Wednesday, March 28, 2007

LG Electronics and Google Team Up to Enhance the Mobile Experience

LG Handsets to integrate Google Search, Google Maps for mobile, Blogger Mobile and Gmail for mobile

Seoul, Korea, and Orlando, Florida March 28, 2007 – LG Electronics (LG), a leading worldwide provider of advanced wireless handsets and accessories, and Google today announced a global collaboration to pre-install Google’s services on millions of LG mobile phones. Mobile users around the world will now be able to easily search for information, find locations, update blogs and manage email while on the move.

"Building on our efforts to set new standards for wireless handsets, we are excited to partner with Google to offer extra value to consumers with enhanced mobile Internet experiences," said Mr. Paul Bae, Vice President of the Product Planning Team at LG Electronics Mobile Communications Company. "LG’s mobile devices, combined with Google, will provide consumers with easy access to their favorite Internet services even without a PC and make it easy for them to stay connected while in motion."

Select LG handsets, pre-installed with Google™ products and services will be shipped globally including North America, Europe and Asia starting in the second quarter of 2007. These handsets will create a more dynamic user experience, including one click access to Google search through an icon in the application menu. More features of LG-Google handsets include:

  • Google Maps™ for mobile, an application that enables users to view maps and satellite imagery, find local businesses, and get driving directions
  • Gmail™ for mobile, a Java-based application that brings more speed, convenience and functionality to the mobile Gmail experience
  • Blogger™ Mobile, an application to upload/download images and text to blog from mobile devices (www.blogger.com), keeps avid bloggers upwardly mobile.

"We’re pleased to work with LG to make it easier than ever for mobile internet users to have powerful applications and personalized information at their fingertips," said Deep Nishar, director of product management, Google. "Users around the world now have more options for accessing information while on-the-go through search and Gmail. With applications like Blogger, users are now free to express themselves from wherever they are in the world."

Through this new partnership, LG and Google will jointly market LG-Google handsets, then further extending their collaboration to develop digitalized home in the future. LG plans to launch mobile handsets pre-installed with Google and products and service for the next few years with at least ten new handsets in 2007.

About LG Electronics, Inc.

LG Electronics, Inc. (KSE: 066570.KS) is a global leader and technology innovator in consumer electronics, home appliances and mobile communications, employing more than 82,000 people working in over 110 operations including 81 subsidiaries around the world. Comprising four business units – Mobile Communications, Digital Appliance, Digital Display and Digital Media with 2006 global sales of US $38.5 billion – LG Electronics is the world’s largest producer of CDMA handsets, air conditioners, optical storage products, DVD players and home theater systems.

LG Electronics Mobile Communications Company is a leading producer of UMTS (WCDMA), CDMA and GSM handsets. LG draws upon its cutting-edge technology and innovative handset design capabilities to create a higher quality mobile environment for its customers around the world. With a total range of wired and wireless solutions, LG is rapidly expanding its presence and market share in the global mobile industry. For more information, please visit www.lge.com.

About Google Inc.

Google’s innovative search technologies connect millions of people around the world with information every day. Founded in 1998 by Stanford Ph.D. students Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google today is a top web property in all major global markets. Google’s targeted advertising program provides businesses of all sizes with measurable results, while enhancing the overall web experience for users. Google is headquartered in Silicon Valley with offices throughout the Americas, Europe, and Asia. For more information, visit www.google.com.

Media Contacts:

Google Inc.

Lois Kim
Head of Corporate Communications & PA
82.2.6001.2983
lois@google.com

Judy Pae
Corporate Communications
822.3777.7144
lgpr@lge.com
www.lge.com/press

LG Electronics, Inc.

Erin Fors
415.39.0582
efors@google.com

Melissa Elkins
LG Mobile Phones
858.635.5329
melkins@lge.com

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Google, Google Maps, Gmail and Blogger are trademarks of Google Inc. in the United States and/or other countries. Other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

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Tuesday, March 27, 2007

Google Packs In More Free Software

Announcement
March 27, 2007

Google has made some additions to the Google Pack that will satisfy your fun side and your sensible side. The Google Pack™ service, a free collection of essential software with millions of users that removes the hassle of finding, installing, and updating software, now delivers new security options and a fresh way to display photos.

What’s new:

Symantec Norton Security Scan: Get basic virus protection from a world leader in PC security. Security Scan features automatic security updates and scheduled scanning, all without a subscription fee.

