This summer, we'll be celebrating my mom's 60th birthday by taking her on an African safari, fulfilling one of her lifelong dreams. She'll need a new camera for the trip, and since I know very little about cameras, the first person I'll turn to is my friend Andrew, an avid photographer. I trust that he knows his stuff and will make a good recommendation. When it comes to making important purchases, friends are often the first people we reach out to for advice.

)Cross-posted on the Google Places and Google Small Business blogs( Nothing beats a good deal, and during these couple weeks we saw that first hand. We teamed up with Floyd's Coffee Shop in Portland to launch the Google Offers beta, a new product that brings Portlanders daily deals from local businesses. On launch day, we asked Portlanders to sign up for our first deal: $3 for $10 worth of drinks and treats at Floyd's, a local favorite. And you guys wasted no time!

)Cross-posted on the Official Google Blog ( This is the latest post in the Official Google Blog series profiling entrepreneurial Googlers working on products across the company and around the world. In this post, you'll read why one team decided to sell their company to Google, and how they went from acquisition to product launch in less than a year. - Ed. The decision to sell your company is one of the hardest an entrepreneur can make, and as the CEO of Jambool,

)Cross-posted on the Places , Retail , Small Business , and Official Google Blogs( Portlanders know how to mix the urban )killer coffee, music and art( and the small-town )easy walking, biking and socializing(. There's no end to the city's great restaurants, coffee shops, hot spots and places to explore. That's why, when we started planning the Google Offers beta, we knew Portland was the ideal place to get it all kicked off. Today,

Google I/O is coming up just a week from today, and the Commerce track will showcase some of the newest ways to buy and sell online. In the Commerce sessions, Google product developers and their guests will explain and show examples of how to use Google tools to monetize your business. Web application developers may be especially interested in the In-App Payments session of the Commerce track.

This year marks the first ever Commerce track at Google I/O . E-commerce continues to grow at an incredible rate and we want to empower developers to tap into that growth and monetize their products with powerful, easy to use APIs. We're kicking off the track with a session on Google Checkout. Google Checkout usage has grown by leaps and bounds in the last few years. It's now the payment platform for almost all Google products. For example,

The Google Security team recently blogged about the new advanced sign-in security feature for your Google account. We know that keeping your emails, photos and documents safe is important to your online security and peace of mind. Once you set up advanced security for your Google account to safeguard these services, the financial data in your Google Checkout account will be protected as well. This advanced opt-in security feature is called 2-step verification,

Google Checkout is now available to Google Apps users with their Apps accounts, along with dozens of other services as part of a recently launched improvement to Google Apps. Google Apps is Google's suite of cloud-based messaging and collaboration apps, including Gmail, calendar, documents, spreadsheets and more, specifically optimized for use in organizations. These services, which run entirely in the cloud,