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Booker on The Next Level

“What more could you ask for
in life than to be given an
impossible challenge?”

–Cory Booker (1969 – )
American mayor of Newark, NJ

Sales encouragement…

complainless: (adj.) 1. to be free of complaints 2. a pleasure to be around

Your words move others. Your words move you.

Let yours send everyone in the right direction.

Here’s how to be “ComplainLess”…

Be aware. Recognize your typical paths to complaining – what (who) sparks your tendency to gripe. Minimize your exposure to them (eliminating those ‘sparks’ altogether may not always be realistic or the best thing). Know that your grumbling is a complete waste of energy.
Be thankful. Regularly reflect on all the good in your life (people, opportunities, things). Understand and enjoy how lucky you really are. Be entitled to nothing.
Pause before you begin. Clip a complaint as you feel it coming. Put a smile or thoughtful statement in its path. Blame no one. Blame nothing.
Be accountable. Focus on solving problems rather than having them (especially with prospects and customers). Set the example for others and recommit when you slip. Care for yourself and create a positive habit.

Simple. More enjoyable for everyone. SalesTough.

Spread the message with the ComplainLess pocket cards or forward this email to someone with a “Let’s commit to being ComplainLess together.”
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While maps are often considered guides to get from here to there, on the Google Maps and Earth team, we’re constantly thinking of innovative ways to express geographic information. From helping you see the world from a street-level perspective with Street View, to enabling you to dive into the Ocean layer in Google Earth, new geographic visualizations are top of mind for the team. With that mapping mindset, Group Product Manager Lior Ron was struck by the abstract landscape paintings he saw at the Sausalito art festival.

Ben Joyce’s painting of San Francisco caught his attention: “The color scheme, brush strokes, and the open frame prompted my imagination freely to think about San Francisco and what I love about this city. What a wonderful way of visualizing spaces!”

San Francisco at Night by Ben Joyce

Ben describes his work as Abstract Topophilia: “The affective bond between people and place. The Love of Place,” and explains how cities like San Francisco inspire his artwork: “There is great beauty and intrigue in the layout of a city – from your everyday drive to work, to the historical creation of the streets, to your personal relationship with the town.”

When Lior shared Ben’s work with some teammates, we too were fascinated by the bold color schemes and dramatic visualizations of geographic information, and were thrilled to learn that Ben has consulted Google Earth to create his city artwork. To share these creative visualizations with the team, we invited Ben to show some of his artwork in our team building, with depictions of cities ranging from Florence to Moscow.

Moscow by Ben Joyce

When we first hung up the paintings, we omitted location descriptions and opened a contest for the team: who could identify all of the paintings first? Google Earth Community Program Manager Robin Ziegler identified all of the locations about 30 hours after we started the challenge, and even plotted all of the paintings in Google Earth. Here you can see how Robin aligned Ben’s painting of Miami with the corresponding imagery in Google Earth.

Ben’s artwork will stay in our team’s building for the next three months, and will continue to remind us of the creative potential of geographic information.

Posted by Emily Henderson, Administrative Assistant, Google Maps & Earth

Lunar Eclipse Live

It’ll be a dark and stormy night on the moon. Well, dark anyway, because tonight is the only total lunar eclipse of 2010.

Visible to people in North America starting at about 9pm Pacific this evening, the Earth will pass between the sun and moon, blocking the sun’s light from reaching the moon’s surface.

We’ve launched a live telescope feed in Google Sky, and we’ll be broadcasting the whole event so that you can keep tabs on the event regardless of the local weather conditions.

To find the feed, which we created in partnership with slooh.com, fire up Google Earth and enter Sky Mode by clicking on the Planet Icon in the toolbar and selecting Sky.