PC Tools Spyware Doctor Starter Edition: This exclusive version of the award-winning anti-spyware and anti-malware utility includes scheduled scanning, threat removal, limited active protection and free automatic updates.

Google Photos Screensaver: Turn your screen into a digital picture frame that displays the latest photos from your friends, family, and favorite photographers. Show images from your computer, Picasa™ Web Albums, or photo feeds from other photo-sharing sites.

Google Pack downloads and installs these and other essential applications quickly and easily. The Google Updater, included in the Google Pack, keeps them up to date so you don’t need to worry about missing out on new features. Google Pack Beta is available in 12 languages, runs on Window XP and Vista, and supports Internet Explorer 6.0 and Firefox 1.0 and higher. Get the Google Pack in a few clicks at pack.google.com.

Google, Google Pack, Google Photos Screensaver, and Picasa are the trademarks of Google Inc. All other company and product names may be trademarks of the respective companies with which they are associated.

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Monday, March 26, 2007

Pet Food Crisis Tops This Week's Google Weekly Zeitgeist

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Thursday, March 22, 2007

Michael Moritz Will Not Seek Re-Election to Google’s Board of Directors

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. – March 22, 2007 – Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) today announced that Michael Moritz has informed the company that he will not seek re-election to its board of directors at the 2007 stockholder meeting. Moritz, who has been a director since May 1999, said his decision will allow him to focus more time on his responsibilities as a general partner of Sequoia Capital.

"Mike’s many contributions to Google over the years as investor and director helped us immensely," said Eric Schmidt, Google’s chief executive officer. "His insights, drive, and determination are part of Google today and will be so forever."

"Larry and I both have valued Mike’s counsel and wisdom from Google’s earliest days," added Sergey Brin, Google’s co-founder and president of technology. "We respect his decision to focus more of his energies on Sequoia, but will miss him. Sequoia provided crucial advice, funding and leadership to Google and we look forward to working with the entire set of distinguished partners at Sequoia in the future."

"Larry and Sergey’s originality and the remarkable accomplishments of Eric and the Google management have generated substantial returns for Sequoia Capital’s limited partners – almost all of which are charities," said Moritz. "I’m delighted to have played a role in these achievements and, along with my partners at Sequoia, look forward to identifying and supporting new businesses, in partnership with Google and others."

Google will hold its annual election of directors at its stockholder meeting on May 10, 2007.

About Google Inc.

Google’s innovative search technologies connect millions of people around the world with information every day. Founded in 1998 by Stanford Ph.D. students Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google today is a top web property in all major global markets. Google’s targeted advertising program provides businesses of all sizes with measurable results, while enhancing the overall web experience for users. Google is headquartered in Silicon Valley with offices throughout the Americas, Europe and Asia. For more information, visit www.google.com.

Contacts:

Jon Murchinson
Corporate Communications
650.253.4437
jonm@google.com

Maria Shim
Investor Relations
650.253.7663
marias@google.com

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Tuesday, March 20, 2007

A New Way to Pay – Google Tests Pay-Per-Action for Google AdWords™

Announcement
March 20, 2007

Google announced today a limited beta test of pay-per-action advertising, a new pricing model that allows advertisers to pay only when predetermined actions are completed on their site. The pay-per-action model gives advertisers the option of paying when a customer makes a purchase, signs up for a newsletter, or completes any other clearly defined action the advertiser chooses. Advertisers have the freedom of defining the value of a completed action, ultimately giving them more control over their advertising costs. Designed to complement Google’s existing cost-per-click and cost-per-impression pricing models, pay-per-action pricing offers advertisers yet another choice, enabling them to reach their customers in a new way, and thereby better meeting their goals and objectives.

Pay-per-action ads are only shown on Google AdSense™ for content sites. AdSense publishers are able to choose whether they want to serve pay-per-action ads on their sites. Publishers can select between an individual ad, a shopping cart of ads, or a specific term or phrase that is relevant to their site’s content. Prior to ads being shown on their site, publishers can view the specifics of the ad, including company name, logo and products or services being sold. This visibility provides publishers with control over which pay-per-action ads are shown on their site.

With this new pricing model, advertisers can create text or image ads in addition to using Google’s new text link ad format, which are brief text descriptions that take on the characteristics of a publisher’s page. Pay-per-action advertising is available to U.S. advertisers. Over the next few weeks, Google will begin adding advertisers and publishers to the beta test. Advertisers and publishers can sign up now to participate and more will be added to the test on a rolling basis.

