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Google+: Explore the world, right from the classroom
November 4, 2013
We all remember the days when we’d arrive at school, permission slips and bag lunches in tow, ready to venture forth on a field trip. Those were the days we waited for all year. Yet most field trips cost money, require lots of planning, and can only go as far as a school bus can take you.
Today we’re launching a new initiative on Google+ called
Connected Classrooms
that enables students around the world to take “virtual field trips” through Google+ Hangouts, visiting places they would otherwise never be able to explore. We’re kicking things off today with field trips to the
Seattle Aquarium
, the
Minnesota Zoo
and the
Solar Impulse
hangar. Later, teachers can sign up to take their classrooms on virtual field trips hosted by organizations like National Geographic, Matilda the Musical, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and more than 20 other partners.
Teachers are already using Google+ to make learning more relevant, collaborative and accessible—from
exploring a world-class art museum
to
staging a play
to
venturing into space
. Connected Classrooms aims to make it easier for teachers to access exciting educational content to share with their students. In addition to the virtual field trips, teachers who visit the Connected Classrooms site will have the opportunity to join a Google+ Community with other educators to collaborate on field trips and share best practices for using digital tools in the classroom.
If you’re a K-12 teacher, head over to the Connected Classrooms site and
learn how your classroom can participate
.
Posted by Lisa Jiang, Google+ Education Partnerships Lead
Android for all and the new Nexus 5
October 31, 2013
Just in time for Halloween, we have two new treats for Android fans. First, we're excited to unwrap our latest platform release, KitKat, which delivers a smarter, more immersive Android experience to even more people. And second, we're introducing Nexus 5—a new Nexus phone developed with LG.
The first thing you’ll notice about KitKat is we’ve made the experience much more engaging: the book you're reading, the game you're playing, or the movie you're watching—now all of these take center stage with the new immersive mode, which automatically hides everything except what you really want to see.
Bringing more Google smarts to Android
Behind the polish on the screen is the power under the hood. Take the Phone app, which for most people hasn’t really changed since the days of flip phones. Now, we’re making calling easier than ever, by helping you search across your contacts, nearby places, or even Google Apps accounts (like your company’s directory), directly from within the app. And with the
new Hangouts app
, all of your SMS and MMS messages are together in the same place, alongside your other conversations and video calls, so you’ll never miss a message no matter how your friends send it. This is just a small taste of KitKat—learn more on our
site
.
Google has always focused on helping users get immediate access to the information they need, and we want to bring this same convenience and power to users on Android. With the new Nexus 5 launcher, Google smarts are deeply integrated into the phone you carry around with you, so getting to the information you need is simple, easy and fast. Swipe once from the home screen to get Google Now literally at your fingertips. Put Google to work for you by saying “OK, Google” to launch voice search, send a text, get directions or even play a song you want to hear. And in the coming weeks, we’re enhancing Now with important new card types that bring you information about contextual topics that interest you such as updates from a favorite website or blog.
Reaching the next 1 billion users
Building a platform that makes mobile phones accessible for everyone has always been at the heart of Android. Until now, some lower-end Android phones couldn't benefit from more recent Android releases due to memory constraints. With KitKat, we've slimmed down Android’s memory footprint by doing things like removing unnecessary background services and reducing the memory consumption of features that you use all the time. We did this not only within Android but across Google services like Chrome and YouTube. RAM (or memory) is one of the most expensive parts of a phone, and now Android can run comfortably on the 512MB of RAM devices that are popular in much of the world, bringing the latest goodies in Android 4.4 within reach for the next billion smartphone users.
Introducing Nexus 5
Along with our
sweet naming tradition
, we also introduce a new device with each platform release to showcase the latest Android innovations. For KitKat, we partnered with LG to develop Nexus 5 -- the slimmest and fastest Nexus phone ever made. Its design is simple and refined to showcase the 5” Full HD display. Nexus 5 also keeps you connected at blazing speeds with 4G/LTE and ultra fast wifi. The advanced new lens on Nexus 5 captures more light for brighter night and sharper action shots. And with optical image stabilization, you no longer have to worry about shaky hands and blurry pictures. A new HDR+ mode automatically snaps a rapid burst of photos and combines them to give you the best possible single shot. Learn more on our
site
.
Nexus 5 is available today, unlocked and without a contract, on
Google Play
in the U.S., Canada, U.K., Australia, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Japan and Korea (and coming soon to India), starting at $349. Just in the time for the holidays, Nexus 5 will be available soon at the following retailers: Sprint, T-Mobile, Amazon, Best Buy and RadioShack.
Android 4.4, KitKat, which comes on Nexus 5, will also soon be available on Nexus 4, 7, 10, the Samsung Galaxy S4 and HTC One Google Play edition devices in the coming weeks.
