9 year old's artwork chosen as Google India's Logo

Google India gave school kids a chance to design a doodle for Google through their Doodle 4 Google competition. Puru Pratap Singh (9) from Gurgaon, India won the Doodle for Google competition. Check out his artwork which ended up as Google India's logo on Friday.



From Hindustan Times:

“The first ‘G’ is in the shape of a peacock; ‘O’ represents the wisdom of our country; the other ‘O’ shows the discovery of water on the moon by India, ‘G’ revolves around Kashmir; ‘L’ is designed as the rifle at Amar Jawan Jyoti at India Gate; and ‘E’ depicts Mahatma Gandhi"

Happy Birthday to Mahatma Gandhi

Today is Gandhi Jayanti which is a national holiday in India to mark the occasion of Mahatma Gandhi's Birthday. This is amazing. Check out Google's Logo today at google.com.

GMAIL now in हिंदी (Hindi)

GMAIL has a new feature now! Now you can type email in Indian Languages. Quoting from the Google Blog

When you compose a new mail in Gmail, you should now see an icon with an Indian character, as the screenshot below shows.

This feature is enabled by default for Gmail users in India. If you do not see this function enabled by default, you will need to go the "Settings" page and enable this option in the "Language" section.

When you click the Indian languages icon, you can type words the way they sound in English and Gmail will automatically convert the word to its Indian local language equivalent. For example, if a Hindi speaker types "namaste" we will transliterate this to "नमस्ते." Similarly, "vanakkam" in Tamil will become "வணக்கம்." Currently there's support five Indian languages -- Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam -- and you can select the language of your choice from the drop-down list next to the icon.

Track Flu Trends for Michigan

(cross posted from mibazaar.com)
Google launches "Flu Trends", which will provide up-to-date flu-related activity estimate for all 50 states in the U.S. Quoting from Google Blog

Our team found that certain aggregated search queries tend to be very common during flu season each year. We compared these aggregated queries against data provided by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and we found that there's a very close relationship between the frequency of these search queries and the number of people who are experiencing flu-like symptoms each week. As a result, if we tally each day's flu-related search queries, we can estimate how many people have a flu-like illness

(Information first found at: http://bit.ly/XTyX)