Attention holiday shoppers: Black Friday help from Google

Midnight turkey sandwiches, leftover pie for breakfast, a leisurely walk around the block—these are the ideal moments in my day after Thanksgiving. But if you’re like me and the millions of Americans who participate in Black Friday and Cyber Monday every year, chances are you’re also looking out for deals ahead of the holiday season. In fact, I hear that online shopping sales are expected to growup to 18 percent this year, and smartphone use for holiday shopping is rising—increasing by 11 percent since 2017.

Good news: Google has you covered across your holiday shopping needs, from making your list, checking it twice, finding out the best deals, and keeping an eye on each package arrivals. 

Find the best prices and places to buy

With the recently redesigned Google Shopping, you can track prices for that espresso machine you’ve been keeping your eye on (and much more). Simply find the product you want, toggle “track price,” and you’ll receive a notification by phone or email when the price of that item drops. Plus, when you buy directly on Google we’ll offset the carbon emissions created from shipping your order.

If you’re committed to shopping local or worried about the shipping deadline, Google Shopping also lets you filter for nearby products, so you can find local stores that carry what you need and see whether they have it in stock. 

Some of our Made by Google products have Black Friday deals this year

Check out the deals on the latest tech from Google

How about some shiny new tech for your Secret Santa? Check out the Google Store for these deals (also at select U.S. retailers):

• Say it with a (very) smart phone: From November 24th through December 2nd, get $200 off an unlocked Pixel 4 and 4XL on the Google Store.
• Give the gift of better Wi-Fi: From November 28th through December 4th, save $40 on Nest Wifi, our newest Wi-Fi router and point which comes in three chic colors ($229).
• Help the new homeowner, parent, or caretaker in your life: From November 28th through December 4th, get $40 off Nest Cam Indoor, Nest Cam Outdoor, and $80 off Nest Hello.
• Bring the party with whole-home audio: From November 28th through December 4th, save $20 on Nest Mini.
• Stay organized, connected, and inspired in the kitchen: Save $30 on Nest Hub Max—and enjoy this exclusive bread pudding recipe from Ayesha Curry on Google Assistant displays.
• Stuff all of the stockings: From November 28th through December 4th, get $10 off Chromecast and $20 off Chromecast Ultra.

Keep track of your deliveries (and spread cheer!)

When you’re expecting more packages than usual, keeping track of each delivery can prove to be stressful. Should you stay and wait for it? What happens if you miss it? With a Nest Aware subscription Nest Hello can alert you when a package arrives, so if it’s an important item you can enlist some help from a neighbor (or, for parents, intercept it before your child discovers an early gift from Santa). 

And starting today you can get a festive Christmas, Hanukkah, New Year’s, or wintry ringtone for your Nest Hello. Whenever someone's at your door, they’ll hear some holiday cheer—including the person delivering your packages.

Stay zen through the shopping frenzy

Remain calm, cool and collected throughout the midnight madness on Black Friday with help from the Digital Wellbeing features on your Pixel devices. 

• Set a time limit on specific apps and sites so your day isn’t consumed by online shopping. When the timer runs out, the app or website is paused for the rest of the day. 

• Snooze alerts that are distracting and focus on the important ones. If you use an app to track discounts and sales, you can prioritize those notifications so you don’t spend extra time wading through notifications and hunting for the deals you want. 

• A nighttime shopping habit can interfere with your sleep. Set Wind Down mode to silence notifications from shopping apps or social media, put your screen into grayscale to signal it’s time for bed, and avoid a night of insomnia.

• And when it is time to wake up for those midnight deals or early morning lines, try the Sunrise Alarm feature on Pixel and Pixel Stand so even in the dead of winter, you can wake up more easily with “sunshine.” 

We wish you great deals, easy shopping, and minimal stress this holiday season.

by Todd Titera via The Keyword

100 Years of Bauhaus on Google Arts & Culture

Even if you’ve never heard of the Bauhaus movement, you’ve probably seen its influence all around you. From traffic signs to office furniture, the legendary design school changed the way our world looks and functions.  

One hundred years after the movement began in Germany, we’re still surrounded by Bauhaus ideas about art, technology and craftsmanship, which are reflected in Google Arts & Culture's newest collection—"Bauhaus Everywhere". The collection came together in partnership with the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation in Germany—as part of our multi-year digitization collaboration—and six other partners including the IIT Institute of Design or the Guggenheim Museum.

Bauhaus Everywhere

Bauhaus design aimed to improve people's lives through functional design. Well-known members of the school, such as its founder Walter Gropius, the controversial Hannes Meyer or Gunta Stölzl, as one of many female designers and artists, have a lasting influence on architecture, furniture design and even typefaces. 

This project digitizes over 10,000 objects, offers virtual tours of iconic buildings and exhibits over 400 artworks captured with our Art Camera. The result is over 45 online exhibitions curated by our seven partners featuring icons like the world known tubular steel armchair or imagery of “Africa's Finest Campus” and the (perhaps unexpectedly) best selling bauhaus design, wallpaper. 

There are also unique insights into the everyday student life of Bauhaus including the renowned Bauhaus parties and the forward thinking empowerment of women. And, because the school’s design principles spread far beyond Germany and Europe, we’ve created a Google Earth Voyager Tour to show how people as far away as Japan, India or Brazil were inspired by Bauhaus. 

• Young people posing at the beach

  The Bauhaus Study Guide: Learn what it was like to study at this very unusual school. © Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau

• 3D model of a round house .gif

  Explore three never-built Bauhaus buildings in Augmented Reality. Here theRundhaus by Carl Flieger.

