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Google Now's images are beautiful, colorful, cheerful, minimalist and futuristic at the same time. Now you can see the full-size scenes in this Flickr set. They were uploaded by Brent Couchman, who created them. "Brent Couchman is an independent graphic designer based in sunny San Francisco, California. Originally hailing from the Lone Star State where he developed branding, packaging & illustration for Fossil, Brent moved to the Bay Area to work with Hatch design," mentions his site.{ via Marques Brownlee and Ade Oshineye. }

Google tests a new interface for the mobile Gmail web app. The toolbar that includes buttons for archiving messages, marking as unread or adding labels now floats above the message and it no longer has a fixed position.Here's the new interface that's currently tested (stock Android browser):And here's the regular interface (mobile Chrome):As you can see, the Gmail mobile site goes back to the roots. Back in 2009, Google added a similar bar to the mobile site: "We made extensive use of other browser functions too: for example, the floaty bar that lets you archive, delete or apply more actions is animated via CSS transformations and controlled in part with touch events (when you scroll the screen, it follows you)."

Ten years ago we launched AdSense to help publishers earn money by placing relevant ads on their websites. I can still remember the excitement and anticipation as AdSense went live that first day. Our small team huddled together in a cramped conference room, and right away we saw that publishers were as excited about AdSense as we were. Fast-forward 10 years, and AdSense has become a core part of Google’s advertising business. The AdSense community has grown to include more than 2 million publishers, and last year alone, publishers earned more than $7 billion from AdSense. AdSense is a community that thrives because of all the content creators we are so fortunate to partner with. Their stories inspire us to do our part to make AdSense great. On this occasion, it’s especially inspiring to hear the stories of partners who have been with us since the very beginning—like a retiree in New Zealand who was able to pursue her dream of writing about her garden, a tech support expert in Colorado who can spend more time with his kids, and a theme park reviewer who now sends employees around the world to test and review rides—all thanks to money earned from AdSense. As part of our 10th anniversary celebration, we hope you’ll tune into our live Hangout on Air today at 10 a.m. PDT (5 p.m. GMT) on the AdSense Google+ page. I look forward to joining several of our partners to share stories from the early days of AdSense, talk about how we’ve all grown since then, and discuss the future for publishers and online advertising. And if you want even more 10th anniversary celebration, just visit our AdSense 10th anniversary page at any time. Posted by Susan Wojcicki, SVP, Ads and Commerce

In Northern California where I live, summer is here, which means family vacations, kids’ camps, BBQs and hopefully some relaxation. But it also means back-to-school shopping is just around the corner. So in case you’re on the hunt for a laptop in addition to pens, paper, and stylish new outfits, your search just got a whole lot easier. Chromebooks—a fast, simple, secure laptop that won't break the bank—will now be carried in over 3 times more stores than before, or more than 6,600 stores around the world. In addition to Best Buy and Amazon.com, we’re excited to welcome several new retailers to the family. Starting today, Walmart will be making the newest Acer Chromebook, which has a 16GB Solid State Drive (SSD), available in approximately 2,800 stores across the U.S., for just $199. Look for Chromebooks coming to the laptop sections of a Walmart near you this summer. And beginning this weekend, Staples will bring a mix of Chromebooks from Acer, HP and Samsung to every store in the U.S.—more than 1,500 in total. You can also purchase via Staples online, while businesses can purchase through the Staples Advantage B2B program. In the coming months select Office Depot, OfficeMax, and regional chains Fry’s and TigerDirect locations will begin selling Chromebooks. In the 10 other markets worldwide where Chromebooks are sold, availability in national retailers continues to expand. In addition to Dixons in the UK, now 116 Tesco stores are selling Chromebooks, as well as all Media Markt and Saturn stores in the Netherlands, FNAC stores in France and Elgiganten stores in Sweden. In Australia, all JB Hi-Fi and Harvey Norman stores will be carrying Chromebooks for their customers as well. We’re working hard to bring Chromebooks to even more countries later this year. Chromebooks make great computers for everyone in the family—and now you shouldn’t have to look very far to find one. Happy summer! Posted by David Shapiro, Director of Chromebook Marketing

