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Google for Entrepreneurs goes to San Diego to empower veterans and military families
August 17, 2012
In addition to all they do for their country overseas, service members are also a markedly entrepreneurial group: although veterans represent only 6% of the U.S. population, they account for an impressive 13.5% of all U.S. small business owners. This entrepreneurial spirit is contributing to business growth around the country, and last week we decided to head down to San Diego to see how Google for Entrepreneurs and
Startup Weekend
could help.
On August 9, Google for Entrepreneurs, along with the
Syracuse University Institute for Veterans and Military Families
and Startup Weekend, hosted a series of events focused on giving business owners and aspiring entrepreneurs from the military community the training and tools they need to take advantage of the web to build and grow businesses. More than 200 service members learned about free tools to
create a web site
, track and measure their web presence and market their product or service.
Engaged and full of pride, the veteran-owned businesses and aspiring entrepreneurs came from across California. Misty Birchall, a Navy veteran and founder of
PubCakes
, delighted attendees when she gave us a taste of her passion for combining baking and craft beer. Marine Corps sergeant turned organic farmer Colin Archipley brought many participants from
Veterans Sustainable Agriculture Training
, an entrepreneurial incubator program he founded to help transitioning veterans train for careers in sustainable agriculture. Even the underdogs (and undercats) were well-represented—
Precious Paw Prints
, an online retailer selling creative pet accessories owned by Marine veteran Kiersten Carlin, shared that small business can win by providing a higher level of quality and service that larger brands cannot.
Over the following weekend, aspiring entrepreneurs from the veterans community attended the local Startup Weekend, where they formed teams to turn their idea ideas into products. By Sunday night, five teams had launched businesses.
Being a successful entrepreneur means having an appetite for risk, an ability to navigate ambiguity and a passion to get things done at all costs; it’s no mystery why such a large number of small businesses are started by veterans or service-disabled veterans. They certainly have what it takes to be entrepreneurs.
You can read more about our recent programs for members of the veterans’ community
here
.
Posted Bridgette Sexton, Global Entrepreneurship Manager
Tour Brazil and prehispanic Mexican cities with more Street View imagery in Google Maps
August 17, 2012
Our ongoing effort to build great maps—ones that are accurate, easy to navigate and cover every corner of the world—continues to progress. Over the last few months, Google Maps has taken people everywhere from
the Amazon
to
Antarctica
, and we’re continuing to add imagery of even more places around globe. Beginning this week, you can dive even deeper into Latin America with new Street View imagery of Brazil and Mexico.
Street View first became available for Brazil in 2010, and as of this week, we’ve grown our collection of panoramic imagery to more than 70 cities throughout the country. You’ll now find colonial cities like
Fortaleza
, architecturally compelling cities like
Brasilia
and coastal landmarks like
Recife
,
Natal
and
Salvador
. You can even virtually travel to the west side of Brazil and visit Foz de Iguaçu, or if you’re planning an upcoming trip, preview the the area around your hotel as well as nearby shopping malls, historic monuments, restaurants and more. With so many upcoming events, like the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics, we’re excited to share the riches of Brazil’s cities not only with tourists from around the world, but also with locals who might want to visit a city, neighborhood or landmark they’ve not yet experienced.
Street View imagery of Brazil available before mid-August 2012
Street View imagery of Brazil available beginning mid-August 2012
We’ve also introduced Street View imagery of 30 Mesoamerican archaeological sites in Mexico. Start your adventure by exploring
Kukulkan’s Temple
, a 1,100-year-old pyramid whose peak is reached by climbing 365 steps, one for each day of the year. When visitors clap their hands, the architectural acoustics at the base of the pyramid’s steps are designed to mimic the
sound of the Quetzal
, a bird that the Mayans regard as representative of their gods.
View Larger Map
Chichén Itzá, Mexico
Find hundreds of magical stories like this one by visiting the colossal pyramids of
Teotihuacan
, emblematic sites for the Mayans such as
Chichen Itza
or seaside archaeological jewels like
Tulum
. These and other famous sites from around the world can be seen in our
Street View Gallery
.
