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Google Tweaks Gmail Calendar Sync

April 23rd, 2008 by iDunzo

Google first offered up the ability to sync your Gmail and Outlook calendars in early March.

Since then, it’s received a bunch of feedback on the usability of the product and has decided to make some changes. The changes are welcome, indeed.

Making sure calendars between devices, platforms, and PCs are all in sync can be a serious pain.

Last month, Google sought to lessen some of that pain with its Google Calendar Sync product.

Unfortunately, it didn’t quite go all the way. Users sent in feedback on a few issues, and Google felt an update was necessary.

The Official Gmail Blog wrote up a brief entry explaining the changes. It said:

“Previously, your Google Calendar e-mail address needed to be the organizer or an attendee of your Microsoft Outlook events for the Outlook events to sync to your Google Calendar. Now, when you choose to do a 2-way sync or a 1-way sync from Outlook calendar to Google Calendar, all of your Outlook events will be synced to your Google Calendar.”

This latest enhancement should relieve some frustration of users who were caught in the organizer/attendee web.

Google is auto-updating people who use the sync program, but if you’re impatient and want to download it directly, you can. The new version is 0.9.3.2.

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Time lapse video of Google Doodle creation

February 14th, 2008 by iDunzo

A time lapse video that shows Chief Google Doodler Dennis Hwang draw a Google Doodle from start to finish.

He creates a doodle that commemorates the Lunar New Year and invites students to join the Doodle 4 Google art competition.

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Google Execs Made 20-Year Commitment To Each Other

February 1st, 2008 by iDunzo

Ah, the heady pre-IPO heydays of Summer 2004. In July of that year, co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, together with CEO Eric Schmidt, must have been feeling pretty bullish on Google’s long-term future.

The three agreed to work together for the next 20 years, to have and to hold, in sickness and health, good times and bad, for better or worse. Will this business marriage last?

The three men revealed the commitment in an offhand remark made during an interview. Said Schmidt, “We agreed the month before we went public that we should work together for 20 years.” Schmidt will be 69 years old in July 2024, and Page will be 51 and Brin 50.

With Google’s market capitalization standing at $170 billion, I’d say the partnership is working out so far. Each man is a billionaire. So what if Google’s numbers for the fourth quarter were a bit off from predictions?

Google reported total 2007 profits of 4.2 billion dollars as compared with 3.08 billion in 2006, but Wall Street had expected bigger numbers.

Google’s stock has been on a downward slide of late, declining some $200 per share since the fall. Despite the slight let down, “We’re very pleased with our performance this quarter,” said Schmidt.

Since the IPO, Google has done nothing but grow. The last three months of 2007 saw the company hire approximately 1,000 new workers, bringing the total headcount to nearly 17,000.

It ended 2007 with $14.2 billion in its bank account. The last 12 months have seen a lot of innovation from the company, with new products and services seemingly launched daily.

So far there’s no sign of any strain between the three men. Whether or not this business marriage can go the distance is something only time will tell.

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Eric Schmidt Gives NASA a Lesson in Management

January 18th, 2008 by iDunzo

Google CEO Eric Schmidt spoke at a luncheon celebrating NASA’s 50th anniversary today in Washington, and somewhat cockily gave the flailing space agency advice on how they should run their business.

No surprise to hear that Schmidt thinks NASA should be run the way he manages his search/web apps company.

Schmidt’s 40-minute speech also included a demonstration of the search giant’s use of NASA technology in Google’s products, like Google Earth.

Unmentioned (or at least unreported) was any reference to Google’s personal relationship with the space agency — Schmidt, along with Google cofounders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, uses NASA’s Moffett Field to park his private planes.

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Happy New Year 2008 Plus 25 years of TCP/IP

December 31st, 2007 by iDunzo

Google does it again with a great tribute logo to the year 2008 which is just a few hours away:

Not only are we celebrating the upcoming year 2008, we are also celebrating 25 years of TCP/IP which is a very important part of the intarweb

So with that in mind, how about a little TCP/IP technology trivia?

The Internet protocol suite is the set of communications protocols that implement the protocol stack on which the Internet and most commercial networks run.

It has also been referred to as the TCP/IP protocol suite, which is named after two of the most important protocols in it: the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and the Internet Protocol (IP), which were also the first two networking protocols defined.

Today’s IP networking represents a synthesis of two developments that began in the 1970s, namely LANs (Local Area Networks) and the Internet, both of which have revolutionized computing.

The Internet Protocol suite—like many protocol suites—can be viewed as a set of layers.

Each layer solves a set of problems involving the transmission of data, and provides a well-defined service to the upper layer protocols based on using services from some lower layers.

Upper layers are logically closer to the user and deal with more abstract data, relying on lower layer protocols to translate data into forms that can eventually be physically transmitted. The TCP/IP reference model consists of four layers.

Want to know more? Check out the official Internet protocol suite Wiki.

On that note, have a Happy New Year. See you next year!

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Happy Holidays from Google Doodle #5 For 2007

December 25th, 2007 by iDunzo

Here is Google’s fifth and final holiday Doodle for counting down the days until Christmas:

Google has some creative people working for them. The various logos they come up with for different holidays and special times of year are awesome.

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