The Googler whose art springs from “useless” objects

If you give a student a Chromebook

We created Chromebooks to help people, students included, achieve anything. These shareable, versatile devices connect people to the internet, to each other and to quality apps and extensions. Give a student a Chromebook and you give them endless access to information and resources. By learning to find answers to their questions, collaborate with others and work independently and effectively, students build digital skills that will help them succeed throughout school and for the rest of their lives. 

So, give a student a Chromebook and they will… 

Find answers and solve problems

Chromebook apps can help students navigate the online world with confidence while improving digital literacy and comprehension skills. These apps have recently been updated for back to school: 

• Epic!, the world’s largest digital reading platform for kids, has a massive library of books, audiobooks, videos and quizzes to help children develop a love of reading and learning. Teachers can now log in with Google single sign-on, add students with Google Classroom and download student reports into Google Sheets.

• CK-12 offers a free, personalized learning platform spanning K-12 math, science and more. Their customizable FlexBook® Courses foster interactivity and continuous feedback, and now include new reports showing class level insights for Google Classroom assignments. 

• DOGO media teaches literacy, reading fluency and global awareness through current events, books and movies. They’ve also launched Spanish-language resources that integrate with Google Classroom. 

TIP: Head to the Chromebook App Hub, where you can find educator and admin preferred apps, hear from app developers directly for up-to-date information, and get real classroom inspiration from teachers. Educators interested in apps on the App Hub should connect with their IT admins who can evaluate purchasing options. 

Learn alongside peers 

Thanks to built-in accessibility features and an array of assistive apps, students with learning differences can develop new strategies. Check out these apps with recently updated features and new integrations: 

• Capti Voice is a reading support tool. Its new Classroom integration allows teachers to accommodate different learning needs and make tests accessible to more students. 

• Texthelp offers assistive technology for reading, writing and language learning. With a new WriQ Classroom integration, educators can view dashboards with writing metrics by class and monitor student progress.

• Don Johnston’s curriculum, learning and evaluation tools, are designed to support all types of learning styles and abilities. For tools that integrate with G Suite/Classroom and support dyslexia and dysgraphia, check out the Snap&Read and Co:Writer extensions.

• ViewSonic’s myViewBoard is an interactive, cloud-based whiteboard teachers can use to engage students. And it now integrates with Classroom and Drive.

• BeeLine's reading tool is a Chrome extension that improves reading fluency and reading comprehension by displaying text using a color gradient that draws the reader’s eyes from the end of one line to the beginning of the next.

TIP: Once settings on a Chromebook are customized for a student, they’re applied every time they log in on any managed Chrome OS device. Bookmark this handy guide about Google’s accessibility tools for the classroom. 

Connect and collaborate in new ways

Virtual communication and collaboration are skills that students will use throughout their lives. With Chromebooks, they can cement these skills as they collaborate with peers in apps and sites or built-in ones like Docs, Sheets and Slides. Here are a few recently-updated apps that teachers can use to engage students while fostering communication and collaboration:

• Remind, a communication app designed to connect parents, guardians, educators and others who matter to student success, has integrated connected accounts in Classroom and Drive. 

• Kami, a PDF and document annotation app that fosters collaboration, now integrates with the Classroom grading page. Kami assignments are categorized to support Classroom’s topics.

• Nearpod, a platform for creating engaging lessons or using existing ones, now lets you embed and edit activities directly within Google Slides.

TIP: Different devices work for different types of students. A rugged laptop, for example, can work well for young students. Touchscreen tablets with stylus compatibility and cameras in the front and back, on the other hand, work for students conducting science experiments or creating artistic masterpieces. With different options, you can customize the outside as much as you customize the inside. 

Schools pick Chromebooks because they are versatile, affordable and easy to manage. When you give an admin a fleet of Chromebooks with the Chrome Education Upgrade, they can easily and securely deploy and manage any number of devices from one cloud-based console. And they no longer need to worry about updating devices. Chromebooks update automatically and have multi-layered security, so—like students—they continue to improve over time. Read more about why admins love Chromebooks, and explore Chromebooks built for education and a range of apps that transform them into learning devices.

by via The Keyword

Join our effort to help Americans find local job training

Android’s Zero-touch enrollment momentum builds with new partners

Android zero-touch enrollment simplifies mobile deployment of corporate-owned Android devices, making large-scale rollouts faster, simpler and more secure. With zero-touch enrollment, administrators can configure devices online and ship them with management, apps, and specific configurations already in place—so employees can open the box and get started right away.

Our partners are an important part of how we grow zero-touch worldwide. We’ve added more than 100 new partnerships this year, empowering their customers with the benefits of a streamlined and secure mobile rollout. 

Customers are able to deliver large scale roll-outs quickly, with less friction and greater security for organizations, IT and employees. With zero-touch, users see an intuitive onboarding that requires just a few steps with the Setup Wizard. In addition, partners have greater flexibility in device support, with capabilities for Wifi-only, dedicated devices and tablets.

We’re seeing tremendous growth with partners, most recently in the Asia-Pacific region. Today, we’re pleased to welcome partners from Australia: Skywire, Vodafone Hutchison Australia, JB Hifi, Multimedia Technology, Optus; Singapore: M1; The Philippines: Smart Communications, Globe Telecom ; Thailand: A2 Network, DTAC; Japan: KDDI Corporation, NTT Docomo; Hong Kong: 1010 Corporate Solutions; Indonesia: Telkomsel, Malifax, Indosat; PT. Satya Amarta Prima; Taiwan: FarEasTone, Cipherlab, Chungwa; Malaysia: Maxis; New Zealand: Sato, PB Technologies; China: RugGear, Lenovo; India: Appobile Labs. 

Zero-touch enrollment is a key feature in how companies around the world are using Android to mobilize their teams. Recent Gartner research validates this trend, with businesses in particular embracing devices that meet the elevated standards of Android Enterprise Recommended.

Learn more about zero-touch enrollment and explore our partnerships in the Enterprise Solutions Directory.

by via The Keyword

How The Baltimore Sun is growing digital subscriptions

Editor’s note: Throughout the month of August, the GNI Subscriptions Lab hosted workshops with 10 U.S. and Canadian news publishers, including The Baltimore Sun, to explore new opportunities for digital subscriptions growth. Last week, we co-published a report with the Local Media Association (LMA) and FTI Consulting to share what we’ve learned.  

Just today, as I write this post, we at The Baltimore Sun launched a new tactic: Some non-subscribers will be prominently asked to enroll in a free newsletter before reading their first free article of the month. The test was born out of the GNI Subscriptions Lab. Here’s how we used data and collaboration to come up with the idea.

Our digital subscriptions team at Tribune Publishing is always seeking new ideas to boost subscriber relationships and digital revenue to help fund our journalism. In this pursuit, we have attended conferences, participated in webinars and devoured research papers on the topic. So, when the Google News Initiative, FTI Consulting and LMA started the GNI Subscriptions Lab earlier this year to help news publishers accelerate their approaches to digital subscriptions, we eagerly joined with one of our storied brands, The Baltimore Sun. 

Job one in the Lab was measuring the health of our digital subscriptions business. We deployed our data analysts to collect 27 months of observations across 300 variables that contribute to our subscriptions model. After compiling our insights across the entire Lab, we had over 80,000 data points to compare and contrast with our fellow participants. 

This is where the power of the Lab first emerged. We focused on 10 of the most critical performance metrics for a digital subscriptions business, such as visits per unique reader, engagement with the paywall (Meter Stop Rate) and effectiveness in monetizing subscribers (Average Revenue Per Unit). We saw which news organizations had best-in-class metrics, and heard directly from those participants about how they achieved success. 

For example, The Baltimore Sun had one of the highest paywall conversion rates in the group. My team shared how our promotional calendar for subscriptions is thoughtfully constructed; we focus our best offers at the end of each month, which is when most readers finish their monthly free-article allotments and hit our paywall. Conversely, comparing our metrics to our fellow publishers, we saw that we should work to increase the number of times each unique reader visits our site. So, we are now prioritizing desktop alerts as an immediate, peer-recommended method for growing visitor frequency. 