How’s that for a treat?
Posted by Sundar Pichai, SVP, Android, Chrome & Apps
How not to get tricked: Your favorite online safety tips
October 31, 2013
Whether it’s defending yourself from identity thieves or removing bad software from your family’s computer, it’s important to know how to stay safe online. Over the course of the past few months, we’ve explored
the simple steps you can take
to help keep yourself, your family and the web safer. And in celebration of October's National Cyber Security Awareness Month, for the past 30 days we’ve posted a daily tip on how to
#staysafe
online.
Even though our favorite month of the year is about to end, it’s good to know how to stay safe all year round. Here are the top five most popular tips from the month:
Add 2-step verification to keep the bad guys out of your Google account.
Use a password to secure your router.
Avoid malware—review permissions and ratings before installing a new app.
Think before you share.
Learn how to locate and remote wipe your mobile device in case it’s lost or stolen.
Security and privacy are important and Google provides
tools
to help you protect yourself and your information. For example,
2-Step Verification
adds another layer of security to your Google Account.
Google+ Circles
and
YouTube settings
help you control what you share and keep your information private if you want to keep it to yourself.
Verify Apps
helps protect your phone from malware, and
Android Device Manager
will ring your phone and locate it on a map to help you find your device if you lose it (and remotely delete your information from the device if you can’t get it back).
For more information on how to stay safe and improve your online security and privacy, visit our
Good to Know site
, which has more information and details about Google’s tools and helpful advice on staying safe.
Posted by Diana Smetters, Software Engineer
Google+ Hangouts and Photos: save some time, share your story
October 29, 2013
We could all use more time for ourselves, and less time figuring out technology. So today's improvements to Google+ Hangouts and Photos aim to take a lot of the work out of messaging, video calling and photo editing.
Hangouts
Hangouts enable conversations among close friends, as well as broadcasts with the entire world. Today we're improving both:
Hangouts for Android now supports
location sharing and SMS
. This way you can send a map of your current location (vs. finding and typing an address), and you can send and receive SMS (vs. switching between apps).
Animated GIFs
also play inline.
Broadcasters can now
schedule Hangouts On Air
, then promote them with a
dedicated watch page
. Once you're live,
Control Room
lets you moderate the conversation with eject and remote mute.
In both cases, the video calling experience is significantly improved. It's now
full screen
across mobile and desktop, and it
fixes and enhances webcam lighting
automatically.
From left to right: location sharing; SMS support; and animated GIFs
From left to right: schedule your Hangout On Air; promote it with a dedicated watch page; and moderate the conversation with Control Room
From left to right: video call before lighting fixes; video call after lighting fixes
The Android app and video calling features will be available in a few days, while the On Air improvements will roll out over the next few weeks.
Photos and videos
Photos and videos capture life's most precious moments, but it’s way too hard to save, organize, edit and share your stuff. Google+ can make things easier, automatically.
For starters,
full size backups and background sync
are coming soon to Google+ for iOS. This way you can backup your photos as you take them.
In addition,
finding your photos is actually fun
. We now recognize over a thousand different objects—from sunsets to snowmen—so you can just type what you’re looking for, and find matching items in your library.
Auto Enhance improves each photo you add to Google+, and now you can now
dial the enhancements up or down
. If you’re already processing your images elsewhere, you can choose to
exempt an album entirely
.
If you like to edit on the go, then you’ll enjoy Snapseed and its new
HDR Scape
filter. While high dynamic range (HDR) imaging requires multiple photos to create its effect, HDR Scape can deliver similar results with a single tap.
We’re also adding
Analog Efex Pro
to the Nik Collection (still just $149). With it you can reimagine your images using classic cameras and processing methods—from toy and medium format to wet plate and vintage.
From left to right: photo searches for "beach", "sunset" and "snow"
From left to right: original image; Auto Enhance at "normal"; Auto Enhance at "high"
From left to right: original image; image enhanced with Snapseed HDR Scape
Auto Awesome can help bring your story to life in creative ways. Today we’re adding three new techniques:
Action.
Maybe it’s your child’s first gymnastic meet, or you’re skateboarding with a friend. Action can take their tumble or half pipe trick, and create a strobe-effect photograph.
Eraser.
When you’re taking pictures of landmarks, people and cars often get in the way. Eraser can take a sequence of these photos, and erase whatever’s moving to give you a “cleaner” image.
Movie.
Movie produces highlight reels from your photos and videos—complete with effects, transitions and a soundtrack—automatically. You can share the movie as is, or dive into the editing process to customize even further.
From left to right: sequence of action shots; Auto Awesome Action
From left to right: sequence of images with people in the way; Auto Awesome Eraser
All of today’s photo and video improvements will be available this week. Auto Awesome Movie works on certain devices with Android 4.3+, but all the other app features are widely supported.
