Our homepage doodle today celebrates the birthday of Alexander Calder, an American artist best known for inventing the mobile.Last year I wandered into a white room at Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago full of Alexander Calder’s delicate “objects…
(Cross posted from the Gmail blog)
Over the years, we’ve expanded Gmail’s communication abilities by allowing you to make voice and video calls to other computers and more recently call phones. Until now, though, you were limited to making one call at a time. Today we’re excited to relax that restriction and allow you to make or receive multiple calls in Gmail.
If you’re in a call and make a second one, your first call will be put on hold while you talk on your new call. You can switch between calls by pressing the “Resume” button on the call you want to talk on, which will automatically put the previous call on hold.
Receiving incoming calls while you’re in another call is just as easy: you’ll receive a notification of the incoming call and can choose to accept it or not. If you take the new call, the previous call will be put on hold.
Whether you make a second call or not, you can now put any call on hold — useful in case you need to talk to someone in the room or grab something off the stove. Just press the “Hold” button and then “Resume” to start talking again.
This feature works across all call types (voice, video, and phone); the only restriction is that a maximum of two outgoing calls to physical phones can be placed at once.
Posted by Richard Dunn, Software Engineer
Last week we explained that we’re prioritizing our product efforts. As part of that process, we’ve decided to wind down Google Labs. While we’ve learned a huge amount by launching very early prototypes in Labs, we believe that greater focus is cr…
(Cross-posted on the Research Blog)Last week, we held our seventh annual Computer Science Faculty Summit. For the first time, the event took place at our New York City office; nearly 100 faculty members from universities in the U.S., Canada and La…
Posted by Maggie Johnson, Director of Education & University Relations (Cross-posted from the Official Google Blog)Last week, we held our seventh annual Computer Science Faculty Summit. For the first time, the event took place at our New York City …
(Cross-posted on the Google Online Security Blog)The Internet brings remarkable benefits to society. Unfortunately, some people use it for harm and their own gain at the expense of others. We believe in the power of the web and information, and we work…
Posted by Damian Menscher, Security Engineer(Cross-posted from the Official Google Blog)The Internet brings remarkable benefits to society. Unfortunately, some people use it for harm and their own gain at the expense of others. We believe in the power …
Posted by Alfred Spector, Vice President, Research Last week, we held our seventh annual Americas Computer Science Faculty Summit at our New York City office. About 100 faculty members from universities in the Western Hemisphere attended the two-day Su…
Posted by Andrew W. Moore, Director, Google Commerce and Site Director, Pittsburgh On July 14 and 15, we held our seventh annual Faculty Summit for the Americas with our New York City offices hosting for the first time. Over the next few days, we will…
In the world of URLs, bigger is not always better. In 2009, we helped shrink up long, unwieldy URLs by launching our public URL shortener, goo.gl. Today, we’re announcing a new URL shortcut that will link only to official Google products and services…
Posted by John Wilkes, Principal Software Engineer On July 14 and 15, we held our seventh annual Faculty Summit for the Americas with our New York City offices hosting for the first time. Over the next few days, we will be bringing you a series of blo…
Posted by Johan Schalkwyk, Software Engineer On July 14 and 15, we held our seventh annual Faculty Summit for the Americas with our New York City offices hosting for the first time. Over the next few days, we will be bringing you a series of blog post…
(Cross-posted on the Google News Blog)On Google News, the average reader of political news has read 20 articles about politics in the last six months. Where do you stand? Starting today, in the U.S. edition of Google News, you can see how voracious a n…
A while back, a few of us wanted to make a little tool that we could use to show just about anybody more of what Google makes. That led to some simple ideas, and then a few more ideas and ultimately, to a challenge: how we could connect people to produ…
If, like me, you have more interesting ways to spend your time than talking to telemarketers, the “Report Spam” button in Google Voice is probably your best friend.
But wouldn’t it be great if the filtering could happen automatically, before unwanted calls even reach your phone, the same way Gmail filters spam before it gets to your inbox?
Thanks to the help of the thousands of Google Voice users who mark calls as spam everyday—and our own spam identification tools—it is now possible to automatically redirect calls, texts, and voicemails from any of the numbers in our database directly into your spam folder.
You can enable this feature on the Calls tab of Google Voice settings by checking the box next to Global SPAM filtering. And if a number ends up incorrectly marked as spam, you can easily unblock it by selecting the message and clicking the “Not Spam” button in your spam folder.
With your continued help marking spammy numbers (and correcting mis-labeled spam), we can continue to refine our filter and prevent annoying unwanted calls from making it to other Google Voice users.
Posted by Alexander Rybak, Software Engineering Intern