With this aerial view of where we’ve been and, more importantly, where we need to go next, The Baltimore Sun is focused on projects to improve soft spots in our subscriptions metrics.

We selected email capture as our first bulls-eye. We have email addresses for about two percent of our unique users, which is below the Lab's target level of five percent. After brainstorming with the group about how we could improve that metric, we developed our first experiment: a free newsletter offer for some readers before their first metered article. Our goal is to generate more email-sourced subscribers and drive greater newsletter engagement through this approach. 

In the coming weeks and months, we look forward to further collaboration among expert organizers and supportive peer-participants in the Subscriptions Lab. As our expectations rise and new challenges emerge, we must seek (or create!) cooperative environments like this to learn and thrive together as an industry.

by via The Keyword

Simplifying our content policies for publishers

One of our top priorities is to sustain a healthy digital advertising ecosystem, one that works for everyone: users, advertisers and publishers. On a daily basis, teams of Google engineers, policy experts, and product managers combat and stop bad actors. Just last year, we removed 734,000 publishers and app developers from our ad network and ads from nearly 28 million pages that violated our publisher policies. 

But we’re not just stopping bad actors. Just as critical to our mission is the work we do every day to help good publishers in our network succeed. One consistent piece of feedback we’ve heard from our publishers is that they want us to further simplify our policies, across products, so they are easier to understand and follow. That’s why we'll be simplifying the way our content policies are presented to publishers, and standardizing content policies across our publisher products.

A simplified publisher experience

In September, we’ll update the way our publisher content policies are presented with a clear outline of the types of content where advertising is not allowed or will be restricted. 

Our Google Publisher Policies will outline the types of content that are not allowed to show ads through any of our publisher products. This includes policies against illegal content, dangerous or derogatory content, and sexually explicit content, among others. 

Our Google Publisher Restrictions will detail the types of content, such as alcohol or tobacco, that don’t violate policy, but that may not be appealing for all advertisers. Publishers will not receive a policy violation for trying to monetize this content, but only some advertisers and advertising products—the ones that choose this kind of content—will bid on it. As a result, Google Ads will not appear on this content and this content will receive less advertising than non-restricted content will.  

The Google Publisher Policies and Google Publisher Restrictions will apply to all publishers, regardless of the products they use—AdSense, AdMob or Ad Manager.

These changes are the next step in our ongoing efforts to make it easier for publishers to navigate our policies so their businesses can continue to thrive with the help of our publisher products.

by via The Keyword

Travel your first and last mile with Google Maps

Ask a Techspert: What is machine learning?

Editor’s Note: Do you ever feel like a fish out of water? Try being a tech novice and talking to an engineer at a place like Google. Ask a Techspert is a series on the Keyword asking Googler experts to explain complicated technology for the rest of us. This isn’t meant to be comprehensive, but just enough to make you sound smart at a dinner party. 

Imagine you’re going to the grocery store to buy ice cream. If you’re an ice cream lover like me, this probably happens regularly. Normally, I go to the store closest to my home, but every so often I opt to go to a different one, in search of my ice-cream white whale: raspberry chocolate chip. 

When you’re in a new store searching for your favorite-but-hard-to-find flavor of ice cream, you might not know exactly where it is, but you’ll probably know that you should head toward the refrigerators, it’s in the aisle labeled frozen foods and that it’s probably not in the same section as the frozen pizza.

My ability to find ice cream in a new store is not instinctive, even though it feels like it. It is the result of years of memories navigating the many sections and aisles of different grocery stores, using visual cues like refrigerators or aisle signs to figure out if I am on the right track. 

Today, when we hear about “machine learning,” we’re actually talking about how Google teaches computers to use existing information to answer questions like: Where is the ice cream? Or, can you tell me if my package has arrived on my doorstep? For this edition of Ask a Techspert, I spoke with Rosie Buchanan, who is a senior software engineer working on Machine Perception within Google Nest. 

She not only helped explain how machine learning works, she also told me that starting today, Nest Aware subscribers can receive a notification when their Nest Hello, using machine learning, detects that a package has been delivered. 

What is machine learning? 

I’ll admit: Rosie came up with the food metaphor. She told me that when you’re looking for something to eat, you have a model in your head. “You learn what to eat by seeing, smelling, touching and by using your prior experience with similar things,” she says. “With machine learning, we’re teaching the computer how to do something, often with better accuracy than a person, based on past understanding.” 

How do you get a machine to learn? 

Rosie and her team teach machines through supervised learning. To help Nest cameras identify packages, they use data that they know contains the “right answers,” which in this case are photos of packages. They then input these data sets to the computer so that it can create an algorithmic model based on the images they provided. This is called a training job, and it requires hundreds of thousands of images. “Over time, the computer is able to independently identify a delivered package without assistance,” Rosie says. 

How do you figure out what to make a machine learn? 

Rosie told me that package detection was one of the most requested features from Nest Hello users. “In particular, we’re trying to solve problems based on what users want,” she says. “Home safety and security is a huge area for our users.” By bringing package delivery notifications to Nest Aware, Rosie and her team have found a use for machine learning that eliminates the tedious task of waiting around for your delivery. 

Do you need a massive supercomputer to do machine learning? 

That depends on whether you’re creating a machine learning model or using it. If you’re a developer like Rosie, you’ll need some powerful computers. But if you want to see whether there’s a package on your doorstep, you don’t need more than a video doorbell. "When engineers develop a machine learning model, it can take a ton of computing power to teach it what it needs to know,” Rosie says. “But once it's trained, a machine learning model doesn't necessarily take up a lot of space, so it can run basically anywhere, like in your smart doorbell."

Can machines understand some things that we humans can’t? 

According to Rosie, yes. “We can often describe the things we’re learning,” she says, “but there are things we can’t describe, and machines are good at understanding these observations.” It’s called black box learning: We can tell the model is learning something but we can’t quite tell what it is. 

A great example of this is when a package arrives at your doorstep. Rosie’s team shows the network lots of pictures of packages, and lots of pictures of other things (trees, dogs, bananas, you name it). They tell the network which images are packages and which ones are not. The network is made up of different nodes, each trying to learn how to identify a package on its own. One node might learn that many packages are brown, and another might notice that many are rectangular. 

“These nodes work together to start putting together a concept of what a package is, eventually coming up with a concept of ‘packageness’ that we as humans might not even understand,” Rosie says. “At the end, we don't actually know exactly what the network learned as its definition of ‘packageness,’ whether it's looking for a brown box, a white bag or something else.” With machine learning, teams can show a network a new picture and it may tell us there’s a package in it, but we can’t fully know exactly how it made that decision. 

What’s the best part about working on machine learning? 

Rosie, who’s been at Google for over five years, says it’s all about working on the unknown. “We get to work on problems that we don’t know are actually solvable,” she says. “It’s exciting to get started on something while knowing that it might not be feasible.” 

So will machine learning be able to identify that raspberry chocolate chip is the best flavor of ice cream ever created? Probably not. We’ll still need human knowledge to confirm that. But machine learning will help us in other ways, like waiting around for a package to be delivered so you can take that precious time to peruse the frozen foods section. 

by via The Keyword

Backing Asia Pacific’s emerging newsroom leaders

Across Asia Pacific, a new generation of journalists is telling the region’s stories and tackling the challenges facing the news industry. The Google News Initiative (GNI) Newsroom Leadership Program, a collaboration between GNI and the Columbia School of Journalism, was established to develop the business and product expertise of these emerging newsroom leaders. Today we’re announcing the 2019-2020 Program fellows and sharing more about their projects.  

The projects they chose are as diverse as their backgrounds. These journalists hail from Pakistan to Japan, India to Australia. They’ll be looking at how digital tools can make great storytelling even better, championing socially-conscious reporting and investigating new approaches to political polling. And they’ll explore new membership and revenue models for news, helping fund the future of journalism in their countries. 

As they work on their projects, the fellows will take part in seminars and develop professional networks across the region. To find out more, we spoke to Raju Narisetti, the Director of the Knight-Bagehot Fellowship in Economics and Business Journalism and Professor of Professional Practice at Columbia, who helped develop the program. 

