Can’t mess with this: new Screen Cleaner in the Files app

Grown in the Netherlands, Google Tulip communicates with plants

Sssnakes on a map

A look back at 2018 with the Android Security & Privacy Year in Review

One week until Code Jam kicks off—here's why you should register

Code Jam, Google's longest-running programming competition, is returning for its sixteenth year. We’re offering another season of challenging algorithmic problems (including some that are interactive) for our global community. Whether you're a seasoned contestant or brand new to the coding competition space, here are three reasons why you shouldn't miss Code Jam 2019:

1. Solve intriguing and fun problems. Every year, the Code Jam engineering team and a dedicated group of Google contributors spend thousands of combined hours creating, testing and publishing some of the toughest problem sets in the world. Despite the complexity of these problems, we hear from contestants that they enjoy the playful nature of Code Jam problem statements. (Who wouldn't want to help a group of raucous mathematicians with their party acoustics?) One of our more recent and unusual problems, Name-Preserving Network, required contestants to evaluate a scrambled network (of their own design) to prove they could map it back to its original configuration. This was also an interactive problem, in which contestants' code had an adaptive conversation with our judge. We introduced problems like this to Code Jam in 2018, and we're proud to offer many more this year. The best part? All you need to get started is access to a computer and an internet connection.
   
2. Experience some of the old, plus some of the new. We’re bringing back the beloved "ask a question" feature this year, which gives contestants the opportunity to interact with Code Jam engineers during online rounds. We're also introducing new concepts, like the ability to test a solution on our servers as well as providing certificates to our competitors. Our website and platform received a refreshed look and feel that we're debuting this season. But don’t worry—the Code Jam staples you may know and love aren't going away. We're retaining our contest structure and the coveted prizes—our World Champion will take home $15,000, while the top 1,000 competitors will win a limited edition 2019 t-shirt. And speaking of the World Finals...
   
3. Join us back where it all started. After our last online round wraps up in June, we're looking forward to returning to the Bay Area for the World Finals. Out of the tens of thousands of contest participants, only the top 25 will qualify to attend on Friday, August 9th at Google's San Francisco office. As always, we'll livestream the competition on YouTube so that you can watch the action from anywhere. While this is our inaugural World Finals in San Francisco, we're feeling nostalgic about heading back to the Bay Area for the first time in ten years. Almost all of the early Code Jam final rounds took place at Google's headquarters in Mountain View, CA.
   

The Qualification Round takes place on April 5 (one week from today!), so now’s the time to register for this year’s Code Jam. For the exact time zone in your location, visit our schedule page. We also recommend warming up with previous problems to improve your chances of advancing to Round 1. Do you have what it takes?

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A day in the life of a local reporter

Five takeaways from our programmatic panel at World Forum Disrupt

Bringing digital and media literacy education to more schools in Korea

Four tools to help drive your nonprofit's mission forward

Google for Nonprofits started as a conversation about a volunteer program in an elevator in our New York office in 2010. Today, Google for Nonprofits has connected more than 200,000 nonprofits around the globe with Google products to help them run their organizations.

We believe that technology can do good in the world, which is why we offer eligible organizations access to a suite of Google products at no cost. Here’s a look at what each of the Google for Nonprofits products has to offer:

Bring teams together with G Suite for Nonprofits

G Suite is a set of integrated apps, including Gmail, Docs, Calendar, Drive and Hangouts Meet. It helps organizations with productivity, collaboration, and security—with G Suite, teammates can work from anywhere, on any device and focus their time on making an impact. If your nonprofit works across different locations, you can use G Suite to organize online video conferences on Hangouts, create group chats, work together simultaneously on the same document and much more.

Team Rubicon UK is a disaster response organization that needs to be prepared for and quickly respond to crises around the world. Using Google Forms and Sheets, Team Rubicon can go from 1,000 potential volunteers to a group of 12 skilled volunteers on the ground supporting a crisis within 24 hours.

Reach more supporters with Google Ad Grants

Google Ad Grants connects people to causes with $10,000 per month in free Google Advertising. Nonprofits can create ads to raise awareness, attract donors and help people around the world.

American Humane, the first national humane group in the U.S., uses Ad Grants to increase the organization's exposure and educate people on their work in the animal welfare space. In one year, Google Ads drove over 1,000 new people to donate or sign up to volunteer and over 600 people to complete a service dog application.

Show your nonprofit’s impact with Google Maps & Earth

Google’s mapping tools help nonprofits in a wide range of ways, from tracking and sharing an organization’s impact to taking supporters on a virtual tour. To help organizations get started, Google for Nonprofits provides Google Maps Platform credits to nonprofits.  

iNaturalist, part of the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, uses Google Maps Platform to encourage environmental stewardship. It uses crowdsourcing, maps and photo sharing to gather data that helps conversationalist save a species before it becomes extinct. iNaturalist has succeeded in its goal of getting hundreds of thousands of people to connect with the natural world and continues to help scientists discover crucial findings about species.

Engage your supporters using video with the YouTube Nonprofits Program

YouTube amplifies your nonprofit’s reach by telling your story to a global audience.  Through the YouTube Nonprofit program, you’ll get access to Link Anywhere Cards that direct your viewers to your external campaign landing pages and to Creator Academy lessons tailored to nonprofits. Your nonprofit can also get access to the YouTube Space in Los Angeles or New York to shoot or edit your videos at YouTube’s creator studio. Just visit Space LA or Space NY and click the “Apply Now” button.

KMVT 15 is an award-winning nonprofit television station and media center that provides a community forum, media literacy education, hands-on training and civic engagement to local residents. KMVT 15 used YouTube for Nonprofits to engage its audience at a global scale: their YouTube channel has garnered more than 4.5 million views and seven thousand subscribers with a minimal marketing budget.

We’re inspired every day by the nonprofits across more than 50 countries who use our products to advocate their causes and make a real difference. If you’re interested in how Google’s technology can help your nonprofit, click here tolearn more.

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Working with the USO to help veterans find jobs

Newsmakers: Reporting in rural India with Kavita Devi

How Netherlands educators use Chromebooks to transform classrooms

Tune in to March Madness for free with your Google Assistant

March Madness is in full swing. Did your team advance to the Sweet 16? As the 2019 NCAA Division I Men's Basketball Tournament goes into its final rounds, you can listen in to all of the action for free with the Google Assistant.   

Just ask any smart speaker or Smart Display, like Google Home, “Hey Google, play NCAA March Madness on Westwood One.” You'll immediately get a live audio stream of the games from the largest audio broadcast network in America—plus analysis from Westwood One’s basketball experts, including Hall of Famer John Thompson and four-time NBA champion Will Perdue. 

You can also use the Assistant to find out when the next game is or check on the latest scores. Simply say “Hey Google…”

• “When's the next March Madness game?”
• “When's the next University of Kentuckgy game?” [substitute other teams]
• “What's the latest March Madness news?”

 The Road to the Final Four is on Westwood One… and now, on Google Assistant too!

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More growth ahead in Taiwan

An external advisory council to help advance the responsible development of AI

McClatchy and Google partner on an experimental lab for local news

Editor’s note: The Google News Initiative is marking its first anniversary with a look at the collaborations and work that has taken place over the last year, as well as what’s planned for the coming year. One of the key programs we’re launching today is the GNI Local Experiments Project. The goal of the program will be testing new approaches in local business models to help the industry as a whole learn what works and what doesn’t. The first effort to emerge is with McClatchy and their Compass Experiment. The following post is by their President and CEO Craig Forman.

At this important time for local news, McClatchy is expanding its partnership with Google to explore and experiment with new sustainable business models for authoritative news and essential information to communities.

Today, we’re introducing The Compass Experiment, which will provide local news coverage to three small to mid-sized U.S. communities that don’t have access to significant local sources of news and information. The effort will be a part of the Local Experiments Project of the Google News Initiative.

