Official Blog
Insights from Googlers into our products, technology, and the Google culture
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
Supporting entrepreneurship in France at Le Camping
June 26, 2012
Entrepreneurs all around the world are building technologies that empower their communities and address both local and global audiences. Last week, a team of Googlers from 10 countries gathered in Paris to spend time with entrepreneurs and startups at Le Camping, an accelerator program that’s part of
Silicon Sentier
, an association focused on supporting promising digital projects in the Ile de France region. We celebrated the results of the first two seasons of the program and welcomed the new startups for season three.
Le Camping’s program selects 12 new startups each season (one season lasts six months). They “camp” in what used to be the facilities of the French Stock Exchange, symbolizing the bridge between the old and the new economy. During this time, the “campers” are coached by
60 mentors
, mostly entrepreneurs but also engineers. We’ve been working in partnership with Le Camping for the last two seasons to provide hands-on training and mentorship to the 12 companies in each class.
We’ve already seen great success from the program. Out of the 24 teams from first two seasons, 40 percent of the startups have raised funds, 60 percent have paying clients and all of the startups belong to a strong and reliable community. The program does not take equity in the startups or charge them to take part; all that’s required is vision, passion and the desire to address a global audience.
This is just one of our efforts to support entrepreneurs in France. Last year we also launched
Startup Cafe
, an online platform which provides access to educational
video content
from several business schools designed for entrepreneurs,
tools
to help start a business and, with the help of the
Agency for the Creation of Entrepreneurs
, a
map
of public organizations that can help entrepreneurs.
We believe that the Internet and entrepreneurship are key drivers of
economic development
. A study from the European Commission highlighted that small enterprises are the driver for growth and employment: they generate nearly 70 percent of jobs in Europe and 60 percent of economic value added. McKinsey’s "
Impact of Internet on the French economy
" reported that when French SMEs use more web technologies, their growth is faster, their operating revenues are higher and their profitability is stronger.
We look forward to continuing to support entrepreneurship in France and are excited to follow the progress of the teams in
season three
of Le Camping: Home’n’go, Explee, Sketchfab, ForgetBox, Stormz, Fleex, Veezio, JellyNote, Augment, Webshell, Poutsch, Whale Street. Stay tuned!
Posted by Elisabeth
Barg
è
s
, Public Policy Manager, Google France
In Nashville, the sweet sound of entrepreneurship
April 27, 2012
Nashville and Silicon Valley have a lot in common. They're both filled with smart, creative people building businesses together. Nashville's start-up scene may be less well known, but it's bursting with energy and creativity like the rest of the city, and on April 19, we brought our
Google for Entrepreneurs
program down to the home of honky tonks to learn more about how we might help out.
Event crowd in our rustic music hall venue.
Google for Entrepreneurs was a full day of sessions exploring topics from how to use Google+ and Youtube to publicize your content, to ads and analytics tools for businesses to our various platforms for developers. The crowd of 430 attendees ranged from tech startups like
Populr.me
, which is building a beautiful HTML5 micropublishing app, to
ArtistGrowth
, which is creating a platform for artists to organize and monetize a music business from their phone. A group of eight enterprising Googlers led conversations on getting your business on the global map, while the
Creator’s Freedom Project
hosted a panel of local artists discussing how creative people can make a living using today's technology. We closed the day by discussing how music and tech can work together to
make the Internet awesome
. Then, naturally, it was time to let the live music and beverages flow. For more photos, check out our web album
here
.
Google panel taking any and all questions.
We’d like to thank all our partners
Flo {thinkery}
,
Entrepreneur Center
,
Nashville Area Chamber of Commerce
,
Nashville Technology Council
and
Tennessee Film, Entertainment & Music Commission
, as well as
Karl Dean
, the Mayor of Nashville and
Beth Harwell
, Speaker of the House (Tenn.) for making this event truly memorable. In one amazing day, we came together to bring the magic of Google to Nashville and made friends with one talented city. We look forward to connecting with more entrepreneurial cities around the country, and the world.
Posted by Bridgette Sexton, Global Entrepreneurship Manager
Let’s fill London with startups...
March 29, 2012
London has become one of the world's great digital capitals. The Internet accounts for eight percent of the U.K. economy and has become, in these days of tough public finances, a welcome engine of economic growth.
We believe there is even more potential for entrepreneurs to energize the Internet economy in the U.K., and to help spur growth, today we’re opening
Campus London
, a seven story facility in the east London neighborhood known as Tech City. Google began as a startup in a garage. We want to empower the next generation of entrepreneurs to be successful by building and supporting a vibrant startup community. Our goal with Campus is to catalyze the startup ecosystem and build Britain's single largest community of startups under one roof.