What are the skills you think emerging newsroom leaders need to be successful today?

The most critical skill is an understanding of the business of journalism and the forces shaping the industry. They also need to hone the ability to think of content as a product, and the willingness to let data inform their decisions. These “hard” skills need to be coupled with “power skills” like developing diverse teams, leading with purpose and managing relentless change.

How do you think the GNI Newsroom Leadership Program addresses this?

The fellows will experience a mix of theory and practice in seminars during their in-residence weeks at Columbia School of Journalism.  Practitioners as well as academics will deliver the sessions, which are specifically designed for the media industry. Topics will range from revenue streams and media sustainability to building video, audience and analytics frameworks and teams for the next decade. They’ll also get hands-on workshops on developing leadership and “managing up.”

What words of advice do you have for the fellows as they prepare to go through the program?

Be really present during the in-residency classroom weeks, because your day job will still be waiting for you. Think of the other participants as a learning and sharing opportunity that can become a professional support network during the year and beyond. And have strong beliefs (about your project or the news business), but hold them loosely, so you can embrace new ideas and solutions.

Caption: Our 2019-2020 Fellows, as pictured from left to right, starting from the top left: Gyanu Adhikari, Phillip O’Sullivan, Akane Imamura, Betina Hughes, Danielle Cronin, Marium Chaudhry, Nitya Thirumalai, Hyuntaek Lee, Ragamalika Karthikeyan, Yusuf Wijanarko, Anisa Menur Maulani, and Lynn D’Cruz.

by via The Keyword

Our top Nest Cam tips for pup parents

I don’t know where I’d be without my rescue mutt, Ted, who my husband and I adopted when Ted was eight weeks old. Since then we’ve watched his personality unfold, we’ve (kind of) trained him, and he’s taught me all about patience, unconditional love and friendship. With his wagging tail and watchful little eyes, Ted never fails to cheer me up and make me feel safe. And science backs this up: studies have shown that dogs lower our stress levels and improve our health. But despite all we know about dogs, one thing remains a mystery: what do they do all day while we’re away from home? 

It’s easy to check in on your pup with an indoor camera like the Nest Cam Indoor or Nest Cam IQ Indoor, which show you a video feed of your dog in action. The cameras even let you talk and listen to them—plus, with a Nest Aware subscription you can record and replay cute clips, then save and share them. 

It’s National Dog Day, so we’ve compiled our top six Nest Cam tips (some require a Nest Aware subscription). Barking at you, pup parents.

1. Keep up with training.Thanks to the two-way talk feature on Nest Cam Indoor and IQ Indoor, you can position your camera to keep an eye on a forbidden piece of furniture and will receive a notification if Fluffy is up to no good. Simply speak into the Nest app to tell them to get off the couch, or to give positive reinforcement.

2. Soothe your dog’s anxiety. Nest Cams monitor for conspicuous sounds like a boom, crash, or barking and howling, so if your dog is stressed and making noises, your camera can let you know (and next time you can leave a soothing toy before heading out to work).
   

3. Avoid dumpster diving. With Nest Aware, set an Activity Zone in the Nest App around an area your pup tends to get into (like the garbage bin) and receive a notification if they linger near it.
   

4. Capture candid clips.Glance through your video history and watch highlights in Sightline (your camera’s timeline in the Nest app). You might catch Bella doing downward dog, or Buster having a case of the zoomies.
   

5. Know when your dog walker arrives. With Nest Aware, you’ll get a familiar faces notification when your walker enters the view of your Nest Cam IQ or Nest Hello—but make sure you have your walker’s permission first (familiar face alerts are not available on Nest Cams used in Illinois).
   

6. Share highlights with your friends and family. With Nest Aware, create a mini timelapse of your favorite clips to melt the hearts of your loved ones, and even post videos and photos to your social channels.
   

Have a paw-some day!

by via The Keyword

Pixel 3a helped me see my vacation through a new Lens

Accelerating Europe’s clean energy transition

Europe has long been a leader in renewable energy. Last year, policymakers passed an ambitious set of reforms to take things to the next level, setting a new goal of meeting 32 percent of Europe’s energy needs from renewables by 2030. Google fully supports this ambitious target, and is committed to helping the continent reach its energy and climate goals. One way we can do so is to share successful strategies that we have used to purchase renewable energy for our own operations in Europe. 

The European Commission has published a new case study on Google’s renewable energy purchasing. It describes the motivations, principles and methods behind our purchasing in Europe, where we have signed 14 power purchase agreements (PPAs) to purchase electricity from 900 megawatts of wind and solar projects, enabling €1.2 billion in investment across the continent.

As the largest corporate purchaser of renewable energy in the world and the second largest in Europe, we believe corporate PPAs can play a significant role in helping Europe reach its clean energy goals. As the study shows, renewables not only are an important part of solving for climate change, but also make business sense. In an increasing number of geographic areas, renewable energy is the cheapest form of energy available. Competitive and stable renewable energy prices allow us to reduce our costs and hedge against price increases in the future, which helps us plan the growth of our business.

The case study also provides policy recommendations to encourage more corporate renewable energy purchasing. They include revising policies to drive down the cost of renewables, ensuring that corporate renewable energy buyers receive certification (known as “Guarantees of Origin”) for the electricity that they procure and encouraging cross-border PPAs so that competitive renewable electricity produced in one country can be easily purchased in another.  

Google’s work with the European Commission builds on our broader commitment to helping all companies secure a clear and easy path to purchase renewable energy. Last year, we helped launch the RE-Source Platform, a broad coalition of companies and NGOs working to accelerate corporate purchasing of renewables in Europe. 

This year is an important one for renewables in Europe, as member state governments create national plans to accelerate their energy transition over the next decade. We’re grateful for the opportunity to work alongside the European Commission to help expand corporate renewable energy sourcing. We hope this case study can help policymakers recognize the important contribution of corporate PPAs to their climate and energy goals, and encourage more companies to explore how cost-effective renewable energy can meet their business needs.

by via The Keyword

Maintaining the integrity of our platforms

The mobile challenge, and how to measure it

The Assistant turns your Smart Clock into a digital photo frame

The Lenovo Smart Clock comes with the Google Assistant, so it can help you better manage your morning and evening routines. When you’re not using your Lenovo Smart Clock, the screen can now turn into a digital photo album, displaying pictures from your Google Photos account or featured photos provided by Google. 

But that’s not all. There’s now an optional setting for Continued Conversation that lets you have a natural back-and-forth conversation with the Assistant (starting in English). 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. The Lenovo Smart Clock also works with most cameras that work with the Assistant, so you can always see on the device who is outside your front door when your hands are full. 

You’ll be getting all of these new features as part of an automatic software update rolling out this week. The Lenovo Smart Clock is now available for sale in the U.S., Canada, U.K., Germany, France, Australia, and Japan, and will be coming soon to India and other countries.

by via The Keyword

Next steps to ensure transparency, choice and control in digital advertising

Ads play a major role in sustaining the free and open web. They underwrite the great content and services that people enjoy and support a diverse universe of creators and publishers. But the ad-supported web is at risk if digital advertising practices don’t evolve to reflect people’s changing expectations around how data is collected and used. 

The mission is clear: we need to ensure that people all around the world can continue to access ad supported content on the web while also feeling confident that their privacy is protected. As we shared in May, we believe the path to making this happen is also clear: increase transparency into how digital advertising works, offer users additional controls, and ensure that people’s choices about the use of their data are respected. 

Working together across the ecosystem

The web ecosystem is complex—it includes users, publishers, advertisers, technology and service providers, advocacy groups, regulatory bodies and more. We’ve seen that approaches that don’t account for the whole ecosystem—or that aren’t supported by the whole ecosystem—will not succeed. For example, efforts by individual browsers to block cookies used for ads personalization without suitable, broadly accepted alternatives have fallen down on two accounts. 