• Colourful expressionist painting

  Zoom into a high resolution capture of Wassily Kandinsky's masterwork “Yellow. Red. Blue” and learn about his condition that made him hear colors. © Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau

  
  

• Image of a big concrete high-rise building

  Learn why the first international exhibition on Bauhaus took place in India and how the Bauhaus ideas influenced the look of Indian cities. © Johannes Schwartz, Het Nieuwe Instituut

• A dining room with colorful furniture

  Follow the tracks of Bauhaus internationally and see what the Dutch De Stijl movement and Bauhaus had in common. © Johannes Schwartz

  
  

New shapes, materials and approaches to construction made Bauhaus proposals stand out. Its architectural designs  were especially known for their avantgarde approach. But many of these bold building plans stayed just that, and were never actually constructed. In collaboration with experts from the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation, the collection contains buildings that had only ever existed on paper and in the minds of their creators. 

Together we assembled archival sketches, scribbles and vague descriptions to create augmented reality models of three visionary structures. In the Google Arts & Culture app anyone can now explore “Round House” by Carl Fieger, “BAMBOS” by Marcel Breuer and “Court House” by Eduard Ludwig from inside and outside. 

László Moholy-Nagy, a teacher at the Bauhaus, put it this way: "Design is not a profession, design is an attitude." We hope you’ll see that the Bauhaus attitude is not just everywhere but, through this exhibit, also for everyone. 

by Amit SoodGoogle Arts & Culture via The Keyword

Protecting users from government-backed hacking and disinformation

Google's Threat Analysis Group (TAG) works to counter targeted and government-backed hacking against Google and our users. This is an area we have invested in deeply for over a decade. Our daily work involves detecting and defeating threats, and warning targeted users and customers about the world’s most sophisticated adversaries, spanning the full range of Google products including Gmail, Drive and YouTube.

In the past, we’ve posted on issues like phishing campaigns, vulnerabilities and disinformation. Going forward, we’ll share more technical details and data about the threats we detect and how we counter them to advance the broader digital security discussion.

TAG tracks more than 270 targeted or government-backed groups from more than 50 countries. These groups have many goals including intelligence collection, stealing intellectual property, targeting dissidents and activists, destructive cyber attacks, or spreading coordinated disinformation. We use the intelligence we gather to protect Google infrastructure as well as users targeted with malware or phishing.

Phishing

We’ve had a long-standing policy to send users warnings if we detect that they are the subject of state-sponsored phishing attempts, and have posted periodically about these before. From July to September 2019, we sent more than 12,000 warnings to users in 149 countries that they were targeted by government-backed attackers. This is consistent (+/-10%) with the number of warnings sent in the same period of 2018 and 2017.

Distribution of government-backed phishing targets in Q3 (Jul-Sep 2019)

Over 90 percent of these users were targeted via “credential phishing emails” similar to the example below. These are usually attempts to obtain the target’s password or other account credentials to hijack their account. We encourage high-risk users—like journalists, human rights activists, and political campaigns—to enroll in our Advanced Protection Program (APP), which utilizes hardware security keys and provides the strongest protections available against phishing and account hijackings. APP is designed specifically for the highest-risk accounts and now has more than 15,500 users. 

In the simple phishing example below, an attacker has sent a phishing email with a security alert lure from “Goolge” suggesting the user secure their account. The user clicks the link, enters their password, and may also get asked for a security code if they have two-factor authentication enabled, allowing the attacker to access their account.

Sample lure used to phish Gmail users

Threat detection

Last week at CyberwarCon, we presented analysis about previously undisclosed campaigns from a Russia-nexus threat group called “Sandworm” (also known as “Iridium”). It’s a useful example of the type of detailed threat detection work that TAG does. Although much of Sandworm’s activity targeting Ukraine and their attacks against the 2018 Winter Olympics have been covered publicly, some campaigns have not been reported. 

In December 2017, TAG discovered a series of campaigns from Sandworm attempting to deploy Android malware. The first campaign targeted users in South Korea, where Sandworm was modifying legitimate Android applications with malware. They then uploaded these modified apps to the Play Store using their own attacker-controlled developer accounts. During this campaign, Sandworm uploaded eight different apps to the Play Store, each with fewer than 10 total installs. 

Malicious apps targeting users in South Korea

We also identified an earlier September 2017 Android campaign from Sandworm where they used similar tactics and deployed a fake version of the UKR.net email app on the Play Store. This application had approximately 1,000 total installs. We worked with our colleagues on the Google Play Protect Team to write detections for this malware family, and eliminate it.

In November 2018, we saw evidence that Sandworm shifted from using attacker-controlled accounts to try and upload malicious apps to compromising legitimate developers. Throughout November, Sandworm targeted software and mobile app developers in Ukraine via spear phishing emails with malicious attachments. In at least one case, they compromised an app developer with several published Play Store apps—one with more than 200,000 installs. 

After compromising the developer, Sandworm built a backdoor in one of the legitimate apps and attempted to publish it on the Play Store. They did this by adding their implant code into the application package, signing the package with the compromised developer’s key, and then uploading it to the Play Store. However, the Google Play Protect team caught the attempt at the time of upload. As a result, no users were infected and we were able to re-secure the developer’s account.

Disinformation

TAG is one part of Google and YouTube’s broader efforts to tackle coordinated influence operations that attempt to game our services. We share relevant threat information on these campaigns with law enforcement and other tech companies. Here are some examples that have been reported recently that TAG worked on:

• TAG recently took action against Russia-affiliated influence operations targeting several nations in Africa. The operations use inauthentic news outlets to disseminate messages promoting Russian interests in Africa. We have observed the use of local accounts and people to contribute to the operation, a tactic likely intended to make the content appear more genuine. Targeted countries included the Central African Republic, Sudan, Madagascar, and South Africa, and languages used included English, French, and Arabic. Activity on Google services was limited, but we enforced across our products swiftly. We terminated the associated Google accounts and 15 YouTube channels, and we continue to monitor this space. This discovery was consistent with recent observations and actions announced by Facebook. 

• Consistent with a recent Bellingcat report, TAG identified a campaign targeting the Indonesian provinces Papua and West Papua with messaging in opposition to the Free Papua Movement. Google terminated one advertising account and 28 YouTube channels.

Partnerships

TAG works closely with other technology companies—including platforms and specialized security firms—to share intelligence and best practices. We also share threat information with law enforcement. And of course there are multiple teams at Google at work on these issues with whom we coordinate. 