Over the next three years, the McClatchy team will launch these new digital-only local news operations on multiple platforms, in collaboration with a team of experts at Google, which is helping support the effort financially. The sites will be 100 percent McClatchy owned and operated and McClatchy will maintain sole editorial control and ownership of the content. Google will have no input or involvement in any editorial efforts or decision making.

The Compass Experiment isn’t about making incremental improvement for local news. It’s about coming up with new approaches, and harnessing the expertise of both McClatchy and Google to create new models. While we don’t know what this will look like at the end of three years, we share a vision for the value and potential impact this collaborative work will have on the local media industry. Our two companies know each other well, having worked closely together over more than a decade—most notably when McClatchy played a key role as one of the launch partners for Subscribe with Google last year.

Our objective at McClatchy is to explore new models for independent local news and information. Google’s objective is to test the business models and operational aspects necessary to succeed in local news. Ultimately, those findings may lead to Google expanding its tools and services to enable other companies to do similar work.

Further details about the Compass Experiment (including locations) will be announced in the coming months. Over time, we’ll share what we’re learning through case studies that cover what’s worked and what’s scalable.

The importance of local journalism and its essential impact on local communities has never been more vital. McClatchy’s 162-year expertise in local news combined with Google’s expertise in technology will help create new paths. Today marks a meaningful step forward.

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Find and book vacation rentals

Take action and stay up-to-date with dynamic email in Gmail

Sparking new ideas in news with global Innovation Challenges

The news industry has a serious challenge ahead: building a successful, sustainable business model for high quality journalism in the digital age. Looking at ways to help this industry-wide transition to digital, last year we launched the Google News Initiative, along with a $300 million commitment to help journalism thrive.

Google has also supported 662 European news organizationswith funds to support innovative ideas in the last three years. Those projects addressed some of the industry’s most pressing issues—everything from new business models to new methods of fact-checking. Building on this experience, we’re announcing a new program: the GNI Innovation Challenges.

$30 million, two years, five regions of the world

To kickstart innovation globally, we will allocate $30 million over the next two years to launch up to five regional editions of the Challenges program, covering the North America, Middle East and Africa, Europe, Latin America, and Asia Pacific regions. Publishers in different parts of the world have told us about issues specific to their regions, and suggested the need for diverse approaches. This is why each Challenge will be designed around a theme that meets their local requirements.

The Innovation Challenges will be open to organizations of every size that look to produce original journalism. These projects should aim to enlighten citizens with trustworthy content and focus on encouraging a more sustainable news ecosystem. The full details about eligibility, as well as the theme, will be published on our website when each regional challenge opens up its application process. For the recently concluded Innovation Challenge in Asia Pacific, the key focus was on reader revenue.

As you’d expect from such a diverse region, we saw a lot of excitement for the Challenge, resulting in 215 applications from 18 countries covering a broad range of news organizations. The applications went through a rigorous assessment process, which concluded with a jury panel made up of a mix of Google executives and external experts from the Asia-Pacific news industry.

In the end, 23 projects from 14 countries were selected for funding, including CommonWealth Magazine, a Taiwanese news magazine, which will be working on an improved paywall to increase subscriptions. Other projects include an experiment by Asahi Shimbun, a Japanese newspaper, to allow readers to give a “tip” to valuable stories to encourage engagement by potential subscribers, and The Record, Nepal’s first membership-supported news site. You can read full details of the winners on our website.

Next, we will be opening applications for projects that help support local news in Europe and North America. We will soon announce the main topic for the Challenges in Latin America, the Middle East and Africa.

Sharing what we’ve learned from the Challenges

We believe this regional approach will allow us to be responsive to individual regions’ needs. And in that spirit, we plan to adapt the program as we learn from the various GNI Challenges globally and hope they will play a meaningful role in working towards a globally sustainable and regionally relevant news environment.

To find out more and apply, check our website for more details.

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Down under, over and all around: Sydney in 3D on Google Earth

Here are the winners of the GNI Innovation Challenge in Asia Pacific

Get a taste of Spanish culinary history on Google Arts & Culture

New data tools from the Google News Initiative, built for publishers

How I teach my friends to know what's actually true online

Rove around "Mars on Earth” in Street View

fo-verify

Year one of the Google News Initiative

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A new app to map and monitor the world's freshwater supply

Ask a Techspert: Why am I getting so many spam calls?

Hot off the press: Talking media with Google News Lab's director

Managed Google Play earns key certifications for security and privacy

With managed Google Play, organizations can build a customized and secure mobile application storefront for their teams, featuring public and private applications. Organizations’ employees can take advantage of the familiarity of a mobile app store to browse and download company-approved apps.

As with any enterprise-grade platform, it’s critical that the managed Google Play Store operates with the highest standards of privacy and security. Managed Google Play has been awarded three important industry designations that are marks of meeting the strict requirements for information security management practices.

Granted by the International Organization for Standardization, achieving ISO 27001 certification demonstrates that a company meets stringent privacy and security standards when operating an Information Security Management System (ISMS). Additionally, managed Google Play received SOC 2 and 3 reports, which are benchmarks of strict data management and privacy controls. These designations and auditing procedures are developed by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA).

Meeting a high bar of security management standards

To earn the ISO 27001 certification, auditors from Ernst & Young performed a thorough audit of managed Google Play based on established privacy principles. The entire methodology of documentation and procedures for managing other companies’ data are reviewed during an audit, and must be made available for regular compliance review. Companies that use managed Google Play are assured their data is managed in compliance with this industry standard. Additionally, ISO 27001 certification is in line with GDPR compliance.

Secure data management

With SOC 2 and SOC 3 reports, the focus is on controls relevant to data security, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality and privacy, which are verified through auditing reports. In managed Google Play, the data and private applications that enter Google’s systems are administered according to strict protocols, including determinations for who can view them and under what conditions. Enterprises require and receive the assurance that their information is handled with the utmost confidentiality and that the integrity of their data is preserved. For many companies, the presence of an SOC 2 and 3 report is a requirement when selecting a specific service. These reports prove that a service company has met and is abiding by best practices set forth by AICPA to ensure data security.

Our ongoing commitment to enterprise security

With managed Google Play, companies’ private apps for internal use are protected with a set of verified information security management processes and policies to ensure intellectual property is secure. This framework includes managed Google Play accounts that are used by enterprise mobility management (EMM) partners to manage devices.

Our commitment is that Android will continue to be a leader in enterprise security. As your team works across devices and shares mission-critical data through applications hosted in managed Google Play, you have the assurance of a commitment to providing your enterprise the highest standards of security and privacy.

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Build your next iOS and Android app with Flutter

How El País used AI to make their comments section less toxic

Digital News Innovation Fund: three years in, and 662 total projects supported

Honoring J.S. Bach with our first AI-powered Doodle

The Google News Initiative, one year in

GNI Subscriptions lab: invigorating the business model for news

Editor’s note: As part of the Google News Initiative, we work with news publishing partners across the world on efforts to help the industry thrive in the digital age. In partnership with FTI Consulting and the Local Media Association (LMA), today we’re launching the GNI Subscriptions Lab for eight publishers in the U.S. and Canada to help them transform their approach to digital subscriptions. A similar effort will launch in Latin America next month. The following post is by the LMA’s President, Nancy Lane.

 While the largest national news publishers have put digital subscriptions at the center of their business transformation, we’ve yet to see a clear template for publications’ success at the metro and local levels. Finding a growth path forward for subscriptions is critical to the very survival of hundreds of newspapers in markets large and small. One local publisher told me that his organization’s existence is being threatened like never before, and that seeing his community lose the kind of journalism they produce is not an option. Another said if we as an industry can’t figure out the digital subscription model, then the end could be near. 