We’re always improving the comprehensiveness of our maps so you can experience more imagery from around the world. Whether you’re planning a visit to one of these areas or touring these locations from the comfort of your armchair, we hope you enjoy these captivating new images of Latin America.
Posted by Ricardo Blanco, Communications Manager for Google in Latin America
Voice Search arrives in 13 new languages
August 16, 2012
“Norwegian restaurants in New York City.” I can type that phrase fast, but I can say it even faster—and when I’m on the go, speed is what I’m looking for. With Voice Search, you can speak into your phone to get search results quickly and easily. Voice Search is already available in 29 languages, and today, we're bringing support to 13 new languages for Android users—bringing the total to 42 languages and accents in 46 countries. In fact, 100 million new speakers can use Voice Search now, with the addition of:
Basque
Bulgarian
Catalan
European Portuguese
Finnish
Galician
Hungarian
Icelandic
Norwegian
Romanian
Serbian
Slovak
Swedish
Each new language usually requires that we initially collect hundreds of thousands of utterances from volunteers and, although we’ve been working on speech recognition for several years, adding these new languages led our engineers and scientists to tackle some unique challenges. While languages like Romanian follow predictable pronunciation rules, others, like Swedish, required that we recruit native speakers to provide us with the pronunciations for thousands of words. Our scientists then built a machine learning system based on that data to predict how all other Swedish words would be pronounced.
This update has already started to roll out, and will continue to do so over the course of the next week. How you get started with Google Voice Search depends on what kind of phone you have. If your phone runs Android 2.2 or later, and you see the microphone icon on the Google Search widget on your homescreen, all you have to do is tap the icon to start a voice-powered search. Otherwise, you can install the
Voice Search app from Google Play
. Note that you can only speak one language into the app at a time, and you may need to change your language settings to use one of these new languages.
As with other languages we’ve added, one of the major benefits to Google’s cloud-based model is that the more people use Voice Search, the more accurate it becomes.
Posted by Bertrand Damiba, Product Manager
(Cross-posted on the
Android blog
)
Google Maps now has schedules for more than one million public transit stops worldwide
August 15, 2012
Since 2005
, we’ve collaborated with hundreds of transit authorities around the world to make a comprehensive resource for millions of riders to find out which bus, train, subway or tram can take them to their next destination. Today, Google Maps has public transportation schedules for more than one million transit stops worldwide, in nearly
500 cities
including New York, London, Tokyo and Sydney.
Public transportation information is especially useful when it’s in the palm of your hand. Today we’re releasing an update to the
Google Maps for Android
app (version 6.10) which makes this transit information even more useful. We’ve made some changes to the Transit Lines layer, so that you can select a specific mode of public transportation (train, bus, tram or subway) to display on the mobile map, hiding the other modes. This is helpful in areas where there is a tight concentration of several types of public transit.
Left: Mobile map with all modes of public transit shown; Right: Transit Lines layer in Subway mode
We’ve also updated the layout of station pages to be more useful. Open it by tapping on the name of the station on your mobile map.
Updated station pages show you departure times, lines serving the station and the distance to nearby stations.
In addition to these new transit features, we’ve updated region highlighting, My Places and Location History displays in Google Maps for Android:
Now, whenever you search for a city or postal code, the borders of that region are highlighted.
Under My Places you’ll notice we’ve added new tabs, which will help you access all your information from a single place; from your saved maps for use offline to your starred places and Custom Maps created on your desktop.
If you enable Location History, you’ll be able to browse the places you’ve been on a daily basis with an updated Location History dashboard.
Whether you’re looking for schedule and fare information, directions by public transit or nearby stations, Google Maps puts comprehensive, accurate and useful transit information at your fingertips. Update to the latest version of Google Maps for Android in the
Google Play store
.
Posted by Christopher Van Der Westhuizen, Software Engineer, Google Maps
London calling: some reflections on the digital games
August 14, 2012
The stats are in, and one clear winner from this year’s summer sports has emerged: digital media. Here’s a quick look behind the “screens” at how the web blew records away around the world, at the most wired Games ever.
