Posted by Tony Hsieh, Product Manager

Technology has made staying in touch with your friends and family both easier and harder: living a fast-paced, on-the-go lifestyle is easier (and a lot of fun), but it's more difficult to keep track of everyone when they're running around at warp speed. That's why we're excited to announce that we've acquired Jaiku, a company that's been hard at work developing useful and innovative applications for staying in touch with the people you care about most -- regardless of whether you're at a computer or on a mobile phone.

Current Jaiku users can still use the service normally, and new folks can sign up for an invitation to the service when we're ready to expand. We plan to use the ideas and technology behind Jaiku to make compelling and useful products. Although we don't have definite plans to announce at this time, we're excited about helping drive the next round of developments in web and mobile technology.

We wish a hearty Google welcome to Jaiku, and are looking forward to working together on new and innovative ways of keeping people connected.

Posted by Christine Lee, Product Marketing Manager

Nowadays, website publishers realize that getting people to visit your website is only half of the equation. Growing your audience is important, but keeping your audience engaged and staying on your site longer is just as important, if not more so. This is why we're excited to let you know about video units on Google AdSense. Video units enable AdSense publishers to display videos from several YouTube content partners. The video units are ad-supported, and the ads are relevant to both the video and the site content, as well as unobtrusive. AdSense publishers and YouTube content partners will receive a share of the ad revenue, so video units enable both groups to earn incremental revenue.

We're excited about video units because we see this as the first step in content distribution on AdSense and a great opportunity to foster the content ecosystem on the web. AdSense publishers can now enhance their sites with interesting videos, YouTube content partners benefit from a new distribution channel, advertisers have a new vehicle to distribute their messages to their target audiences, and people can tune in to interesting videos on sites they normally visit.

To learn more about video units, mosey on over to the Inside AdSense blog.

Posted by Christophe Bisciglia, Senior Software Engineer

Just as people are social animals, computers are social machines—the more, the merrier. Twenty or thirty years ago, large, centralized mainframes sat alone in sheltered bunkers in computer science departments and government offices alike, choking for hours on mere megabytes of data. Even with recent advances in server technology, large, centralized machines are still struggling to cope with today’s modern computational challenges, which now involve terabytes of data and processing requirements well beyond a single CPU (or two, or four, or eight). One computer just won’t hack it; these days, to support a new paradigm of massively parallel systems architecture, we need to break the machine out of its bunker and give it some friends.

In this age of “Internet-scale” computing, the new, evolving problems faced by computer science students and researchers require a new, evolving set of skills. It’s no longer enough to program one machine well; to tackle tomorrow’s challenges, students need to be able to program thousands of machines to manage massive amounts of data in the blink of an eye. This is how I, along with my good friend and mentor Ed Lazowska of the University of Washington’s CSE department, started to think about CS curricula and the obstacles to teaching a practical and authentic approach to massively parallel computing.

It's no easy feat. Teaching these methods effectively requires access to huge clusters and innovative new approaches to curricula. That's why we are pleased to announce the successful implementation of our Academic Cluster Computing Initiative pilot program at a handful of schools, including the University of Washington, Carnegie-Mellon University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Maryland. This pilot extends our expertise in large scale systems to strong undergraduate programs at the pilot schools, allowing individual students to take advantage of the hundreds of processors being made available. As the pilot progresses, we'll work with our technology partner IBM to shake the bugs out of the system so that we can expand the program to include more educators and academic researchers.

The future of computing is already taking shape on campuses today, and Google and IBM are thrilled to help inspire a new generation of computer scientists to think big. All of the course material developed by UW as well as other tools and resources to facilitate teaching this cutting- edge technology is available at http://code.google.com/edu. If you're a student wondering just what this sort of thing means for you, check out the five-part video lecture series (originally offered to Google Engineering interns) that introduces some of the fundamental concepts of large-scale cluster computing.

