GetPopularSoftware

For an example of a harmonious, multicultural society, look no further than Singapore, where people of different ethnicities, religious backgrounds, and who speak varying languages live and work together peacefully. It’s a remarkable achievement — one of Singapore’s great strengths as a global hub for trade, travel and technology. It’s also something that all of us in Singapore have to work hard to preserve. At Google, and YouTube, we’re committed to doing everything we can to promote and celebrate Singapore’s diversity — and to protect it from threats. Today, in collaboration with the Ministry of Culture, Community and Youth, we’re kicking off a series of workshops developed with Ministry of Funny . The aim is to help creators from local interfaith groups and religious organizations start meaningful discussions on issues of online extremism and hate, while fostering awareness, tolerance and empathy. Participants in the workshops will learn the basics of video production, content s...

Ninety-six years ago on April 30th, one of the original highways in the U.S. Highway System was assigned its numerical designation of 66, creating what we know today as Route 66. But to say Route 66 is just a highway is a grave understatement. After all, it is the most-searched U.S. highway of all time. One of the perks of working as a Doodler (I promise, it’s a real job) was getting to drive the 2,448-mile journey from Chicago to Los Angeles in my ‘72 Chevelle. I got to experience this captivating road trip firsthand, to create a Doodle celebrating Route 66. This Doodle, which is essentially an animated sketchbook of various historic spots along the route, is the product of more than 100 paintings and sketches I created from the side of the road and countless U-turns. I remember being utterly lost one day, driving further and further down an old dirt road, when I finally saw an old man sitting on a lawn mower. “Is this Route 66?” I enquired. “Boy, this isn’t even Route 6!” he resp...

As many people start returning to the office, we know there’s a lot to (re)figure out — like what to wear on the first day back, how long your commute will take and how to stay productive . So we’re sharing some tips for getting back into the office groove with a little help from Google products. Rebuild a routine Google Assistant Routines can help you automate tasks so you have less to do and think about before you head to work. Just say "Hey Google, good morning" and your Assistant can share news, weather or traffic updates, tell you what’s on your calendar, and even get your smart coffee maker started on your morning brew. You can create a Routine based on a specific schedule or when the sun rises or sets every day. Commute with confidence Whether you usually hop on public transit, get behind the wheel or hit the pavement, your commute may have changed since the pandemic — or, like me, you might have just forgotten how long it takes. Check Google Maps to f...

Let’s say you make cat posters, and you want to sell them online. You can create a website, but you need to host it online so people can access it. A server hosts the code that lets customers select which cat poster they want, and then buy it. Another server hosts the database of your inventory, which tells you which posters are available to purchase, and it also hosts the image files to show customers pictures of the posters. Now imagine your posters go viral online, and are incredibly popular. Everyone is interested in going to your website — and that means you need more servers to keep your website up and running. And that server can’t be on your computer, because imagine what happens if you have a power outage, or your computer crashes? That’s where the cloud comes in — hosting your website on the cloud lets you just focus on the cat posters. But for someone who’s not an engineer, this stuff can get confusing. I’m a senior developer advocate at Google Cloud, and I’m also an ar...

Nicolette Mashile wanted to find a more fulfilling career. So in 2016, she resigned from her job as a Client Service Director at a Johannesburg advertising agency. But quitting meant Nicolette was forced to stick to a stricter budget. She began sharing her money-saving tips on YouTube and it wasn’t long before she noticed her advice resonated with African viewers. Eventually, this South African content creator built a significant following for her candid take on money management, and was invited to join the #YouTubeBlackVoices Creator Class of 2021. This in turn helped her Financial Bunny YouTube channel garner almost 9 million views. “I was very frank about money management, how to effectively budget and how to plan your spending. When I saw my YouTube following growing, I knew this personal finance advice was making a real impact and I committed to improving financial literacy in South Africa,” Nicolette says. This meant finding creative ways to make financial literacy more in...

