GMail has realized that sending every single inbox message across multiple mail clients via IMAP can become overwhelming, especially if you are mixing business and personal e-mails.  Now GMail can send specific e-mails based on filters to your other e-mail clients running on Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP). 

IMAP is different from POP because it syncs functions across all mail clients.  If you delete a message on GMail using Outlook’s IMAP system, it will be applied to the web-based version of GMail.com too.

To set this up, click on “Settings” when logging into GMail.  Then click on “Labs.”  Scroll down to where it says, “Advanced IMAP Controls by Jamie N.”  Enable that feature and then click on Save Changes at the bottom of the Labs page.

After the feature is enabled, click on the Labels tab under Settings and select which Filters you would like to “Show in IMAP.”  Click on the image below to see what the menu looks like:

GMail’s IMAP deletion is slightly more complicated however.  When deleting a message that is still present in the screen that you are looking for, GMail sets it to a filter called [Imap]/Deleted Items.  You can change this by going into Settings -> IMAP Access -> and clicking from one of the below options:

Today Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) subsidiary, YouTube is trying a new strategy to monetize videos. YouTube will be providing e-commerce links to goods that are related to specific products.  For example, if you are watching a music video of a song by Katy Perry, YouTube will provide a link to a site where you can purchase the song through iTunes or Amazon.com. 

This feature is applicable towards movies, video games, and books as well. 

Below is a screenshot of how it works:

This is a great way for YouTube to make sure that the copyright owners of this music will somehow get royalties for allowing the video to be uploaded on the site.  I believe It might be wiser to actually integrate the links in the video as many people embed these videos on external sites. 

While YouTube is finding ways to effectively monetize copyrighted material, Viacom Inc. (NYSE:VIA.B) is still pursuing their $1 billion lawsuit on the video sharing site.  Viacom filed discovery requests against YouTube’s early investors about why they chose to invest in them.  Viacom wants to find out if the investors believed that more users will come to the site because of copyright-infringed videos.

Jon Stewart and Demetri Martin mocked the $1 billion lawsuit in March 2007 on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.  The Daily Show with Jon Stewart is aired on Comedy Central, a Viacom subsidiary.

Viacom sent the discovery requests to Sequoia Capital, Artis Capital Management, and TriplePoint Capital.  The three firms have decided to comply and will produce the documents necessary by October 27.  Sequoia invested in YouTube in 2005 and after Google acquired the video sharing site for $1.65 billion, the venture capital firm received shares in the search engine company worth $504 million.  TriplePoint received Google shares worth $6.4 million and Artis received shares worth $83 million.

Earlier this year, Viacom won the right to be given hard drives containing YouTube users habits. 

Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) has put their $23 million acquisition of AdScape Media to use.  Today the search engine company announced that they are developing new ways for game publishers to make money through AdSense for Games.  AdSense for Games allows game publishers to place video advertisements into games based on the web.

Game publishers that Google is working closely with includes Konami, Zynga, Demand Media, Mochi Media, Zynga, Esurance, Sprint, and Sony.  Current game publishers must have 500,000 game plays per day to be eligible for AdSense for Games.

“As a beta user of AdSense for Games, you can display video ads, image ads, or text ads within your online games to earn revenue. You’ll be able to show these ads in placements you define, such as interstitial frames before a game, after a level change, or when a game is over,” stated Ryan Hayward, a Googler on the Ads Product Marketing team. “Members of our AdWords team will sell your in-game ad placements directly to top brand advertisers, and you’ll also see contextually
targeted text and image ads based on content and demographic information. In addition, you’ll be able to control the ads you see on your pages using our filtering options.”

I’m not a big fan of playing games of the Internet.  I’m actually more of a console guy myself.  In the past, I’ve been addicted to computer games like Counter-Strike, Command & Conquer, and Unreal Tournament, but having games like that covered in ads would suck.  I hope Google only sticks to placing ads in games such as Texas Hold Em’, Solitaire, Chess, and other non-RPG games.

Out of all of the random features that find themselves in Google’s GMail Labs, I think Mail Goggles top them all.  Mail Goggles prevents drunk people from sending out incriminating e-mails.  If phone companies can integrate this feature for text messages, then that would be very useful.  I’ve sent out many incoherent text messages in my day, some of them being this past weekend alone.  I even have one friend from studying in the U.S. from Dubai who uses 2 separate phones.  One for going out that has international calling blocked and the other for normal, routine calls.  He just switches the SIM cards between both phones.