If there's a popular Google product that's different from any other Google products and services, it must be Android. Most Google services got the basics right and then started to add features. Before you could use image search, video search, voice search and flight search, Google started with a clean interface and relevant results that loaded quickly. I still remember that Gmail didn't have a delete button or support for drafts when it launched, but it had support for conversations, search, 1GB of free storage and a great spam filter. Back in 2008, Chrome didn't support extensions, it was Windows-only, you couldn't even preview pages before printing them, but it was fast, it had a clutter-free interface and sandboxed tabs.Android is the odd one out because it didn't focus on the users, it focused on apps and developers. It started with great APIs for developers before building a great interface, it started with voice search before running fast, it started with live wallpapers and widgets before optimizing battery life. It's like releasing a slow and cluttered Chrome with tons of great APIs for developers or launching Google Search with a lot of advanced search operators and natural language understanding, but the results aren't relevant and you need to wait a few seconds until they're displayed.Customization is important, APIs and third-party apps are important, but getting the basics right is the most important. The first iPhone was great, even if it didn't support third-party apps, 3G, MMS and many other things. It had an impressive user interface and a few well-built apps. Everything else was added later: third-party apps, multitasking, notification center, folders.Android focused on APIs and third-party apps. HTC had to come up with Sense to sell some Android phones because Google's interface was just a placeholder. Other phone manufacturers created their own interfaces and system apps. A lot of innovative ideas, but not much common ground. The only things that connected all the different devices were the Android APIs. Ice Cream Sandwich changed all that: the Holo theme was mandatory, Android added support for hardware acceleration and apps started to look consistent. Then Jelly Bean and Project Butter addressed lag.Paul Buchheit, the man behind Gmail, has a great post titled "If your product is Great, it doesn't need to be Good." He explains how to build new products: "What's the right approach to new products? Pick three key attributes or features, get those things very, very right, and then forget about everything else. Those three attributes define the fundamental essence and value of the product -- the rest is noise." That's how Gmail started. "It was fast, stored all of your email (back when 4MB quotas were the norm), and had an innovative interface based on conversations and search. The secondary and tertiary features were minimal or absent. There was no 'rich text' composer. The original address book was implemented in two days and did almost nothing."Android focused on the wrong things initially, but still won because it was the only significant alternative to iOS, so carriers, phone manufacturers and users embraced it. Now it's hard to go back to the basics and fix them, make apps less powerful, remove APIs and focus on what matters on a mobile device: smooth experience and battery life.Note: I use both Android and iOS. Android has improved a lot lately (even though Android 4.2 looks like a step backward) and I hope that constructive criticism will make it even better.

Our first AdWords customer was a small business selling live mail-order lobsters. It’s been a long time since then, but a majority of our customers are still small businesses, who play a vital role not only for Google, but for the American economy. More than 60 percent of new jobs each year come from small businesses. This Small Business Week, we want to celebrate you. We’re grateful to you for everything you do for us and our communities. Whether you fix people’s cars, offer music lessons to aspiring musicians, or make the world’s best homemade ice cream—when you do what you love, our lives get better. As part of the celebration, we’ll be highlighting some amazing small businesses across the country, so keep an eye on the Google+ Your Business page. And in the meantime, check out some of the Google tools that are designed to help you take care of business. Happy Small Business Week. Posted by Lisa Gevelber, VP Marketing, Americas

In the Game of Thrones series, people use the term "bastard" literally. If your parents weren't married when you were born, you're a bastard. While bastards are common in Westeros, everyone looks down on them for the crime of existing. In one scene, Catelyn Stark meets a charming mountain guide, but her delight suddenly turns to disgust:She sounded so cocky that Catelyn had to smile. "Do you have a name, child?""Mya Stone, if it please you, my lady," the girl said.It did not please her; it was an effort for Catelyn to keep the smile on her face. Stone was a bastard's name in the Vale, as Snow was in the north, and Flowers in Highgarden; in each of the Seven Kingdoms, custom had fashioned a surname for children born with no names of their own. Catelyn had nothing against this girl, but suddenly she could not help but think of Ned's bastard on the Wall, and the thought made her angry and guilty, both at once. She struggled to find words for a reply. (A Game of Thrones)Why exactly do the people of Westeros so despise bastards? Stereotypes say they're not to be trusted:They still think me a turncloak. That was a bitter draft to drink, but Jon could not blame them. He was a bastard, after all. Everyone knew that bastards were wanton and treacherous by nature, having been born in lust and deceit. (A Storm of Swords)As you read the stories, though, two things become clear: First, moral standards are so low that bastards couldn't be much worse on average than non-bastards. Second, bastards endure more scorn for merely being bastards than non-bastards endure for blatantly heinous behavior. What then is the real reason why the people of Game of Thrones loathe bastards? Given the cultural chasm between our world and theirs, the answer is obvious: Misanthropy. The people of Westeros loathe bastards for existing. Complaints about their "treachery" are little more than rationalizations for blanket negativity toward people who were born the wrong way. Yet why would people want to impugn the very existence of bastards? Given the cultural chasm, the answer is again fairly obvious. Bastards serve crucial psychological and social functions. Psychologically, every non-bastard can automatically feel superior to every bastard. Socially, every non-bastard can automatically expect the people around them to affirm their sense of superiority. If you call a particular person a bastard, there's a slight chance he'll push back; but I can't recall a single sentence where someone stood up for bastards in general.*In our society, we're more likely to feel slightly sorry for bastards than scorn them. Political correctness has strangely failed to banish the word "bastard"; Google Ngram actually shows that the word has enjoyed a major comeback in recent decades. But almost no one denounces people because their parents weren't married on the day they were born.Before we pat ourselves on the back, though, we should reflect. We may be largely free of contempt for bastards. But does our society have a substitute target for misanthropy? I say we do. Illegal immigrants - actual and potential - serve the same psychological needs and fill the same social role in the modern United States as bastards do in Westeros. Consider how the typical American reacts when he discovers that someone is an "illegal immigrant." He's a lot like Catelyn Stark when she discovered that Mya Stone was a bastard. What suddenly matters is not the content of the person's character, but how the person came to be. The fact that the person is helpful, even charming, does not redeem him. In both cases, again, there is a long list of specific complaints. But our double standard is as plains as theirs. The clearest proof: Americans would rather exile a peaceful, hard-working foreigner than a native-born violent criminal. Indeed, most would strongly favor the former and strongly oppose the latter.George R.R. Martin still has two Game of Thrones books left to write.