That’s why the Local Media Association teamed up with the Google News Initiative and FTI Consultingto create the GNI Subscriptions Lab. The goal of the lab is to develop a sustainable and thriving business model for newspapers across North America—powered by digital subscriptions.

To get there, we’ve designed a six-month long experience that will address every step of the digital subscriptions process. Eight publishers will be chosen to participate, representing a cross-section of the local news industry, with a mix of both chain-owned and independent community and metro titles. Those chosen must be dedicated to figuring out a subscriptions strategy with buy-in and direct involvement from the highest executives (including the CEO) in their respective companies. They’ll come with open minds, a willingness to experiment and a community spirit built around sharing what they learn along the way. We’re looking to help these eight publishers make significant leaps forward with their subscription businesses, the kinds of leaps that can transform these organizations.

The publishers will undergo a mix of quantitative and qualitative market research, looking at existing and potential reader segments in an attempt to better understand the addressable market, readers willingness to pay and more.  

FTI Consulting will perform a full diagnostic evaluation of each participating publisher across multiple dimensions—including people, process, technology, marketing and content—to benchmark current performance, identify short-term optimization opportunities and recommend longer-term transformation roadmaps. This includes providing a detailed scorecard to show how each publisher sizes up, and a dashboard for measuring ongoing progress.  

During the entire process, the publishers will have support from Google teams that bring expertise in data, technology, product, subscriptions and more. Our businesses will be challenged in new and exciting ways. To have our subscriptions strategies looked at from multiple angles, with all of the powerful tools and resources that they bring, is exactly what’s needed given what’s at stake.

As we see results, we’ll share learnings with the industry at large—including at the LMA-LMC Elevate Summitin September—through experiential learning, playbooks, conference workshops and more. The future of community journalism is indeed at stake. I can’t think of a project more important at this moment in time. This is a powerful group effort, and our expectations are high.

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Building a safer internet, one secure domain at a time

Do you lock your doors when you're not home or when you’re sleeping at night? Your home protects everything and everyone that lies within it—whether that’s your family, pets or belongings—and a door is the most direct way for a criminal to access your home. Locking your door is the simplest thing you can do to keep safe. Similarly, when you’re browsing the web, there’s one key thing that helps keep you and your information safe and “locked” up.

HTTPS is a certificate that works just like the lock on your front door at home. By “locking” your connection to a website, it helps prevent interception or alteration of content on the site you’re visiting. We want every website to have a lock on it. That’s why Google Registry created safe.page: so you can understand the most direct steps you can take to keep yourself and others safe while browsing the internet.

Visit safe.page to learn how to read a URL (to avoid phishing attacks) and the importance of a secure connection (especially when sharing sensitive info like credit cards and passwords).

Build safely, get rewarded

That’s not all we’re doing to support HTTPS. We're also teaming up with WordPress to make it easy for anyone to build a secure website. They make building secure websites a snap by automatically installing SSL certificates at no cost for domains they host. If HTTPS is locking your online information safely, an SSL certificate acts like the actual lock on the door.

If you’ve been thinking of building a website, now’s a good time to get started: We're running a contest for the best sites created through April 30, 2019. Nine winners will be selected based on their website’s user experience, user interface, originality, design and content clarity. Winners will receive a Pixel 3 phone or equivalent prize and the opportunity to be featured on one of Google Registry's websites (get.page, get.app and get.dev). Entering the competition is simple:

1. Register your .page, .app or .dev domain. All three extensions are secure by default (registered domains only work with an SSL certificate). You can register your domain through your preferred registrar.
   
2. Build your website. You can get started building your site on WordPress.com and save 25 percent using the promo code SAFE_A24F at checkout. (The offer is valid until April 30, 2019.) Websites created in other ways on .app, .page and .dev are also eligible for the contest.
   
3. Learn more about the contest rules here, including eligibility restrictions, prize details and entry deadlines. Submit your website to the contest at safe.page.
   

That’s it! Regardless of whether you create your own secure website, we encourage everyone to visit safe.page to learn the fundamentals of keeping your information safe. Good luck and thanks for doing your part to build a safer internet!

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Supporting choice and competition in Europe

For nearly a decade, we’ve been in discussions with the European Commission about the way some of our products work. Throughout this process, we’ve always agreed on one thing一that healthy, thriving markets are in everyone’s interest.

A key characteristic of open and competitive markets一and of Google’s products一is constant change. Every year, we make thousands of changes to our products, spurred by feedback from our partners and our users. Over the last few years, we’ve also made changes一to Google Shopping; to our mobile apps licenses; and to AdSense for Search一in direct response to formal concerns raised by the European Commission.  

Since then, we’ve been listening carefully to the feedback we’re getting, both from the European Commission, and from others. As a result, over the next few months, we’ll be making further updates to our products in Europe.

Since 2017, when we adapted Google Shopping to comply with the Commission’s order, we’ve made a number of changes to respond to feedback. Recently, we’ve started testing a new format that gives direct links to comparison shopping sites, alongside specific product offers from merchants.  

On Android phones, you’ve always been able to install any search engine or browser you want, irrespective of what came pre-installed on the phone when you bought it. In fact, a typical Android phone user will usually install around 50 additional apps on their phone.

After the Commission’s July 2018 decision, we changed the licensing model for the Google apps we build for use on Android phones, creating new, separate licenses for Google Play, the Google Chrome browser, and for Google Search. In doing so, we maintained the freedom for phone makers to install any alternative app alongside a Google app.

Now we’ll also do more to ensure that Android phone owners know about the wide choice of browsers and search engines available to download to their phones. This will involve asking users of existing and new Android devices in Europe which browser and search apps they would like to use.

We’ve always tried to give people the best and fastest answers一whether direct from Google, or from the wide range of specialist websites and app providers out there today.  These latest changes demonstrate our continued commitment to operating in an open and principled way.

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Stadia: a new way to play

New guide: Rethink your eCommerce experience with Google Ad Manager

When shopping online, today’s consumers want seamless, convenient, and genuinely enjoyable experiences. They expect retailers to understand what they want, with advertising that puts the right products in front of them at just the right moments. So, how exactly are retailers making it all happen — especially with the modern path to purchase spanning across so many different devices, formats, and channels?   

Leading retailers are accelerating their businesses by using integrated technology and data to help them connect with shoppers at each step of their journey. With platforms that provide advanced insights, retailers are collaborating with brands on innovative ad formats and placements that drive action by delivering a frictionless experience across their sites and apps.

In our new guide, Transforming shopping experiences on your eCommerce platform, we show you how Ad Manager can help you deliver unique experiences at every stage of the shopping journey, and increase profits while serving your customers, partners, and employees.

Ready for a new approach to eCommerce? Download the full guide here and see how you can create experiences that work for all of your customers.

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Helping Latino students learn to code

Growing up in Costa Rica, I was always passionate about creating things and solving puzzles. That’s what drove me to computer science. I saw it as an opportunity to explore my interests and open doors to new possibilities. It's that love and passion that eventually helped me get to Google, and to the United States, where I now live.

Computer science requires students to learn how to think in a totally new way. Getting into that mindset can be really hard for anyone, but it can be even tougher if you’re learning key phrases, concepts, and acronyms in an environment that feels different from your everyday life.

That’s why I’m proud to share that Google.org is making a $5 million grant to UnidosUS, the YWCA and the Hispanic Heritage Foundation. The grant will bring computer science (CS) education to over one million Latino students and their families by 2022 with computer science curricula, including CS First, Google’s coding curriculum for elementary and middle school students. Additionally, it will support students' experience with how they learn about computer science, helping them explore CS and offering culturally relevant resources to engage parents.

This $5 million grant is part of a new $25 million Google.org commitment in 2019 to increase Black and Latino students’ access to computer science (CS) and AI education across the US. This initiative will help these students develop the technical skills and confidence they need for the future, and help prepare them to succeed in the careers they pursue.