“When you enable Mail Goggles, it will check that you’re really sure you
want to send that late night Friday email,” wrote GMail engineer Jon Perlow on the GMail blog. “And what better way to check
than by making you solve a few simple math problems after you click
send to verify you’re in the right state of mind?”

Like all other GMail Labs features, I want to make sure to fully test them out to see how they work.  So here goes…

To enable the feature, log in to your GMail account.  Click on “Settings” and then click on “Labs.”  Scroll to where it says “Mail Goggles” by Jon P and click on Enable.  After clicking on Enable, the Mail Goggles settings will appear under the General Settings tab. 

In order to test it out, I created my settings to ask questions on a difficulty scale of 1 between the times of 12AM - 12AM on Tuesdays and Wednesdays.  Then I clicked Save Changes.  After that, I clicked Compose Mail and tried writing myself an e-mail.  The questions popped up like a charm.  Intentionally writing a wrong answer, below are the results:

“Water and bed for you.  Or try again.”  Haha very clever, Google!  That is just as funny as a message appearing after uninstalling Google Chrome that says “Is it something we said?”  After answering the right answers, it goes through successfully.  If you successfully answer the questions, then every mail you send after that will go through.

Okay, so how tough are the most difficult questions?  I logged out of GMail and logged back in, then changed the difficulty to 5.  Below are the questions on a difficulty of 5 that I received: basic multiplication, division, longer subtraction, and longer addition.

From a user perspective, this feature is very helpful.  I think I may just keep this feature enabled just in case, but it might be also be a great feature to integrate into the labs of Google Android for text messaging.  E-mail is definetely a great start though.  My applause for the GMail team on creating a feature like this.  I’m sure it is very useful for people.

After the Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) acquisition bid for Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) fell through, Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) made an advertising deal.  The deal was that Google would act as a Yahoo!’s broker for advertising inventory.  This way both Yahoo! wouldn’t have a shortage of ads and Google would make a good amount of money from it.  There have been many complaints about this deal as Yahoo! and Google are the #1 and #2 websites in the world according to Alexa. 

The Association of National Advertisers, Inc. sent a letter to the United States Department of Justice citing that the Google and Yahoo! partnership would control 90% of search advertising inventory.  The ANA claimed that this would lead to diminished competition, limit choices, and increase concentration of market power.

Google responded by creating a website with a presentation about why this does not cause any of the aforementioned circumstances.

The Justice Department and government officials in Canada and Europe are exploring whether the deal is anti-competitive.  Although both companies are ready to move ahead with the deal, they have decided to pause just in case there is any further interruption.  Why start arranging the ads if it gets ruled to be unlawful later?

The investigation is expected to conclude towards the end of the month.

As most of you know, Google recently turned 10 years old. The powerful search engine has been growing its Internet empire through acquisitions and partnerships ever since it went public.  In this post, I’ll be going in depth about the companies Google acquired in the past and where are they now.

1. Deja.com (Price unknown, Date: February 12, 2001)

Google bought Deja.com in February 2001.  Deja News Research was a forum based on Usenet that started in 1995.  Steve Madere started Deja News in Austin, TX and Google wanted it because of it’s searching capabilities.  Deja News could search across all of their archived newsgroups.  Results were found immediately.  However, some of the material submitted to Deja.com included that from The Church of Scientology so the company found themselves facing a couple of lawsuits.

In 1999, Deja.com shifted their business model to focus on shopping comparison.  The archived messages did not become available to their users any longer.  Then one year later, the company was in financial distress so they sold the shopping service to eBay’s Half.com and the archives to Google.  Google took the archives from Deja and integrated it into Google Groups.

“We welcome Deja’s loyal users into the growing community of Google users worldwide,” stated Larry Page in a press release from 2001.  Page was CEO of Google in 2001 when they acquired Deja.com. “With more than 500 million individual messages and growing fast, Usenet and its thriving community is one of the most active and valuable information sources on the Internet.”

Deja.com redirects to Google Groups and is blocked from Archive.org.

2. Outride (Price: unknown, Date: September 20, 2001)

Outride was a spin-off from the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC).  Outride specialized in online information retrieval.  Through the acquisition, Google bought the I.P., the patent rights, source code, trademarks, and domain names from them.  Using the technology from Outride, Google created iGoogle in May 2005.  iGoogle is an AJAX-based starting homepage where users can aggregate RSS feeds and Google Gadgets.