First, blocking cookies materially reduces publisher revenue. Based on an analysis of a randomly selected fraction of traffic on each of the 500 largest Google Ad Manager publishers globally over the last three months, we evaluated how the presence of a cookie affected programmatic revenue. Traffic for which there was no cookie present yielded an average of 52 percent less revenue for the publisher than traffic for which there was a cookie present. Lower revenue for traffic without a cookie was consistent for publishers across verticals—and was especially notable for publishers in the news vertical. For the news publishers in the studied group, traffic for which there was no cookie present yielded an average of 62 percent less revenue than traffic for which there was a cookie present.¹

Second, broad cookie restrictions have led some industry participants to use workarounds like fingerprinting, an opaque tracking technique that bypasses user choice and doesn’t allow reasonable transparency or control. Adoption of such workarounds represents a step back for user privacy, not a step forward.

Exploring new privacy-forward standards for the web

Today, Chrome shared an update on their efforts to explore new foundational technologies for the web that will deliver on the vision laid out above—widespread access to free content and strong privacy for users. Chrome has offered a number of preliminary proposals to the web standards community in areas such as conversion measurement, fraud protection and audience selection. The goal of these proposals is to promote a dialog on ways browsers could advance user privacy, while still ensuring publishers can earn what they need to fund great content and user experiences, and advertisers can deliver relevant ads to the right people and measure their impact.

Getting the web standards community to work on developing a new set of technologies is a tall order, but it’s not unprecedented. The community has worked together on a number of similar challenges over the years—such as gaining consensus to phase out browser plug-ins and reaching agreement to move away from Flash. We expect this will take years, not months, and we don’t anticipate any near-term changes to how our ads products work on Chrome. But this is important work and we support the effort. 

Pursuing a new level of ads transparency and user control

While Chrome explores new technologies for the web, we’re also acting on the commitment we made in May of this year to increase the transparency of digital ads and offer users more control. Over the past few months, we’ve been listening to feedback from users and partners, and have arrived at an initial proposal to give people more visibility into and control of the data used for advertising. We’ve begun sharing this proposal for discussion to key industry and stakeholder groups and we’re eager to hear and incorporate feedback.

Whether it’s working with the standards community to explore a new set of technologies, or getting feedback from participants across the digital ads industry on a proposal to increase transparency and offer users more control, Google is committed to partnering with others to raise the bar for how data is collected and used. Only by working together can we define and implement new practices that result in better, more privacy-focused experiences for users while addressing the requirements of publishers and advertisers that fund and ensure access to free content on the web.

---

_{1.  Google Ad Manager data; n=500 global publishers; Analysis based on an A/B experiment where cookies are disabled on a randomly selected fraction of each publisher's traffic; May-August 2019}

by via The Keyword

A pop of color and more: updates to Android’s brand

Building a more private web

Privacy is paramount to us, in everything we do. So today, we are announcing a new initiative to develop a set of open standards to fundamentally enhance privacy on the web. We’re calling this a Privacy Sandbox. 

Technology that publishers and advertisers use to make advertising even more relevant to people is now being used far beyond its original design intent - to a point where some data practices don’t match up to user expectations for privacy. Recently, some other browsers have attempted to address this problem, but without an agreed upon set of standards, attempts to improve user privacy are having unintended consequences.

First, large scale blocking of cookies undermine people’s privacy by encouraging opaque techniques such as fingerprinting. With fingerprinting, developers have found ways to use tiny bits of information that vary between users, such as what device they have or what fonts they have installed to generate a unique identifier which can then be used to match a user across websites. Unlike cookies, users cannot clear their fingerprint, and therefore cannot control how their information is collected. We think this subverts user choice and is wrong.

Second, blocking cookies without another way to deliver relevant ads significantly reduces publishers’ primary means of funding, which jeopardizes the future of the vibrant web. Many publishers have been able to continue to invest in freely accessible content because they can be confident that their advertising will fund their costs. If this funding is cut, we are concerned that we will see much less accessible content for everyone. Recent studies have shown that when advertising is made less relevant by removing cookies, funding for publishers falls by 52% on average¹.

So we are doing something different. We want to find a solution that both really protects user privacy and also helps content remain freely accessible on the web. At I/O, we announced a plan to improve the classification of cookies, give clarity and visibility to cookie settings, as well as plans to more aggressively block fingerprinting. We are making progress on this, and today we are providing more details on our plans to restrict fingerprinting. Collectively we believe all these changes will improve transparency, choice, and control. 

But, we can go further. Starting with today’s announcements, we will work with the web community to develop new standards that advance privacy, while continuing to support free access to content. Over the last couple of weeks, we’ve started sharing our preliminary ideas for a Privacy Sandbox - a secure environment for personalization that also protects user privacy. Some ideas include new approaches to ensure that ads continue to be relevant for users, but user data shared with websites and advertisers would be minimized by anonymously aggregating user information, and keeping much more user information on-device only. Our goal is to create a set of standards that is more consistent with users’ expectations of privacy.

We are following the web standards process and seeking industry feedback on our initial ideas for the Privacy Sandbox. While Chrome can take action quickly in some areas (for instance, restrictions on fingerprinting) developing web standards is a complex process, and we know from experience that ecosystem changes of this scope take time. They require significant thought, debate, and input from many stakeholders, and generally take multiple years. 

To move things forward as quickly as possible, we have documented the specific problems we are trying to solve together, and we are sharing a series of explainers with the web community. We have also summarized these ideas today on the Chromium blog.

We look forward to getting feedback on this approach from the web platform community, including other browsers, publishers, and their advertising partners. Thank you in advance for your help and input on this process - we believe that we must solve these problems together to ensure that the incredible benefits of the open, accessible web continue into the next generation of the internet.

_{1 Google Ad Manager data; n=500 global publishers; Analysis based on an A/B experiment where cookies are disabled on a randomly selected fraction of each publisher's traffic; May-August 2019. More information available on the Google ads blog.}

by via The Keyword

Additional safeguards to protect the quality of our ad network

Supporting a healthy ads ecosystem that works for publishers, advertisers, and users continues to be a top priority in our effort to sustain a free and open web. As the ecosystem evolves, our ad systems and defenses must adapt as well. Today, we’d like to highlight some of our efforts to protect the quality of our ad network, and the benefits to our publishers and the advertising ecosystem. 

Last year, we introduced a site verification process in AdSense to provide additional safeguards before a publisher can serve ads. This feature allows us to provide more direct feedback to our publishers on the eligibility of their site, while allowing us to communicate issues sooner and lessen the likelihood of future violations. As an added benefit, confirming which websites a publisher intends to monetize allows us to reduce potential misuse of a publisher's ad code, such as when a bad actor tries to claim a website as their own, or when they use a legitimate publisher's ad code to serve ads on bad content in an attempt to demonetize the good website — each day, we now block more than 120 million ad requests with this feature. 

This year, we’re enhancing our defenses even more by improving the systems that identify potentially invalid traffic or high risk activities before ads are served. These defenses allow us to limit ad serving as needed to further protect our advertisers and users, while maximizing revenue opportunities for legitimate publishers. While most publishers will not notice any changes to their ad traffic, we are working on improving the experience for those that may be impacted, by providing more transparency around these actions. Publishers on AdSense and AdMob that are affected will soon be notified of these ad traffic restrictions directly in their Policy Center. This will allow them to understand why they may be experiencing reduced ad serving, and what steps they can take to resolve any issues and continue partnering with us.

We’re excited for what’s to come, and will continue to roll out improvements to these systems with all of our users in mind. Look out for future updates on our ongoing efforts to promote and sustain a healthy ads ecosystem.  

by via The Keyword

“Lite” but packs a punch: Google Go comes to Android everywhere

New tools to help Spanish speakers build their careers

Spanish is my first language, and it’s what I spoke with my family growing up in Costa Rica. Even today, after making the U.S. my home for more than two decades, it’s the language my brain thinks in. So I understand well the challenges of living in a country where the spoken language is your second language, or even completely new to you. Especially for those trying to get ahead—taking classes, learning new skills, finding work—it can be really hard.

That’s why I’m thrilled that today, through Grow with Google, our initiative to create economic opportunity for everyone, we’re making new resources available to help Spanish speakers learn skills they need to prepare for a job or grow a business in today’s economy.