Going forward, our goal is to give more updates on the attacks that TAG detects and stops. Our hope is that shining more light on these actors will be helpful to the security community, deter future attacks, and lead to better awareness and protections among high-risk targets.

by Shane HuntleyThreat Analysis Group via The Keyword

Updates from TAG

by via The Keyword

37 students accepted to CS Research mentorship program

Computer science research addresses problems that affect all of our lives, from producing better flood forecasts to live captions and more. To ensure that CS research explores the issues that affect all communities, the researchers themselves need to be representative of those communities But in 2018, less than 25 percent of computer science PhD degrees in the United States were awarded to researchers from groups historically underrepresented in technology.

As part of our efforts to broaden participation in CS research careers and make them more accessible to everyone, we accepted 37 outstanding undergraduates to Google’s CS Research Mentorship Program (CSRMP) this fall. The program encourages students to pursue graduate and doctorate-level CS studies by matching them with Google mentors. As the students work toward their goals, they attend a CS research conference and travel to Mountain View as guests for the PhD Fellowship Summit.

We caught up with Sam Steinberg, a junior in Information Science at Cornell University, to learn about her journey to the program and what she wants to accomplish with CS research. 

What led you to CS?

At six years old, I walked into my room and threw the family laptop onto the ceramic floor. I wanted to  see its insides, and there they were: circuits, capacitors, resistors and motors scattered like cookie crumbs across the ground. While my parents were certainly upset about the mess I made (sorry mom and dad!), I was in awe, and that’s how my love affair with technology began.

What were some defining moments in your CS journey?

In high school, I was the only girl in my CS classes. After a Girls Who Code summer program, I started a club at my school. I found that so much of learning difficulty doesn’t have to do with the content, but the environment in which you absorb material. In the Girls Who Code club, I felt undaunted to ask questions, work alongside my peers, and help teach other girls. 

One of the most humbling moments was being named the inaugural winner of The Society of Women Engineers SWENext Award. As a young Latina aspiring to work in tech, it was eye-opening to learn about the discrepancies in retention for minorities in STEM. SWE has helped further instill my passion for advocating about the importance of gender and ethinic diversity in STEM fields.

Why are you interested in CS research?

I'm a 5 foot 2 Puerto Rican Jew with a lisp, and the career aspirations of Shuri, the female engineer from Black Panther. Like any Marvel hero, I want to change the world, but not by shooting laser beams to defeat the bad guys. I’ve always been fascinated with how technology can be used as a tool to help others, especially how those with cognitive and learning disabilities can maintain focus and relaxation in school and daily life.

What do you hope to accomplish during the CS Research Mentorship Program? 

My latest project is called illuMATE, a bracelet designed for children with autism and other developmental disabilities that monitors heart rate via an Arduino pulse sensor. When it detects a spike in heart rate, it sends a series of customizable vibrations down the child’s wrist to help them relax. Touch-pressure and vibration technology has been clinically proven to help those with autism de-stress. My goal with CSRMP is to work with my mentor Rachel to further develop my project and framework with supporting research, and learn more about how product management works at Google.

We are humbled to support such exceptional students as they pursue CS research careers. Look for these 37 names in future headlines as they confront our greatest challenges (and solve them).

by Sloan Davis via The Keyword

Google for Startups Accelerator empowers AI startups in Europe

With access to the world's largest economy, a growing number of companies valued at a billion dollars, and a tech industry growing five times faster than the rest of the world, startups play a critical role in the future of Europe.

We’ve been working with startups in Europe for many years at our Google for Startups Campuses in the UK, Spain and Poland, as well as through partner organizations in 13 European countries. Startups at our Campuses and in our partner network are drivers of economic growth, having created more than 19,000 jobs and raised $1.7 billion since 2015.

To support startups to do great work, we’re bringing our Google for Startups Acceleratorprogram to Europe. The program is open to startups across Europe and each one will focus on a particular sector—with our current programs supporting startups in cybersecurity, entertainment, and social impact. Our accelerator selects startups focused on AI and, for three months, provides intense support on the teams' biggest challenges. We bring experts from Google and the industry to give these founders mentorship and tailored technical expertise. The program also includes workshops focused on machine learning, product design, customer acquisition, and leadership development for founders.

Our first Google for Startups Accelerator kicked off last month in Malaga, Spain. With a focus on cybersecurity startups, it includes companies like SecureKids, a team working to help parents and teachers keep their children safe when using tablets and mobile devices.

This month at our Google for Startups Campus in Warsaw, we welcome our second Google for Startups Accelerator cohort, made up of top entertainment startups from across Europe. Recent research showed that investment from Asia, USA, and Canada into the Central and Eastern Europe region has doubled since 2015; it is an exciting and fast-growing area now home to 12 companies valued at 1 billion dollars or more.

Also this month we announced the Google for Startups Accelerator: Sustainable Development Goals, focused on social impact startups that are building a healthier and more sustainable future. Startups will be selected based on the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, including poverty, inequality, climate, prosperity, and peace and justice.

We also have plans to further expand across Europe in 2020 to continue to support the continent’s growing startup communities. Want to learn more about Google for Startups Accelerator or apply for future cohorts? Learn more at our website.

by Agnieszka Hryniewicz-Bieniek via The Keyword

How Grupo Reforma grew using Subscribe with Google

For more than 80 years, Grupo Reforma has had a single mission: respect for the truth and, above all, for our readers. This mission has extended beyond our journalism to the way we’ve invested in our technological innovations. 

Throughout our history, we have reported on everything from politics and corruption to sports and style, with 10 newspapers across Mexico staffed by an extensive network of professional journalists. In 2000, in response to our readers consuming more content online, we launched our three main digital sites: El Norte, Reforma and Mural. Three years later, we launched a paywall, becoming one of the first news outlets in the world to implement this business model. Our digital subscribers receive access to exclusive content, like investigative reports, in-depth videos, sports analyses and more. 

