Rippe Speaks About Google

Did you know that if you make an international phone call and you use Google Voice and Google's Droid based mobile phone that you simply select the contact in your phone and your call is connected.  You may ask, what is special about this feature?  Google Voice allows you to make very low cost international calls in addition to being a voice mail system.  So the phone determines you are making an international call, so it uses Google Voice to get you the best rates.  The phone automatically contacts Google Voice then dials the international number you selected and gets you very good low cost international rates.

Makes dialing an international call from your cell phone as easy as calling across the street for pennies per minute!

The Google Appliance which is Google's solution to bring the Google Search capabilities to the corporate environment is available from our business partner, Google.  Many success stories are available, click here to see a few.  We have highlighted one such story below from Reuter's News for your convenience.

“Users are definitely pleased to have the capability to search stock quotes, videos, images, background information, and breaking news, all from one search box”Leon Shklar, EVP of Technology, Reuters Media

New web clipboard for Google Docs that improves copy and paste This new clipboard temporarily stores items you’ve copied in the cloud, then allows you to paste them with proper formatting into documents, spreadsheets and presentations. Editions included: Standard, Premier, Education, Team and Partner Editions Languages included: All languages supported by Google Docs How to access what's new: While editing in Google Docs, select the item that you want to copy. Use the new clipboard menu to copy the item in question. Then, go to your other document, spreadsheet or presentation, and use the clipboard menu there to paste the item into the document. Please note that while items in your web clipboard are available across browsers and across sessions, they do expire after a month.

Google announced a couple of further changes to Gmail Buzz, in relation to the privacy concerns people voiced in the past days. Following people will now require a more explicit, not so easy to miss opt-in action. Furthermore, Google Reader and Picasa sites won’t be auto-connected to your Buzz account now (even though they’re public). Third, Gmail will also include a new Buzz settings tab, in which you can (among other things) completely disable your Buzz account. Google in their post says sorry because they feel they “didn’t get everything quite right”.

One setting I’m not sure is easy to find at the moment though is to disable yourself from showing in the “follows” lists of profiles of others... does anyone know more about this? I’ve heard this can be changed by the setting “Display my full name so I can be found in search” in your profile, but if that’s true then it doesn’t seem to be very obvious. Something else I’m not sure about is which settings exactly stop you to be suggested to others to be followed.

Listen to this YouTube video on a new experimental fiber network. They are planning to build and test ultra high-speed broadband networks in a small number of trial locations across the United States. We'll deliver Internet speeds more than 100 times faster than what most Americans have access to today with 1 gigabit per second, fiber-to-the-home connections. We plan to offer service at a competitive price to at least 50,000 and potentially up to 500,000 people.

Google lobbed a salvo at Facebook on Tuesday, adding Google Buzz, a new social networking capability to its popular Gmail Web e-mail service. Though Google Buzz is somewhat integrated with Twitter, along with a few other services – Flickr and Picasa, most notably – there's no integration with the social network of record, Facebook. And that's a hole Google will have to fill.

For now, Google is rolling the Buzz service out to all its users over the next few days, so sit tight if you don't have it yet. Check buzz.google.com to see if your account is activated

If you are still using IE 6.0 please take note:

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.

Google Apps will continue to support Internet Explorer 7.0 and above, Firefox 3.0 and above, Google Chrome 4.0 and above, and Safari 3.0 and above.

Starting this week, users on these older browsers will see a message in Google Docs and the Google Sites editor explaining this change and asking them to upgrade their browser. We will also alert you again closer to March 1 to remind you of this change.

In 2009, the Google Apps team delivered more than 100 improvements to enhance your product experience. We are aiming to beat that in 2010 and continue to deliver the best and most innovative collaboration products for businesses.

Thank you for your continued support!