The U.K.’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Rt. Hon. George Osborne MP, launched Campus at this morning's official opening. The Chancellor toured the building, meeting some of the entrepreneurs currently making their home in Campus and learning more about their innovations, ranging from fashion trendsetting websites to personalized London leisure guides. He then flipped the switch on a commemorative graffiti plaque.
Campus is a collaboration between Google and partners Central Working, Tech Hub, Seedcamp and Springboard. It will provide startups with workspace in an energizing environment and will also host daily events for and with the community. We will run a regular speaker series, alongside lectures and programing, as well as provide mentorship and training from local Google teams.
Visitors will have access to a cafe and co-working space, complete with high speed wifi. We welcome members of the startup community: entrepreneurs, investors, developers, designers, lawyers, accountants, etc. and hope that this informal, highly concentrated space will lead to chance meetings and interactions that will generate the ideas and partnerships that will drive new, innovative businesses.
The buzz around Campus from within the startup community has meant that today, on day one, Campus is already at 90% capacity, with more than 100 people on site and an additional 4,500 who have signed up online to visit.
We are looking forward to getting to know the community. East London is emerging as a world-leading entrepreneurial hub, and we’re excited to be a part of it. Take a photo tour of Campus
here
, and if you’d like to learn more, visit us at
www.campuslondon.com
.
Let’s fill this town with startups!
Posted by Eze Vidra, Head of Campus London
(Cross-posted from the
European Public Policy blog
)
Providing a springboard for women entrepreneurs in India
March 9, 2012
Meghana Musunuri
was a typical female entrepreneur in India. Born and brought up in
Medak
, she received a good education and spent time abroad both studying and working. Eventually, she decided to return to India and make a difference in her native country. After teaching in London for more than eight years, Meghana opened the
Fountainhead School
in Hyderabad in 2009. Meghana was smart, driven and passionate, but like many of her contemporaries in India, she needed guidance on how to use the web to broaden her business and her education mission. To help Meghana and the many other women entrepreneurs like her, we recently launched
Women Entrepreneurs on the Web
(WEOW).
Women Entrepreneurs on the Web teaches participants how to use web-based technologies to improve and grow their businesses. WEOW is divided into five different units or “circles,” all designed for women entrepreneurs with varied degrees of online presence and expertise. Entrepreneurs at various stages in their startups can enter the program through any of these circles.
Building an online presence:
creating a website, a YouTube channel, and a business page on a social network like Google+
Collaborating effectively:
tools like Gmail, Calendar and Docs
Connecting with customers:
hosting Google+ Hangouts, creating and distributing targeted offers and discounts
Promoting your organization:
online product demos, creating viral videos on YouTube, advertising through AdWords and AdSense
Tracking and optimizing your online presence:
Google Analytics, Google Alerts, ripples on Google+, the +1 button, webmaster tools
Meghana completed all five circles of the program and today, her school is completely online. She’s hosted several Google+ Hangouts for students and parents from the Fountainhead School’s
Google+ page
and is also using the page to post news, resources and recaps of in-person workshops. There’s more from Meghana on what she learned from the WEOW program in
this video
.
Rupa Aurangabadkar, another WEOW participant, recently launched a design company,
Colorquill
. She’s now working on a series of digital videos that will showcase each step of creating a mural and will distribute them via her YouTube channel. Archana Doshi of
Archanas Kitchen
has started offering cooking classes online via Google+ Hangouts. She also plans to have guest chefs sign up to offer culinary lessons via her website.
As part of our
launch event
at Google Hyderabad, Yolanda Mangolini, our head of diversity and inclusion, spent time with 30 women entrepreneurs. During this meet-and-greet, she highlighted company initiatives that focus on female empowerment, like the
Google Anita Borg India Memorial Scholarships
,
Grace Hopper Celebrations
and several outreach programs run by the Women@Google employee group. She also talked about our goal to build an organization that reflects its globally diverse users. Watch the highlights in the video below:
For updates on WEOW India, visit our
website
and
YouTube channel
. To date, we’ve had more than 300 women sign up for WEOW, and we plan to roll out WEOW to more offices and countries in the future.
Posted by Keerthana Mohan, Diversity and Inclusion Manager, Asia-Pacific
Helping entrepreneurs in the Crescent City
March 9, 2012
I made my first visit to the Gulf Coast as a Red Cross shelter manager six weeks after Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005. What I witnessed there made me believe in the potential for individuals and businesses to come together to rebuild a community devastated by disaster. Every year since, I’ve returned to New Orleans to engage in and lead much of Google’s commitment to the area, which has included the
direct use of Google Earth
to aid in rescue efforts,
search tools
to help during the aftermath and many service hours put in by
Google volunteers
.