Below is a screenshot from April 2001 of what Outride’s homepage looked like:

Outride had 2 products created at the time: Outride Search Service and Outride Communications Service.  The technology platform created by Outride was called Outride Relevance Builder and Outride Relevance Miner.  Outride Search Service provided search results based on user interests and demographics.  This data was collected by their search habits.  Outride Communications Services was a Web-based community platform that harvests hyperlinks from emails, calendars, communication apps, and other groupware.

“This acquisition is another example of Google’s commitment to providing the highest quality search service in the world,” stated Larry Page.  Page was the President of Products at the time of the acquisition. “Outride has made significant advances in the field of relevance technology and we believe Google provides the ideal vehicle to continue the development of these technologies.”

The Outride.net domain name is no longer online, but screenshots of the old site are available on archive.org.

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Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) stock dropped by $200 per share in the last couple of minutes of the market closing today.  The Nasdaq Stock Market operater is currently investigating some of the transactions that might have happened as an error.  “Participants should review their trading activity for potentially erroneous trades and request adjudication,” stated the surveillance arm of the Nasdaq OMX Group. 

Bethany Sherman, a spokeswoman of the Nasdaq stated that they are investigating the trades that occurred in the last 3 minutes of the market closing (3:57-4PM E.S.T.).  “We’ll take a look at the trades and make a judgment as to whether there were erroneous trades,” Sherman reported. 

Clearly by looking at the highs and the lows, there is a data error with calculating the stock price.  The low is $0.01 and the high is $498.36.  The stock should be back above the $400 mark by the opening of the market again tomorrow.  Those who made the trades at the abnormal prices will most likely be undone. 

Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) believes it is important that their advertising partnership with Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) should not be misinterpreted.  Google set up a website called YahooGoogleFacts.com to answer FAQs about concerns that people may have regarding the deal.  I embedded the presentation above.

“Some people have questions about our advertising agreement with Yahoo! and there are some misconceptions about it,” stated Karen Wickre of the Google Blog Team.  “So today we are putting facts about the deal on a new website to provide more information on the agreement and why it is good for consumers, advertisers and publishers. We’ll be updating the site regularly, so check back when you have additional questions.”

Some of the main bullet points of the presentation includes:
- A screenshot of how the Yahoo! homepage may look like with Google Ads embedded
- The partnership is similar to the one that Ask.com and Google already have in place
- Yahoo! search today has little or few ads in their inventory compared to Google
- Yahoo! would have the right to use AdSense for Search and AdSense for Content for U.S. and Canada.  Yahoo! can control how much they want to use it
- It is a non-exclusive advertising supplier agreement.  Yahoo! has the right to find other ad partners.
- Yahoo! will allow interoperability between Yahoo! Messenger and Google Talk
- People that use Yahoo! won’t see a major change except for seeing more relevant ads
- Advertisers will have new ways to reach more target customers
- The deal is not a merger and does not remove a competitor from the playing field
- This deal does not increase Google’s search traffic
- This deal does not allow Google to control set prices for advertisers
- This deal does not give Google any equity stake in Yahoo
- Similar deals are taking place where Toyota provides Ford with hybrid engine technology and Canon suppliers laser printer engines to HP
- Yahoo! had supplied advertising inventory to Microsoft between 2003-2006 through the acquisition of Overture
- Google’s AdWords program won’t change in any way through this agreement, meaning that the advertiser still bids a price that they think is fair
- The DoJ and FTC have already endorsed similar agreements in the past, meaning non-exclusive commercial deals
- Last slide quotes several publications about the deal

Deutsche Telekom AG (NYSE:DT) subsidiary T-Mobile is the first distributor of the Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) Android powered phone.  T-Mobile stated before that users of the HTC G1 phone be restricted to 1GB of data per month.  But then they quickly retracted that cap.  T-Mobile will find some other way to manage the network bandwidth without capping early adopters of the HTC G1.

The New York Times’ Saul Hansell sent a message about the 1GB cap.  Below is the response from T-Mobile:
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There is a difference between those who build a product or service out of a conversation versus those who don’t act upon an idea.  Those who don’t act upon an idea end up possibly regretting it later.  When Microsoft bought DOS from Seattle Computer Products in 1980 for $50,000 and contracted it to IBM, thus creating millions of dollars in revenue, Tim Paterson was not happy.  When Microsoft valuated Facebook at $15 billion based on the $240 million investment, we started hearing about ConnectU, the company that claimed Facebook stole their ideas.  And now that Google is worth $136 billion and has turned 10 years old, Hubert Chang has created a video claiming that he helped with the idea and business plan for the search engine.