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Google, AdSense, and AdWords are the trademarks of Google Inc.

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Google Launches New Feature to Decorate Your Personalized Homepage

Announcement
March 20, 2007

This week, Google launched a new feature on the Google Personalized Homepage service. Users now have the option of selecting from 6 different "themes" to decorate their personalized homepage. The themes to choose from include: a beach, a city, a sweet dreams theme, a teahouse, a winter hills theme, and a bus stop.

To engage the user, each theme changes dynamically – based either on the user’s time of day or local weather conditions. For example, if you select the beach theme, the sunrise and sunset on your personalized homepage will correspond with your local sunrise and sunset times. Or, if you choose the bus stop theme, when it’s raining in your neighborhood, the characters in your bus stop theme will be equipped with umbrellas and rain gear. While each theme design is dynamic, it doesn’t interfere with the user’s ability to read and access information on the page. Our goal is to create an online experience that mirrors users’ local conditions (time, weather, etc.) and serves as a reflection of their own changing environment.

This is one of several new features that have been developed recently to enhance users’ experience with Google Personalized Homepage. Last week, we launched a Google Talk gadget and a "Magic Tabs" feature that auto-generates a tab based on a category the user selects (i.e. sports, news, movies, etc.)

We’ve worked hard to ensure the design and technology underpinning these new themes continues to offer the best possible user experience. We set out to create themes that were both graphically-rich and dynamic, but still meet Google’s speed and scalability requirements. We used a new CSS framework to optimize our ability to scale images and easily add new themes. We also used a tiling approach from the center to ensure that resizing the image did not distort it. The end result is a set of fun themes that are easy to use, change according to the user’s time and location, but don’t take away from the clarity of the page.

To select a theme for your personalized homepage, go to www.google.com/ig and click the "Select theme" link located on the top right-hand side of your screen.

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Monday, March 19, 2007

Hoops Madness Reigns In This Week's Google Weekly Zeitgeist

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Google announces partnership with Rwandan Government and Kenya Education Network to provide free communications applications

Mountain View, Calif., Kigali, Rwanda and Nairobi, Kenya, March 19, 2007 – Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) today announced separate partnerships with the Rwandan Ministry of Infrastructure and the Kenya Education Network (KENET). As a result, Rwanda’s educational institutions and government ministries, and Kenya’s universities are starting to use Google Apps™ – Google’s set of hosted and customizable communications services. Students in both African countries as well as Rwandan government officials will have access to free communications tools including email, shared calendars, instant messaging and word processing under their institutions’ domain names.

Rwandan Minister of State for Energy and Communications, The Hon Albert Butare, said: “This partnership will be a boost in terms of services offered to our Rwandan Academic Institutions, allowing them to collaborate in their learning activities. Furthermore, I believe communication between students and their lecturers will be enhanced as users throughout the country will now be using the same state-of-the-art, cutting edge technology that is available in other parts of the world.”

Three Rwandan universities – the National University of Rwanda, the Kigali Institute for Education and the Kigali Institute for Science and Technology – will initially have access to Google Apps Education Edition, while the country’s government ministries will be using Google Apps Standard Edition. During this first phase, around 20,000 users in Rwanda will have access to these services. A broader countrywide rollout will follow shortly afterwards.

The University of Nairobi’s 50,000 students will be the first to be offered Google Apps for Education in Kenya. These services will then be extended to 150,000 Kenyan students at universities across the country. The rollout will be jointly coordinated by Google and KENET.

Shona Brown, Senior Vice President of Business Operations at Google added: “Google has a simple ambition – to help organize the world’s information, making it universally accessible and useful. For us, universality is crucial because we believe everyone should have access to the same services – wherever they live, whatever their language and regardless of income. I am delighted that we have signed this deal and look forward to working with other African governments to make life-enhancing services like free email, instant messaging and PC-to-PC phone calls more widely available across Africa.”

