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A Big Tent for free expression in The Hague
December 8, 2011
Google has long worked hard to raise the issue of Internet freedom in Europe. So when the Dutch Foreign Minister Uri Rosenthal took the initiative to host a meeting bringing together foreign ministers from more than 16 countries in the Netherlands, we wondered what could we do to support it.
Our answer was to hook up with the Dutch NGO
Free Press Unlimited
and host one of our
Big Tent events
, which aim to bring together corporations, civil society and politicians. We were delighted when both U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Minister Rosenthal agreed to take part. Our Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt welcomed them to the Fokker Terminal in The Hague. “We are joined in a spirit to fight people who want to shut down free speech," he said. "It makes easy sense for a government to say: 'We don't like that...we're going to censor it'.” The conference, he said, was organized "to make the point that this is not right."
Secretary of State Clinton
called
on companies to protect Internet freedoms and stop selling technology that allows repressive governments to censor the net or spy on Internet users. She urged corporations to join Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and others in the
Global Network Initiative
to resist government efforts to impose filtering or censoring requirements. She also called on governments to fight attempts to impose national controls on the net. Any such attempt would contain people in a “series of digital bubbles rather than connecting them,” she said. "It is most urgent, of course, for those around the world whose words are now censored, who are imprisoned because of what they or others have written online, who are blocked from accessing entire categories of Internet content or who are being tracked by governments seeking to keep them from connecting with one another.”
Minister Uri Rosenthal called for legislation against exports of Internet surveillance material and promised 6 million euros to help Internet activists in repressive regimes. High-powered contributions came from the European Commissioner for the Digital Agenda
Neelie Kroes
, the Swedish Foreign Minister
Carl Bildt
and European parliamentarian
Marietje Schaake
.
A panel brought together business leaders and prominent human rights activists, including the Thai webmaster Chiranuch Premchaiporn, better known as
Jiew
, who faces trial over comments posted on her site that were deemed insulting to the monarchy.
The Hague is our third Big Tent (see highlights
here
), a place where we bring together various viewpoints to discuss essential topics to the future of the Internet. The format seems to be a hit, and we plan to hold more around the world in the coming months.
Posted by Rogier Klimbie, Policy Manager, Amsterdam
(Cross-posted on the
European Public Policy blog
and the
Public Policy blog
)
Gmail and Contacts get better with Google+
December 8, 2011
We want to bring you a great experience across all Google products which, for Gmail and Contacts, means understanding what you care about and delivering it instantly. With that in mind, we’re introducing some new integrations with Google+ that we think will make Gmail and Contacts even better. If you use Google+, you can now grow your circles, filter emails and contacts by circles, keep all your contact information up-to-date automatically and share photos to Google+, all right from Gmail and Contacts.
Grow your circles from your email
Now when you open an email from someone on Google+, you can see the most recent post they’ve shared with you on the right-hand side of the conversation. If they’re not in your circles yet, it’s easy to add them straight from Gmail.
Find information from the people you care about most
Looking for the info on an upcoming family holiday gathering but can't remember who sent it? If you've spent time building your Google+ circles, you can now quickly use them to filter your mail, saving yourself from having to sift through that pile of daily deal emails and newsletters. You can see messages from all of your circles at once or from each individual circle. And if you want, you can show circle names on emails in your inbox. Contacts can also be filtered by circles, making it easier to view your social connections.
Keep your contact information up-to-date automatically
Manually entering contact information can be a huge time drain—so let your circles do it for you. If your contacts have a Google profile, their contact entry in Gmail will be updated with the profile information they’ve shared with you, including phone numbers, email addresses and more. If they change it in the future, you’ll get those updates automatically. You can also make sure the people you care about have your most up-to-date contact information by updating your own Google profile and sharing it.
Share effortlessly without leaving your inbox
Lots of great images are sent through email, but sharing those photos with friends on Google+ used to require downloading the image from Gmail and re-uploading to your profile. Not anymore: Now you can share photo attachments with one quick click. The image(s) will be uploaded to your Google+ photos and be viewable only to the circles that you choose to share with.