For example, our Applied Digital Skills curriculum helps learners develop crucial digital skills to thrive in the workplace through free, video-based lessons. We also offer minicourses in Spanish for local businesses and job seekers on our free Google Primer app, which teaches business and digital marketing skills through short and easy interactive lessons. Our IT Support Professional Certificate, which is designed to prepare beginners for entry-level IT support jobs in as little as six months, will be available in Spanish starting September 16. These resources and more can be accessed at grow.google/espanol. 

Skills like these help people thrive in today's jobs. According to Brookings, nearly two thirds of all new jobs created since 2010 required either high or medium-level digital skills. 

The Latino community makes up 16 percent of the U.S. labor market and will make up half of the people entering the workforce by 2025. Latino nonprofits are key resources for educating and training community members. Google.org is making a grant to the Hispanic Federation to launch an accelerator to strengthen institutions serving the Latino community with workforce development and digital training programs. Through this grant, the Hispanic Federation will enhance the capacity of 20 Latino-led and Latino-serving nonprofit organizations, which in turn will provide career-aligned digital skills training to more than 10,000 Latinos over the next two years. This builds on our ongoing commitment to the Latino community, which includes a $5 million grant announced earlier this year to bring computer science education to over one million Latino students and their families by 2022. 

The LULAC Institute will integrate Applied Digital Skills and Primer into their programming, to bring digital skills training in Spanish to more than 60 local technology centers around the country. Community organizations across the U.S. can also apply to join the Grow with Google Partner Program, to access bilingual resources and trainers that help community members learn essential skills like creating a resume or growing a business through digital marketing.

I’m proud that the company I work for is helping provide more opportunities for Spanish speakers to grow their skills all across the U.S.

---

El español es mi primer idioma, y es el que utilice con mi familia, mientras crecía en Costa Rica. Aún ahora, después de que los Estados Unidos se convirtió en mi hogar, durante más de dos décadas, es el idioma en el que mi cerebro piensa en la mañana. Así que entiendo las dificultades de vivir en un país donde el idioma hablado es tu segundo idioma. Especialmente para aquellos que quieren salir adelante—tomar clases, aprender nuevas habilidades, encontrar trabajo—puede ser muy difícil.

Por eso estoy emocionada que hoy, por medio deGrow with Google, nuestra iniciativa para crear oportunidades económicas para todos, estamos proporcionando  nuevos recursos a los hispanohablantes, para aprender las habilidades que necesitan, prepararse para un trabajo, o hacer negocios en la economía digital.

Por ejemplo, nuestro plan de estudios,Habilidades Digitales Aplicadas, ayuda a desarrollar habilidades digitales cruciales para prosperar en el trabajo, por medio de lecciones gratuitas basadas en video. También ofrecemos mini cursos en español para pequeños negocios y personas buscando trabajo en nuestra aplicación gratuitaGoogle Primer, que enseña habilidades comerciales y de marketing digital, a través de breves lecciones interactivas y fáciles.  NuestroCertificado Profesional de Soporte de TI, está diseñado para preparar a principiantes para trabajos de nivel de entrada de TI, en solo seis meses, y estará disponible en español a partir del 16 de septiembre. Se puede acceder a estos recursos y más engrow.google/espanol.

Habilidades como estas, ayudan a las personas a prosperar en los trabajos actuales. De acuerdo conBrookings, casi dos tercios de todos los nuevos empleos, creados desde 2010, requieren habilidades digitales de nivel alto o medio.

La comunidad latina representa el16 por ciento del mercado laboral de los Estados Unidos, y será la mitad de los trabajadores que ingresen a la fuerza laboral para 2025. Las organizaciones latinas, sin fines de lucro,  son instrumentos clave para educar y capacitar a los miembros de la comunidad. Es por eso que Google.org está otorgando una donación a la Federación Hispana (Hispanic Federation), para lanzar un acelerador que fortalezca las instituciones que sirven a la comunidad latina, con programas para el desarrollo y capacitación digital de la fuerza laboral. Con esta donación, la Federación Hispana acelerará la capacidad de 20 organizaciones sin fines de lucro, dirigidas a los  latinos que, a su vez, proporcionarán capacitación en habilidades digitales a más de 10,000 personas durante los próximos dos años. Esto aumenta nuestro compromiso con la comunidad latina, e incluye una donación de$5 millones de dólares, anunciada a principios de este año, para brindar educación en ciencias de la computación a más de un millón de estudiantes y familias latinas para el 2022.

ElInstituto LULAC integrará lasHabilidades Digitales Aplicadas yPrimer en su programación, para brindar capacitación en español a más de 60 centros de tecnología comunitarios en todo el país. Organizaciones comunitarias en los Estados Unidos también pueden solicitar unirse al programaGrow with Google Partner Program para tener acceso a recursos, así como entrenadores bilingües, que ayudan al aprendizaje comunitario de  habilidades y destrezas esenciales, como crear un currículum o hacer crecer un negocio a través del marketing digital.

Me siento orgullosa de que la compañía, para la cual trabajo, esté ayudando a brindar más oportunidades de crecimiento para los hispanohablantes en los Estados Unidos.

by via The Keyword

“Great Sporting Land” tours Australia’s sports-mad history

It’s time: Nest users can now switch to Google Accounts

Back in May, Nest and Google Home joined together as Google Nest to create a more helpful home. And now, the next step involves you: starting today, you can migrate your Nest account to a Google Account. It's easy to do and only takes a few minutes—here's what you need to know.

Migrating to a Google Account gives you new benefits, like:

• Automatic security protections such as Suspicious activity detection, 2-Step Verification and Security Checkup. 
• Your Google Nest devices and services will work together. For example, if you have a Nest Cam and a Chromecast, just say, "Hey Google, show me the backyard camera” to cast your camera stream to your TV without any additional setup. 
• One account to sign into both the Nest and Google Home apps. 
• Your homes and home members will be aligned across the Nest and Google Home apps.

You’ll receive an email invitation from Nest to migrate, but if you’d like to migrate now, you can select the “Sign in with Google” option in the most recent version of the Nest app. If you already have a Google Account that you use to sign into Google Home, just select that account when migrating your Nest Account. If you don't, it’s easy to create one. If you’re a first-time Nest user, you can use your existing Google Account to sign in. 

We’ve worked with Amazon on an updated Nest skill that will work with Google Accounts, so if you want to enable the Alexa integration with your Nest Thermostat or Nest Cam, you can click here to activate the updated skill. 

If you’re using Works with Nest with other partners, we suggest waiting to migrate your account until you receive an email invitation. If you decide to migrate before receiving your email, your Works with Nest integrations will no longer work and you won’t be able to get them back. We’re currently working with partners to provide similar integrations through Assistant Routines, and you'll receive your email invitation to migrate when these integrations are ready. If you don’t migrate your Nest Account, your existing Works with Nest integrations will continue to work.

You should make sure that you’ve downloaded the most recent Nest app on Android or iOS before you start your migration. If you have questions about migrating you can find help here or contact Nest Support.

by via The Keyword

By day and by night: video call, no matter the lighting

Tackling cardiovascular disease with AI

Westmead team with Google’s Mel Silva and Australian Minister for Industry, Science and Technology, Hon Karen Andrews MP

Heart disease and cardiovascular health are a major challenge around the world, and in Australia, one in six people is affected by cardiovascular disease. The University of Sydney’s Westmead Applied Research Centre is working on a digital health program for people at risk of cardiovascular disease, and they recently received a $1 million Google.org grant that will help them apply AI to give patients more personalised advice and support.  

We sat down with Professor Clara Chow, Professor of Medicine and Academic Director at Westmead Applied Research Centre, and Dr. Harry Klimis, a cardiologist and Westmead PhD student, to hear more about the program.   

Why is cardiac health such a big issue? 

Professor Chow: Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of premature death and disability worldwide. In Australia, cardiovascular disease affects approximately 4.2 million people, has resulted in more than 1 million hospitalizations, and caused 1 in 3 deaths in 2016. That’s one death every 12 minutes, and these deaths are largely preventable.

How are you proposing to address this problem? 