When we first learned about Subscribe with Google, it felt natural for us to be a launch partner, as it fit with our previous innovations to meet users’ demands and changing habits. We began implementing Subscribe with Google because the product makes it easier for our readers to become subscribers and stay engaged with our journalism. People who arrive at our hard paywall can subscribe in just a few clicks and avoid a lengthy registration process--all with a sense of confidence and security in the payment method. Those subscribers can also access our content more easily. As long as our subscribers are logged into their Google account, they can enjoy our journalism anywhere--whether they’re switching from our mobile apps to our desktop site or searching for the latest news directly in Google Search. 

In March 2019, we officially launched Subscribe with Google on our sites, and since then, we’ve been optimistic based on the new data we’ve seen. Over a third of all our subscriptions come from Subscribe with Google. Subscribe with Google has dramatically simplified the overall subscription experience: 43 percent more readers become subscribers when using Subscribe with Google than when using our traditional process. We have also found that these subscribers read more of our journalism--they have  13 percent more pageviews on our sites, which we suspect is because they’re able to easily stay logged in through their Google account. 

The experience has helped us more deeply understand changes we can make to our paywall to create a better experience for our readers. It has also reminded us to focus on letting people enjoy our journalism, instead of making them struggle to access it. 

by Juan NavaGrupo Reforma via The Keyword

When fashion and choreography meet artificial intelligence

At the Google Arts & Culture Lab in Paris, we’re all about exploring the relationship between art and technology. Since 2012, we’ve worked with artists and creators from many fields, developing experiments that let you design patterns in augmented reality, co-create poetry, or experience multisensory art installations. Today we’re launching two experiments to test the potential of artificial intelligence in the worlds of contemporary dance and fashion.

For our first experiment, Runway Palette, we came together with The Business of Fashion, whose collection includes 140,000 photos of runway looks from almost 4,000 fashion shows. If you could attend one fashion show per day, it would take you more than ten years to see them all. By extracting the main colors of each look, we used machine learning to organize the images by color palette, resulting in an interactive visualization of four years of fashion by almost 1,000 designers.

Everyone can now use the color palette visualization to explore colors, designers, seasons, and trends that come from Fashion Weeks worldwide.  You can even snap or upload a picture of, let’s say, your closet, or autumn leaves, and discover how designers used a similar color palette in fashion.

• Various fashion images in visualised cloud.gif

  Explore four years of runway looks organized by color using machine learning.

• Images of clothing on a mobile screen.gif

  Take a picture or upload a photo to see how designers used a similar color palette in fashion.

• a visualisation showing fashion looks.gif

  Click on a palette to see which runway looks have similar colors, and compare by collection.

For our second experiment, Living Archive, we continued our collaboration with Wayne McGregor to create an AI-driven choreography tool. Trained on over 100 hours of dance performances from Wayne’s 25-year archive, the experiment uses machine learning to predict and generate movement in the style of Wayne’s dancers. In July of this year, they used the tool in his creative process for a new work that premiered at the LA Music Center. 

Today, we are making this experiment available to everyone. Living Archive lets you explore almost half a million poses from Wayne’s extensive archive, organized by visual similarity. Use the experiment to make connections between poses, or capture  your own movement to create your very own choreography.

You can try our new experiments on the Google Arts & Culture experiments page or via our free app for iOS and Android.

by Damien HenryGoogle Arts & Culture via The Keyword

Deliver consistent site experiences with Google Optimize

Consumers expect connected shopping experiences from research to purchase. But their journeys aren’t linear; they move around, visiting—and revisiting—multiple sites and apps, multiple times a day. 

This makes it challenging for businesses to deliver a coordinated site experience, especially if they are running an experiment or personalization on their site. How do they make sure that the version of their site someone saw in the morning is the same version they see in the afternoon? 

Google Optimize can now understand when a customer has returned to a site they visited before and deliver a consistent site experience. Let’s see how this works.

Imagine you’re a hotel business running a marketing campaign that promotes a 20 percent discount for the upcoming holiday season. When people visit your site in response to the campaign, you want to make sure you offer this discount to them throughout their entire booking experience, even if they come back multiple times before they make a reservation.

One part of your marketing campaign is paid media you buy through Google Ads. In this case, you would use Optimize to create a custom web page featuring the discount and then add the Google Ads rule to ensure this page is shown to people who first arrive to your site from your Google Ads campaign. There are likely many people who click on an ad, explore your site, then come back later to complete the reservation. Now, no matter how many other pages on your site people visit, or how many times they return over 24 hours, Optimize will automatically display that custom page to them each time. 

Another way you promote this sale is through email. For this part of your campaign, once you create a custom web page with the discount offer, add a utm_campaign parameter named “holiday-sale” to the URL in the email. Then in Optimize, add a UTM parameter rule for “holiday-sale.” Optimize can now use that parameter to display the correct experience every time people who received the promo email visit your site. In addition to email, you can also use the UTM parameter rule in advertising campaigns managed with Display & Video 360 and Search Ads 360, or any other campaigns you are running that support UTM parameters.

Create a UTM parameter rule to focus your experiment or personalization on a particular marketing campaign.

Royal Bank of Canada is an Optimize 360 customer that has already begun using UTM parameter rules. 

Together with their Google Marketing Platform Partner, Bounteous, they often use Optimize 360 to run personalizations across their entire website. Because most of these personalizations are focused on delivering the right content to the right user from their marketing campaigns, they were excited to start using the UTM parameter rule. 

"The customer journey at the Royal Bank of Canada is rarely linear. We need experiments that can react as customers frequently engage and navigate our website. The UTM parameter rule gives us that flexibility, and it is changing the way we approach our campaigns.” 

- Arnab Tagore, Senior Manager of Digital Analytics, Royal Bank of Canada

Both the Google Ads rule and UTM parameter rule are already available to use in Optimize and Optimize 360. We encourage you to go into your account and check them out and we look forward to sharing more new features that help you better meet your customers’ expectations and get the most out of your website.

by Praveen Krishnan via The Keyword

Ladies of Landsat builds inclusivity in the geosciences

Editor’s note:Today’s post is by Morgan Crowley, a Ph.D. candidate at McGill University who studies wildfire progressions. This post is based on her recent appearance on the podcast Scene From Above. Above photo courtesy of McGill University.