Online violence against women goes beyond the internet. It impacts society and the economy at large. It leads to damaging economic repercussions, due to increased medical costs and lost income for victims. It impacts the offline world, with seven percent of women changing jobs due to online violence, and one in ten experiencing physical harm due to online threats, according to Google-supported research conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit in 2020. That’s why the Women Techmakers program, which provides visibility, community and resources for women in technology, supports online safety education for women and allies. Google community manager Merve Isler, who lives in Turkey and leads Women Techmakers efforts in Turkey, Central Asia and the Caucasus region, organized the first-ever women’s online safety hackathon in Turkey in 2020 , which expanded to a full week of trainings and ideathons in 2021 . Google community manager and Women Techmakers manager Hufsa Manawar brought o...

Technology has always been a huge part of my life. Growing up in the nineties and early noughties, I can’t remember a time without it. From chunky flip phones and CDs, to newer, sleeker gadgets with all sorts of capabilities, technology has changed rapidly and remarkably in my lifetime alone. But, despite growing up around tech, I — like lots of my female peers — never really felt I could be involved in creating it. This needs to change. Technology can be made by anyone, and is for everyone. We need to make sure that girls and young women have the opportunity to pursue an interest in STEM subjects. That’s why, as a Ranger and Young Leader within Girlguiding, I’m really excited about Girlguiding’s newly expanded programme with Google which will give nearly 400,000 Rainbows, Brownies, Guides and Rangers more opportunities to learn digital skills for their future. Girls feel STEM is not for them To encourage more girls and young women to pursue STEM subjects, we nee...

The global internet began with an incredible promise: a shared resource that everyone could access wherever they lived. Over the last few years, this ideal has been strained to the breaking point as governments around the world have adopted conflicting regulations that are fragmenting the internet to the detriment of people everywhere. That’s why it’s great to see countries coming together today to launch the Declaration for the Future of the Internet (DFI). Through this effort, allies across the public and private sectors will work together to protect the importance of the global web, including by opposing shutdowns and other “efforts to splinter the global Internet.” Digital fragmentation impacts everyone using the internet. As conflicting regulations proliferate, people’s access to content, privacy protections, and freedom to transact and communicate increasingly vary depending on where they are located. Digital fragmentation has become a significant barrier to internat...

Over the years, Google has worked to ensure that the United States patent system continued to spur new inventions and technologies. A healthy patent system incentivizes and rewards the most original and creative inventors — while helping others build on existing ideas and avoiding frivolous litigation. Supporting that balanced approach, we were one of the first companies to pledge not to sue any user, distributor, or developer of open-source software on specified patents, unless first attacked. We helped found the License on Transfer (LOT) Network, which shields its members from being sued over patents that other members have sold to patent trolls. And we worked in collaboration with others to create a repository of hard-to-find “prior art” documents to improve the patenting process, resulting in higher quality patents. We have also invested heavily in patenting our engineers’ inventions in advanced technologies. Our tens of thousands of engineers have authored over 42,000 ho...

Privacy and online safety go hand in hand. And when you’re using the internet, it’s important to have control over how your sensitive, personally identifiable information can be found. On Google Search, we already have a set of policies that allow people to request the removal of certain content from Search, with a focus on highly personal content that, if public, can cause direct harm to people. But the internet is always evolving – with information popping up in unexpected places and being used in new ways — so our policies and protections need to evolve, too. Open access to information is a key goal of Search, but so is empowering people with the tools they need to protect themselves and keep their sensitive, personally identifiable information private. That’s why we’re updating our policies to help people take more control of their online presence in Search. Request the removal of personally identifiable information that appears in Google Search For many year...

There’s been an uptick in home-cooked meals in my life over the past couple of years. (Quarantine cooking, anyone?) As my cooking increased, so did the food scraps. And while using my trusty compost bin has kept most of my unused food from heading to the landfill, I’ve made it a goal to get more scrappy with my cooking to cut back on food waste. Finding creative ways to reduce food waste is something that teams at Google have been thinking about for years — especially with its recent pledges to cut food waste in half for each Googler and send zero food waste to the landfill by 2025 . If they can figure out how to work with suppliers, chefs and Googlers to reduce food waste across offices in 170 cities — surely they could help me do the same in my kitchen. So for Stop Food Waste Day , I chatted with the chef behind Google’s food program, Michael Kann, to hear what Google is doing to cut back on food waste and learn tricks the rest of us can adopt at home — including scrappy recipes s...