We’ll be rolling out all of these changes out over the next few days to Gmail, Gmail Contacts and the “standalone” version of Google Contacts at
contacts.google.com
. Please note that Google Apps users won’t see the Contacts updates quite yet, but we’re actively working to make them available.
All of these features (and the more to come) are the result of the
great discussion
that we had on Google+ with users in July. If you want to join in discussions like these, add the
Gmail Google+ page
to your circles. And if you haven't signed up for Google+ and would like to try these new features, visit
this page
to get started.
Posted by Mark Striebeck, Engineering Director
Congratulations to three Googlers elected ACM Fellows
December 8, 2011
It gives me great pleasure to share that the
Association for Computing Machinery
(ACM) has
announced
that three Googlers have been elected ACM Fellows in 2011. The ACM is the world’s largest educational and scientific computing society, and the Fellows Program celebrates the exceptional contributions of leaders in the computing field. This year the society has selected
Amit Singhal
,
Peter S. Magnusson
and
Amin Vahdat
for their outstanding work, which has provided fundamental knowledge to the field.
The recently-named Fellows join 14
prior Googler ACM Fellows
and other professional society honorees in exemplifying our extraordinarily talented people. On behalf of Google, I congratulate our colleagues. They embody Google’s commitment to innovation with impact, and I hope that they’ll serve as inspiration to students as well as the broader community of computer scientists.
You can read more detailed summaries of their achievements below, including the official citations from the ACM.
Dr. Amit Singhal, Google Fellow
For contributions to search and information retrieval
Since 2000, Dr. Amit Singhal has been pioneering search as the technical lead for Google's core search algorithms. He is credited with most of the information retrieval design decisions in Google Search – a massive system that has responded to hundreds of billions of queries. More than anyone, Amit has a deep understanding of Google’s entire algorithmic system. He is responsible for prioritization and has overseen the development of numerous algorithmic signals and their progression over time. He is the clear thought and managerial leader who has led critically important initiatives at the company. Among many other things, Amit catalyzed Universal Search, which returns multi-modal results from all available corpora; he was the force behind Realtime Search, which returns results from dynamic corpora with low latency; and he championed Google Instant, which returns search results as the user types.
Prior to joining Google, Amit boasted a prolific publication record averaging 5 publications/year from 1996-9 while at AT&T Labs. Since that time, you could say Google Search has been one long, sustained publication demonstrating a constant advancement in the state of the art of information retrieval.
Peter S. Magnusson, Engineering Director
For contributions to full-system simulation
Peter has made a tremendous impact by driving full-system simulation. His approach was so advanced, it can be used in real world production of commercial CPUs and prototyping of system software. Starting in 1991, Peter began to challenge the notion that simulators could not be made fast enough to run large workloads, nor accurate enough to run commercial operating systems. His innovations in simulator design culminated in Simics, the first academic simulator that could boot and run commercial multiprocessor workloads. Simics saw huge academic success and has been used to run simulations for research presented in several hundred subsequent publications.
Peter founded Virtutech in 1998 to commercially develop Simics, and he ultimately forged and became the leader in a new market segment for software tools. With Peter at the helm, Virtutech pushed Simics beyond several performance barriers to make it the first simulator to exceed 1 billion instructions per second and the first simulator to model over 1,000 processors. Peter joined Google in 2010 to work with cloud computing.
Dr. Amin Vahdat, Principal Engineer
For contributions to data center scalability and management
Amin’s work made an impact at Google long before he arrived here. Amin is known for conducting research through bold, visionary projects that combine creativity with careful consideration of the engineering constraints needed to make them applicable in real world applications. Amin’s infrastructure ideas have underpinned the shift in the computing field from the pure client-server paradigm to a landscape in which major web services are hosted “in the cloud” across multiple data centers. In addition to pioneering “third-party cloud computing” through his work on WebOS and Rent-A-Server in the mid-90s, Amin has made important advancements in managing wide-area consistency between data centers, scalable modeling of data center applications, and building scalable data center networks.