Chow: Our goal is to support people at high risk of developing cardiovascular disease by encouraging them to adopt healthy habits, such as diet and exercise, and connecting them to health services when they need them. Data and mobile technology means we can do this in ways that weren’t possible before. 

Dr Klimis: We’ve already developed mobile health text-message programs using basic algorithms to customise programs to individuals. We now plan to use machine learning and AI to keep improving how we support participants and help them self-monitor measures like cholesterol, blood pressure, weight, physical activity, diet and smoking.

How will you use the funding and support from Google.org? 

Chow: The grant will help us create digital tools that enable clinicians and health services to provide personalized advice without the need to meet face to face. Initially, we’ll link data from existing secondary sources like hospital and clinic presentations to create programs tailored to individuals, and the system will learn from there. 

How does AI help?  

Klimis: An example would be if “John” went to the emergency room at hospital with chest pain and had type 2 diabetes, obesity and hypertension. After being assessed and treated, he could be flagged as a patient at high risk of heart attack and added to the mobile health prevention program. The AI program would learn from John’s activities and deliver health advice via SMS or through an app. If John was less active at a particular time of day, the program might register this and prompt him to take a 5-minute walk. 

What do you think is going to be the most challenging part of your project?

Klimis: Making sure we have reliable enough data to support a program capable of AI and machine learning. Our original program sent out standard text messages to over 3000 people, which allowed us—with their permission—to collect data on their characteristics, how they respond to different messages, and how this affects health outcomes. That data will be crucial in building an AI model for the current project.  

What are you most optimistic about?

Chow: We have the potential to help more people at risk of cardiovascular disease by giving them high-quality prevention programs developed by clinicians and researchers, without requiring frequent clinic or hospital visits. Over the long term, mobile and digital health solutions could reduce hospitalizations, bring down healthcare costs, and make healthcare more accessible.  

by via The Keyword

What’s new in Chrome OS: better audio, camera and notifications

Explore college opportunities with new Search features

How a love of reading turned into new features for Play Books

Have you ever wondered how new features are developed at Google? We start with a problem that needs to be solved, then consider what the best solution might be, so that our products can be more helpful. And, when we can, we like to get feedback from you (and Googlers themselves) before we officially launch so we can refine and improve.

Beta Features is new from Play Books, and it lets you test out experimental features on the web. This project originated with Dan Kimberg, a software engineer who joined the Play Books team to perfect a product he’d been a longtime fan of. Self-proclaimed bookworm and lifetime lover of literature, Dan was eager to personalize his library and make it easier to browse and organize his collection of books. He knew that other readers out there probably felt the same way—so he got to work.

These features may lack a bit of polish; they might evolve, improve, disappear or transform into new Play Books product updates. They’re experimental, and Dan and the team want to hear what’s most helpful to you. We sat down with Dan to learn more about the inspiration behind Beta Features.

What led you to the Play Books team?

I’ve been an avid reader my whole life, but I wasn’t always working in the world of books. I've been a software engineer at Google for eight years on different teams. And before coming to Google, I spent nearly 20 years as a researcher in cognitive neuroscience, using brain imaging to try to understand how the mind works. 

Before joining the Play Books team I filed around 50 feature requests, and I'd been thinking idle thoughts about how technology could improve reading, listening, (and writing) since I was a teenager. 

What inspired you to develop Beta Features?

As a constant reader, I used to go on vacation and pack 20 books because I didn’t know what I’d end up wanting to read. Throughout my years of reading physical books, there were some fundamental frustrations that inspired me to think differently about how technology can make reading more enjoyable. Physical books don’t give you the flexibility of selecting the right font size for you, not all printed books are well bound, page size varies and long lines of text may not be conducive to your reading style. Now, with the help of technology, I can try to solve some of those frustrations for others (and now I can bring as many books as I want on vacation).

Which Beta Features are available now to test out—and which is your favorite?

First, there’s Custom Shelves—my personal favorite and the most frequently requested feature from our users. It lets you organize your shelves in a more useful and personal way. For example, I’ve titled one of my Custom Shelves "Re-read me"—this is for books I've read but would like to revisit, so they don't get lost in the jumble of other books.

You’ll also be able to search quickly for a particular book within your library, or sort your library using different criteria—like author, title, last read and price. The last Beta Feature is a new shelf called Ready to Read, which shows you the books you haven’t finished yet to help you quickly pick up where you left off. 

How can you get started testing?

Head to play.google.com/books, click the Settings button, and select “Beta Features” to get started. You can enable all features or just the ones you find most useful. If you’d like to submit feedback on the Beta Features after you’ve tried them out, or want to send us a feature request you’ve been dreaming up, click on the Settings icon and then select Send Feedback.

by via The Keyword

When students get stuck, Socratic can help

Growing in-app viewability coverage with Open Measurement

People are spending more time on their mobile phones, especially in apps, and move across screens frequently. As people’s usage of mobile apps has grown, so has the importance of standardizing the way viewability is measured on mobile devices.

Today we’re sharing how we’ve made in-app inventory more measurable through the IAB Tech Lab’s Open Measurement standard. Integrating the Open Measurement Software Development Kit (SDK) into both our Google Mobile Ads (GMA) and Interactive Mobile Ads (IMA) SDKs has allowed us to enable Open Measurement on 85+ percent of in-app display and video impressions on Google AdMob and Google Ad Manager publishers. This means that buyers of this inventory can now take viewability measurements using solutions like Integral Ad Science, DoubleVerify, Comscore, and Moat in addition to measurement that was previously available with Active View.  

“IAB Tech Lab’s Open Measurement (OM) initiative makes it easier for ad buyers and sellers to work together for viewability measurement and other verification needs,” said Dennis Buchheim, Executive Vice President and General Manager, IAB Tech Lab. “The sell-side has been adopting OM quickly, and we ask brands, agencies, and Demand Side Platforms (DSPs) to get more active and take advantage of what OM offers.” 

Advertisers can get started today by appending Open Measurement enabled tags from their viewability vendor of choice to their creatives.

Measurement vendors are lauding this development as progress for a more measurable future. Joseph Ranzenbach, Director of Product Management, IAS says, "Google's adoption of the Open Measurement SDK is a huge step in moving the industry forward and creating more transparency for advertisers." Sumit Shukla, SVP, Strategic Partnerships, Comscore says, "It’s important for Brands to consistently measure viewability across the entirety of their media buys. With Comscore’s cross-platform campaign measurement as a trusted market currency, this close partnership with Google further helps Brands measure what matters."  

Viewability measurement unlocks high-performing In-app inventory for advertisers

Viewability continues to be an integral part of measuring ad effectiveness—it helps advertisers understand if their ad had the opportunity to be seen and it helps publishers offer more high-quality inventory.

In-app viewability means that advertisers can confidently take advantage of this high-value inventory. In 2018 we worked with Ipsos MORI to understand the impact of in-app advertising and found it was successful in driving action. People were 50 percent more likely to interact with a brand, buy a product or service, follow a call-to-action or recommend a brand to their family or friends after seeing its ad in an app, compared with those who saw it via a browser. Display & Video 360 customers can now confidently extend their brand campaigns to apps knowing they are able to measure ad viewability at the impression level as they would in other environments.

Publishers like Pandora recognize the importance of holistic viewability measurement. Maria Breza, VP, Ad Quality Measurement and Audience Data Operations at Pandora said, “Advertisers should be able to seamlessly use one viewability provider to measure their buys across all publishers and platforms. Open Measurement has allowed Pandora to make this a reality for our clients with less latency, less maintenance and more stability.”

What’s next for Open Measurement

We’re continuing to work with the IAB’s Tech Lab Open Measurement Working Group to expand Open Measurement to use cases beyond viewability, as well as to other environments such as web video. We believe Open Measurement has the potential to create a more transparent and accountable digital media ecosystem across all screens. Reach out to your measurement partners and Google representative to find out how you can take advantage of this new measurement technology.

by via The Keyword

Five ways to make your app video-ad friendly

Stay organized and productive with new Assignable reminders

A proactive approach to disaster relief

A new way to help students turn in their best work

Google Assignments, your new grading companion

When journalists collaborate instead of compete

At ProPublica, a nonprofit investigative news organization, collaboration is part of our DNA. Since we first started publishing 11 years ago, we've partnered with news organizations all over the U.S., from the Des Moines Register to the New York Times, and from NPR to CBS News. Those collaborations have taken many forms. In the past few years, we’ve taken on very large scale partnerships, working with many newsrooms at once, sharing a data set that hundreds of reporters could use to do their jobs.