Working and studying in the geosciences can be lonely sometimes. I didn’t realize how lonely I was, and that this loneliness was tied to my identity as a woman, until I spent several days at a conference without seeing anyone else in the ladies’ room. Groups like Ladies of Landsat, which I help coordinate, connect us to fellow scientists who are gender and other minority peers so we can reach out about everything from finding research partners to starting a family.  By building up each other’s confidence and celebrating our wins, we lift, retain and attract women in the field. 

In our case, most connections happen on Twitter, although we do come together at events like the 2018 Google Earth Engine summit in Dublin. Google provided a space for us to connect while also teaching us technical skills in Google Earth and Earth Engine, so we were equipped to answer pressing scientific questions like where and when do wildfires spread in Canada, and how much air pollution does a fire produce in India? 

At the September 2019 Geo for Good Summit, we teamed up with Women in Geospatial, another online group promoting gender equality in geosciences, to discuss shared interests, challenges and skills. 

• Morgan Crowley and others check in on the first day of Geo for Good 2019.

  Morgan Crowley and others check in on the first day of Geo for Good 2019.

• Morgan Crowley presents her wildfire progression research during the Earth Engine User Summit 2018.

  Morgan Crowley presents her wildfire progression research during the Earth Engine User Summit 2018.

• Erika Persons presents her Google Earth story map during Geo for Good 2019.

  Erika Persons presents her Google Earth story map during Geo for Good 2019.

In 2018, I went to the ForestSAT conference and heard women like Dr. Jody Vogelerand Dr. Joanne White talk about forestry with an incredible level of depth. I got chills. It was the first time I’d talked to more than one woman at a time about this type of science. Dr. Kate Fickas, a research faculty member at the University of Utah and the brains behind Ladies of Landsat, set up a women’s networking event at a local bar. Dr. Monika Moskal brought her ground-based LiDAR unit, a surveying device, to take a picture of us. So many people came up to us and said, “I’ve never been with this many women in the field. This is incredible.”

A LiDAR selfie of the Ladies of Landsat members standing in a circle around the laser scanning sensor at our 2018 ForestSAT meet up at the University of Maryland. (Image credit: Dr. Monika Moskal)

It’s encouraging to see that Ladies of Landsat and Women in Geospatial are not the only groups working to make geospatial sciences more inclusive. There are amazing groups all over the world like Women in GIS, Women in GIS - Kenya, WinGRSS and She Maps. There’s also GeoLatinas, Black Girls Mapp, GeoChicas and Indigenous Maps, who support people of color in the field. And in spite of our name, Ladies of Landsat, we’re not just about lifting up women; we’re inclusive to all genders and identities. 

The work of making geosciences more inclusive is just starting—and you can play a role, too. If you read a research paper whose authors are all men, ask why. If you go to a scientific event and every panel member is a white person, speak up. Invite gender and racial minority scientists to share their work and nominate them for grants and speaking slots. The burden to change this status quo rests on people in power.

by Morgan Crowley via The Keyword

Helping families stay connected with the Google Assistant

Every night at our house, bedtime means storytime with Dad. A time when our daughters get to share an experience that’s just between them, get to share storylines and characters with Dad, and I get a few minutes to myself. 

But when my husband deploys, everything changes. And getting recordings of stories from Dad halfway around the world is technically tricky. Listening to him read “The Wind in the Willows” involved downloading each file from Drive and casting it to a Nest Mini. We knew there had to be a better way. 

We even asked folks on message boards for help, which is how my daughters and I ended up traveling to Portland to meet with engineers and designers from Instrument and Google Nest. We helped them design something called My Storytime—a new Google Assistant Action that makes it easier for pre-recorded stories to be played back home for loved ones.

• Oliver Girls at Instrument

  The Olivers looking at initial designs for My Storytime.
  

• Oliver Girls at Instrument

  The Olivers looking at initial designs for My Storytime.
  

• Oliver Girls at Instrument

  The Olivers looking at initial designs for My Storytime.
  

• Olivers at Instrument

  Oliver family at the Instrument office in Portland, OR.

Now, no matter where you are, you can visit MyStorytime.com to create a private account for your family and begin building your library of recorded stories. And once shared with the parent back home, all they have to say is “Hey Google, talk to My Storytime” to hear your personal stories. 

My daughters and I shared our own experiences and ideas in hopes that it would be useful to the more than 100,000 military parents who deploy every year—and the nearly 250,000 children who are back home. According to one organization, United Through Reading, that’s  40 million bedtime stories missed each year by military children. But storytime isn’t only important to military families. Grandparents who live states away, nurses and police officers who work the night shift, and anyone who travels for work can relate to the struggle of trying to make it home in time to read for bedtime. Because every bedtime story is, at its heart, a love story.  

Nothing can replace Daddy being home, but hopefully My Storytime will help make it just a little bit easier to get through the next deployment and that it brings some comfort to other families as well.

by Jennifer Oliver via The Keyword

Buy movie tickets with the Google Assistant on Chrome

Using our Duplex technology, the Google Assistant can already book your restaurant reservations over the phone. Now we’re extending that technology to complete tasks online, like buying movie tickets.

On Android phones, the Assistant can now help you  purchase movie tickets on the web. As you’re thinking about holiday activities for the family, ask the Assistant something like, “Hey Google, showtimes for [movie] in Phoenix this weekend.” Or you can do a search for movie times from the Google app on Android. 

After selecting a theater and time that works best for you, you’ll have the option to “Buy tickets” with the Assistant from more than 70 cinemas and ticketing services, such as Fandango, MovieTickets.com, AMC, or MJR Theaters in the U.S., or ODEON in the UK. From there, the Assistant opens in Chrome to guide you through purchasing your ticket. Thanks to Duplex on the web technology, the Assistant will be able to navigate the site and input your information, like payment information saved in Chrome.

