Google Places

The Google Places  promotion that started in Portland in December, 2010 is now ongoing in four additional cities: Austin, Las Vegas, Madison and Charlotte.

As a part of the promotion, any business in any of those cities that claims their listing is eligible for a business kit that includes Google bling. Apparently several businesses are having difficulties with the ordering process and reported problems in the forums.

I was curious about the process and problems and managed to finagle an order via the online catalog. Here is a slide show of oder process and the (many) items available. Many of the same items available in Portland are also available in the four other cities although it is not clear if Google is using every promotional tactic that they used in there.

Unfortunately Google was out of stock on the neon signs and the fridge magnets but they apparently still have a good stock of the fortune cookies. Not sure exactly what they might be predicting….:

Listen to more languages in Google Translate for Android

Today we launched an update to Google Translate for Android that allows you to listen to translations in several more languages.

We’ve dramatically improved the quality of our spoken translations in over 15 languages, including Russian, Chinese and Portuguese, and added the ability to listen to three new languages: Japanese, Arabic and Korean. Text-to-speech is one of the most popular features of this mobile interface. Whether you’re learning how to say a foreign phrase, or trying to share information with someone in their language, simply tap the Speaker icon after doing a translation and you’ll hear the difference.

With today’s launch, Google Translate for Android supports translation between 58 languages and can speak translations in 24 languages. The application works on phones and tablets running Android 2.1 and above. To download Google Translate for Android, scan the QR code below, or visit us on the Android Market.

Google News for Opera Mini

While the Google News team has been hard at work redesigning our service for smartphones, we’ve also been thinking about our milllions of users around the world who access the web not from a smartphone, but from a feature phone, using Opera Mini as their browser.

So we have rolled out a redesigned Google News for Opera Mini in all 29 languages and 70 editions of Google News. This includes an enhanced homepage featuring richer snippets, thumbnail images, links to videos and section content without explicit navigation, a convenient search bar, comfortably spaced links and the ability to access your desktop personalization on your phone.

We hope that this will improve the news browsing experience for Opera Mini users around the world, including millions of people using a feature phone as the primary point of access for the web. See it here in the Indian Hindi and Nigerian English versions.

So, pick up your feature phone and point your Opera Mini browser to http://news.google.comto catch up on news anytime and anywhere. For more information or to share your feedback with us, please visit our Help Center.