Even as a fluent English speaker, I can’t count the number of times people misunderstand me because I pronounce things differently, or the times it takes me a little longer to understand because my day-to-day work language is not my primary language. This language barrier is not the only barrier—students from underrepresented communities, especially those who are Black and Latino, often don’t feel represented or connected to their first introduction to the field.

While Black and Latino students have equal interest in CS education, they often face social barriers to learning CS, such as a lack of role models, and a lack of learning materials that reflect their lived experiences, like those that are in a language they understand. On top of these social barriers, these students often face structural barriers, such as not having equal access to learn CS in or outside of the classroom. 

Along with the grant, CS First is launching its first set of lessons in Spanish. In the first activity, "Animar un nombre," students choose the name of something or someone they care about and bring the letters to life using code. The second activity, "Un descubrimiento inusual,” encourages students to code a story about when two characters discover a surprising object.

Today’s announcement is an exciting part of Google.org’s work to support students who have historically been underrepresented in computer science. These grants to partner organizations will help Black and Latino students access materials and engage with role models who feel connected to their culture. We will also help create more opportunities for students to access the courses they need to continue their studies.

To me, the new Spanish coding lessons are more than just a fun way to learn coding. They are opportunities for entire communities of students to see themselves reflected in computer science education materials, perhaps for the first time. It’s our hope that students like the ones I met will use CS to create more inventions and opportunities for us all.

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How companies are finding the right device with Android Enterprise Recommended

We recently returned from Mobile World Congress, where many of our hardware partners showcased their latest devices and how Android is shaping the future of mobility. When we launched  the Android Enterprise Recommended program, our goal was to provide the mobile ecosystem with powerful and versatile solutions, validated for enterprise use. The first validated knowledge-worker devices debuted just over a year ago, and since then the program has expanded to rugged devices, enterprise mobility management solutions and most recently, managed service providers. Today, we’re sharing highlights about how our partners are embracing Android Enterprise Recommended for how it provides choice, cost savings, and empowers companies to choose devices with confidence.

Embracing device choice

SAP, a leader in enterprise application software, wanted to give its teams greater device choice and embrace the latest Android Enterprise management features. The company was looking for a solution to transition 9,000 corporate-owned devices onto modern Android Enterprise management for the separation of business and personal data delivered by the work profile.

Jarmo Akkanen, SAP Global Service Owner, Mobile Operations, said with Android Enterprise Recommended the company was able to confidently choose devices that it knew met strict security requirements and supported rapid deployment features: “We urgently wanted to offer our colleagues more choice for their mobile workplace. We found that Google’s Android Enterprise Recommended program is a good opportunity to broaden our portfolio of managed company-owned smartphones.”

Lower cost and speedy deployment

As part of this device strategy, the SAP IT team was also looking for a way to reduce the total cost of ownership with high-quality devices across various price points. Nokia has a diverse portfolio of Android Enterprise Recommended devices that range from high-end to more cost-efficient options. This gave SAP flexibility in choosing devices that met the same rigorous standards for the enterprise, regardless of cost.

Part of the equation in lowering costs is time—SAP is transitioning to zero-touch enrollment for all Android Enterprise Recommended devices so the company can deploy corporate devices in bulk without any manual setup. Employees will get their device with the right apps and management settings already configured.

Finding great devices

When Yorkshire Building Society (YBS), a financial institution based in the UK, had numerous devices that were either unmanaged or running a legacy operating system and management solution, the company’s IT team was eager to modernize its management framework. After investigating both iOS and Android-based approaches, the YBS IT team migrated its mobile device infrastructure to Android Enterprise Recommended devices. The company made the Nokia 7 Plus its new corporate standard phone and developed a company app store to distribute applications through managed Google Play.

YBS’ End User Computing Delivery Manager Andrew Ellison said employee feedback about the transition was positive, and the new phones bring together a mix of smooth and consistent software experience with excellent hardware. “Thanks to the migration to Android, we will give our employees a good user experience and offer an extended set of services and software to them,” he said. “With Android Enterprise we will be able to offer our colleagues a personal user experience on corporate owned devices without compromising security and manageability.”

These are just a couple of examples of what companies are doing with Android. We’re looking forward to hearing how more customers and partners are embracing the potential of Android.

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How digital skills training helped three friends found a startup

Whether you’re a teacher, accountant, engineer or farmer, the digital economy is transforming the workplace as we know it. According to a study by the European Commission, 90 percent of workplaces in the European Union today require employees to have basic digital skills. And Europeans are beginning to learn these skills on their own in their spare time. This is exactly what Nik Kiene, Malte Schülein and Lennart Hartrumpf, three students from Flensburg, a city in northern Germany, did last summer. While most students spent the holidays hanging out or traveling with friends and family, the trio went back to school.

They had a vision to create a web-based startup together. “ShareSpace,” a sharing economy platform, would help users rent out rarely used goods, like sporting or technical equipment. While they’d been developing the startup idea for months, the three friends lacked the skills needed to turn their vision into reality.

That’s when 19-year-old Lennart found out about Google Zukunftswerkstatt, one of three Grow with Google training centers in Hamburg, which provides free training on a variety of digital topics. He attended one of the sessions on a whim; the next time he went, he brought Nik and Malte along. They soon agreed that the curriculum at Google Zukunftswerkstatt was the perfect fit, since it would provide them with both the technical and soft skills they needed to get ShareSpace started.

After they began attending trainings at Google Zukunftswerkstatt, their business plans started to fall into place. “The insights from the Google Analytics training helped us tremendously in properly evaluating data and improving our platform,” explains Lennart, “while the online marketing courses are now helping us get the word out about our startup.” They continued and enrolled in additional training sessions on different skills: “The training session ‘Negotiating successfully’ has helped us out on many occasions, especially during talks with older and more experienced business owners. We’re way more confident now,” says Malte.

Lennart and his friends ended up attending every training session available during their summer break, commuting six hours every day from their hometown Flensburg to Hamburg and back. “Anyone can spend their summer break at the pool! Getting up early was definitely worth it for the offerings of Google Zukunftswerkstatt”, says Malte.

Like these three budding entrepreneurs, many people in Germany might feel like they don’t have the skills needed to be part of the new, technology-centred economy. The free training sessions at Google Zukunftswerkstatt are open to everyone. So far, through Google Zukunftswerkstatt, Grow with Google has helped more than half a million people obtain new digital skills, leading to a positive impact on individuals’ careers, businesses and the German economy. At each of our training centers in Munich, Hamburg and Berlin, we aim to help people take the next step in their career, grow their business, find a job and be empowered with the skills they need.

For Nik, Malte and Lennart, spending the summer holidays a little differently has paid off. The threesome recently launched a beta of their ShareSpace platform and are now pitching for seed funding as a registered company. While their journey began with free Google Zukunftswerkstatt sessions, it has led to the exciting beginnings of a working startup and an exciting future ahead.

by via The Keyword

Bringing new voices, and communities, to the world of podcasts

How digital skills training helped three friends found a startup

Whether you’re a teacher, accountant, engineer or farmer, the digital economy is transforming the workplace as we know it. According to a study by the European Commission, 90 percent of workplaces in the European Union today require employees to have basic digital skills. And Europeans are beginning to learn these skills on their own in their spare time. This is exactly what Nik Kiene, Malte Schülein and Lennart Hartrumpf, three students from Flensburg, a city in northern Germany, did last summer. While most students spent the holidays hanging out or traveling with friends and family, the trio went back to school.

They had a vision to create a web-based startup together. “ShareSpace,” a sharing economy platform, would help users rent out rarely used goods, like sporting or technical equipment. While they’d been developing the startup idea for months, the three friends lacked the skills needed to turn their vision into reality.