Posted by Mendel Chuang, Product Marketing Manager

Google Desktop lets you not only search your computer easily, but you can also personalize your desktop. From cultivating a virtual potted plant, to reading the latest news and checking the weather forecast, you can customize your desktop with a variety of gadgets and a sidebar. Some of you have asked if you can also put gadgets on iGoogle homepages next to your other gadgets. And starting today, the answer is yes.

With Google Desktop 5.5 Beta, you can you now embed Google Desktop Gadgets right into your iGoogle homepage. Gadgets on an iGoogle homepage can have more advanced functionality, such as playing music from your computer. You can find them alongside other gadgets in the iGoogle Content Directory. We've also improved some of the other features; such as better looking Quick Search Box, support for multiple copies of a gadget, and improved Outlook search functionality. Read more on the Google Desktop Blog and check out these gadgets you can now add to your iGoogle homepage.

Posted by Scott Petry, Founder, Postini

Three weeks ago today was the official close of Google's acquisition of Postini -- and what a three weeks it's been. "Official close" meant that integration work could legally begin, and so the Google Apps team and Postini team have been burning the midnight oil to get our services integrated. Now, Google Apps customers, Postini customers and everyone else can see the results.

Postini security and compliance capabilities are officially part of Google Apps Premier Edition. Google Apps customers get these services for free. Postini customers get an extended trial period for Apps. New customers can choose their entry point: Apps (including Postini security and compliance) or any of the standalone Postini services.

The benefits of software as a service are numerous -- that's why we're seeing a huge interest in Apps. Businesses of all sizes are asking for these services, and we need to help customers embrace Apps without loss of features, functions, or security. I'm proud that Postini plays a role in this offering.

Postini was founded in 1999 with the vision of transforming how IT organizations consumed security and compliance products. We recognized the service delivery model brings huge leverage, and 36,000 customers around the world validated that vision. Google Enterprise is now scaling that vision. No one knows what the next three weeks will bring, but we're all excited to be part of it.

Posted by Josh Mendelsohn, Program Manager

When it comes to philanthropy, everyone’s got something different to give – some people have money, others have time, and bloggers have devoted readers. The creative folks at DonorsChoose have a few ideas about how bloggers can help students and teachers.

In case you’re not familiar with DonorsChoose, it’s a site where teachers post needs they have for their classrooms, and donors fund those projects directly. If you’ve got a blog, a website, or even an email account, you can help by creating what’s called a challenge. Just pick some of your favorite projects and challenge your family, friends, and readers to fund them. If you’ve got a Blogger account, it’s easy to add your challenge to your blog in just a few clicks.

To support their recent expansion to schools all across the U.S., the DonorsChoose team is holding a little competition, keeping track of which bloggers and webmasters drive the most funding to schools.

We think this is a cool idea, so we want to help it succeed. We’re going to reward the winning bloggers with exactly what they gave to DonorsChoose, students, and teachers: traffic. The competition will remain open until the end of October - we'll then take a look to see who has helped raise the most money in each of the eight DonorsChoose challenge categories. We’ll post links to the winners’ blogs here, and we’ll also throw in a $500 gift certificate for each winner to spend on DonorsChoose.

So here’s our challenge to you: go create a challenge on DonorsChoose.

Posted by Steve Miller, Google Earth Outreach

On October 13^th and 14^th, Googlers and many people around the world will head out to clean up local parks, beaches, trails and other places close to home. We'll be planning our cleanups using Google Maps and sharing our plans with friends and families, along with an invitation to help. So far, Googlers have sent in almost 100 cleanup maps and proposed plans, and have invited more than 900 of their personal contacts to help.

And since many small cleanups add up to one big impact, we hope you'll join in too. It takes just a few minutes to plan your own cleanup, make a map of it, and send your map to us -- we'll add it to a growing map of all the cleanups around the world. If you keep your cleanup small (groups of 6-10 people work best) and close to home, it'll be easy to organize and you can be sure that you're doing what's most important for your neighborhood. After your cleanup, share your work with the world by posting photos and videos to your map.

If you'd like to join this global effort, you can get started here.