Almost seven years later, I find myself amazed at the recovery and revitalization of the entire region, specifically in New Orleans. The city has come to embody a spirit of perseverance and evolved into a model for economic and community redevelopment. In 2010, Google provided
$102 million of economic activity
for Louisiana businesses, website publishers and nonprofits—and there’s still more work to do. Next week, we’re heading back to NOLA once again, this time to serve as the Premier Partner for the fourth annual
New Orleans Entrepreneurship Week
(NOEW).
Our support for NOEW is diverse and wide-ranging. Among other activities, we’re providing seed grants to up-and-coming educational entrepreneurs in the Education Entrepreneurship Challenge, as well as hosting “Google 101” (and 201) workshops for entrepreneurs and one-on-one Google Office Hours for small business owners. On Saturday, March 10, we’ll be working with Brad Pitt’s foundation,
Make It Right
, to help the organization engage with supporters globally during their NOEW charity event. At 8:00pm ET the
Make It Right Google+ Page
will host a live hangout with Brad Pitt and special guests Ellen DeGeneres, Randy Jackson and Aziz Ansari. Following the hangout, real time updates from the evening will be posted exclusively on the Google+ page, and visitors can view photos, ask questions of celebrity guests and watch videos from the evening.
Our sponsorship of NOEW 2012 is one piece of our ongoing work supporting entrepreneurship in New Orleans. Other support includes bringing a major partner,
Startup Weekend
, to NOLA as well as increasing
Accelerate with Google
in the region. We look forward to contributing to the entrepreneurship ecosystem to provide real economic opportunities for the New Orleans community, its people and its businesses.
I look at the week ahead as a celebration of the potential that one person has to make a difference—one volunteer, one business owner, one celebrity, even you. What I know for sure is that this one person is looking forward to returning to a city that has captured her heart through its people, its spirit, its music and ah yes, most definitely the food. Hope to see y’all there soon!
Posted by Tara Canobbio, Google New Orleans Outreach Lead
Adapting AdWords for time-strapped small businesses
August 2, 2011
This is the latest post in our
series
profiling entrepreneurial Googlers working on products across the company and around the world. In this post, you’ll read how a small team took a successful grassroots approach to helping businesses advertise online. - Ed.
In early 2010, I was talking with some friends from Google’s India office about how to help small, local businesses advertise online. We found that small business owners the world over had a key commonality: very little time. We decided to tackle this problem head on, with the hopes of making the advertising process quicker and easier for small businesses.
My colleagues in India flew out to our headquarters in California, and we teamed up with a Google Maps product manager who had some first hand experience working with small business owners. One of his friends ran a small mountain clothing store in New Hampshire called
The Mountain Goat of Hanover
, which had just moved to town. She was responsible for staffing, bookkeeping, inventory management and many other time-intensive tasks—all with very little help. She had the desire to try promoting her business online, but learning to manage a new form of advertising wasn’t something she had time for.
Kendra Dynok, manager of The Mountain Goat of Hanover, helps a customer.
The Mountain Goat of Hanover was our first case study, but it seemed like any interaction we had with a small business led to a conversation about how it advertised. A photographer in Virginia, a San Francisco dentist and a contractor re-doing my kitchen all told the same story: Online advertising should be simpler.
What all of these business owners needed was advertising that was measurable, affordable and quick. While they could use AdWords, they needed something even faster: a tool that they could set up easily and then walk away from, trusting that their advertising would be managed efficiently.
A handful of us started building a new tool for advertisers that met these requirements and within a few weeks, we were beta testing it with the owner of The Mountain Goat, the photographer, the dentist and the contractor—inviting more small businesses as interest grew. We literally went door to door in San Francisco and Chicago, asking local businesses if our tool could help them advertise better. Soon, we had more than 50 businesses testing the new ads product and within a few months, that number was over 2,000.
Our team runs somewhat like the small businesses with which we work. We’re a small, close-knit group of friends that spend most of our time huddled in a room making decisions on the spot and moving fast to launch a product in a matter of months. By the end of 2010, we’d launched our tool, which we called Google Boost at the time, in 25 cities across five states. And just last week, we officially
launched
AdWords Express to all businesses in the U.S. We would never have been able to do that outside of Google, where we were able to leverage the existing AdWords system, infrastructure and dedicated teams. By making it easier for people to implement effective advertising campaigns, we’ve been able to bring tens of thousands of small businesses online—and we’ve only just begun.
