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Showing posts from September, 2020

Help for retailers and shoppers in Asia Pacific

Retailers have played a vital role in Asia Pacific’s response to COVID-19, battling through a tough economic environment while serving their customers and communities, providing essential products and services, and supporting jobs.  As more of the region’s businesses turn to ecommerce, we’ve been focused on supporting them in every way we can —including helping retailers list their products online for free. We’ve been doing this in India and Indonesia since 2019, and now we’re extending similar support across the broader region: making it free for merchants in Asia Pacific to list their products on the Google Shopping tab.   For retailers, this change means free exposure to millions of people who come to Google every day for their shopping needs, regardless of whether they advertise on Google. For shoppers, it means more products from more stores, discoverable through the Google Shopping tab. For advertisers, it means paid campaigns can now be augmented with free ...

Say goodbye to hold music

Sometimes, a phone call is the best way to get something done. We call retailers to locate missing packages, utilities to adjust our internet speeds, airlines to change our travel itineraries...the list goes on. But more often than not, we need to wait on hold during these calls—listening closely to hold music and repetitive messages—before we reach a customer support representative who can help. In fact, people in the United States spent over 10 million hours on hold with businesses last week. Save time with Hold for Me Hold for Me, our latest Phone app feature, helps you get that time back, starting with an early preview on Pixel 5 and Pixel 4a (5G) in the U.S. Now, when you call a toll-free number and a business puts you on hold, Google Assistant can wait on the line for you. You can go back to your day, and Google Assistant will notify you with sound, vibration and a prompt on your screen once someone is on the line and ready to talk. That means you’ll spend more time doing w...

A new, more helpful editor in Google Photos

Whether it’s a daily selfie or a #throwbackthursday photo, we all want our photos to look great before we share them. For some, that might mean getting the lighting or crop just right. Or maybe it means achieving a look that perfectly reflects your own personal style. Today, we’re rolling out a new, more helpful editor in the Google Photos app on Android with smart suggestions and easy-to-use granular adjustments, so your photos look their very best. A little help to make your photos shine Google Photos already helps you get the most of your photos by providing helpful suggestions like brightening, rotating or archiving a picture while you're viewing it. Now, we’re building off that idea and applying it to the editor to make editing easy—with Google Photos doing most of the heavy lifting. We’ve added a new tab right in the editor that uses machine learning to give you suggestions that are tailored to the specific photo you’re editing.  These suggestions help you get stunning...

Google TV: Entertainment you love, with help from Google

In today’s golden age of television, there are seemingly limitless options for you to enjoy at home—that binge-worthy show, the big game or the latest blockbuster movie. But with more choices than ever, it can take a long time just to find something to watch. That’s why we made Google TV —a new entertainment experience designed to help you easily browse and discover what to watch—available first on the new Chromecast with Google TV . An experience that’s tailored for you The new Google TV experience brings together movies, shows, live TV and more from across your apps and subscriptions and organizes them just for you. To build this, we studied the different ways people discover media—from searching for a specific title to browsing by genre—and created an experience that helps you find what to watch. We also made improvements to Google’s Knowledge Graph, which is part of how we better understand and organize your media into topics and genres, from movies about space travel to real...

Pixel 4a (5G) and Pixel 5 pack 5G speeds and so much more

Pixel 4a (5G) and Pixel 5 are here, packing more helpful Google features into phones backed by the power and speeds of 5G 1 . From Google’s latest AI and Assistant features, to the biggest ever batteries we’ve put in a Pixel, to industry-leading camera features, Pixel 4a (5G) and Pixel 5 join our much loved Pixel 4a in providing more help at a more helpful price.  5G speeds at affordable prices 5G is the latest in mobile technology, bringing fast download and streaming speeds to users around the world. Whether you’re downloading the latest movie 2 , listening to your favorite music on YouTube Music, catching up on podcasts with Google Podcast or playing a game on Stadia, Pixel 4a (5G) and Pixel 5 will provide you with fast speeds 1 . YouTube, YouTube Music and Google Podcasts on Pixel 4a (5G) and Pixel 5 also give you access to the content you want when you don't have connectivity by pre-downloading content via 5G when you don’t have WiFi connectivity 1 .  For more in...

Our best Chromecast yet, now with Google TV

Chromecast changed the way we enjoy our favorite movies, TV shows and YouTube videos by making it easy and inexpensive to bring your online entertainment to your TV—a revolutionary idea in 2013. Today, we have more content choices than ever, sprinkled across an ever-expanding variety of apps...which can make it difficult to find what to watch. This inspired us to rethink what simple and easy content discovery on your TV should look like. So today, we're making our biggest leap yet to help you navigate your entertainment choices with the all-new Chromecast with Google TV.  Best Chromecast yet Chromecast with Google TV has your favorite Chromecast features and now comes with the all-new Google TV entertainment experience. Google TV experience brings together movies, shows, live TV and more from across your apps and subscriptions and organizes them just for you. We're also bringing our most requested feature—a remote—to Chromecast. A new look, inside and out The...