That’s when 19-year-old Lennart found out about Google Zukunftswerkstatt, one of three Grow with Google training centers in Hamburg, which provides free training on a variety of digital topics. He attended one of the sessions on a whim; the next time he went, he brought Nik and Malte along. They soon agreed that the curriculum at Google Zukunftswerkstatt was the perfect fit, since it would provide them with both the technical and soft skills they needed to get ShareSpace started.

After they began attending trainings at Google Zukunftswerkstatt, their business plans started to fall into place. “The insights from the Google Analytics training helped us tremendously in properly evaluating data and improving our platform,” explains Lennart, “while the online marketing courses are now helping us get the word out about our startup.” They continued and enrolled in additional training sessions on different skills: “The training session ‘Negotiating successfully’ has helped us out on many occasions, especially during talks with older and more experienced business owners. We’re way more confident now,” says Malte.

Lennart and his friends ended up attending every training session available during their summer break, commuting six hours every day from their hometown Flensburg to Hamburg and back. “Anyone can spend their summer break at the pool! Getting up early was definitely worth it for the offerings of Google Zukunftswerkstatt”, says Malte.

Like these three budding entrepreneurs, many people in Germany might feel like they don’t have the skills needed to be part of the new, technology-centred economy. The free training sessions at Google Zukunftswerkstatt are open to everyone. So far, through Google Zukunftswerkstatt, Grow with Google has helped more than half a million people obtain new digital skills, leading to a positive impact on individuals’ careers, businesses and the German economy. At each of our training centers in Munich, Hamburg and Berlin, we aim to help people take the next step in their career, grow their business, find a job and be empowered with the skills they need.

For Nik, Malte and Lennart, spending the summer holidays a little differently has paid off. The threesome recently launched a beta of their ShareSpace platform and are now pitching for seed funding as a registered company. While their journey began with free Google Zukunftswerkstatt sessions, it has led to the exciting beginnings of a working startup and an exciting future ahead.

by via The Keyword

Driving change with Rolling Study Halls

Using technology to support project-based learning

The creative coder adding color to machine learning

Helping Indonesia prepare for disasters

A recipe for beating the record of most-calculated digits of pi

Enabling a Safe Digital Advertising Ecosystem

Supporting people with disabilities: Be My Eyes and phone support now available

Grow your games business with ads

Your mission, gumshoe: Catch Carmen Sandiego in Google Earth

With Lookout, discover your surroundings with the help of AI

Google Marketing Live broadcast on May 14th: register today

Did you know that searches for "best” have increased by 80% in the last two years? For example, in recent third-party research, we saw that some people spend over 50 days searching for the “best chocolate” before making a decision.

Google Marketing Live is happening on May 14th—register now to discover how to take action on new consumer insights like these and learn about the latest digital marketing products from Google. For the first time, we'll also be live streaming 8+ hours of additional content from the event. Engage directly with product managers through live Q&A, learn new best practices, and get an inside look at how our latest products are developed.

by via The Keyword

Kormo, an app helping young job seekers find work, launches in Jakarta

How I started traveling the world on my own, thanks to Google

Cloud Covered: What was new with Google Cloud in February

February is a time for chocolate and candy hearts, but you know what's really sweet? Less email spam and apps that work faster. Those are just two of our updates from Google Cloud last month. Read on for what was new and popular last month on the Google Cloud blog.

Gmail: now with even less spam.

Gmail already blocks 99.9 percent of spam email for users, and a new application of our machine learning framework TensorFlow is now helping to block 100 million more spam messages every day. TensorFlow does this by detecting new types of spam messages by identifying potentially suspicious patterns in large data sets more efficiently than humans can. So this use of machine learning means it’s easier to stop new types of spam, which are constantly emerging.  

You can move to and from the cloud with a hybrid platform.

Working in the cloud means that businesses won’t run their back-end computers (known as servers) at their own location anymore, but will instead use a cloud provider to run them in the cloud. Hybrid cloud is the concept of a business running some of their servers with a cloud provider, in a cloud provider’s data center, and keeping other servers in their own data centers. Last month’s hybrid cloud announcement brought news that this is now a lot easier for businesses using Google Cloud Platform (GCP) to do. The Cloud Services Platform (CSP) launch means that developers can build and, IT teams can run, their applications both in the cloud and in their own data center with a consistent experience.

A database could be the secret sauce that helps build apps faster.

Lots of us—or maybe most of us—depend pretty heavily on our phone applications to book transportation, find restaurants, order food and do lots of other everyday tasks. There’s a lot under the hood that makes those apps work well and stay updated all the time. We announced last month that the Cloud Firestore database is generally available, and described some of the ways to use it for  building mobile, web, and IoT apps. One media company used Cloud Firestore to build a real-time media feed so users would see the latest news updated across all their devices.

We introduced a new sandbox (but not the messy kind).

The idea of a sandbox in the tech world isn’t that different from the kind you see at playgrounds: It’s essentially a contained area to explore and play, using software development tools instead of shovels and buckets. There’s a new type of sandbox for IT students, developers and other experimenters to use Google Cloud’s BigQuery without having to enter credit card information.  BigQuery is a Google Cloud product that lets companies ask questions of their collected data, such as to track business trends over time, or to explore publicly available data sets, such as NOAA weather data, to include in their own applications. BigQuery sandbox users get the same compute power as paying users, and just like paying users can use new capabilities like BigQuery Machine Learning and BigQuery Geospatial Information Systems.

It’s easier to explore cryptocurrencies and blockchains.

On the topic of publicly available data sets, we released six new cryptocurrency blockchain data sets last month. What does that mean, you might ask? The blockchain itself is a list of records, and a cryptocurrency is a type of, well, currency that’s exchanged online and secured by cryptography. Bitcoin may be the most well-known example of a cryptocurrency based on blockchain, but there are others as well. Adding these six new blockchain data sets mean that BigQuery users can explore and analyze data to understand how these cryptocurrencies really work, and integrate them into other financial data management systems.

That’s a wrap for February. Make sure to check out our upcoming Google Cloud Next ‘19 conference to read lots more about cloud.

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Keep the conversation going with your Assistant on Smart Displays

From controlling all your devices from a single dashboard to helping you prepare a new recipe for dinner, there are a lot of ways you can use Smart Displays with the Google Assistant to get things done around the house.

But let’s face it: having to repeat “Hey Google” every time you use the Assistant on Smart Displays can be cumbersome. Starting today, we're adding support for Continued Conversation on Smart Displays, an optional setting that lets you have a natural back-and-forth conversation with the Google Assistant. After you initially trigger the Assistant with a request, the Assistant will stay active for long enough to respond to follow up questions so you don't have to say “Hey Google” as often. You can turn on this feature in the Google Assistant app by going to Settings → Preferences → Continued Conversation and hitting the toggle.

Continued Conversations is currently available in english (US) across all Smart Displays, including the Google Home Hub, Lenovo Smart Display^TM, JBL Link View and LG XBOOM AI ThinQ WK9.

That’s not all that’s new with the Assistant on Smart Displays. Here’s a look at some features we’ve recently added on Smart Displays:

• Let the Assistant be your interpreter:Have family members or friends who don’t speak the same language? Interpreter Mode is now available and helps you have a free-flowing conversation in dozens of languages. Just say, “Hey Google, be my French interpreter.”
• Control your devices and appliances at home: The Google Assistant connects with more than 10,000 devices for your home, and Smart Displays gives you a single dashboard to easily control all these devices. Swipe down from the top edge to reveal your home view to control cameras, doorbells, lights, plugs, thermostats and more.
• Manage multi-room audio:You can add your Smart Display to a speaker group, and play music throughout the house. And with this release, we added controls for adjusting the volume of any device in the group. Just tap on the group name of the player on the screen to get started.
• Enjoy the small touches:We made it easier to dismiss certain cards on the home screen of your Smart Display when you no longer need them by just swiping up. And in those instances when you don’t want to wake up your partner when setting an alarm late at night, you can find a quick touch setting from the Quick Settings menu bar of your Smart Display.
• Share photos from Live Albums with Google Photos:Your Smart Display also can double as a digital photo frame. With Live Albums, you can show off the best photos of your favorite people and pets without you having g to curate them. If you see a photo that you love, you can now say “Hey Google, share this photo with Mom.” You can also remove photos from the device easily with your voice.
• Play a game: Gather friends and family around your Smart Display and say, “Hey Google, Are you Feeling Lucky?” You’ll play five rounds of trivia culminating in the final round of challenging “Guesstimation Station” brain teasers where you’ll answer questions like, “How many dimples does a golf ball have?”