To continue to help you get things done with the Assistant on your phone, we'll expand this feature to other tasks. Up next, car rentals.

by Dana Ritter via The Keyword

An update on our political ads policy

We’re proud that people around the world use Google to find relevant information about elections and that candidates use Google and search ads to raise small-dollar donations that help fund their campaigns. We’re also committed to a wide range of efforts to help protect campaigns, surface authoritative election news, and protect elections from foreign interference.

But given recent concerns and debates about political advertising, and the importance of shared trust in the democratic process, we want to improve voters' confidence in the political ads they may see on our ad platforms. So we’re making a few changes to how we handle political ads on our platforms globally. Regardless of the cost or impact to spending on our platforms, we believe these changes will help promote confidence in digital political advertising and trust in electoral processes worldwide. 

Our ads platforms today

Google’s ad platforms are distinctive in a number of important ways: 

• The main formats we offer political advertisers are search ads (which appear on Google in response to a search for a particular topic or candidate), YouTube ads (which appear on YouTube videos and generate revenue for those creators), and display ads (which appear on websites and generate revenue for our publishing partners). 

• We provide a publicly accessible, searchable, and downloadable transparency report of election ad content and spending on our platforms, going beyond what’s offered by most other advertising media.  

• We’ve never allowed granular microtargeting of political ads on our platforms. In many countries, the targeting of political advertising is regulated and we comply with those laws. In the U.S., we have offered basic political targeting capabilities to verified advertisers, such as serving ads based on public voter records and general political affiliations (left-leaning, right-leaning, and independent). 

Taking a new approach to targeting election ads

While we've never offered granular microtargeting of election ads, we believe there’s more we can do to further promote increased visibility of election ads. That’s why we’re limiting election ads audience targeting to the following general categories: age, gender, and general location (postal code level). Political advertisers can, of course, continue to do contextual targeting, such as serving ads to people reading or watching a story about, say, the economy. This will align our approach to election ads with long-established practices in media such as TV, radio, and print, and result in election ads being more widely seen and available for public discussion. (Of course, some media, like direct mail, continues to be targeted more granularly.) It will take some time to implement these changes, and we will begin enforcing the new approach in the U.K. within a week (ahead of the General Election), in the EU by the end of the year, and in the rest of the world starting on January 6, 2020.

Clarifying our ads policies

Whether you’re running for office or selling office furniture, we apply the same ads policies to everyone; there are no carve-outs. It’s against our policies for any advertiser to make a false claim—whether it's a claim about the price of a chair or a claim that you can vote by text message, that election day is postponed, or that a candidate has died. To make this more explicit, we’re clarifying our ads policies and adding examples to show how our policies prohibit things like “deep fakes” (doctored and manipulated media), misleading claims about the census process, and ads or destinations making demonstrably false claims that could significantly undermine participation or trust in an electoral or democratic process. Of course, we recognize that robust political dialogue is an important part of democracy, and no one can sensibly adjudicate every political claim, counterclaim, and insinuation. So we expect that the number of political ads on which we take action will be very limited—but we will continue to do so for clear violations.

Providing increased transparency

We want the ads we serve to be transparent and widely available so that many voices can debate issues openly. We already offer election advertising transparency in India, in the EU, and for federal U.S. election ads. We provide both in-ad disclosures and a transparency report that shows the actual content of the ads themselves, who paid for them, how much they spent, how many people saw them, and how they were targeted. Starting on December 3, 2019, we’re expanding the coverage of our election advertising transparency to include U.S. state-level candidates and officeholders, ballot measures, and ads that mention federal or state political parties, so that all of those ads will now be searchable and viewable as well. 

We’re also looking at ways to bring additional transparency to the ads we serve and we’ll have additional details to share in the coming months. We look forward to continuing our work in this important area.

by Scott SpencerGoogle Ads via The Keyword

Chord Assist makes playing the guitar more accessible

Joe Birch, a developer based in the UK, has a genetic condition that causes low vision. He grew up playing music, but he knows it’s not easy for people who have visual impairments or hearing loss to learn how to play. 

He wanted to change that, so he created Chord Assist, which aims to make learning the guitar more accessible for people who are blind, Deaf and mute. It gives instructions on how to play the guitar through braille, a speaker or visuals on a screen, allowing people to have a conversation to learn to play a certain chord.

“Chord Assist” is powered by Actions on Google, a platform that allows developers to create additional commands for unique applications. The guitar is used as a conversational tool to allow the student to learn a chord by simply saying, “Show me how to play a G chord,” for example. The guitar understands the request, and then gives either a voice output or braille output, depending on the need. 

“I love seeing people pushing the boundaries and breaking the expectations of others,” Joe says. “When someone builds an innovative project that can change the lives of others, it inspires me to achieve the things that I am passionate about. That’s what this whole developer community is really all about, we are here to inspire each other.” 

With the emergence of new technology and easy-to-access educational resources, it’s easier than ever to become a developer. The developer community is global, and is made up of people from all walks of life and backgrounds, with one thing in common—using technology to take an idea and turn it into reality. 

That is what the Google Developers Experts program aims to do by connecting 700 outstanding developers around the world. They gather to share the skills they’ve mastered through application development, podcasts, public speaking and bringing technology to local communities. Each Google Developers Expert has experience and expertise in one or more specific Google technologies.

Joe is a GDE focused on Actions on Google and Android, and has been an engineer for seven years. “Being a GDE allows me to fulfill my passion for both technology and education,” Joe says. “I learned so much by following  designers and developers online. Seeing the cool work that these people are doing helps to fuel my brain and inspire me for the next idea that I might have.”

by Aline RakhmatoullinaGoogle Developers Experts via The Keyword

Keeping families connected with the Google Assistant

Every night at our house, bedtime means storytime with Dad. A time when our daughters get to share an experience that’s just between them, get to share storylines and characters with Dad, and I get a few minutes to myself. 

But when my husband deploys, everything changes. And getting recordings of stories from Dad halfway around the world is technically tricky. Listening to him read “The Wind in the Willows” involved downloading each file from Drive and casting it to a Nest Mini. We knew there had to be a better way. 