Amin’s innovations have penetrated and broadly influenced the networking community within academia and industry, including Google, and his research has been recapitulated and expanded upon in a number of publications. Conferences that formerly did not even cover data centers now have multiple sessions covering variants of what Amin and his team have proposed. At Google, Amin continues to drive next-generation data center infrastructure focusing on Software Defined Networking and new opportunities from optical technologies. This is emblematic of Amin’s ability to build real systems, and perhaps more significantly, convince people of their value.
Posted by Alfred Spector, Google Research
Atmosphere 2011: A view from the cloud
December 7, 2011
Last month 350 CIOs and thousands of live stream viewers joined us for
Atmosphere 2011
, our annual cloud event. Leading companies from around the world came to explore how businesses are using the web to drive collaboration, innovation and growth in their organizations. In case you missed them, the keynotes are now available on our
YouTube channel
. You can watch the entire conference in order on the
Atmosphere playlist
.
This year’s speakers included a best-selling author, award-winning computer scientists, Google executives and product managers, and several
Google Apps
customers including Flint Waters, CIO of the state of
Wyoming
, Bryson Koehler, SVP of Global Revenue and Guest Technology at IHG, Michael O’Brien, CIO of
Journal Communications
and Christine Atkins, VP of Group IT at Ahold.
One of the highlights was listening to Christine Atkins talk about Ahold’s experience moving 55,000 users to Google Apps and how, in her words, “Google Apps is helping us deliver on the promise that we've all been seeking: that of strong collaboration platforms that help our company come together and work together.” You can watch Christine’s presentation here:
Posted by Chris Farinacci, Global Marketing Director, Google Enterprise
Saluting Europe’s eTowns
December 7, 2011
It’s often assumed that big cities benefit the most from the Internet, but we believe the net offers giant opportunities to everyone from urbanites to small town residents, farmers and nature lovers in the far-flung countryside. We recently tested this thesis in our first-ever European
Google eTown awards
, which recognize those areas that had most embraced the web’s potential over the last year.
The results were fascinating—and surprising. Smaller, quirky and plucky towns came out ahead.
Scunthorpe
, a steel town in the north of England, topped the U.K.’s list.
Caen
, a town in rural Normandy not far from the D-Day beaches and famed as the home of camembert cheese, came first in France.
Salerno
, nestled between the Amalfi and the Cilento Coast led the way in Italy and
Elbląg
, a remote northern town located in the region of 1,000 lakes won in Poland. In all four participating countries, eTown lists included towns of all sizes.
How did we determine our eTown awards? We broke down the U.K., France, Italy and Poland into all of their thousands of towns and then ranked local areas according to the growth in small businesses using AdWords over the last year. The top towns in each country won Google eTown awards.
The results back up recent research identifying the Internet as a main force driving growth throughout Europe. For example, a recent McKinsey report
Internet Matters
states that 2.6 Internet jobs are created globally for every job destroyed. Separately, the Boston Consulting Group estimates that by 2015 the web will account for 7.3 percent of Denmark’s GDP, 10 percent of the U.K.’s GDP and 5.5 percent of France’s GDP. The net drives growth of both big and small businesses—indeed another BCG report called “
Turning Local
” (PDF) makes clear that small businesses with a website grow faster than businesses without a web presence.
We’ve seen this ourselves, in the businesses of all shapes and sizes that we encountered as part of our eTown awards. An entrepreneur in
Hartlepool
in the U.K. sells golf balls online. A Polish programmer runs a data recovery business from
Piaseczno
. An plumber directs a
heating systems
company from Vicenza, Italy and a French retailer has reached new scooter customers online in
Reims
. Online advertising has helped them grow and reach more customers than ever before. When it comes to the Internet, our eTown awards show that anybody, almost anywhere, can boost a business by going online.
Posted by Ben Novick, European Communications Manager
Show your love for charities on Google+ this holiday season
December 7, 2011
We’ve been thrilled to see the ways nonprofit organizations use Google+ to raise awareness about their work, as well as the ways people connect with causes on Google+. In the past couple days, several entertainers have helped start a movement for this holiday season, drawing attention to their favorite charities on Google+ using the phrase
#CauseILoveEm
and creatively showing their followers what they love about these nonprofit organizations.