Searches set a new pace
Mirroring the growth of the web and digital media, Google search volume around the world was dramatically higher this year than during Beijing in 2008:
Driven by a 900 percent increase in [
ryan lochte
] searches, American interest in [
swimming
] spiked 25 percent higher than 2008 levels.
The “Fierce Five” vaulted U.S. searches for [
gymnastics
] to almost double the 2008 peak.
Spurred on by a record-breaking performance by sprinter Usain Bolt, Jamaican searches for [
track and field
] raced up 40 percent from 2008.
Japanese gymnast and first-time gold medalist [
kohei uchimura
] proved he’s a “superman” in search as well as on the tumbling mat, with search volume in his home country up 420 percent over the last games.
Success may have been sweeter the second time around for wrestler [
sushil kumar
], the first Indian athlete to win an individual medal at successive Olympics, with searches up more than 375 percent from the 2008 games.
Here are a few more search snapshots:
Top Athlete Searches (U.S.)
Top Athlete Searches (U.K.)
Top Artist Closing Ceremony Searches (U.S.)
Michael Phelps
Usain Bolt
Jessie J
Ryan Lochte
Jessica Ennis
Beady Eye
Lolo Jones
Michael Phelps
Gary Barlow
Usain Bolt
Victoria Pendleton
Ed Sheeran
Alex Morgan
Andy Murray
Freddie Mercury
Global streaming goes the distance
YouTube
powered
the live stream for NBC Olympics and for the International Olympic Committee’s YouTube Channel, making the world’s games even more global and accessible. NBC Olympics saw more live streams than during the entire Beijing Games—more than 159 million total video streams and more than 64 million live streams across YouTube's online, mobile and tablet experiences. In all, more than 20 million hours of total video was streamed over 17 days. And of course, the Games were also streamed on the IOC’s channel (youtube.com/olympic), with tens of millions of streams to 64 countries in Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. We’ll have more details on the
YouTube blog
soon.
The multi-screen relay
More than ever, people experienced the Games not just via the TV broadcast, but on desktops, mobile phones and tablets. Through
research panels conducted in partnership with NBC
in the U.S., we learned a bit more about how this played out:
Mobile makes a strong showing:
Many viewers turned to one or more “second screens” beyond TV to keep updated on the Olympics—nearly half of those who did (44 percent) did so via a mobile phone or tablet.
Power viewers:
Second-screen viewing didn’t seem to diminish participants’ interest in watching the games on TV...in fact, it increased it. People who followed the Games on TV plus
one
other screen watched 52 percent more Olympics on TV than those who didn’t; people who followed on
two
additional screens spent more than twice as much time (105 percent) with TV. And people who watched live streams of events online watched 66 percent more Olympics on television than people who followed exclusively on TV.
Synchronized usage:
Overall, nearly 56 percent of people who followed the Games on TV and at least one other screen did so simultaneously. These simultaneous viewers also watched TV for 67 percent longer than those who only watched TV.
Gold for digital businesses
Brands who invest in digital marketing to connect with customers grow their own businesses and help make great content possible. A few campaigns that caught our eye:
Visa’s global “Go World" campaign invited fans to show their support for Team Visa athletes in the form of cheers across social media. The campaign generated more than 59 million cheers, and
Visa’s YouTube channel
accounted for more than 47 million views of Visa’s commercials and athlete training videos from around the world.
Insurance provider
Zurich
launched a successful “Share your Sports Moments” marketing campaign on Google and
YouTube
, featuring members of the German Olympic team. The result: a significant uplift in the number of leads who then signed insurance contracts.
Lloyds TSB Bank
, presenting partner of the Olympic Torch relay, conducted a successful AdWords campaign that kept pace with the Olympic torch as it passed through towns in the U.K., resulting in more than 190,000 clicks and more than 2 million impressions over three months.
Higher traffic and increased investment in the web also helped online publishers in a big way:
In the U.S., across 2 million sites in our
Google Display Network
and the
DoubleClick Ad Exchange
, ads shown on sports-related websites increased by 19 percent, while revenues (RPMs) for these sites increased by 14 percent, compared to the two previous weeks.