Posted by Xuefu Wang, Tech Lead and Manager, AdWords Express
From acquisition to in-app payments in less than one year
June 6, 2011
(Cross-posted on the
Commerce Blog
)
This is the latest post in our
series
profiling entrepreneurial Googlers working on products across the company and around the world. In this post, you’ll read why one team decided to sell their company to Google, and how they went from acquisition to product launch in less than a year. - Ed.
The decision to sell your company is one of the hardest an entrepreneur can make, and as the CEO of Jambool, I thought long and hard about Google’s offer to acquire us when they came calling in August 2010. Ultimately,
we decided to join Google
for two reasons: one, we shared the goal of offering consumers and merchants unified online payment solutions, and two, we realized that Google was serious about helping us integrate our technology into their digital tools by providing us with infrastructure and other support. Less than a year later, we’ve already taken a major step to help Google deliver on this vision with
Google In-App Payments
, which we announced last month at
Google I/O
. In-App Payments enable web application developers to receive payments for digital and virtual goods without the user ever leaving the application.
Me on stage at Google I/O introducing Google In-App Payments
When we first joined, we expected to spend a lot of time ramping up, meeting people and learning Google’s technology. In reality, our shared vision for the product enabled us to quickly partner with teams across the company to build out our product at scale. As a startup, you spend the majority of your time building teams from scratch to focus on functions like product, sales, marketing, operations and legal. At Jambool, I’d divide my time across operations, raising funds and meeting with outside developers. But at Google, we were able to combine our efforts with teams already in place who could manage those areas while we focused on the core product.
We set an ambitious goal of launching in-app payments nine months later at Google I/O, which motivated us to work quickly. We worked with Google’s established teams—especially Chrome, Android and Google Checkout—to build a simple API and intuitive user interface. During the last few weeks before Google I/O—when we were still working around the clock just to finish the product—we were invited to announce our launch as part of the day two keynote. That gave us even more drive to finish on time. And, thanks to the Chrome team, we found partners like Angry Birds and Graphic.ly, which really demonstrated the product’s usefulness and got developers excited about our broader vision of seamless digital payments.
As a startup, we never imagined we’d stand on a stage like the one at I/O and instantly reach consumers, businesses and developers around the world. In the first 24 hours after the announcement, thousands of developers signed up to use the API. This is something we wouldn’t have been able to do so quickly on our own, and it’s a testament to the big things a startup can accomplish by joining Google. We’re already looking forward to what the next year brings as developers around the world start to build great businesses on our platform.
If you’re interested in integrating your apps into Google’s In-App Payments API, we invite you to
sign up
and
send us feedback
.
Posted by Vikas Gupta, Head of Consumer Payments
Accelerating diversity outreach to businesses in local communities
May 10, 2011
(Cross-posted on the
Google Small Business Blog
)
This is the latest post in our
series
profiling entrepreneurial Googlers working on products across the company and around the world. Here, business development manager Chris Genteel tells how Googlers across the U.S. are diversifying our marketing and sales outreach efforts to help communities of minority-owned small businesses around the country build an online presence. - Ed.
In May 2009, a team of Googlers and I attended the
Black Enterprise Entrepreneurs Conference
near our office in Ann Arbor, Mich., where we talked with dozens of small business owners. These folks were true entrepreneurs and clearly not afraid to try new things, yet many were unaware of Google’s products and services, such as
AdWords
and
Apps for Enterprise
. In fact, many of them didn’t even have an online presence.
The following Monday, two women Googlers who were new to the team and passionate about Google’s diversity initiatives busted into my office already on a mission—to help educate small businesses on Google tools in order to help them better connect with their target audience. They had attended the conference as well and decided to start a 20 percent project to increase awareness of and engagement with small, minority-owned businesses. Two months later, we proposed a business plan to Bonita Stewart, vice president of sales, to start reaching out to businesses. She approved our proposal and gave us the go-ahead to lead the initiative; it was our responsibility to find people who wanted to help.
We found our first volunteer when an intern on the team decided to make our initiative her 20 percent project, and, throughout that summer, more people were inspired to contribute their expertise part-time as well. Before we knew it, we had more than 40 Googlers working on what eventually became
Accelerate with Google
—a program to help minority-owned small businesses grow their online presence by working with organizations and partners who encourage the adoption of web tools within their local communities.
