Call phones from Gmail

Gmail voice and video chat makes it easy to stay in touch with friends and family using your computer’s microphone and speakers. But until now, this required both people to be at their computers, signed into Gmail at the same time. Given that most of us don’t spend all day in front of our computers, we thought, “wouldn’t it be nice if you could call people directly on their phones?”

Starting today, you can call any phone right from Gmail.



Calls to the U.S. and Canada will be free for at least the rest of the year and calls to other countries will be billed at our very low rates. We worked hard to make these rates really cheap (see comparison table) with calls to the U.K., France, Germany, China, Japan—and many more countries—for as little as $0.02 per minute.

Dialing a phone number works just like a normal phone. Just click “Call phone” at the top of your chat list and dial a number or enter a contact’s name.


We’ve been testing this feature internally and have found it to be useful in a lot of situations, ranging from making a quick call to a restaurant, to placing a call when you’re in an area with bad reception.

If you have a Google Voice phone number, calls made from Gmail will display this number as the outbound caller ID. And if you decide to, you can receive calls made to this number right inside Gmail (see instructions).

We’re rolling out this feature to U.S. based Gmail users over the next few days, so you’ll be ready to get started once “Call Phones” shows up in your chat list (you will need to install the voice and video plug-in if you haven’t already). If you’re not a U.S. based user—or if you’re using Google Apps for your school or business—then you won’t see it quite yet. We’re working on making this available more broadly—so stay tuned!

For more information, visit gmail.com/call.

Google Plans Adorable, Green, and (Most Importantly) Free Google Voice Phone Booths

When Google announced the previously rumored phone call feature for Google Voice inside Gmail, we all got excited for a Skype-challenging VoIP service that's already embedded in our email. But the most charming element of the announcement was yet to come.
Instead of a boring old ad campaign of TV commercials, YouTube videos, billboards, and what have you, Google decided to do something a little bit more fun. The company is constructing several old-style British phone booths that will be using the new Google Voice feature--all for free. The phone booths, modeled on a 1957 vintage example, will be installed in high-traffic areas, like college campuses.
The Google Voice phone booths seem to be completely free--there's no way to contribute money, for one thing--so I suspect the calls will be limited to the States and Canada. There'll also be a 20-minute limit on phone calls to discourage unscrupulous youngsters from yapping away on the phone for hours like they do in old-timey sitcoms from the '90s.
Even better, at least part of the booth is solar-powered. There's a big light inside the otherwise-spartan booth which is powered by a solar panel on the outside. It's not clear if the phone itself is powered by solar energy or not.
Google hasn't released information regarding the specific number of booths or the locations in which they'll be installed. But keep an eye open--you might see a free, adorable phone booth on a college campus near you.

Company Logos and their Meanings

Ever wondered what company logos mean and whats the significance behind them? Wonder no more!

You might think the arrow does nothing here. But it says that amazon.com has everything from a to z and it also represents the smile brought to  

the customer's face. Wow, that is quite deep.

 

Am not sure how many of you have noticed a hidden symbol in the Federal Express logo.

Yeah, I am talking about the 'arrow' that you can see between the E and the x in this logo. The arrow was introduced to underscore speed and precision, which are part of the positioning of the company.

 The old logo of Baskin Robbins had the number 31 with an arc above it. The new logo took this idea to the next level. The pink parts of the BR still form the number 31, a reference to the 31 flavours.

 Carrefour is one of the biggest European retailers, and its also French for crossroads. The logo symbolizes this word via two opposite arrows. They also added the first letter of the name, because if you look closely youll see the letter C in the negative space between the two arrows.

 

 At first, this logo might not make much sense. But if you look closely, youll see the number 1 in the negative space between the F and the red stripes. I also love how this logo communicates a feeling of speed.

 The NBC (National Broadcasting Company) is one of the biggest American television networks. I think most of you have already seen the peacock in this logo. The peacock has 6 different tail feathers, referring to the six divisions at the time that this logo was created. The peacocks head is flipped to the right to suggest it was looking forward, not back.

Sony Vaio is a well known brand of laptops. But did you know that the name Vaio logo also had a hidden meaning? Well, the first two letters represent the basic analogue signal. The last two letters look like a 1 and 0, representing the digital signal.

Toblerone is a chocolate-company from Bern , Switzerland . Bern is sometimes called The City Of Bears. They have incorporated this idea in the Toblerone logo, because if you look closely, youll see the silhouette of a bear.

Unilever is one of the biggest producers of food, beverages, cleaning agents and personal care products. They produce a huge amount of different products and they wanted to reflect this in their logo. Each part of the logo has a meaning. For example: the heart represents love, care and health - feeling good, a bird is a symbol of freedom. Relief from daily chores “ getting more out of life.

Paul Rand (who designed the iconic IBM logo in 1972) designed this 'eye bee M' logo in 1981. I like that they are quite relaxed about the logo, unlike certain other companies who do not like the logo to be tampered with in any way even for internal promotions

The SUN Microsystems logo is a wonderful example of symmetry and order. It was a brilliant observation that the letters u and n while arranged adjacent to each other look a lot like the letter S in a perpendicular direction. Spectacular.

 

The above are two magazines from the Readers Digest stable. Again, the attempt to communicate what it is about quite figuratively through the logo catches my attention.

This was a logo created for a puzzle game called Cluenatic. This game involves unravelling four clues. The logo has the letters C, L, U and E arranged as a maze. and from a distance, the logo looks like a key

Eighty-20 is a small consulting company which does sophisticated financial modeling, as well as some solid database work. All their work is highly quantitative and relies on some serious computational power, and the logo is meant to convey it.

People first guess that 20% of the squares are darkened, but that turns out to be false after counting them. The trick is to view the dark squares as 1's and the light squares as 0's. Then the top line reads 1010000 and the bottom line reads 0010100, which represent 80 and 20 in binary.

Kinda like the surreal green screen of The Matrix, they want us to read stuff in binary

12-year old Indian origin a Math genius

A very unlikely, and the most awe-inspiring, delegate made her presence at the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) 2010. 12-year-old Kaavya Jayram, who presented a paper on her results in the area of integer partitioning - expressing numbers as the sum of other numbers, was the youngest person at the International Congress of Women Mathematicians, a satellite conference that preceded the ICM reports Indian Express.

Her paper will be published by the International Journal of Number Theory. Parimala Raman, an invited speaker at ICM and one of India's most well-known experts in algebra who is now the Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Mathematics at Emory University, U.S. said, "She is really good and she is way ahead of her age. She is interested in problem solving and research, taking great courses at Stanford. She was at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in December when I gave a talk. We've been in touch."

Kaavya took a fancy to number theory after attending a definitive lecture on the subject at IIT Kanpur by Professor Manindra Agrawal who heads the institute's computer science department.

She was home schooled by her mother as she had attained the tag of a 'problem child' at school, thanks to her intelligence. She decided she would be a mathematician, when eight, and began taking courses at the San Jose State University and Stanford University, the latter at the invitation of noted number theorist Kannan Soundararajan.

Kaavya says of her fancy for numbers, "What I like about number theory is there are so many unsolved problems which seem simple but have stumped mathematicians for years."

Presently the family is based in California's Bay Area and is in India for a year. After this, Kaavya will go to university full time, perhaps to Berkeley or Stanford.