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Did you know?

The Google Mobile team is working on an instant translation tool that works by using your phone to capture text and convert it to your language. It works by sending a photo of the text to Google's servers which then use optical character recognition (OCR) to identify the text and then translates the message using Google Translator and then sends the translated text back to your phone.

You can watch a video of it in action here –

The service isn't ready yet but shows you the future of web connected devices.

Did you know?

The apps script is great for automating tasks in Google Docs, but requires a bit of programming know-how. Also very cool about this is that you can "hook into Google's own APIs, which makes bringing in stock quotes or other data relatively easy."

9. Fine-tune Google Apps for your domain
7. Turn off Buzz, Chat, and Labs in Gmail
4. Link and integrate your apps
2. Back up Google apps' data

Building a Farm Where a Freeway Used to Be…download it here.

Did you know?

There’s plenty of hype this week with the rollout Google Buzz, attempt by Google to build a social media platformon top of your Gmail contact list and built inside of Gmail. The service will import activities and comments from your friends and their friends directly into your Gmail. Techcrunch.com breaks it down -

Imagine taking elements of Twitter, Yammer, Foursquare, Yelp, and other social services, and shoving them together into one package. Now imagine covering that package in a layer that looks a lot like FriendFeed. Now imagine shoving that package inside of Gmail. That’s Buzz. If Google Wave is the future, Google Buzz is the present.

How is this service any different from FriendFeed, Facebook or Twitter? For starters, they use totally open standards like PubSubHubbub, OAuth, MediaRSS, Salmon, the Social Graph API, and PortableContacts. Google Buzz also has an API for you to build applications on top of, which is important for a healthy application community to thrive and one of the reasons Twitter was able to take off. Secondly, because of these open standards, Buzz isn’t stuck behind a walled garden, like Facebook. Potentially Idealist could use Buzz to pull in data and push out activities from our site.

Techcrunch has a very thorough write-up on Google Buzz if you want to find out more. Also, take a look at the video below for more info -

Buzz also works on Android, which you can read more about here and watch the video. I’ll write more about the next week.

Did you know?

Google is working on an instant speech-to-speech translation tool for Google Android, which will be “a combination of two of Google’s existing technologies; its online universal translator service, Google Translate, and its voice recognition system.”

The tool will listen to and translate entire chunks of speech as opposed to a word-by-word approach, much like Google Translator. For those that have your Translator, you know it’s not perfect but is much better than many existing services.

It looks like this tool won’t be ready for a couple more years.

Visual Process Manager for SalesForce

SalesForce has deployed a tool called Visual Process Manager that allows customers to “visually design any complex business process with a design tool and instantly run it in the cloud without writing a single line of code.”

The tool helps customers create applications using a wizard to map out business processes and turn them it scalable software -

The Process Designer essentially helps businesses sketch out applications with established set forms, questions, and choices, and logic components, like task assignments, decision trees, and approval processes. These components can be dragged and dropped into a visual process design diagram/ The Process Wizard Builder enables companies to design a “wizard” to help walk end-users, step-by-step, through their business process. The Process Simulator lets customers test out and review processes before they are deployed.

Facebook email addresses back in plain text

This isn’t huge news but it’s good to see that Facebook has changed email addresses back to text. Facebook was displaying user profile emails as images instead of text, mainly for security purposes, making them difficult to work with.

Usage of optical character recognition (OCR) by scammers has made this practice obsolete. Hopefully Facebook will allow applications to leverage this change so users can sync friend addresses with their own address books.

Delete your account

Many online social sites make it difficult for users to easily delete unused accounts in the hopes that you won’t leave their service. A new site called deleteyouraccount.com makes the process of deleting an unused account much easier. Check it out, it will save you time and a headache.

Geolocation for Enterprise

Geolocation isn’t just for Twitter and Google; Apisphere, a Berkeley, California-based startup, has recently raised $4.6 million in funding. They’re trying to bring location-aware technology to services like SalesForce, Outlook and GPS devices. Apisphere has “explored a variety of location-based mobile services, starting with tracking salespeople.”

Hopefully they’ll be able to help bring location-aware services out of the niche of social networking and apply the technology to services everyone will find useful.

Did you know?

Google has very quietly launched searching within your social circle in their results. I don’t know if everyone has access to this at the moment but I can see it within some of my own search results.

So what does this look like?

Last week I wrote about what Google knows of you and your friends (and their friends) in terms of which sites everyone has a profile on. Google will bring back links from these profiles and display the links related to your search query. If your Gmail friend shared a link on Twitter about Obama, it may come back in a Google query related to the president.

Did you know?

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Google is planning to launch an apps store for business applications. The apps store will focus on creating software for Google Apps.

These third-party applications would “enhance Google’s suite of apps (e.g. Gmail, Docs, Calendar, Sites, GTalk). These outside apps could be for adding more security, enhancing word-processing features, or porting information into Google Apps.”

I don’t know how exactly they’ll set up the app store but it will work in a similar manner to the iPhone or Android app stores.

Very interesting.