Boutiques.com reveals the fashion trends on everyone’s mind

Since we introduced Boutiques.com last November, we’ve been busy developing new features that we’re proud to unveil as New York Fashion Week hits the runways.

More of the boutiques you love
We’re welcoming hundreds of thousands of stunning new boutiques, including those from designers Helmut Lang, Michael Kors, Billy Reid and Thakoon.

Trend data to excite designers and fashion enthusiasts alike
Over the past few months, we’ve watched usage of Boutiques soar. Shoppers aren’t just creating their own customized boutiques, they’re enthusiastically taking our Stylyzer Quiz and sharing what they “love” and “hate” about products while browsing. As a result, we’ve gained a unique, aggregate view into the latest fashion trends—a reflection of what shoppers think and feel about the colors, silhouettes, patterns and prices of individual products from across the web.

So today we’re unveiling Designer Analytics, a tool that enables our design partners to benefit from this collective knowledge—giving them insight into how their products are searched, shopped and loved. With easy-to-understand data visualizations, Designer Analytics shows what colors, shapes and patterns are most loved and hated broadly (in categories such as shoes, dresses and handbags) and even down to how specific items are performing. Designers can also see how their stats compare to brands like them. Designer Analytics is available when logged in, and looks like this:


We’re also launching a public version called Trend Analytics that gives curious fashionistas a view into the latest, site-wide fashion trends. Using aggregate data from both Boutiques.com and Google Search, it shows the hottest colors of the season, the most-loved products and the must-have trends.



New boutique features to help you express your style
We’re adding some enhanced features for boutiques, including a photo gallery and video upload (celebrity, designers, blogger and featured boutiques only) to give more opportunities for people to express who they are and share their unique point of view.


A Fashion Week giveaway game to put your fashion acumen to the test
We’re also kicking off a fashion trivia giveaway game, called Sartorial Pursuit, which you can play anywhere via SMS/Twitter. Each hour during fashion week, you’ll find a new multiple-choice trivia question that ties into our trend analytics and features designers and products on the site. Follow the game on our Twitter account @BoutiquesStyle to answer quiz questions from home for a chance to win stylish Fashion Week prizes.

Posted by Abigail Holtz, Product Manager

Dialed up: the rapid launch and growth of Click-to-Call

This post is the first in our series profiling entrepreneurial Googlers working on products across the company and around the world. Here, you’ll get an in-depth look at how one of our most successful mobile advertising features was launched by one and a half engineers in a matter of months. -Ed.

I’ll always remember my first cell phone—a big, black brick that was really only good for making calls. While technology certainly has advanced since then, I still appreciate the speed of connecting to people and businesses instantly over the phone, something that I found harder and harder to do when I searched, for example, for the number of a restaurant to make a reservation.

So in June of 2009, a few engineers and I pooled our 20% time and worked to develop a prototype of what would eventually become Click-to-Call for smartphones, an ad unit that makes it easier for people to connect to a business by phone, rather than through a website.


Building the feature was the easy part; essentially, we developed an ad extension that allows advertisers to include a phone or location in their campaigns. However, it was launching it to advertisers that posed the biggest challenge.

With new products like Click-to-Call, we often choose to launch in beta, and incrementally roll out the features to a small subset of users, usually beginning at a 1% test and increasing from there. With Click-to-Call, we’d developed a mobile feature that we wanted to launch as soon as possible, but since mobile advertising was much smaller at that point—then with only about one-sixth as many search queries we get today—we calculated that it would take nearly three years to roll out to 10% and around 10 years to actually launch it. At that rate, the feature would likely become antiquated long before it ever officially launched.

So I decided not to follow the usual process and took a risk, choosing to launch to 50% of Google’s mobile advertisers within the first week. In my view, there was simply no other way to collect enough feedback in a short period of time so that we could quickly iterate based on feedback. Thousands of advertisers—an unprecedented amount for a brand-new feature—were on board to try it out, and with a few engineers and some pretty massive spreadsheets, we started to see real results. Within a month, we had the magical ingredient—momentum—and from there we were collecting enough feedback to be on track to bring the feature to all advertisers in a matter of months.


This is one of the reasons I work at Google. Google gives me freedom to experiment, ownership of my ideas, and amazing resources and support. We built Click-to-Call in June 2009, began testing it in July, and had it up and running for all advertisers in January 2010. One year later, Click-to-Call ads on both search and the Google Display Network are generating millions of calls every month on mobile phones and driving strong performance for advertisers.

If you’re interested in exploring some of the most significant trends in mobile, you can watch our Think Mobile livestream this Thursday, February 10 at 1:05pm EST, where we’ll discuss why it’s “not too late for businesses to still be early” in this space.

Posted by Surojit Chatterjee, Senior Product Manager, Google Mobile Ads team

Introducing the Google Translate app for iPhone

(Cross-posted from the Google Mobile Blog)

Back in August 2008, we launched a Google Translate HTML5 web app for iPhone users. Today, the official Google Translate for iPhone app is available for download from the App Store. The new app has all of the features of the web app, plus some significant new additions designed to improve your overall translation experience.

Speak to translate
The new app accepts voice input for 15 languages, and—just like the web app—you can translate a word or phrase into one of more than 50 languages. For voice input, just press the microphone icon next to the text box and say what you want to translate.

Listen to your translations
You can also listen to your translations spoken out loud in one of 23 different languages. This feature uses the same new speech synthesizer voices as the desktop version of Google Translate we introduced last month.

Full-screen mode
Another feature that might come in handy is the ability to easily enlarge the translated text to full-screen size. This way, it’s much easier to read the text on the screen, or show the translation to the person you are communicating with. Just tap on the zoom icon to quickly zoom in.

And the app also includes all of the major features of the web app, including the ability to view dictionary results for single words, access your starred translations and translation history even when offline, and support romanized text like Pinyin and Romaji.

You can download Google Translate now from the App Store globally. The app is available in all iOS supported languages, but you’ll need an iPhone or iPod touch iOS version 3 or later.

Posted by Wenzhang Zhu, Software Engineer