Stay tuned for more features and functionality coming to Smart Displays to help you throughout your day.

by via The Keyword

A VR series about women with the “courage to question”

Inspiring girls and women to pursue their career ambitions

Take your mobile games business to the next level with Google AdMob and Google Ads at GDC

Each year, the global games community gets together in San Francisco for the Game Developers Conference (GDC), a major industry event for developers, publishers, and business professionals working in games to learn, get inspiration, and make new connections to grow their business. 

This year at GDC, our Google AdMob and Google Ads team have several sessions and activities lined up to share the latest product innovations and best practices, all geared toward helping you grow and scale your mobile games business through user acquisition and monetization.

To help you navigate all the content and plan your agenda more easily, here’s a preview of the major speaking sessions and activities that we have planned for you.

Talks

Monday, March 18

Google Mobile Developer Day: 3 tips to help your mobile games business succeed 

• Time and location: 12:10 - 12:25 PM at Moscone West (room #2020)
  
• Speaker: Duke Dukellis, Director, Product Management, Mobile App Advertising, Google
  
• Summary: Join this session to hear pro tips on how to enhance your monetization strategy with better user experience design and innovative new ways to monetize non-purchasers to maximize growth and revenue. The session will be available via livestream. 

Wednesday, March 20

Google Ads Keynote: Growing your games business with ads

• Time and location:12:30 - 1:30 PM at Moscone West (room #2020)
  
• Speaker:Sissie Hsiao, VP, Product Management, Google
  
• Summary:The global gaming industry has become increasingly competitive. At Google we have been investing in providing new tools and solutions to help you stay ahead of the curve by gaining a loyal fanbase and building sustainable revenue streams. Join this keynote to learn about Google’s latest growth and monetization innovations that make it easier for developers to grow their user base and find and retain high-value players.
  

Google Booth Talk: Rewarded ads best practices

• Time and location: 4:00 - 4:30 PM at the Google Booth Theatre
  
• Speaker: Ed Weng, Product Manager, Google AdMob
  
• Summary: Designed with practitioners in mind, join this session to learn best practices for rewarded ads with real-world examples to help you implement and optimize this popular, player-friendly ad format.
  

Thursday, March 21

Google Breakout Session: Making the most of Google’s app ads and monetization innovations for strategy and casual games

• Time and location: 10:00 - 11:00 AM at Moscone West (room #3009)
  
• Speakers: Ed Weng, Product Manager, Google AdMob; Jennifer Lui, Product Manager, Mobile App Ads, Google
  
• Summary: Get the inside scoop on how to leverage Google’s advertising solutions for your games. Whether your game is strategy or casual, our experts will share pro tips on user acquisition and monetization to help you deliver the very best app and ads experience to your players.
  

Google Booth Talk: Optimizing monetization strategies for casual games

• Time and location: 10:00 - 11:00 AM at Moscone West (room #3009)
  
• Speakers:Ed Weng, Product Manager, Google AdMob; Daehyun An, Global Product Lead, Mobile Apps, Google
  
• Summary: Casual games have enjoyed rapid growth in the past few years. Join our product experts and learn tried-and-true tips with real world examples to help you enhance your user acquisition and monetization strategies for this game category.
  

Google Booth Talk: Optimizing monetization strategies for strategy games

• Time and location:10:00 - 11:00 AM at Moscone West (room #3009)
  
• Speakers: Ed Weng, Product Manager, Google AdMob; Kyle Rapp, Global Product Lead, Mobile Apps, Google
  
• Summary: With a focused and valuable player base, strategy games are faced with unique challenges. Join this session to learn actionable tips and best practices to grow your strategy game while unlocking new monetization opportunities.
  

Activities

March 20 to 22

Explore new ways to level up your gaming business at the Google booth 

• Time and location: 10:00 AM - 5:00 PM daily in the Central Hall of the Moscone Convention Center
  
• What to expect:Come visit us in person at GDC to explore new products and learn about feature launches across Google products. From Google Ads, AdMob, Cloud, and Maps, learn about ways to take your game to the next level. 
  

Wednesday, March 20

Connect with the gaming community at the Google Mixer

• Time and Location:6:00 - 10:00 PM at Mezzanine
  
• What to expect: Join fellow game professionals from around the world at the Google Mixer to network, wind down, and have some fun. This is an invitation-only event so please contact your account manager at Google if you’re interested in attending. 
  

We’re excited to share new product innovations, industry insights, and best practices at this year’s GDC to help you take your mobile games business to the next level. We hope to see you there!

Follow us on Twitter to get live coverage from the event and more.

by via The Keyword

A look into one woman’s job at Google: opening doors for other women

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Simplifying programmatic: first price auctions for Google Ad Manager

Book a table with the Google Assistant across the country on more devices

From Phoenix to Atlanta, it’s been great to see many of you using our new Google Assistant feature built on Duplex technology to quickly book restaurant reservations over the phone. Thanks to your feedback, we’re beginning to make this feature available to more people across the United States. Now, you can use it on all Pixel phones in 43 U.S. states.

All it takes is a few seconds to tell your Assistant where you'd like to go. Just ask the Assistant on your phone, “Book a table for four people at [restaurant name] tomorrow night.” The Assistant will then call the restaurant to see if it can accommodate your request. Once your reservation is successfully made, you’ll receive a notification on your phone, an email update and a calendar invite so you don’t forget.  

For restaurants that already use an online booking service that partners with Google, the Assistant will work directly with Reserve with Google  to confirm the reservation. Business owners can read more about this feature here.

We look forward to bringing this service to more people across the U.S. to make planning a night out just a bit easier. Over the next few weeks, we’ll start slowly bringing this feature to more Android and iOS devices, and will continue to incorporate feedback as we continue testing. Bon appétit!  

by via The Keyword

Explore millennia of human inventions in one exhibition

Using Data GIF Maker to compare data and tell stories

Connecting you to visual shoppers with new ad formats on Google Images

Doing our part to share open data responsibly

This past weekend marked Open Data Day, an annual celebration of making data freely available to everyone. Communities around the world organized events, and we’re taking a moment here at Google to share our own perspective on the importance of open data. More accessible data can meaningfully help people and organizations, and we’re doing our part by opening datasets, providing access to APIs and aggregated product data, and developing tools to make data more accessible and useful.

Responsibly opening datasets

Sharing datasets is increasingly important as more people adopt machine learning through open frameworks like TensorFlow. We’ve released over 50 open datasets for other developers and researchers to use. These include YouTube 8M, a corpus of annotated videos used externally for video understanding; the HDR+ Burst Photography dataset, which helps others experiment with the technology that powers Pixel features like Portrait Mode; and Open Images, along with the Open Images Extended dataset which increases photo diversity.

