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• Happy 40th birthday Sesame Street!

  It's hard to believe, but today marks the 40th anniversary of Sesame Street! Over the past four decades, Sesame Street has been entertaining and educating children all across the world. To pay tribute to the colorful cast of characters, we've been delighted to feature some of your favorites on the Google homepage during the past week. With this effort, we're honored to help support Sesame Workshop, the non-profit organization behind Sesame Street. It's always great to see the spotlight on children's education, and we hope you enjoyed the homepage doodles as much as we did. And, we have an exciting birthday surprise — for this very special celebration, we're happy to share a high-resolution gallery that includes all of the Sesame Street doodles for you to download. Almost as fun as the doodles themselves, there's even a sneak peak into the photo shoot that yielded today's doodle. As an added bonus, you'll also find a few extra characters that spent some time in other countries. From Oscar to Elmo, the whole gang had a ton of fun hanging out with Google this week. So, enjoy the full series again, change your desktop background, hang them around your desk, and join us in celebrating Sesame Street! Posted by Marissa Mayer, VP Search Products & User Experience

• Fifty states of Street View

  In 1959 Hawaii became the 50th state admitted to the union. Today, 50 years later, we're including Hawaii as the 50th state in Street View on Google Maps. With our imagery of Oahu and Maui, you can now take a virtual vacation to white sandy beaches, revisit special places from your honeymoon, or plan your next getaway. We've worked with the Hawaii Visitors and Conventions Bureau to create collections in our new Street View Gallery featuring Hawaii's best beaches and hometown favorites of President Obama. Being born and raised on Oahu, I like to think we saved the best for last. I'll get you started with a tour around some of my favorite places from home. Waimea Bay is famous for 30-foot winter waves. In the summer, as you can see in Street View, it transforms into a calm bay for snorkeling and swimming: View Larger Map If you're a history buff, you can also visit Iolani Palace, a national historic landmark that was the official residence of the Hawaiian Kingdom’s last two monarchs: View Larger Map This is just a small taste of all the beautiful sights in the Aloha State. Check out the gallery to see even more stunning high-resolution imagery. And now that we have imagery from all 50 states in the U.S., we've created tours of the 50 state capitol buildings for the gallery. One of the great things about Street View is that it lets you virtually wander the streets of a diverse range of cities around the world, whether you want to gaze up at the Tokyo Tower in Japan or explore ancient Roman ruins in Italy. In addition to expanding our coverage in the U.S., today we're also adding imagery from Mexico for the first time, covering Mexico City, Monterrey, Guadalajara, Puebla, Puerto Vallarta, Cancun, Playa del Carmen and Cozumel: View Larger Map As we keep working to bring Street View to new countries and cities across the globe, we want to hear directly from you about the places that you want to see featured in Street View next. A few weeks ago, we asked you to submit your nominations for places that you want our Street View trike to visit. We combed through more than 25,000 submissions and today we're unveiling the finalists. You can read more about the competition and the finalists on the Lat Long blog, and head to www.google.com/trike to cast your votes for the special locations we should add to Google Maps next. Posted by Laura Melahn, Product Marketing Manager

• Investing in a mobile future with AdMob

  We're happy to announce today that we have signed an agreement to acquire AdMob, a mobile display advertising company based in San Mateo, CA. AdMob is a great Silicon Valley story — founded in 2006 by Omar Hamoui when he couldn't find good ways to generate traffic for his mobile site. Over the past few years, Omar and his talented team have built a thriving company with great mobile advertising products, and we are looking forward to having them join the Google team and work with us on the future of mobile advertising. We've written in the past about how mobile phones are becoming an increasingly indispensable part of our daily lives, and we continue to see how great devices with full Internet browsers and vibrant app marketplaces are driving an explosion of usage. In fact: iPhone and Android users browse the Internet more often than anyone else [Morgan Stanley], contributing to Google's 5x mobile search growth over the past two yearsAnd a quarter of these same iPhone and Android users spend nearly 90 minutes per day using applications on their devices [AdMob]Despite the tremendous growth in mobile usage and the substantial investment by many businesses in the space, the mobile web is still in its early stages. We believe that great mobile advertising products can encourage even more growth in the mobile ecosystem. That's what has us excited about this deal. For publishers of mobile websites and applications, this deal will mean better products and tools and more effective monetization of their content — allowing them to focus more on their users and less on how to generate revenue. For advertisers who want to reach users when they are engaged with mobile content, this deal will bring better, more relevant ads and greater reach. It will also mean more interesting, engaging ad formats. Last, but certainly not least, we believe users will benefit from this deal — through more mobile content and through better mobile ads that deliver useful information. And that's good for all of us. For more information, check out this site that we've set up about the deal. Posted by Susan Wojcicki, Vice President, Product Management and Vic Gundotra, Vice President, Engineering