Our premium ad serving platform for publishers (
DoubleClick for Publishers
), which helps some of the web’s largest publishers make money from their content, broke a new record, with one major publisher serving more than 400 million ad impressions in a day across its website and mobile content—driving higher revenues and more free content.
A fun note to end on: showing how the web can fuse data and creativity while opening the playing field, one of our software engineers used
Google App Engine
to create a
“per capita” medal tally
(the data is real, the accounting is somewhat creative). On this basis, one country stands above all others—congratulations to the most successful nation of the last two weeks, Grenada!
Posted by Richard Keelty, Product Marketing Manager, U.K.
Conquer the back to school blues with Google tools
August 9, 2012
August is both an end to the lush freedom of summer and the beginning of another year of student life. As a rising senior at the University of Florida, this time is both exciting and anxiety-inducing. Even though I’m looking forward to many aspects of the school year, there are certain things about college—from book budgets to calculus study sessions—that can make it a headache.
But this fall, I feel more prepared to face the daily student grind. This summer, I had the chance to intern on the communications team at Google and got the inside track on some tools and tricks to make school a snap. For example, did you know there was an
extension for Chrome
that helps you stay focused on your work? Yup, didn’t think so! So I thought I’d share some of my new favorite tips—my “Survival Guide for Student Life”—to help make it easier for all students to get through the coming months.
Easy ways to coordinate your social and extracurricular life
Google+ Hangouts enables you to video chat with up to nine friends from your desktop,
mobile phone or tablet
. A great feature for when your club needs to discuss some last minute changes for the upcoming meeting.
Stay on task with
Hangout Apps
like
Symphonical
, which provides a digital wall of sticky notes for virtual brainstorm sessions.
With
Google+ Events
, invite all your friends to your get-together and attach a personalized video greeting to the invitation. During the event, photos from the party can be uploaded to the event page in real-time using Party Mode. So if you have to miss a party due to a study session, you can avoid that pesky FOMO (Fear of Missing Out)!
Let your friends know what you’re up to by sharing your Google Calendar with them. Or create a shared calendar just for your study group.
Stay organized and efficient—and be prepared for the unexpected
Stop the email flood from the ridiculous number of email lists you signed up for using Gmail’s
auto-unsubscribe
feature.
No more sore eyes from crowded inboxes—Gmail's default mode is
Priority Inbox
so it automatically sorts your important messages for you.
Cite your sources! Use Google Docs’
research tool
to investigate highlighted portions of your essay and then generate a citation.
Group projects call for collaboration. With
Google Drive
, you can use shared folders so everyone can access materials without having to email updates to each other.
Using your laptop or phone, you can send any documents or presentations saved on your Google Drive to
Fedex
to be printed, thanks to Google Cloud Print.
Get what you need and where you’re going faster
For those of you starting at university this year, Google Maps has 360-degree panoramic
Street View imagery
for many campuses around the world to give you a preview of your new stomping grounds.
Back to school shopping is one of the most fun things about August. Find your way in and out of malls and department stores with
indoor Google Maps
on Android devices.
We college students can’t go too long without homemade food. Search for your next flight home with
Flight Search
. (If flying makes you a bit queasy, track any care packages by typing the tracking code into the Google search bar.)
Stay informed with
Google Now
. This feature, available on Android devices running Jelly Bean, can update you when the next bus is coming or provide the weather forecast for Saturday’s big game.
Reading, writing, 'rithmetic and... YouTube
Don’t break the bank on textbooks. Google Play has millions of FREE (emphasis is important) books readily available such as "
Pride and Prejudice
" and "
Gulliver’s Travels
."
With the new
Nexus 7 tablet
, you can take your
Google Play
books, music, movies, TV shows, magazines and apps (like
My Majors
and
doubleTwist Alarm Clock
) with you, wherever you go.
Locate hard-to-find books online or at a library near you with
Book Search
.
Put Chrome to work with educational
apps
.
Not a fan of traditional note taking?
Chromebooks
are a super fast and virus-proof laptop. It starts seconds after you boot it and will last through a whole day of classes.