Just because data is open doesn’t mean it will be useful, however. First, a dataset needs to be cleaned so that any insights developed from it are based on well-structured and accurate examples. Cleaning a large dataset is no small feat; before opening up our own, we spend hundreds of hours standardizing data and validating quality. Second, a dataset should be shared in a machine-readable format that’s easy for others to use, such as JSON rather than PDF. Finally, consider whether the dataset is representative of the intended content. Even if data is usable and representative of some situations, it may not be appropriate for every application. For instance, if a dataset contains mostly North American animal images, it may help you classify a deer, but not a giraffe. Tools like Facets can help you analyze the makeup of a dataset and evaluate the best ways to put it to use. We’re also working to build more representative datasets through interfaces like the Crowdsource application. To guide others’ use of your own dataset, consider publishing a data card which denotes authorship, composition and suggested use cases (here’s an example from our Open Images Extended release).

Making data findable and useful

It’s not enough to just make good data open, though--it also needs to be findable. Researchers, developers, journalists and other curious data-seekers often struggle to locate data scattered across the web’s thousands of repositories. Our Dataset Search tool helps people find data sources wherever they’re hosted, as long as the data is described in a way that search engines can locate. Since the tool launched a few months ago, we’ve seen the number of unique datasets on the platform double to 10 million, including contributions from the U.S. National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Federal Reserve, the European Data Portal, the World Bank and government portals from every continent.

What makes data useful is how easily it can be analyzed. Though there’s more open data today, data scientists spend significant time analyzing it across multiple sources. To help solve that problem, we’ve created Data Commons. It’s a knowledge graph of data sources that lets users  treat various datasets of interest—regardless of source and format—as if they are all in a single local database. Anyone can contribute datasets or build applications powered by the infrastructure. For people using the platform, that means less time engineering data and more time generating insights. We’re already seeing exciting use cases of Data Commons. In one UC Berkeley data science course taught by Josh Hug and Fernando Perez, students used Census, CDC and Bureau of Labor Statistics data to correlate obesity levels across U.S. cities with other health and economic factors. Typically, that analysis would take days or weeks; using Data Commons, students were able to build high-fidelity models in less than an hour. We hope to partner with other educators and researchers—if you’re interested, reach out to collaborate@datacommons.org.

Balancing trade-offs

There are trade-offs to opening up data, and we aim to balance various sensitivities with the potential benefits of sharing. One consideration is that broad data openness can facilitate uses that don’t align with our AI Principles. For instance, we recently made synthetic speech data available only to researchers participating in the 2019 ASVspoof Challenge, to ensure that the data can be used to develop tools to detect deepfakes, while limiting misuse.

Extreme data openness can also risk exposing user or proprietary information, causing privacy breaches or threatening the security of our platforms. We allow third party developers to build on services like Maps, Gmail and more via APIs, so they can build their own products while user data is kept safe. We also publish aggregated product data like Search Trends to share information of public interest in a privacy-preserving way.

While there can be benefits to using sensitive data in controlled and principled ways, like predicting medical conditions or events, it’s critical that safeguards are in place so that training machine learning models doesn’t compromise individual privacy. Emerging research provides promising new avenues to learn from sensitive data. One is Federated Learning, a technique for training global ML models without data ever leaving a person’s device, which we’ve recently made available open-source with TensorFlow Federated. Another is Differential Privacy, which can offer strong guarantees that training data details aren’t inappropriately exposed in ML models. Additionally, researchers are experimenting more and more with using small training datasets and zero-shot learning, as we demonstrated in our recent prostate cancer detection research and work on Google Translate.

We hope that our efforts will help people access and learn from clean, useful, relevant and privacy-preserving open data from Google to solve the problems that matter to them. We also encourage other organizations to consider how they can contribute—whether by opening their own datasets, facilitating usability by cleaning them before release, using schema.org metadata standards to increase findability, enhancing transparency through data cards or considering trade-offs like user privacy and misuse. To everyone who has come together over the past week to celebrate open data: we look forward to seeing what you build.

by via The Keyword

Searches for "Black girl magic” are on the rise

As Black History Month comes to a close and we look toward International Women’s Day, people are searching for “Black girl magic” more than ever before. Searches hit an all-time high in February of this year.

To me, “Black girl magic” is an empowering phrase that celebrates the achievements, beauty and irrepressibility of Black women and girls. The phrase is appropriate for moments both big and small, and ignites the internal spark that motivates both personal and professional achievements.

As black women, it’s rare to see our own, varied images reflected back to us in media and pop culture. But this film celebrates women—past and present, famous and unknown—who have broken down barriers in many fields and industries. It reminds me that whether you’re getting your diploma, winning your 23rd grand slam, or simply putting one foot in front of the other, you’re making magic.

To learn more about magic created by women all over the world, visit g.co/IWD.

by via The Keyword

Build with Classroom and G Suite

Ask a Techspert: What is quantum computing?

Ask a Techspert: What is quantum computing?

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Ensuring we pay fairly and equitably

Editor’s note: The following information was provided to employees in January and we’re sharing more broadly now.

Compensation should be based on what you do, not who you are. Every year, each employee’s compensation is modeled algorithmically, based on work-related inputs like the market rate for their job, their location, level and performance rating. If managers then want to apply discretion to adjust an employee’s modeled compensation, they must provide a clear rationale.

To make sure that the modeled amounts, and any changes made by managers, are equitable across gender and racial lines, we conduct an annual pay equity analysis that covers all job groups that meet minimum n-count thresholds for statistical analysis. If we find any statistically significant discrepancies in any job groups, we make upwards adjustments across the group to eliminate the discrepancy.  You can read more about our methodology here (we’ve run pay equity analyses every year since 2012).

In 2018, we included 91percent of Googlers in our analysis, the highest percentage to date. We provided $9.7 million in adjustments to a total of 10,677 Googlers.  

There are a couple of reasons that the pay equity analysis required more adjustments in 2018, compared to 2017. First, the 2018 analysis flagged one particularly large job code (Level 4 Software Engineer) for adjustments. Within this job code, men were flagged for adjustments because they received less discretionary funds than women. Secondly, this year we undertook a new hire analysis to look for any discrepancies in offers to new employees—this accounted for 49 percent of the total dollars spent on adjustments.

Our pay equity analysis ensures that compensation is fair for employees in the same job, at the same level, location and performance. But we know that’s only part of the story. Because  leveling, performance ratings, and promotion impact pay, this year, we are undertaking a comprehensive review of these processes to make sure the outcomes are fair and equitable for all employees.

Our first step is a leveling equity analysis to assess how employees are leveled when they are hired, and whether we can improve how we level.

This expanded review is the next step in our commitment to paying fairly. We’ll keep working to improve our practices and to ensure that Google is a great place to work for everyone.

by via The Keyword

How my passion for ice cream became More Than A Business

Editor’s Note: This Friday, March 8 is International Women’s Day. We’re commemorating the day early by hearing from Natasha Case, Founder & CEO Of Coolhaus from Los Angeles, California. She’s sharing her story of how her business idea grew from one Google Search to a product that’s sold in thousands of stores across the U.S. Check out the stories of other women around the world who have built #MoreThanABusiness here.

Ice cream has always been a lifelong passion of mine, and when I went to architecture school, I thought I could use food to make architecture more fun. I knew I was onto something when my friends were devouring my crazy ice cream concoctions—ginger cookies and chocolate wasabi ice cream, anyone? My partner, Freya Estreller, and I decided to do a Google search ("hipster ice cream truck") to see if anything like my ice cream experiments was already out there. Nothing popped up. After we did that search, we saw an opportunity to take a leap of faith and turn my hobby into an actual business. In 2008, we converted an old postal truck into an ice cream truck, brought it to a music festival—and Coolhaus was born.

Coolhaus now distributes to over 7,500 grocery stores, has three storefronts and operates 10 mobile ice cream trucks and carts in Los Angeles, New York and Dallas. It’s been a rewarding, challenging and delicious journey. Along the way, people have asked us countless questions about how we built and expanded our business. For us, the answer has always been following the guidance of mentors and partners. You can learn from other female entrepreneurs, whether they're further along in their business journey or just getting started. It's common—almost natural—for us to overthink or feel as if we have to prove something before we ask for a mentor or partner. Have the courage to ask; the worst will be a "no," but the upside is so much greater than that.