We even asked folks on message boards for help, which is how my daughters and I ended up traveling to Portland to meet with engineers and designers from Instrument and Google Nest. We helped them design something called My Storytime--a new Google Assistant Action that makes it easier for pre-recorded stories to be played back home for loved ones.

Now, no matter where you are, you can visit MyStorytime.com to create a private account for your family and begin building your library of recorded stories. And once shared with the parent back home, all they have to say is “Hey Google, talk to My Storytime” to hear your personal stories. 

My daughters and I shared our own experiences and ideas in hopes that it would be useful to the more than 100,000 military parents who deploy every year—and the nearly 250,000 children who are back home. According to one organization, United Through Reading, that’s  40 million bedtime stories missedeach year by military children. But storytime isn’t only important to military families. Grandparents who live states away, nurses and police officers who work the night shift, and anyone who travels for work can relate to the struggle of trying to make it home in time to read for bedtime.  Because every bedtime story is, at its heart, a love story.  

Nothing can replace Daddy being home, but hopefully My Storytime will make it just a little bit easier to get through the next deployment and that it brings some comfort to other families as well. 

by Jennifer Oliver via The Keyword

Create your own maps and stories in Google Earth

As humans, we've always bonded by sharing stories about the places that matter to us. It likely started around a campfire—elders recounting tales of sites sacred to their people. Today, we use technology to celebrate our ancestry, raise awareness about places we care about, and rekindle memories of home.

For nearly 15 years, people have turned to Google Earth for a comprehensive view of our planet. But our mission has never been to just show you a static picture of the planet; we want to bring the world to life. With new creation tools now in Google Earth, you can turn our digital globe into your own storytelling canvas, and create a map or story about the places that matter to you.

See how a teacher, conservationist and family are using the new creation tools

With creation tools in Google Earth, you can draw your own placemarks, lines and shapes, then attach your own custom text, images, and videos to these locations. You can organize your story into a narrative and collaborate with others. And when you’ve finished your story, you can share it with others. By clicking the new “Present” button, your audience will be able to fly from place to place in your custom-made Google Earth narrative.

See what people are making with the new creation tools:

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  Build maps that help people connect with a river under threat.

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  Take people on a 3D tour of Renaissance architecture in Italy.

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  Illustrate the harrowing journey one enslaved person took to freedom.

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  Travel on an Antarctic expedition with a Japanese art teacher.

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  Bring the classic young adult novel Walk Two Moons

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   to life.

Two years ago when we rewrote Google Earth for modern browsers and devices, we launched the Voyager program to start to infuse the globe with stories from the world's best storytellers. Today, we’re taking the next and most significant step forward: turning the power of mapmaking and storytelling over to you. 

Creation tools are now available in Google Earth on web. You can view your projects on mobile and tablet devices using the latest version of our iOS or Android app. Thanks to an integration with Google Drive, you can share your stories with your audience and they can view it anywhere—their phone, tablet or laptop. Best of all, you can invite others to collaborate and co-author projects with you. 

Check out what you can do with the new creation tools:

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  Map out your places: Add placemarks, lines or shapes to the map. Choose from the icon palette or style with custom colors to jazz up your project.

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  Set the scene. Pick just the right 3D view to frame your scene, or dive into Street View to capture the view from the ground.

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  Add rich text, photos & videos: Bring your projects to life with photos and videos. Use the rich text editor to add a narrative.

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  Fullscreen slides: The slide feature lets you create title cards or break up your project into sections.

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  Show and tell: Click the Present button to take your project fullscreen and take anyone on an immersive and interactive tour of the places you care about.

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  Share and collaborate: Best of all, creation tools are integrated with Google Drive so you can collaborate with others on your projects.

We're excited to see the stories you tell in Google Earth, and we'll continue to build out this new capability with your help and feedback.

by Gopal ShahGoogle Earth via The Keyword

Balance your spend across YouTube and TV with Reach Planner

YouTube is focused on helping brands reach their audiences and drive business impact. That’s why we launched Reach Planner in April 2018 to give advertisers a better way to plan their YouTube and video media. To help make it even easier for users to for users to discover the optimal mix of TV and YouTube to maximize the reach of a video based media plan, today we’re launching  Nielsen TV Data in Reach Planner. Now you can see how different distributions of spend on TV and YouTube can affect your reach.

Using this together with Nielsen Total Ad Ratings (TAR), you can compare YouTube and TV reach from the planning stages through to post campaign reporting.

With audiences shifting to digital, it’s important to plan TV and digital together

With audiences shifting to digital, it’s important to plan across channels. According to Nielsen, there are thirty one percent fewer available weekly 18-49 GRPs across broadcast and cable television compared to just five years ago. TV’s decline in reach to 18-49 year olds now requires a forty six percent increase in frequency for marketers to achieve the same GRP levels.¹

Advertisers can offset this decline and grow their business by adding YouTube to their overall video plan. Across the 20 Total Ad Ratings (TAR) studies we’ve commissioned with Nielsen, YouTube has consistently driven incremental reach at a more balanced frequency compared to TV.²

Get started in Reach Planner

By adding Nielsen TV data to Reach Planner, advertisers can optimize their mix of TV and online video to maximize reach, balance frequency, and reduce waste.  Advertisers can also change the mix of YouTube formats to see the effect on the overall campaign.

TV Data in Reach Planner is available to all users of Reach Planner in the US. This feature will be available in more countries in 2020.

To get started, reach out to your Google team to get TV Data in Reach Planner enabled for your planning team.

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1. Nielsen, NTI, U.S., Npower Reach & Frequency Report, Sept. 30, 2013–Oct. 27, 2013 vs. Oct. 1, 2018–Oct. 28, 2018.

