGuru is a map driven real estate search engine, comprising of homes for sale throughout Australia. It features an intuitive interface, powerful search and property comparison tools. PropertyGuru was designed to alleviate the frustration experienced when buying a house. It allows the home buyer to locate potential properties by moving an interactive Google map to any area in Australia, bringing up pins for properties that meet their budget and requirements.

The site is complemented with many research tools such as suburb median prices to ensure that your next home purchase is at the right price.
With a comprehensive view of the property market, PropertyGuru.com.au is the best way to find your dream home.

Well done guys! (they're the ones in the middle with the slightly bigger trophy). Google is really pleased to provide developers with free tools and APIs on which amazing Australian websites can be based.


The other 5 finalists, all top sites I'm sure you'll agree, are detailed below (in their own words).

Bikely

Put very simply, Bikely helps cyclists share knowledge of good bicycle routes. It can be tricky traversing a car dominated city by bicycle, particularly when you need to travel an unknown route to a new destination. But the chances are, someone has cycled that way before you. Bikely makes it easy for him or her to show you the best way. Bikely is not about mapping technology - it's about leveraging community knowledge to make cycling safer and more fun.

Remember the Milk

Remember The Milk is an online task management service used by over 200,000 people which builds on a number of Google APIs. A Google Maps mashup allows users to visualise where tasks are located in the real world, and includes cool features such as filtering by time and clustering by zoom level. With the Google Gadget, users can review and manage their tasks from iGoogle. Remember The Milk also integrates with Google services by providing task management in Google Calendar (including another Maps mashup), and sends reminders via Google Talk. The service is available in 21 languages.

planOfile

planOfile is a trip collaboration system allowing users to publicly and privately share their trips on map browsers. It works for any type of trip: air travel, driving, sailing, bush walking etc... Users can minimize planning effort by including published trip legs for airline flights, bus tours, etc... Users can create events that allow attendees to add their own trip information, effectively providing a visual calendar for the event. e.g. reunion, family Christmas, fly-in etc...
Organisations can view past, present and future location of resources. e.g. Who is overseas today and when will they return?

FGMap

FGMap is a Google Map web app. developed to be used with FlightGear, a cross-platform open source flight simulator. It was first written to show air traffic on the FlightGear multiplay online server in real time. You can find out who (in the game) is flying online, and where in the world he or she is flying on the map. It was then extended with the capability to display "navaids" such as airport/runway data, radio navigation, and landing guidance.



Cannonade (The Patrick O'Brian Mapping Project)

Patrick O'Brian's series of twenty one novels, set in the Napoleonic age of sail, are the basis for this project. Despite the fictional nature of the series the plot is inspired by, and overlaps with, real historical events and the narrative often refers to real locations and even actual longitudes and latitudes. A minute examination of the text is used to find each reference to physical location, ship's course; wind direction and speed. I have interpreted these references and translated them into map markers. Marker info dialogs can include a quote that justifies position, a description and an image. Markers also have a concept of context so forward and back links (in the info dialog) can be used to iterate over the story.

We'll showcase more great Aussie mashups on the blog soon. Soon, we hope that some of these will be available on Google Maps itself, via the newly released Mapplets (still in Developer preview mode). More on that soon too!

Posted by Leticia Macvean, Events Coordinator

Developer Day Australia is on and I wanted to update you live from Australian Technology Park in Sydney.



It's an awesome event - we're delighted that over 400 developers are here, making this the biggest event in Google Australian history.Read More

Posted by Leticia Macvean, Events Coordinator

Developer Day Australia is on and I wanted to update you live from Australian Technology Park in Sydney.



It's an awesome event - we're delighted that over 400 developers are here, making this the biggest event in Google Australian history.

This morning, Aaron Boodman announced the worldwide launch of Google Gears, an open source browser extension to enable web applications work offline (think: doing your internet banking without an internet connection!).

We've heard sessions from Aussie Googlers Alan Noble, Lars Rasmussen, James Macgill, Zhen Wang and Bo Majewski. Alice Boxhall is blogging the event live on the Developer Day Blog. Check it out.



We've got a "speedgeeking"competition where everyone is voting on the best Aussie Google mashup. We'll put the finalists on the blog in coming days. Winner announced today at 5:30pm.


More photos here. Wrap up to come!