Remember Gmail's sponsored promotions, the feature that combined ads with email? Google found an intrusive way to display these ads in the new inbox interface: they're added to the promotions tab and look almost like regular messages. Sure, they have a different background color and there's an "ad" label, but inbox tabs should only include your messages, not ads disguised as email."It's a new type of ad which you can forward to a friend, or star to save it to your inbox. If you dismiss this ad, you won't see it again," informs Google. You can click "dismiss" or use the "x" icon to remove an ad. If you want to see all the sponsored promotions for your account, go to this page.With the new inbox tabs, Gmail no longer displays web clips (which are mostly ads) above/below the messages from your inbox, so it now shows ads in the promotions tab. Web clips could be disabled from the settings, but the new ads can't be disabled. The only thing you can do is to hide the promotions tab by clicking the gears button and selecting "configure inbox". When you hide the promotions tab, Gmail will bring back the web clips ads, but these can be disabled from the settings.

I don't know why Google Play Services is an app in Google Play, but some of the reviews are great. It's hard to review a system component that adds support for new APIs, so some of the reviewers got creative. Here are my favorite reviews:1. "I was given a Nexus 7 by an old shaman in a yellow poncho. He told me to install this package and sacrifice a living watermelon to Utanapishti, singing the Bollywood rendition of 'Love Train' as an offering of my adulation. Upon completion, all the disease and sickness in my village was cured, and we knew no more sadness. Also, Mark Wahlberg came to visit and gave us all Nexus 7s before he returned to the 8th dimension of Kajiik Masunraht."2. "After i installed this my screen went from 4.6 inches to 5! I say it was well worth it. But the best part was using my phones NFC as a key for my mustang. I bet it would work on a mercedes, just put it up to the steering wheel and tap it to turn the car on. Don't forget to activate your free netflix subscription!!"3. "I got a pony, and a car, and unicorn, and a pony, and a leprechaun, and a pot of gold, and a reindeer, and a computer, and a slave, and a Santa, and a genie, and a unlimited wishes voucher, and a pony."4. "This app has taken over my life. I'm addicted so bad that my wife took the kids and left me! Ooh well, its well worth it woooooooooo"5. "This game is amazing, if you collect all the frogs, beat the mini game and unlock Knights of the Round once you beat Level 10, (God Mode) there is a bonus level. I beat the bonus boss and my phone suddenly started vibrating and transformed into only what I can imagine is a Samsung Galaxy S 6!"6. "This app give me an extra Maps to Mordor! And i can take pictures of Nàzgul while in 3D Panoramic Mode. And I can control Curiosity on Mars too! Thank you Google!"7. "Cannot recommend this enough. Seamless integration with my Atari 2600 and immersive soundtrack. Inspired!"8. "This is without a doubt the best game on the entire play store. the graphics are beyond console quality and the storyline is better than mo's movies these days. Level 8 is quite impossible though... Anyway, props to Google for a job well done!"9. "This service of play is the best there is. Beats Apple 5 services which don't play well with anything. Google plays well...very well. So well, they even have this nifty service. All my friends with Android devices use it too. How my life has gotten better with Google Play services ?? Well, for one thing, I don't have to think any more. Google Services reads my mind, and does stuff for me...WELL in advance of when I would have probably done it.... Sends emails, sets reminders, ANSWERS emails before they even arrive! It is so awesome... Actually, this is Google service writing this so my owner didn't have to...... I'm awesome."10. "Reunited me with my dad 26 years after he said he was going to the store to buy milk and cigarettes."Another app with many funny reviews is Samsung Push Service. Here's an example: "After 2 months of staring at the divorce papers, I picked up the pen preparing to flush 10 years down the drain. At that moment, the app download it. Screeching tires in my driveway and my wife came running in the house and ripped up the papers. Thank you Samsung, you saved my life."Any other Google Play apps with funny reviews?

Google Maps shows a clever promo for Map Maker in the classic interface: "Is something missing? Edit Google Maps." It's probably an experiment, but the message always shows up when using this URL. Even without the promotional message, you'll usually see an option to "Edit in Google Map Maker" at the bottom of the map, next to the copyright message."Google Map Maker is a Google Maps service that allows you add or edit features, such as roads, businesses, parks, schools and more. Using Google Map Maker tools, you can visually mark locations and add detailed information about these locations," informed a Google post back in 2008, when Map Maker was launched. At that time, Map Maker was only available for 17 countries, including Cyprus, Iceland, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Bahamas and Vietnam. Google continued to add new countries and the service now supports over 200 countries. "More than 40,000 people around the world are making contributions and improving Google Maps through Google Map Maker each month," announced Google in April, when the UK was added to Map Maker. OpenStreetMap has more than 1.2 million users, but less than 2% contribute to the project.