Posted by Carrie Farrell, Veteran Santa Tracker

It was more than half a century ago, on Christmas Eve in 1955, that a Sears Roebuck & Co. store in Colorado Springs advertised a special hotline number for kids to call Santa. What the company didn't know at the time was that they had inadvertently misprinted the telephone number. Instead of Santa's workshop, the phone number put kids through to the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), the bi-national U.S.-Canadian military organization responsible for the aerospace defense of the U. S. and Canada. Worse, it wasn't just any number at NORAD: it was the commander-in-chief's operations hotline. In the spirit of the season, Colonel Harry Shoup, the director of operations at the time, had his staff check radar data for any indication of a sleigh making its way south from the North Pole. They found that indeed there were signs of Santa, and merrily gave the children who called an update on his location. Thus, a tradition was born, and NORAD has continued to help children track Santa on Christmas Eve ever since.

It just so happens that Colonel Shoup is my grandfather, which is why I'm so excited that, 52 years later, Google is joining the effort. This holiday season, NORAD has partnered with Google to use technology including Google Maps, Google Earth, iGoogle and YouTube to track Santa. I can remember tracking Santa with my grandfather as a child, and I'm so proud to see my company carry on his vision of doing something this special for kids around the world.

The countdown begins December 1st on NORAD's website, where families can find a new kid-friendly game or activity every day until December 24th. And starting at 1:00 am PST on December 24th, you'll be able to track Santa's trip in real time. You can download Google Earth and add the NORAD Tracks Santa iGoogle gadget to your iGoogle page anytime, but make sure to come back to noradsanta.org on December 24th to download the special Santa Tracking file for an enhanced 3D Santa-tracking experience.

Posted by by Chris Sacca, Head of Special Initiatives

Here at Google, we see the upcoming 700 megahertz spectrum auction at the Federal Communications Commission as one of the best opportunities consumers will have to enjoy more choices in the world of wireless devices. That's why we announced today that we are applying to participate in the auction.

We already know that regardless of which bidders ultimately win the auction, consumers will be the real winners either way. This is because the eventual winner of a key portion of this spectrum will be required to give its customers the right to download any application they want on their mobile device, and the right to use any device they want on the network (assuming the C Block reserve price of $4.6 billion is met in the auction). That's meaningful progress in our ongoing efforts to help transform the relatively closed wireless world to be more like the open realm of the Internet.

Regardless of how the auction unfolds, we think it's important to put our money where our principles are. Consumers deserve more choices and more competition than they have in the wireless world today. And at a time when so many Americans don't have access to the Internet, this auction provides an unprecedented opportunity to bring the riches of the Net to more people.

While we've written a lot on our blogs and spoken publicly about our plans for the auction, unfortunately you're not going to hear from us about this topic for awhile, and we want to explain why.

Monday, December 3, is the deadline for prospective bidders to apply with the FCC to participate in the auction. Though the auction itself won't start until January 24, 2008, Monday also marks the starting point for the FCC's anti-collusion rules, which prevent participants in the auction from discussing their bidding strategy with each other.

These rules are designed to keep the auction process fair, by keeping bidders from cooperating in anticompetitive ways so as to drive the auction prices in artificial directions. While these rules primarily affect private communications among prospective bidders, the FCC historically has included all forms of public communications in its interpretation of these rules.

All of this means that, as much as we would like to offer a step-by-step account of what's happening in the auction, the FCC's rules prevent us from doing so until the auction ends early next year. So here's a quick primer on how things will unfold:

• December 3: By Monday, would-be applicants must file their applications to participate in the auction (FCC Form 175), which remain confidential until the FCC makes them available.
  
  
• Mid-December: Once all the applications have been fully reviewed, the FCC will release a public list of eligible bidders in the auction. Each bidder must then make a monetary deposit no later than December 28, depending on which licenses they plan to bid on. The more spectrum blocks an applicant is deemed eligible to bid on, the greater the amount they must deposit.
  
  
• January 24, 2008: The auction begins, with each bidder using an electronic bidding process. Since this auction is anonymous (a rule that we think makes the auction more competitive and therefore better for consumers), the FCC will not publicly identify which parties have made which bid until after the auction is over.
  
  
• Bidding rounds: The auction bidding occurs in stages established by the FCC, with the likely number of rounds per day increasing as bidding activity decreases. The FCC announces results at the end of each round, including the highest bid at that point, the minimum acceptable bid for the following round, and the amounts of all bids placed during the round. The FCC does not disclose bidders' names, and bidders are not allowed to disclose publicly whether they are still in the running or not.
  
  
• Auction end: The auction will end when there are no new bids and all the spectrum blocks have been sold (many experts believe this auction could last until March 2008). If the reserve price of any spectrum block is not met, the FCC will conduct a re-auction of that block. Following the end of the auction, the FCC announces which bidders have secured licenses to which pieces of spectrum and requires winning bidders to submit the balance of the payments for the licenses.

If you're interested in keeping track of the publicly available details of the auction, check out this page on the FCC's website or Google News. In the meantime, my lips will be sealed (something, frankly, that I'm not used to).

Yahoo!'s set to take on two big conferences next week. Taking a divide and conquer approach, Yahoo! will split up to attend SES in Chicago and WebmasterWorld's PubCon in Las Vegas to participate in a total of 13 panels focusing on topics such as traffic quality, brand management and local/video search, to name a few.