With 540 million people active across Google each month, 300 million people active in just the stream and more than 1.5 billion photos uploaded every week, the Google+ community is growing faster than we ever could have imagined. Today’s updates are our way of saying “thank you”—we hope they save you time, and help you share your story.
Posted by
+Vic Gundotra
, Senior Vice President
New free expression tools from Google Ideas
October 21, 2013
As long as people have expressed ideas, others have tried to silence them. Today
one out of every three
people lives in a society that is severely censored. Online barriers can include everything from filters that block content to targeted attacks designed to take down websites. For many people, these obstacles are more than an inconvenience—they represent full-scale repression.
This week, in partnership with the
Council on Foreign Relations
and the
Gen Next Foundation
, Google Ideas—our “think/do tank”—is hosting a summit in New York entitled “Conflict in a Connected World.”
The summit brings together “hacktivists,” security experts, entrepreneurs, dissidents and others to explore the changing nature of conflict and how online tools and can both harm and protect. We’re also assessing what might be done to better protect people confronting online censorship. With our partners, we will launch several new products and initiatives designed to help:
Project Shield
is an initiative that enables people to use Google’s technology to better protect websites that might otherwise have been taken offline by “distributed denial of service” (DDoS) attacks. We’re currently inviting webmasters serving independent news, human rights, and elections-related content to apply to
join
our next round of trusted testers.
The
Digital Attack Map
is a live data visualization, built through a collaboration between Arbor Networks and Google Ideas, that maps DDoS attacks designed to take down websites—and their content—around the globe. This tool shows real-time anonymous traffic data related to these attacks on free speech, and also lets people explore historic trends and see related news reports of outages happening on a given day.
uProxy
is a new browser extension under development that lets friends provide each other with a trusted pathway to the web, helping protect an Internet connection from filtering, surveillance or misdirection. The
University of Washington
and
Brave New Software
developed the tool, which was seeded by Google Ideas. To learn more about the challenges uProxy aims to address, watch our
video
.
Information technologies have transformed conflict in our connected world, and access to the free flow of information is increasingly critical. This week’s summit—as well as Shield, the Digital Attack Map and uProxy—are all steps we’re taking to help those fighting for free expression around the globe.
Posted by Jared Cohen, Director, Google Ideas
Google Media Tools: a new intersection for newsgathering
October 21, 2013
The New York Times used Google+ Hangouts to
interview U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry
about Syria’s chemical weapons. The Weather Channel used Google Earth to illustrate the damage of
Superstorm Sandy
through dramatic before and after satellite images and live YouTube video. And Svenska Dagbladet used the Google Maps API and crowdsourced information from readers to
plot disparities in neighborhood mortgage rates
, generating a meaningful debate in Sweden.
These are just a handful of ways journalists around the world are already using the Internet and Google tools to report the news, visualize data and improve their storytelling capabilities. To continue helping journalists report the news in new and compelling ways, we’ve launched
Google Media Tools
, a centralized hub aimed at empowering journalists of all skill levels with more ways to connect with their audiences and communities.
The site—which we unveiled last week at
Online News Association ‘13 (ONA)
, a premier digital journalism conference—features a variety of ways to do everything from research to developing to publishing. There are many tips and tricks to make technology do some of the heavy lifting in the daily lives of journalists. The site also showcases the power of the Internet overall in reaching new audiences and giving journalists more ways to make an impact.
We’ll add more resources including case studies, tutorials and expanded content in the coming months, and will soon launch the site in other languages as well.
Posted by Daniel Sieberg, Head of Media Outreach at Google
Leaving a lasting legacy with help from Google
October 18, 2013
Last year Andrew Willis used Search and Maps to turn his love for skateboarding into something that could bring a community together: his skatepark, Frontside Gardens. Here is his story.
-Ed.
Andrew (“Andy” to his friends) has been a passionate skateboarder for as long as he can remember. To make his dream of building a skatepark for his community come true, in 2012 Andy entered a competition to lease a piece of land in Hackney Wick, in East London. He won—then realized he had no budget to build his dream.
Using Search and Maps, Andrew found a wealth of reclaimed materials in the area. From screws to planks of wood to sheets of ply, he sourced his skatepark materials from local suppliers and businesses. An engineering graduate, he also used YouTube to learn how to use new materials, like marble. The result: an empty building site turned into a thriving community skatepark—Frontside Gardens.
For Hackney Wick families and kids, Frontside Gardens is more than a skatepark. Built by hand from scratch, it’s a place to enjoy a sunny day, learn new skills and make the most of what they've got together. For Andrew, it’s a place to pass down the things he's learned over the years and in doing so, creating a legacy all his own.
Posted by Steve Vranakis, Creative Lab
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