A fair portion of us students aren’t fans of mental math. Type any equation into the Google search box to get the answers you need. It can
graph functions
as well.
We know we spend too much of our time watching funny videos on YouTube, but there are video channels that can actually help us learn more about a variety of subjects—from
astrophysics
to
world history
. Find more educational channels at
YouTube EDU
.
I’m resting a bit easier now that I know there are tools that make student life a bit less overwhelming. Here’s hoping you, too, feel armed to face the fall semester—and beyond—with Google in your backpack.
Posted by Jenise Araujo, BOLD Intern, Communications Team
Building the search engine of the future, one baby step at a time
August 8, 2012
Larry Page once described the perfect search engine as understanding exactly what you mean and giving you back exactly what you want. It’s very much like the computer I dreamt about as a child growing up in India, glued to our black-and-white TV for every episode of Star Trek. I imagined a future where a starship computer would be able to answer any question I might ask, instantly. Today, we’re closer to that dream than I ever thought possible during my working life—and here are some of the latest steps we’re taking today to make search even more intelligent:
1. Understanding the world
In May we
launched the Knowledge Graph
, our database of more than 500 million real-world people, places and things with 3.5 billion attributes and connections among them. The feedback has been phenomenally positive and we want to extend this feature to people outside the U.S. So starting today, you’ll see Knowledge Graph results across every English-speaking country in the world. If you’re in Australia and search for [chiefs], you’ll get the rugby team—its players, results and history.
We’ll also use this intelligence to help you find the right result more quickly when your search may have different meanings. For example, if you search for [rio], you might be interested in the Brazilian city, the recent animated movie or the casino in Vegas. Thanks to the Knowledge Graph, we can now give you these different suggestions of real-world entities in the search box as you type:
Finally, the best answer to your question is not always a single entity, but a list or group of connected things. It’s quite challenging to pull these lists automatically from the web. But we’re now beginning to do just that. So when you search for [california lighthouses], [hurricanes in 2008] or [famous female astronomers], we’ll show you a list of these things across the top of the page. And by combining our Knowledge Graph with the collective wisdom of the web, we can even provide more subjective lists like [best action movies of the 2000s] or [things to do in paris]. If you click on an item, you can then explore the result more deeply on the web:
So far we can produce hundreds of thousands of lists involving millions of items, and we’ll keep growing to match your curiosity. A quick preview:
2. Putting your info at your fingertips
Sometimes the best answer to your question isn’t available on the public web—it may be contained somewhere else, such as in your email. We think you shouldn’t have to be your own mini-search engine to find the most useful information—it should just work. A search is a search, and we want our results to be truly universal. So we’re developing a way to find this information for you that’s useful and unobtrusive, and we’d love your
feedback
. Starting today, we’re opening up a limited trial where you can
sign up
to get information from your Gmail right from the search box.
So if you’re planning a biking trip to Tahoe, you might see relevant emails from friends about the best bike trails, or great places to eat on the right hand side of the results page. If it looks relevant you can then expand the box to read the emails:
We’re working on some even more useful features. For example, if you search for [my flights] we will organize flight confirmation emails for any upcoming trips in a beautifully easy-to-read way right on the search results page:
3. Understanding your intent
Often the most natural way to ask a question is by asking aloud. So we’ve combined our speech recognition expertise, understanding of language and the Knowledge Graph so that Voice Search can better interpret your questions and sometimes speak the answers back as full sentences. This has been available on Android for a few weeks and people love it. It’ll soon be available on your
iPhone or iPad
(iOS version 4.2+).
You just need to tap the microphone icon and ask your question, the same way you’d ask a friend. For example, ask “What movies are playing this weekend?” and you’ll see your words streamed back to you quickly as you speak. Then Google will show you a list of the latest movies in theaters near you, with schedules and even trailers. It works for everything from celebrity factoids to the height of Kilamanjaro and more. When Google can supply a direct answer to your question, you’ll get a spoken response too.
These are baby steps, but important ones on our way to building the search engine of the future—one that is much more intelligent and useful than it was just a few years ago. It’s a very exciting time to be working in this field.
Posted by Amit Singhal, SVP Google Search
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