Now that we have more than 10 years of experience, we’re passionate about being on the other side as mentors to other female entrepreneurs. Here are some of the lessons we’ve learned along the way:

1. Fail forward. You're going to fail, so make the most out of how you do that. When you need to cut cords on an idea, do it with efficiency and don't drag it along.
   
2. We talk a lot about minimum viable product—meaning that sometimes, an idea just needs to get put out there to see how it will do. Focus on building, measuring and learning.
   
3. Inexperience is not an obstacle. When you realize the status quo are not hard truths, you start to take risks that you didn't realize you were taking.
   

We’re thriving in an important moment of time where there’s a real energy of women helping and supporting each other. We’re proud not only of the business we’ve built, but also of the opportunity to lead by example. We want other women to take their crazy ideas from a Google search to an actual business, too.

by via The Keyword

Helping developers create more choice for educators

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EU Copyright Directive: One Step Forward, Two Steps Back

We support updating copyright rules for this digital age, recognize the value of content that creators and rights holders produce and care deeply about journalism. We all share a belief in the social value of knowledge and content, and when publishers and creators succeed, we succeed.  

European lawmakers recently agreed on a final text of a new copyright directive. Many voices, including consumer associations, creators, small publishers, academics and startups have shared their concerns about the outcome. Having studied the final text, we agree that the directive would not help, but rather hold back, Europe’s creative and digital economy.

Let’s start with the positive. The latest text improves the version adopted by the European Parliament in September 2018. Take Article 13. Platforms making a good-faith effort to help rights holders identify and protect works should not face liability for every piece of content a user uploads, especially when neither the rights-holder nor the platform specifically knows who actually owns that content. The final text includes language that recognizes that principle.

At the same time, the directive creates vague, untested requirements, which are likely to result in online services over-blocking content to limit legal risk. And services like YouTube accepting content uploads with unclear, partial, or disputed copyright information could still face legal threats. 

The text needs to be clearer to reduce legal uncertainty about how rights holders should cooperate to identify their content—giving platforms reference files, as well as copyright notices with key information (like URLs) to facilitate identifying and removing infringing content, while not removing legitimate material.

Article 13 could impact a large number of platforms, big and small, many of them European. Some may not be able to bear these risks. This would be bad for creators and users, who will see online services wrongly block content simply because they need to err on the side of caution and reduce legal risks.

Then there’s Article 11. Again, we’ve seen improvements to earlier versions of the text. We’ve always said the copyright directive should give all publishers the right to control their own business models, making it possible for them to waive the need for a formal commercial license for their content. And it seems that the directive gives publishers the freedom to grant free licenses, which makes it easier for publishers of all sizes to make money from getting more readers.

Yet this latest version hurts small and emerging publishers, and limits consumer access to a diversity of news sources. Under the directive, showing anything beyond mere facts, hyperlinks and “individual words and very short extracts” will be restricted. This narrow approach will create uncertainty, and again may lead online services to restrict how much information from press publishers they show to consumers. Cutting the length of snippets will make it harder for consumers to discover news content and reduce overall traffic to news publishers, as shown by one of our recent search experiments.

Finally, while we share the directive’s goal of promoting quality journalism, the directive’s definition of what counts as a “press publisher” could well be interpreted too broadly, including anything from travel guides to recipe websites  - diluting any benefits for those who gather and distribute the kinds of news most central to the democratic process.

We recognize and appreciate the progress in the text of the directive, but we remain concerned about unintended consequences that may hurt Europe’s creative economy for decades to come. The details matter, so we urge policy makers to take these concerns into consideration ahead of the decisive vote and in the implementation phase that follows. 

by via The Keyword

EU Copyright Directive: One Step Forward, Two Steps Back

We support updating copyright rules for this digital age, recognize the value of content that creators and rights holders produce and care deeply about journalism. We all share a belief in the social value of knowledge and content, and when publishers and creators succeed, we succeed.  

European lawmakers recently agreed on a final text of a new copyright directive. Many voices, including consumer associations, creators, small publishers, academics and startups have shared their concerns about the outcome. Having studied the final text, we agree that the directive would not help, but rather hold back, Europe’s creative and digital economy.

Let’s start with the positive. The latest text improves the version adopted by the European Parliament in September 2018. Take Article 13. Platforms making a good-faith effort to help rights holders identify and protect works should not face liability for every piece of content a user uploads, especially when neither the rights-holder nor the platform specifically knows who actually owns that content. The final text includes language that recognizes that principle.

At the same time, the directive creates vague, untested requirements, which are likely to result in online services over-blocking content to limit legal risk. And services like YouTube accepting content uploads with unclear, partial, or disputed copyright information could still face legal threats. 

The text needs to be clearer to reduce legal uncertainty about how rights holders should cooperate to identify their content—giving platforms reference files, as well as copyright notices with key information (like URLs) to facilitate identifying and removing infringing content, while not removing legitimate material.

Article 13 could impact a large number of platforms, big and small, many of them European. Some may not be able to bear these risks. This would be bad for creators and users, who will see online services wrongly block content simply because they need to err on the side of caution and reduce legal risks.

Then there’s Article 11. Again, we’ve seen improvements to earlier versions of the text. We’ve always said the copyright directive should give all publishers the right to control their own business models, making it possible for them to waive the need for a formal commercial license for their content. And it seems that the directive gives publishers the freedom to grant free licenses, which makes it easier for publishers of all sizes to make money from getting more readers.

Yet this latest version hurts small and emerging publishers, and limits consumer access to a diversity of news sources. Under the directive, showing anything beyond mere facts, hyperlinks and “individual words and very short extracts” will be restricted. This narrow approach will create uncertainty, and again may lead online services to restrict how much information from press publishers they show to consumers. Cutting the length of snippets will make it harder for consumers to discover news content and reduce overall traffic to news publishers, as shown by one of our recent search experiments.

Finally, while we share the directive’s goal of promoting quality journalism, the directive’s definition of what counts as a “press publisher” could well be interpreted too broadly, including anything from travel guides to recipe websites  - diluting any benefits for those who gather and distribute the kinds of news most central to the democratic process.

We recognize and appreciate the progress in the text of the directive, but we remain concerned about unintended consequences that may hurt Europe’s creative economy for decades to come. The details matter, so we urge policy makers to take these concerns into consideration ahead of the decisive vote and in the implementation phase that follows. 

by via The Keyword

Now in more cities: Lime bikes and scooters on Google Maps

Black History Month

by via The Keyword

Google Fi welcomes a new phone from Motorola

Last year, we brought more devices to Google Fi, and now there’s a new phone designed for Fi on board: the budget-friendly, moto g7.

With the moto g7 you can easily capture high quality portraits and even low light snapshots on a two cameras with 12 megapixels, and view your photos on a 6.2” display. If you see something that piques your curiosity—whether it’s a dish on the menu or an unfamiliar landmark—you can even use your camera to search what you see with Google Lens.

When it’s time to get things done, the moto g7 has you covered. Thanks to a fast processor and plenty of memory for multitasking with 4 GB of RAM, you can quickly and easily take care of everyday tasks, whether you’re checking your email or taking a break to stream the latest episode of your favorite TV show. A long lasting battery and quick TurboPower™ charging ensure your moto g7 is ready to go whenever you need it.

Finally, as a phone designed for Fi, the moto g7 unlocks access to all Google Fi features, from the ability to seamlessly switch between networks at home to our enhanced network that automatically provides additional security and privacy.

Want to be the first to get your hands on the moto g7? You can preorder the moto g7 for just $249 (typically $299) on the Google Fi website.

by via The Keyword