Google Apps allows institutions as well as individuals to use Google’s communication and collaboration applications under their own domain names. All services are hosted by Google and are available to users via any web-based PC. Google Apps includes the following services:

  • Gmail™ – provides users with 2 gigabytes of storage, highly effective spam filtering and powerful search. Gmail includes instant messaging within the email interface;
  • Google Calendar™ – is an online calendar that makes it easy for people to organize their lives and share schedules with others;
  • Google Talk™ – lets users make PC-to-PC voice calls and send instant messages to each other for free;
  • Google Docs & Spreadsheets™ – allows people to create and collaborate on documents and spreadsheets without the need to email attachments back and forth. Different people from within the same organization can work on a document at the same time. All revisions are recorded for editing, and controls enable people to define who can and cannot share the information; and
  • Google Page Creator™ – This what-you-see-is-what-you-get web page authoring tool lets domain administrators build simple web pages for their domain and publish them to the web even if they don’t have any website building experience.

About Google Inc.

Google’s innovative search technologies connect millions of people around the world with information every day. Founded in 1998 by Stanford Ph.D. students Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google today is a top web property in all major global markets. Google’s targeted advertising program, which is the largest and fastest growing in the industry, provides businesses of all sizes with measurable results, while enhancing the overall web experience for users. Google is headquartered in Silicon Valley with offices throughout North America, Europe, and Asia. For more information, visit www.google.com.

Contact:

Emmanuel Evita
emmanuele@google.com
650-253-8175

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Friday, March 16, 2007

Google has acquired Adscape Media

More Information about the acquisition:

Frequently asked questions

Background

Q. What is Adscape Media?

A. Adscape Media is a small in-game advertising company based in San Francisco California. Adscape Media offers dynamic delivery of advertising with plot and storyline integration - making its solutions a truly interactive marketing platform. Adscape Media supports sophisticated demographic and geographic targeting and also provides a robust reporting interface for marketers.

Q. Why did Google acquire Adscape Media?

A. In-game advertising is an area where we believe Google could add a lot of value to users, advertisers and publishers. Adscape Media’s technology and talented team are a great addition to Google’s current advertising solutions for advertisers and publishers.

Q. What are the terms of the acquisition?

A. The terms of the acquisition are confidential and the deal is officially closed.

Q. How much did Google pay?

A. The terms of the acquisition are confidential and the deal is officially closed.

Q. Will Google assume full operational control of Adscape, or will Adscape remain autonomous?

A. We are excited to have the Adscape team join the Google team. We will work together on moving this project forward.

Q. Why did Adscape Media decide to sell to Google?

A. We found that there was a great fit with their technology, team and culture.

Q. Has Google previously incorporated in-game advertising into its ads services?

A. No.

Adscape Media Partners & Business

Q. What does this mean for Adscape Media’s partners?

A. We plan to continue working with the developer, publisher and advertiser communities. Many of our partners have already been informed of the acquisition. If you have questions, you can contact us directly at: info@Adscapemedia.com.

Q. Will current partners continue to get paid?

A. Yes, current partners will continue to get paid - and we will honor any open contracts.

Q. When will Google integrate in-game advertising into the Google advertising platform?

A. At this time, we do not have news to share about the integration plans.

Industry/Business

Q. Do you already have deals signed with game developers?

A. We have been in discussions with many in the game development community and hope to partner with both large and small game publishing companies.

Q. Given the dramatic growth of the gaming market in recent years, how much advertising market share does Google hope to gain from this acquisition, both immediately and over time?

A. We don’t release specific projections but we think there is great value in video game advertising. As more and more people spend time playing video games, we think we can create opportunities for advertisers to reach their target audiences while maintaining a high quality, engaging user experience. That said, we will test ways of successfully implementing this form of advertising and Adscape’s technology will be instrumental in those tests.

Q. Will the in-game ads continue to be integrated into the game or will they become text ads similar to AdSense format?

A. As this is a recent acquisition it is too early to say what the ads will look like. We will explore a variety of options to determine what is best for the advertiser and user.

Q. Where does Google see in-game advertising going in the future, in terms of both revenue and the technology itself?

A. We don’t release specific projections but we think there is great value in video game advertising. As more and more people spend time playing video games, we think we can create opportunities for advertisers to reach their target audiences while maintaining a high quality, engaging user experience. That said, we will test ways of successfully implementing this form of advertising and Adscape’s technology will be instrumental in those tests.

Over the past few years, the video game experience has become richer and more interactive. We think this rich environment is a perfect medium to deliver relevant, targeted advertising that ultimately benefits the user, the video game publisher and the advertiser.

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Monday, March 12, 2007

Lottery Winners, Idols, Superheroes And Sled Dogs Share Space In This Week's Google Weekly Zeitgeist

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Monday, March 5, 2007

Oscars, "Idol" Dominate The Google Weekly Zeitgeist

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