+Russell Brand
is asking fans to volunteer for two hours of charity work at
+Habitat for Humanity of Greater Los Angeles
,
+Los Angeles Animal Alliance
or one of four other local L.A. charities. In exchange, he and Sarah Silverman will give fans two hours of live comedy.
+Usher
and student participants in his New Look Leadership Academy asked people to do an international act of kindness and post descriptions of their acts including photos and videos as comments on
+Usher's New Look Foundation
. The acts with the most "+1"s will be re-posted by Usher and highlighted on the
New Look Foundation website
.
+Linkin Park
posted a new video asking people to spread about the word about
+Music For Relief
and their new
Power the World Give Light
campaign, which encourages people to donate to provide solar-powered light bulbs for families in Haiti without electricity. People who share
their website
online and drive the most clicks will be eligible to win prizes.
+Dolly Parton
and
+Dolly Parton's Imagination Library
, her early child literacy program that provides 700,000+ free books every month, are sharing
Champion Spotlight
stories about their community leaders and posting the 20 most inspiring
Imagination Moments
submitted by families who have benefited from this gift of reading.
Co-founder
+Hugh Jackman
and
+Laughing Man
Coffee & Tea asked people to share photos of themselves with Laughing Man's fair trade products (the profits of which go to charity) and to sound off on living their motto, "All Be Happy," using #CauseILoveEm to be included in a thank you photo album.
+Find Your Light Foundation
and
+Josh Groban
announced the
Fulfill-a-Wish
campaign, spotlighting the needs of nonprofit arts organizations from across North America in videos and posts, and asking for your help fulfilling these holiday wishes.
We hope you’ll join these folks and lots of others in the Google+ community who have already started sharing their favorite nonprofits this holiday season. Say which nonprofit you like and what you like about them in a public post using the phrase
#CauseILoveEm
and mentioning the nonprofit’s Google+ page by typing “+” and the nonprofit’s name. Be creative and post videos, images and stories that will convince others to love them too. Through the end of December on our
+Google for Nonprofits
page, we’ll re-share great examples of the ways people are recognizing their favorite nonprofits and highlight some nonprofits with which you might want to connect.
If the nonprofit you care about most isn’t yet on Google+, be sure to let them know about our
Google+ for Nonprofit community page
that they can use to get started and learn more. Thanks in advance for caring about these organizations and doing something small to help them grow and achieve their goals during the holiday season.
Posted by Mimi Kravetz, Google.org, Senior Product Marketing Manager
10 Billion Android Market downloads and counting
December 6, 2011
One billion is a pretty big number by any measurement. However, when it’s describing the
speed
at which something is growing, it’s simply amazing. This past weekend, thanks to Android users around the world,
Android Market
exceeded 10 billion app downloads—with a growth rate of one billion app downloads
per month
. We can’t wait to see where this accelerating growth takes us in 2012.
To celebrate this milestone, we partnered with some of the Android developers who contributed to this milestone to make a bunch of great Android apps available at an amazing price. Starting today for the next 10 days, we’ll have a new set of awesome apps available each day for only
10 cents each
. Today, we are starting with
Asphalt 6 HD
,
Color & Draw for Kids
,
Endomondo Sports Tracker Pro
,
Fieldrunners HD
,
Great Little War Game
,
Minecraft
,
Paper Camera
,
Sketchbook Mobile
,
Soundhound Infinity
and
SwiftKey X
.
Of course, none of these apps would have existed if it weren’t for the developers who created them. Every day, these developers continue to push the limits on what’s possible and delight us in the process. For that, we thank them.
Please join us in this 10-day celebration and check in every day to see what new apps our developer partners are making available on
Android Market
—for only a dime.
Posted by Eric Chu, Director, Android Developer Ecosystem
(Cross-posted on the
Mobile blog
and the
Android Developers blog
)
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