Google Opens The World Of Rugby To All

Google opens the world of rugby to all!

In honour of the Rugby World Cup, Google is launching a special feature off of its customisable homepage, iGoogle, which will give rugby fans access to the latest news, scores, and events surrounding the Rugby World Cup.

Live scores, team information, rugby news, stadium locations, local information, rugby videos, results and rankings can be accessed by visiting www.google.com.au/rugby2007 and clicking on the link to add the "Rugby 2007" tab to your personalised homepage. The Rugby 2007 tab then becomes a part of the user's iGoogle experience, which will appear whenever the user visit Google.

This Rugby 2007 tab offers three gadgets, with an additional two available to users in some countries.

"Live" allows fans to follow the course of the matches in real time (tries scored, latest moves), look up team selections or the latest news.

The "Results" gadget offers an overview of results and each team's performance: users can thus view the ranking of the teams in each pool.

With the "GoogleMaps" gadget, which is offered in Australia, Canada, England, Fiji, France, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Namibia, New Zealand, Portugal, Samoa, Tonga, USA, users can geolocalise all the useful addresses in the cities where the matches take place: stadiums, giant screens to view the matches, supporter bars, hotels, stores, and tourist information centres.

Thanks to the "Fan videos" gadget, users in Australia, Canada, France, Ireland, Italy, New Zealand, Spain UK, USA and Japan can view YouTube videos from supporters around the world and access YouTube to post their own videos.

The last gadget is the supporter game: "Make some noise". It lets you encourage your team by clicking on its flag. The winning team is the one that scored the greatest number of clicks!

"By offering rugby fans the possibility to view their team's results in real time on iGoogle, to localise all the useful addresses on Google Maps or to share supporter videos on YouTube, we are providing them with an easy and user-friendly way to take part in the excitement of this event, which will furthermore take place in France. The Rugby World Cup is above all a community event that brings together supporters from around the world. We wish to join them by making all the news and information linked to this sporting event accessible on Google's personalised homepage", says Sandrine Murcia, Google Marketing Manager, France and Southern Europe.

The tab dedicated to the Rugby World Cup is available on iGoogle in numerous languages including French, English, Italian and Spanish.

The iGoogle personalised homepage is an easy and free way for users to customise their Google homepage, with news, weather, games, or any other type of content. Creating an iGoogle page simply requires clicking on the 'iGoogle' link on the top right of the Google homepage, and following the simple directions to personalise the page's content and appearance.

The page dedicated to the Rugby World Cup can be found at: www.google.com.au/rugby2007

ENDS

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