Hubert Chang claims that he helped come up with the idea for Google and is considered a founder just as much as Larry and Sergey.  Chang stated that he was introduced to the founders of Google by Professor Motwani.  Given this interesting claim Erick Schonfeld of TechCrunch e-mailed Google spokespeople and Professor Motwani himself.  Motwani stated that he recalled exchanging a couple of e-mails with Chang and shared them with Larry and Sergey.  But at that time PageRank was already in place and Google was being built.  Google also e-mailed TechCrunch stating that Larry and Sergey have no recollection of meeting Chang.  And “PageRank had already been developed by that time, and Larry and Sergey had already decided to start Google.”

Will anything come out of this for Chang?  I think that the most he will get is the acknowledgement that he had a conversation about an idea.  Unless Chang can come up with any evidence that Larry and Sergey took his idea and ran off with it, to the public this may not be a valid claim.  Personally based on his expression and the fact that Motwani acknowledged his existence makes me convinced that at least he might have contributed an idea or two.  At the end of the day, everyone has that one great idea, but the ones that actually implement it get the glory.

In any case, Below is the full transcript I wrote from the video as accurate as I can understand. 
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Royal Pingdom noticed that about half of Google’s products are still in the beta phase.  Beta means that a product is no longer complete or finished.  This includes GMail, Chrome, Docs, Knol, Alerts and Video.  Pingdom found that out of 49 products, 22 are in beta.  That means that 45% of their products are in beta.  If Pingdom included Google Labs projects in the count, that would bring the total to about 57%.  Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) quietly announced recently that they are shutting down Page Creator to focus on other projects.

“We are no longer accepting new sign-ups for Page Creator because we have shifted our focus to developing Google Sites, which offers many of the capabilities of Page Creator along with new features like site-level navigation, site-level headers, control over who can see and edit your site, and rich embeddings like calendars, videos, and Google docs,” states the Google Page Creator homepage.  This was noticed by Pulse 2.0 commenter, Helen Saridaki.  

Current Page Creator users will be automatically transitioned into Google Sites later on in the year.  Google Page Creator allowed users to crop, rotate, add special effects, and edit brightness of images online.  Websites used to be hosted on username.googlepages.com.  Google Sites is not in beta.

For those of you that have visited or live in New York City, you know that getting around just ain’t easy.  To get around the city you can use water taxis, regular taxis, subways, buses, cars, bikes, segways, regional rail, or just walking everywhere.  Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) has just introduced a new way to make transportation planning easier in New York.  They have taken the route and schedule information of the New York Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA), the largest public transportation agency in the U.S. and have integrated them into Google Maps. 

The route and schedules belong to the regional rails, buses, and subways themselves.  This includes the Long Island Rail Road, the Long Island Bus, Metro-North Railroad, and the MTA Bus Company.  This project is a part of Google Transit.  Google Transit plays a huge role in energy conservation.  The number of cities that Google Transit provides the routes and guides for is astonishing.  They even have the routes and guides to several whole countries like Switzerland, Japan, and Austria. 

“Thinking about the magnitude of today’s launch, I can’t help but think about how far we’ve come towards reaching our goal. It’s been nearly two years to the day since I posted about the expansion of the Google Transit trip planner (we added five more cities to our initial single-city launch in Portland, Oregon). And in that post I included some statistics about how many people lived in a city covered by our product. At the time, our coverage was 6 U.S. cities,” stated Chris Harrelson, Tech Lead & Creator of Google Transit.  “Now we cover more than 170 cities and countries across the globe, including about 70 cities in North America and 81 in China, plus cities in Europe and Australia and national coverage of Japan, Switzerland and Austria. And the number of people served annually by agencies was at about 6 million. Now it’s hard to count precisely, but the number is at least at several hundred million (wow!).”

The route guide for NYC on Google Maps is available at: http://maps.google.com/nyc.  Below is a demo of how to use Google Transit for New York City:

Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) is debuting today in front of a large audience at the T-Mobile G1 event.  Google Android will be available in America and in Europe upon the initial launch.  The HTC Dream G1 phone will be released on October 22 and will cost about $179.  The HTC Dream G1 phone will be touch screen, have 3G WiFi, QWERTY keyboard, YouTube, Street View, Maps, Google applications, 3MP camera, video, music player, 1GB in memory, and access to the Google Android Market.  T-Mobile will start integrating 3G networks at major airports. 