We’ve learned that it's not easy to wrangle hundreds of journalists on a single project—but we’ve developed some strategies and tools to help. With the support of the Google News Initiative, we're publishing a guidebook to collaborative data journalism, including big crowdsourced projects like the ones we've done. The guide provides tips for establishing collaboratives, managing workflows and tracking your work. Our collaborative reporting guidebook is available on our website. Our database tool will be available in the fall.

For the past few years, we’ve been working with the Google News Initiative on making large-scale collaborations possible. In 2016 and 2018, we worked together on the Electionland project, which monitored voting problems in real time. (Google provided financial support for the 2016 Electionland.) That project allowed ProPublica and our partners to tell stories about long lines, voter check-in issues, voter ID and much more, reporting on these problems as they arose so that authorities could have the opportunity to address them. 

Starting in 2017, Google and ProPublica have worked together on building tools for Documenting Hate, which tracks hate crimes and bias incidents. We've reported on how hate manifests itself in communities big and small, from schools and universities to superstores and supermarkets. We are now taking what we’ve learned and the tools we’ve built and giving them away so that other newsrooms can launch and run their own collaborations around data. 

When we start a large collaboration, local and national newsrooms sign up to get access to the data we’ve collected, which they can use to report their own stories. That way, we can make the most out of a big set of data, and help reporters all over the country tell stories. We’ve also built software to help organize, verify and share tips; we’ll be making that available for other newsrooms to use later this fall. You can sign up using our form to learn when our collaborative reporting tool is ready.

While collaboration in journalism has grown considerably in the last few years, we know that some newsrooms are still hesitant due to concerns about competing with other media organizations and getting exclusive access to sources. But through our experience with these projects, we know that journalists can do great reporting through collaborations. This guide demonstrates that by working together, newsrooms can benefit by reaching larger audiences, finding new stories and making the most out of large data sets. We hope it will be helpful and will inspire more journalists to work together.

by via The Keyword

7 ways to grow programmatic video revenue with Google Ad Manager

Meet this year's Doodle for Google contest winner

Cloud Covered: What was new with Google Cloud in July

July was a month for barbecue, ice cream and sunshine. Here at Google Cloud, we managed to squeeze in some of what we consider cloud computing fireworks, like a supercomputing record and new partner in bringing more storage options to businesses. 

The internet, under the sea
It’s easy to imagine all of what we do on the internet as just sort of floating around in the air. But there are actually thick cables under our oceans that carry data around the world, so we can get our email and web search results quickly. Google fully funds some cables, while others are shared. The new Equiano subsea cable will connect Europe and Africa once it’s done. It includes cool technological advances that give this cable 20 times the network capacity of the last one built to serve this region. 

G Suite gets even more security features
In Tokyo last month, we hosted another cloud conference where one of the big topics was security and how it works within our products. At the event, we announced that Google’s Advanced Protection Program now works with G Suite, so people whose data is at risk of online attack (think high-level executives) can be protected with help from IT. We also brought IT administrators new auto-alerts in their tools to help them see and prevent risky activity in their company. It’s powered by machine learning models.

Storing files is a big job
File storage enables businesses to store lots of files that users or apps need to access simultaneously. Of course, on a business scale, there can be thousands or millions of these files, so the underlying systems need to be able to handle that volume. Last month we announced that Elastifile is now a part of Google Cloud. Elastifile will be integrated with our Cloud Filestore product. This will help those managing large file systems to scale them quickly. 

Cloud beats not-cloud in machine learning benchmark 
Cloud TPU Pods are Google’s supercomputers built just for machine learning. They get faster in each generation of hardware—they’re now in v3—and set three new performance records last month in an industry benchmarking exercise. It used to be that this type of speed could only be achieved with on-premises systems, meaning hardware physically located and operated in a data center. Google Cloud is the only provider of public cloud technology that has been able to do these tasks faster than an on-premises system can. 

School’s not out for summer, after all
Cloud computing, like most things related to technology, is constantly changing. New concepts and products arrive regularly, and even the most experienced IT pros can learn new things. We offer lots of different classes and certificates, and just added a new class to our Google Cloud course catalog: theArchitecting with Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) Specialization. It uses both lectures and hands-on labs to demonstrate how Kubernetes works. It’s a new way of organizing and managing all the information that lives in your cloud, so there’s a lot to learn about how it works and how to get started using it.

That’s all for July! Stay up to date with Google Cloud on our blog.

by via The Keyword

New coding activities for any classroom

How Android helps law firms make their case with mobility

Information privacy and security are essential for businesses in the legal industry. Legal teams want the convenience afforded by mobility, while devices must adhere to strict management and data protection standards. Several major law firms are choosing Android Enterprise solutions for the security, flexibility and management capabilities to keep their teams connected while giving IT peace of mind about secure access to sensitive case information.

How Android keeps teams connected at Howard Kennedy LLP

Howard Kennedy LLP is a London-based law firm that sought to ensure that their teams could securely access essential case files from mobile devices, instead of needing to bring the paper files or pull out their laptop.  When the time came for devising this strategy with the IT team, the firm’s partners made it clear that they didn’t want employees to have to carry personal and work devices.

Personally-enabled work devices were the right solution—these corporate devices use the Android work profile to keep personal and corporate apps and data separate on the same device, while also giving IT a vast array of device controls. 

“We've equipped our users with devices that they can use for just about anything, business or personal.” said Howard Kennedy IT Director Clive Knott. “More importantly, we've got those devices locked down in such a way that we have full control over what we do.”

By managing the devices with Enterprise Mobility Management provider BlackBerry, Howard Kennedy IT teams are confident in their device security and management tools. The IT team also uses managed Google Play to deliver the essential apps needed for their legal work. 

Android the right verdict for Brodies LLP

Brodies LLP, a large Scottish law firm, wanted to invest more deeply in mobility so its team of lawyers could access essential information quickly and securely from anywhere.

The solution was deploying a fleet of fully managed devices to its legal teams. With BlackBerry UEM partner Appurity, the firm implemented a secure and rapid device rollout.

“With Android zero-touch enrollment, and as part of our Mobile Managed Service when building and deploying devices for legal firms, we can deliver large-scale environments across multiple sites, with the required apps,” said Appurity Director Steve Whiter.

With managed Google Play, the firm deploys several apps to the Android work profile to support the legal teams’ work.  For example, the Rubus Android app, developed by Appurity Connect gives lawyers access to iManage, for accessing and tracking their key files.  iManage is a widely-used document management system for legal and finance customers, including both Howard Kennedy and Brodies. 

As part of its Android solution, Appurity securely enables this software on devices so fee earners and partners can send and file essential documents within a matter of minutes, and access, edit, and open them from virtually anywhere. 

“Android allows our employees to use consumer apps when they're sensible, while Android Enterprise connects everything back to our network in a secure way,” Brodies LLP IT Director Damien Behan said. “If you're in a meeting with a client and they ask you about a particular document, the ability to directly access the latest version of that document is invaluable. It's been a great advantage for our lawyers."

Enterprises across various industries continue to adopt Android in the workplace to support critical business needs.

Learn more about getting started with Android, and discover devices and service providers that are Android Enterprise Recommended.

by via The Keyword

How local accelerators are powering global startups

Indigenous speakers share their languages on Google Earth

An environmental nonprofit takes on AI "sprint week"

This May, the global group of Google AI Impact Challenge grantees gathered in San Francisco to kick off the six-month Launchpad Accelerator program. With $25 million in funding from Google.org, credits from Google Cloud and mentorship by Google’s AI experts, the teams sought to apply AI to address a wide range of problems problems, from protecting rainforests to coaching students on writing skills. 