2. "Nielsen Total Ad Ratings (TAR) Meta Analysis, including all 20 TAR US studies inclusive of YouTube in-app traffic commissioned by Google running from January 2018 to March 2019 across desktop, mobile and TV. Incremental Reach Value calculated as YouTube’s on-target incremental reach / YouTube’s Total on-target Reach. Standard Deviation 22%. On Target Frequency calculated as On Target Impressions / On Target Reach. Standard Deviation 6.5

by Dacheng Zhao via The Keyword

Digital skills for Indonesia's internet economy

Since joining Google just over a year ago, I’ve heard so many inspirational stories about the ways Indonesians are using the internet to improve their lives and others’.  Entrepreneurs like Sherly Santa—who took her durian business online—have helped make Indonesia’s internet economy the largest in Southeast Asia.  And a new generation of young Indonesians is working on big ideas for the future—like the Developer Student Club that built a flood warning app for villages in Bojonegoro.  

The challenge for Indonesia isn’t a lack of ability or ambition. It’s giving more Indonesians the digital skills to take advantage of the opportunities technology creates, something that’s a priority for us and our Indonesian partners. Training programs like Gapura Digital and Women Will have helped 1.4 million Indonesians learn digital basics and business tools. But we also want to help Indonesians gain more advanced software skills, which are in high demand from Indonesian technology companies. 

Today, at the fourth Google for Indonesia event, we announced a new initiative aimed at meeting that need. Bangkit (meaning “rise up” in Indonesian) is an intensive, six-month training program for developers run in partnership with Gojek, Tokopedia, Traveloka and leading Indonesian universities in Jakarta, Bandung, Denpasar and Yogyakarta. The program will be free, but selective—open to cohorts of 300 of the most talented developers across the country, with workshops starting in January 2020. The goal is to teach developers both technical skills in machine learning, as well as more general “soft skills” that can help them advance their career in the technology sector. Our hope is that Bangkit helps expand the pool of talent in Indonesia, making it easier for even smaller startups to hire people with the skills they need—and supporting Indonesia's digital economy as it continues to grow. 

Bangkit isn't the only way we're helping Indonesians get the most out of the internet. At Google for Indonesia we also announced a partnership with Telkom to expand Google Station, so it reaches more Indonesians with a network of fast, free and secure Wi-Fi points. We’ve launched Kormo, a career app that connects job seekers and employers to entry-level roles. And we’re deepening our commitment to protecting Indonesians online, announcing Stay Safer for Google Maps—a feature that lets people share their location with friends and family, and alerts them when their driver deviates from their chosen route by more than 500 meters.

With 152 million Indonesians online—and more joining them every day—there’s great potential for Indonesia to shape its future with new technologies, growing digital industries and jobs. It starts with expanding skills and opportunities more widely across the country—and we’re committed to playing our part. 

by Randy JusufGoogle Indonesia via The Keyword

Tools to help healthcare providers deliver better care

There has been a lot of interest around our collaboration with Ascension. As a physician, I understand. Health is incredibly personal, and your health information should be private to you and the people providing your care. 

That’s why I want to clarify what our teams are doing, why we’re doing it, and how it will help your healthcare providers—and you. 

Doctors and nurses love caring for patients, but aren’t always equipped with the tools they need to thrive in their mission. We have all seen headlines like "Why doctors hate their computers," with complaints about having to use "a disconnected patchwork" that makes finding critical health information like finding a needle in the haystack. The average U.S. health system has 18 electronic medical record systems, and our doctors and nurses feel like they are "data clerks" rather than healers. 

Google has spent two decades on similar problems for consumers, building products such as Search, Translate and Gmail, and we believe we can adapt our technology to help. That’s why we’re building an intelligent suite of tools to help doctors, nurses, and other providers take better care of patients, leveraging our expertise in organizing information. 

One of those tools aims to make health records more useful, more accessible and more searchable by pulling them into a single, easy-to-use interface for doctors. I mentioned this during my presentation last month at theHLTH Conference. Ascension is the first partner where we are working with the frontline staff to pilot this tool.

Google Health - Tools to help healthcare providers deliver better care

Google Health: Tools to help healthcare providers deliver better care

This effort is challenging. Health information is incredibly complex—there are misspellings, different ways of saying the same thing, handwritten scribbles, and faxes. Healthcare IT systems also don’t talk well to each other and this keeps doctors and nurses from taking the best possible care of you. 

Policymakers and regulators across the world (e.g., CMS, HHS, the NHS, and EC)have called this out as an important issue. We’ve committed to help, and it’s why we built this system on interoperable standards. 

To deliver such a tool to providers, the system must operate on patients' records. This is what people have been asking about in the context of our Ascension partnership, and why we want to clarify how we handle that data.

As we noted in an earlier post, our work adheres to strict regulations on handling patient data, and our Business Associate Agreement with Ascension ensures their patient data cannot be used for any other purpose than for providing our services—this means it’s never used for advertising. We’ve also published a white paper around how customer data is encrypted and isolated in the cloud. 

To ensure that our tools are safe for Ascension doctors and nurses treating real patients, members of our team might come into contact with identifiable patient data. Because of this, we have strict controls for the limited Google employees who handle such data:

• We develop and test our system on synthetic (fake) data and openly available datasets.

• To configure, test, tune and maintain the service in a clinical setting, a limited number of screened and qualified Google staff may be exposed to real data. These staff undergo HIPAA and medical ethics training, and are individually and explicitly approved by Ascension for a limited time.

• We have technical controls to further enhance data privacy. Data is accessible in a strictly controlled environment with audit trails—these controls are designed to prevent the data from leaving this environment and access to patient data is monitored and auditable.

• We will further prioritize the development of technology that reduces the number of engineers that need access to patient data (similar to our external redactiontechnology).

• We also participate in external certifications, like ISO 27001, where independent third-party auditors come and check our processes, including information security controls for these tools.

I graduated from medical school in 1989. I've seen tremendous progress in healthcare over the ensuing decades, but this progress has also brought with it challenges of information overload that have taken doctors’ and nurses’ attentions away from the patients they are called to serve. I believe technology has a major role to play in reversing this trend, while also improving how care is delivered in ways that can save lives. 

by Dr. David Feinberg via The Keyword