The browser will be Chrome-like.  And the music player will be able to support DRM-free MP3, WMA, AAC.  Larry Page and Sergey Brin made a surprise visit at the event.

Google has also recently announced the winners and finalists of the Android Developer Challenge.  The developers that won $275,000 in awards are:
1. cab4me: An app that connects cab drivers with potential passengers
2. CompareEverywhere: An app where readers can read reviews of local stores.
3. Ecorio: Track your mobile carbon footprint.  Recommends ways to conserve energy (carpooling, bus, etc.)
4. GoCart: Scan the barcode of a product using the built-in camera and find the best prices for that good at other places.
5. Life360:  Uses messaging system and the social network around your neighbor-hood to find out about natural disasters or help finding a lost pet.
6. Locale: Change advanced phone settings based on your geographic location.  For example, go to vibrate mode when sitting in the office.
7. PicSay: Personalize images and share with friends or other photo sites.
8. Softrace: Set up fun races with friends through the Location API.
9. TuneWiki: Social media player that loads audio, video, music maps, social networks, and lyrics around certain songs.
10. Wertago: Find local parties where other friends might be located.

The developers that won $100,000 in awards are:
1. BreadCrumbz: Take pictures of a route that you are following and send them to friends using the camera and the GPS.
2. Cooking Capsules:  An application that shows you pictures of ingredients and recipes.
3. Maverick: An app that makes it easy to exchange multimedia with other Maverick users through Google Talk and Blogger.com.
4. PebbleBox: Exchange and share local information about housing, restaurants, etc.
5. PhoneBook 2.0: Contextual social address book.  For people to share mood and location.
6. Piggyback: Real-time carpooling application
7. Pocket Journey: Connects mobile phone user to local media describing certain landmarks based on geographic location.
8. Rayfarla: Games centered around music and play virtual music instruments.
9. ShareYourBoard: Share whiteboard data with friends.  Great app for start-up companies and corporations.
10. Teradesk e-Storage: Remote file access and virtual storage.

“Developers will soon be able to distribute their applications to real handsets through the beta version of Android Market,” stated Erick Tseng, Lead Product Manager of the Android Team. “Handset manufacturers and wireless carriers will be able to incorporate Android innovations into their own new handsets and service offerings. And users will get better handsets and more choice. We think it’s another step towards realizing the full potential of the mobile phone.”

Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) will be removing any videos that contain any form of intimidation through the use of guns and knives from their video site and from YouTube.com.  This is the first time that YouTube has made a policy change specifically for the U.K. 

“We recognize that there has been particular concern over videos in the UK that involve showing weapons with the aim of intimidation” stated a YouTube spokesman.  There has been an increase in concern about violent gun and knife related crimes in the U.K. 

This isn’t the first time that social media was blamed for weapon-related crimes.  In July, sensationalist newspaper, Sun U.K. blamed Facebook application, Superpoke for a violent epidemic taking place because the application had a way to virtually “shank” friends. 

YouTube U.K. is powered by: http://uk.youtube.com/. 

Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) Android is set to debut on September 23 for a demo and hit stores by the end of October.  The T-Mobile HTC Dream will be the first phone to power Google Android.  Strategy Analytics predicts that Android will reach 4% of smartphones by the end of 2008.  That equates to 400,000 units sold. 

Smartphones are defined as a mobile device that is powered by an operating system with e-mail and Internet capabilities.  This includes BlackBerries, Treos, iPhones, etc. 

“We forecast 10.5 million smartphones to be sold in the U.S.during Q4 2008,” stated Neil Mawston, Director of the Wireless Device Strategies division at Strategy Analytics. “We estimate smartphones with Google’s Android operating system, led by HTC of Taiwan, will reach 0.4 million units in the quarter, for a 4 percent market share. Android is a relatively late entrant and it will join an increasingly crowded market.”

Google announced that many applications can be built around the Android platform.  The Android Market will competes directly with the Apple iPhone App Store.  Apple’s App Store has already sold over 100 million applications this month.  Some of the applications for the Android will revolve around GPS, Wi-Fi, touch, and Bluetooth technologies. 

Many people are skeptical about the impact Google Android will have when compared to the iPhone.  But looking at Google’s brand power, they were able to get 2 million people to download Chrome in one week–so anything is possible for them right now.