Here's where we'll be spending our time (in addition to manning our booth at WebmasterWorld):

SES CHICAGO
December 3 - 6, 2007

Tuesday, December 4
3:30 - 4:30 p.m.
Online Maps: Plotting the Direction of Local Search
Jeremy Kreitler, Director of Product Management, Yahoo! Maps

Wednesday, December 5
10:15 - 11:15 a.m.
Digital Shelf: The Search Marketing Opportunity for Packaged Goods
Matt Wilburn, Senior Category Director, CPG

11:30 a.m. - 12:30 p.m.
Breaking Down Silos: Specialization With Integration
Kelly Graziadei, Senior Agency Development Director

Ad Exchanges are Changing Everything
Bill Wise, VP, Yahoo! Publisher Network

2:00 - 3:00 p.m.
CSS, AJAX, Web 2.0 & Search Engines
Priyank Garg, Director of Product Management, Yahoo! Search

WEBMASTERWORLD'S PUBCON
December 4 - 7, 2007

Tuesday, December 4
10:00 - 11:30 a.m.
Major PPC Engines - Vendor Panel
Patrizio Spagnoletto, Senior Director of Marketing, Yahoo! Search Marketing

Duplicate Content Issues Duplicate Content Issues
Priyank Garg, Director of Product Management, Yahoo! Search

11:35 a.m. - 12:50 p.m.
In House SEO
Jessica L. Bowman, Senior Marketing Manager

7:00 - 8:30 p.m.
Special Event: Open Search Forum with the Engines and Special Guest Moderator Guy Kawasaki
Tim Mayer, Vice President of Product Management, Yahoo! Search
Dan Boberg, Managing Director of Sales Technology, Yahoo! Search Marketing

Wednesday, December 5
10:15 - 11:30 a.m.
Local and Mobile Search
Brian Gil, Director of Product Management, Yahoo! Local

1:30 - 2:45 p.m.
SEO and Big Search
Dave Roth, Director of Search Engine Marketing

Thursday, December 6
10:15 - 11:30 a.m.
Brand Management
Jessica L. Bowman, Senior Marketing Manager

Video Search Engines
Bruno Furnari, Senior Product Manager, Yahoo! Search

Hope to see you at the shows!

Yahoo! Search Blog team

Posted by Rose Yao, Google Mac team

A question everyone asked when we launched Google Desktop for the Mac was: where are the gadgets? Today, we have an answer: they're in your Dashboard! Now there's a new feature for Google Desktop, Google Gadgets for the Mac, which is ready to install. With this launch, we're bringing hundreds of Google Gadgets to the Mac OS X platform. You can take advantage of gadgets to do things like browse YouTube videos, nurture a virtual flower pot, or even check your day's agenda in Dashboard.

Not only that, the new Google Gadgets applications let you add gadgets with one click and interact with them beside your Apple widgets in Dashboard. There's an automatic update to the gadget list each week, so you'll always have something new to look forward to.

Watch the Gadget application in action:



Attention, gadget/widget developers: this launch makes it possible for you to write your gadget once and have it run on a Mac, a PC, and any webpage on the Internet. Learn more about how to write a cross platform gadget.

Posted by Steve Grove, Head of News and Politics, YouTube

First up were the Democrats, and now it's the Republicans' turn. Tonight marks the much-anticipated CNN/YouTube Republican Debate, in which the 8 GOP candidates on our You Choose '08 platform will descend on St. Petersburg, Florida to answer video questions submitted via YouTube. The two-hour debate will be aired live on CNN at 8 PM ET, and all the clips will be hosted soon after on YouTube.

People submitted almost 5,000 questions (4,927, to be exact) to the GOP hopefuls right on YouTube -- 2,000 more than the Democrats got on July 23. In true YouTube style, some of the questions are creative, but most are compelling -- and demonstrate the concerns of voters trying to differentiate between the candidates in a crowded primary field.



Back in July, we broke new ground in presidential debates with our first-ever CNN/YouTube Debate. Thirty-nine questions were posed to the Democratic candidates, and when Stephen Sixta asked a question about whether or not the presidential contenders would speak directly to foreign dictators, a conflict broke out between Senators Obama and Clinton that has matured into the defining difference between these two front-runners in this campaign.

The core concept behind these debates is to let real questions from real people drive the dialogue. The power of YouTube is that it lowers the barrier to entry to engage in the political process, and levels the platform for political discussion. It used to be that a voter had to live in Iowa, New Hampshire, or Florida to engage with the candidates at this stage of the campaign, but YouTube has broken down those barriers, and has brought more transparency and access to the political dialogue than ever before. We think that politics will never be the same (thankfully).

Posted by Steve Lee, Product Manager, Google Mobile team

We know a lot of you are using Google Maps for mobile to view maps and satellite imagery, find local businesses, and get directions. But to date not many of you have been able to take advantage of the increased speed and convenience that location information from technologies like GPS can afford, if only because there are very few GPS-enabled devices on the market.

Well, when it comes to location information, GPS is no longer the only game in town. Today we released a version of Google Maps for mobile with a new beta technology called My Location, which provides approximate location information for those of us without GPS, and complements GPS location information for those who do have it. Head over to our new mobile blog to learn more.