Made for music, the new Nest Audio is here

This year, we’ve all spent a lot of time exploring things to do at home. Some of us gardened, and others baked. We tried at-home workouts, or took up art projects. But one thing that many—maybe all of us—did? Enjoyed a lot of music at home. I’ve spent so much more time listening to music during quarantine—bossa nova is my go-to soundtrack for doing the dishes and Lil Baby has become one of my favorite artists.  We worked with Kelton Research and found that over the past five months, Americans increased the amount of time they spend listening to music at home by 61 percent, and many people nearly doubled the amount of time they spend jamming out at home. So, given we’re all listening to more music than ever, we’re especially excited to introduce Nest Audio , our latest smart speaker made for music lovers. A music machine Nest Audio is 75 percent louder and has 50 percent stronger bass than the original Google Home—measurements of both devices were taken in an anechoic chamber ...

Founded: A new podcast focuses on women who lead

When women-led businesses are supported, funded and have the opportunity to scale, the economy grows. We recently supported a research report on women entrepreneurs in the U.S. from Endeavor Insight which showed that in 2017, more than 1.1 million women-led businesses generated nearly $1.5 billion in revenue and created more than 10 million jobs.  The report goes on to highlight that if businesses founded by women grow to employ 50 or more people, they can potentially generate over 4 million new jobs and add over $500 billion in additional productivity each year to national GDP. Despite this, many industries, including the technology sector,  still continue to face significant gaps in gender parity. In 2019, only 2.8 percent of all VC funding went to women tech founders.  Women founders deserve visibility and recognition, which is why Women Techmakers and Google for Startups joined forces to create a new podcast series called Founded. The podcast, built upon the o...

How The Trevor Project continues to support LGBTQ youth

This September, National Suicide Prevention Awareness Month feels different. Over the past nine months, LGBTQ youth have experienced unique challenges in relation to COVID-19. The pandemic has amplified existing mental health disparities and created new problems that have impacted the daily lives of many LGBTQ youth.  As the world's largest suicide prevention and crisis intervention organization for LGBTQ young people, The Trevor Project has seen the volume of youth reaching out to our crisis services for support increase significantly, at times double our pre-COVID volume. We’ve heard from a great number of youth who no longer have access to their usual support systems, including many who have been forced to confine in unsupportive home environments. The unprecedented crisis of 2020 has reaffirmed the need for increased mental health support for LGBTQ youth, particularly as we’ve ventured into a more virtual world.  From transitioning our physical call center operations ...

Powering economic recovery through retail

Progetto Quid is a small fashion business in Verona, Italy that provides employment opportunities for women coming out of difficult situations. When the company closed its stores during the lockdown, it  started making non-medical masks,  safeguarding its business and the future of its workers. Within two months they’d sold 700,000 masks, using Google Ads to reach their customers. As a result of switching production they were able to retain their entire staff. This is just one of many stories of resilience we’ve heard from businesses small and large as they look to sustain themselves and support their communities. At Google, we’re helping retailers accelerate recovery with training, tools and insights to help them adapt fast. Through September we ran Accelerating Retail , a month of training and collaboration, directly engaging with more than 7,500 retailers across Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and many more in partnership with industry bodies such as HDE in Germany...

The shift to distance learning in Asia Pacific

When I was growing up in Serbia, there was only one small school in my village, and we often shared a classroom with the grade above us. The teacher would focus on my classmates and me for a couple of minutes, before turning his attention to the older students on the other side of the room. I can’t imagine how difficult that must have been—but somehow, he made it work, kept our classes fun and engaging, and gave us all the best possible education. I’ve thought about that experience a lot over the past few months, seeing how teachers and students around the world have struggled to keep learning going during the COVID-19 pandemic.  Technology has made it easier to teach online—but not all communities have the same access to digital tools, or the same ability to use them. It’s one of the main reasons we launched Google.org’s $10 million Distance Learning Fund : an initiative to help educators and students get the resources they need, especially in underserved communities....

Tribal schools embrace distance learning with Google tools

In the United States, there are 574 federally recognized tribal nations. Collectively they are referred to as “Indian Country,” but there is tremendous diversity among the tribes. Each has its own unique history, geography, culture and economy, as well as its own opportunities and challenges.  Far too often, we only hear about challenges facing these tribal nations and rarely hear about the solutions tribes create. In response, the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development founded Honoring Nations, a national awards program that spotlights success in tribal governance. Since 1998, Honoring Nations has awarded 136 tribal governance programs from over 100 tribal nations, highlighting key lessons that other governments, both Native and non-Native, can adapt for themselves. By sharing these lessons, we are changing the conversation from what isn’t working to what is. We also facilitate the sharing of practical tools to improve the strength and vitality of Indian Count...

Web Creator Spotlight | Stuart Schuffman

Stuart Schuffman, a.k.a. Broke-Ass Stuart, is a globetrotting superblogger who has built his brand around the idea that you don’t actually need tons of money to enjoy yourself. Since the early 2000s he’s made it his mission to uncover hidden gems in his hometown of San Francisco and in cities like New York, San Diego, Detroit, Austin, and all over Europe as a longtime stringer for the backpacker’s bible, “Lonely Planet.”  Over the years Stuart has published a handful of top-selling urban adventure guides dedicated to “busboys, poets, social workers, students, artists, musicians, magicians, mathematicians, maniacs, yodelers, and everyone else out there who wants to enjoy life not as a rich person, but as a real person.” But to call Stuart a travel writer is to sell him short. He’s a web creator—a TV show host, marketer, social media manager, editor, writer, and publisher all wrapped into one.  Launched in 2009, his website Brokeassstuart.com has grown from a local’s guide...