Now in the second phase of the program, Tech Sprint Week, the grantees tackled their projects’ greatest technical challenges with support from a team of mentors from Google. At Google for Startups’ campus in London, teams continued work on their ideas and learned user experience design principles along the way.

Grace Mitchell, a data scientist at grantee WattTime, opened up about her team’s experience at Tech Sprint Week—and how they’re using AI to build a globally accessible, open-source fossil fuel emissions monitoring platform for power plants.

Can you tell us about WattTime? 

WattTime is an environmental tech nonprofit, and our mission statement is to give people the power to choose clean energy. Users integrate our API into their IOT (Internet of Things) capable devices, which tells them the type of fuel that provides their energy. It also tells them the environmental impact of the type of fuel they’re using. As an example, coal has a value equivalent to around 900 to 1200 pounds of emissions per megawatt hour, whereas renewable energy would be zero.The whole point is to shift electricity usage based on high or low emission periods. 

For this program, we’ve partnered with The Carbon Tracker Initiative to take on a new challenge: fossil fuel emissions monitoring. We’re using image processing algorithms and satellite networks to replace expensive, on-site power plant emissions monitors with a globally accessible, open-source monitoring platform.

Who is on your team for this project?

Our project for the Google AI Impact Challenge is a partnership between two different organizations, WattTime and The Carbon Tracker Initiative. We're a collection of data scientists, and project managers, and we think about the best ways for organizing our data and how best to engage new users.

What have you learned at Tech Sprint Week?

We’ve covered a lot! We went through a lot of user experience design and research, thinking about how users will be interacting with our product as we design it. We’ve also learned a lot about machine learning and feature engineering. The mentors reminded us to make sure we train our model on the type of data that it would actually have, which sounds intuitive but it's actually hard to do. It might be easy to give your model a “leg up” with training data that it shouldn't have, but then you would see that it's not operating as you expected. 

Now that Tech Sprint Week is complete, what are your next steps? 

We need to catch up with everybody else on the team and share all of the great information and resources that we've received from this week. I’ve also been exposed to a lot of new tools like TensorFlow, an open source library that makes it easy to create machine learning models. So I want to get familiar with that tool and actually integrate it into our workflow. We're also doing a lot of hiring, so we’ll continue to build our team. 

What kinds of people have you met through this program? 

All the mentors have been helpful. Everyone has this attitude of “Hey, how can we help?” Our AI Coach, Ang Li, has been extremely useful and really responsive. I'll contact him at random times of the day and get a response within a few minutes. He's even helped us with hiring!

by via The Keyword

Press play: Find and listen to podcast episodes on Search

Want the best prices for your trip? Google can help.

Take off to your next destination with Google Maps

How a village took a local festival to the global stage

Google for Chile: Supporting development through tech

Over the last decade, Chile has become known as one of the most connected countries in Latin America, and its population has been an early adopter of new technologies. But the country still has important challenges and opportunities to connect and bring all Chileans closer to technology that can make both their work and home lives easier.

Today we hosted our first Google for Chile, with a group of more than 300 people in Santiago. There, we discussed our ongoing commitment to the digital growth of Chile and Latin America, improving connectivity and creating a safer public cloud. 

Connecting Chile's entrepreneurial force

In Chile and around the world, small and medium businesses increasingly need to be online in order to grow. Google My Business has become one of the best allies for entrepreneurs who want to see their businesses "on the map" and for their customers to find them. The number of verified companies on the platform in Chile has grown by 76% over the past year.

More efficient cities, in the cloud

In Chile, almost 50 percent of drivers use Waze to drive around all types of streets. That means users can serve as a kind of “sensor” in addition to stationary ones like radar and cameras, and cities can learn a lot from their drivers. Now, all the information from the Waze for Cities program will be stored for free for its members on Google Cloud, making it even easier for cities to see movement patterns and measure the effects of interventions. Currently, more than 190 partners across Latin America have joined the program.  

Partners like the Subsecretaría de Transportes de Chile have been using Waze data to improve traffic. They monitor more than 400 road segments to determine the periods with the most traffic. This information is used to program traffic lights, and whenever patterns change (like when traffic piles up or there’s an accident on the road), they can adapt the lights accordingly. 

Keeping Chilean children, teachers and parents safe online

In 2018, we launched Be Internet Awesome, which teaches children to be safe explorers of the online world. In Chile, we have been working with the Education Ministry so teachers and administrators can use our program’s tools. In the coming weeks, teachers using Be Internet Awesome will be able to find a new module—in Spanish—to teach students to think critically about the information they consume online, avoiding misinformation. 

Privacy for all 

New privacy tools are now officially available in Chile. People can now use Android phones as security keys, adding an extra layer of protection to their information. They can also check how data is being used in Maps, Search and the Assistant, by accessing the apps menu and choosing the option “Your data in …” There, you can review and delete your location activity in Maps or your search activity in Search. Soon, the same feature will be accessible on YouTube.

Auto-delete controls for Web and Apps Activity are also now available globally, allowing people to easily manage the amount of time their data is saved. Choose a limit—3 or 18 months—and anything older than that will be automatically deleted on an ongoing basis.

The cloud in Quilicura

The first and only Google data center in Latin America is located in Chile, in the city of Quilicura. Announced in 2012, the data center allows us to provide support to and guarantee the operation of all of our products, not just for Chile but for all of Latin America. 

In September 2018, we announced the expansion of our data center, with an additional investment of US$140 million that will triple the size of the initial structure. And last April we announced the arrival of Curie on the coasts of the Valparaiso Region: Curie is the first submarine fiber optic cable to reach Chile in about 20 years.

How AI is transforming industries in Chile 

At Google, we use artificial intelligence to make our products more useful, from email that is spam-free and easier to write to a digital assistant that understands you when you ask it questions.

Much of the progress made with AI is based on our open source machine learning platform, TensorFlow. In Chile, machine learning is opening up new opportunities in several industries like food, construction and astronomy. Local technology company Odd Industries found potential in using AI with camera footage in the construction sector, letting data reveal what humans can’t see. Artificial intelligence processes images from construction sites and converts them into concrete data, allowing companies to build responsibly and intelligently. 

Working together with industry associations, academic institutions, government officials and our users, I’m excited to find new ways to use technology to help everyone succeed. 

by via The Keyword

The Advanced Protection Program expands to Chrome

Hip-hop dancers show Paris in a new light on Street View

Pick an idea and make it happen with Google Images

Support for app-ads.txt to protect your app revenue and brand

Code Next students merge computer science and activism

Our hardware sustainability commitments

Most of us can’t get through the day without a phone, tablet, computer or smart speaker. My team at Google understands this well—we’ve been making consumer hardware (like Pixel phones and Google Home Minis) for just over three years now. But building these devices and getting them into the hands of our customers takes a lot of resources, and disposing of our old electronics can create significant waste. 

My job is to integrate sustainability into our products, operations and communities—making it not just an aspect of how we do business, but the centerpiece of it. It’s an ongoing endeavor that involves designing in sustainability from the start and embedding it into the entire product development process and across our operations, all while creating the products our customers want. This is how we will achieve our ambition to leave people, the planet, and our communities better than we found them. 

To help us get a step closer to reaching our goals, we’re sharing a set of hardware and services sustainability commitments: 

• By 2020, 100 percent of all shipments going to or from customers will be carbon neutral 
• Starting in 2022, 100 percent of Made by Google products will include recycled materials with a drive to maximize recycled content wherever possible.
• And we will make technology that puts people first and expands access to the benefits of technology. 

These commitments will build on the foundation and progress we’ve already made. In 2018, we began publishing our product environmental reports, which help everyone understand exactly what our products are made of, how they’re built and how they get shipped to you. And from 2017 to 2018, our carbon emissions for product shipments decreased by 40 percent. we’ve also launched our Power Project, which will bring one million energy- and money-saving Nest thermostats to families in need by 2023, and built much of our Nest product portfolio with post-consumer recycled plastic.  

We’re always working to do more, faster. But today we’re laying the foundation for what we believe will be a way of doing business that commits to building better products better. 

by via The Keyword