Engineer Darren Smith remembers the day that Google Drive launched in 2012. “We were all in a conference room, sort of like a war room,” he says. “We all cheered when the first user was live with Drive!" And just like that, Drive was...well, alive. (Fun fact: The team who launched it actually had “It exists” shirts made.) Drive was originally available via invite only when it was first rolling out. “We were all given tokens — sort of like digital passes — that we could share with family and friends,” says Darren. “It was really fun to see people finally using this thing we’d been working on for so long.” It’s hard to remember a time before you could save files from Gmail directly to Drive, but it was only a short while ago: Attachments in Gmail were introduced in 2013, saving us all from that agonizing experience of downloading file after file after file. You can store a lot in Google Drive — but maybe you don’t know how much. Ahem, a few numbers that may surpris...

Editor’s Note from Ludovic Blecher, Head of Google News Initiative Innovation: The GNI Innovation Challenge program is designed to stimulate forward-thinking ideas for the news industry. The story below by Gabriel Kahn, professor at USC Annenberg School of Journalism, is part of an innovator series sharing inspiring stories and lessons from funded projects. One year ago, our team at the University of Southern California started the Crosstown Neighborhood Data Project. Rapidly expanding news deserts - areas that receive no regular news coverage - can be seen across the US. Small town newspapers are drying up, and toxic “pink-slime” pseudo journalism is seeping in. These news deserts are growing even in big cities. Los Angeles has lost four local papers recently, and so many neighborhoods are overlooked by the news outlets that remain. That is why we started covering every corner of Los Angeles with a four-person editorial team. It sounds impossible, but it’s not. Here’s...

We work hard to keep Google Play a safe , trusted space for people to enjoy the latest Android apps. Today, we’re launching a new feature, the Data safety section, where developers will be required to give people more information about how apps collect, share and secure users’ data. Users will start seeing the Data safety section in Google Play today, and developers are required to complete this section for their apps by July 20th. As app developers update their functionality or change their data handling practices, they will show the latest in the apps’ Data safety section. A unified view of app safety in Google Play We heard from users and app developers that displaying the data an app collects, without additional context, is not enough. Users want to know for what purpose their data is being collected and whether the developer is sharing user data with third parties. In addition, users want to understand how app developers are securing user data after an app is downloaded. That’...

Two years ago, as many of us were thrown into remote work, I wrote a blog post about tips for working from home. Now, as many of us find ourselves returning to the office or preparing to do so soon, I wanted to talk about a few ways we can transition productively to (yet another) new (er, maybe old?) working environment where some of us are in the office, some aren’t…or some combination of the above. Here are my top 10 tips for being productive in a hybrid work environment: Make sure people know where you are . Nothing screams inefficiency more than hundreds of emails and calendar invites (and invite changes) where everyone is trying to figure out who is where, when and on what days. Take the guesswork out of it by setting your working location and your working hours in Calendar, and RSVP to meetings with your location . Add other responsibilities to Google Calendar. Do you have commute time? School drop off? Moving to a different office campus mid-day? Add it to your Calenda...

Before COVID-19, the countries of Southeast Asia were some of the world’s most popular travel destinations. The pandemic changed that in a matter of months — with devastating repercussions for the region’s $380 billion tourism industry . In early 2022, though, the tide started to turn again. Southeast Asian nations have eased travel restrictions, and the region’s travelers are eager to make up for lost time. They’re committed to traveling more frequently, open to new destinations, and determined to make the most of the opportunities that are now opening up. To understand these travelers’ preferences and expectations — and the opportunity that resurgent demand creates for the region’s tourism operators — we took a closer look at some recent Google Search trends. Resurgent demand In Southeast Asia, inbound travel demand – visits by non-residents to a country – has experienced the fastest upturn in the Philippines and Indonesia, based on search volumes. In March, inbound demand for t...