Throughout 2010, we traveled across the country to places like Detroit, Los Angeles, New Orleans, Miami, Chicago and New York to learn more about the minority-owned, small business community. Along the way, we built partnerships with leading business organizations, such as the
National Minority Supplier Development Council
, which already have respect and support from these communities. Our original goal was to build partnerships with minority community organizations nationwide, but that quickly developed into a larger mission to not only help small businesses move online, but empower them to be the web tools educators in their communities as well.
This May, we’re excited to be part of the
Michigan Minority Supplier Development Council
annual conference; they’ve been our chief partner and recipient of a grant for $175,000 to support the development of our program within its business community. We’ve trained Council representatives to be experts in Google tools like AdWords, and in turn they’ve led workshops for small business owners on how to build an online presence. We’ve built a similar partnership with the
Louisiana Council
by funding a $100,000 initiative to build outreach to small businesses in the area through programs such as
Google Certified Partners and Trainers
, which help people certify and demonstrate their proficiency in our ads tools.
All of this is just the beginning. This month marks the two-year anniversary of the initial inspiration for this project, and our team will once again be attending the
Black Enterprise Entrepreneurs Conference
, this time with a very different perspective. A project that began as a side job has now become a full-time role for myself and one of the project founders, with our ad hoc group of Googler volunteers still helping out part-time. We’ve seen measurable shifts in online engagement with the communities we’re working with—adding more than 100 minority-owned businesses in 2010 alone—and I’m excited to keep pushing this initiative out to business owners everywhere.
Posted by Chris Genteel, Business Development Manager, Global Diversity Programs
Google Workshops: a place for Googlers to get their hands dirty
April 26, 2011
This is the latest post in our
series
profiling entrepreneurial Googlers working on products across the company and around the world. Here, mechanical engineer Dan Ratner gives you a peek at a collection of machine workshops on campus that were used to construct the prototypes for the Street View trike, snowmobile and trolley, among other personal and 20 percent time projects. -Ed.
Wood, metal, welding and electronics shops are probably not what come to mind when you think about Google but in fact, we often have to build physical products to help us collect and organize information that’s found outside of the web. We do this at the Google Workshops, a hands-on facility equipped with everything from an
oscilloscope
to a
miter saw
and even a
plasma cutter
. Day and night—and even on weekends—the workshops are alive with Googlers working on personal projects—such as home furniture or model airplanes—as well as work-related ones like green business prototypes or components of our
self-driving cars
.
Googlers using a MIG welder in one of the workshops
In 2007, I took a trip to Barcelona, where I became inspired to share with the world the magnificent architecture lining the narrow alleys through which even a Smart Car can’t squeeze. When I returned home and saw a pedicab pedaling along the pier in San Francisco, I decided how I was going to do it. That spark of an idea became the
Street View trike
, which collects outdoor imagery from parks and cultural sites, and was my first attempt at creating a mobile unit to traverse areas unreachable by car. Over a weekend, a couple of engineers and I hacked together a somewhat
rudimentary trike design
and quickly followed that up with a second and better prototype that enabled us to capture usable imagery during a test run at
Emerald Park
in Dublin, Calif. Our initial images proved that the concept was feasible, and after a bit more work on both hardware and software, we were invited to use our prototype trike around
Legoland
, our first participant in the
Street View Partner Program
. Our prototype and 20 percent project eventually evolved into a production-quality trike fleet and full-scale operation employing many Googlers around the world.
Me on the Street View trike, capturing imagery in Legoland
People have asked us to visit historical buildings, national landmarks and other places that even a trike can’t reach—and we’re always trying to find new ways to do so. However, designing a new vehicle requires more than just sticking a camera on top of an apparatus. We often spend hours in the workshops testing out entirely new components made out of wood, metal and—it must be said—quite a bit of duct tape in order to find new and better ways to capture remote imagery. We worked extensively in our own facilities on components of the Street View
snowmobile
and
trolley
—from wiring up electronics to milling metal.
Our first prototypes sometimes start out rough around the edges—the first trolley
prototype
was actually built from an off-the-shelf, narrow dolly designed for schlepping around beer kegs—but our polished production vehicles wouldn’t exist if we didn’t first make early stage “hack” prototypes in our workshops.
Innovation at Google comes in many forms—it can be an idea, a program or even a handmade prototype. For me, it’s in a workshop with a
table saw
,
3D printer
,
TIG welder
,
vertical mill
and a variety of raw materials. As a robotics enthusiast and mechanical engineer, these are the kinds of challenges and opportunities that bring me back to work every day.
We're always looking for new and exciting sites to explore. If you'd like to include your property in Street View, please visit our
submission form
.
Posted by Daniel Ratner, Senior Mechanical Engineer, Google Geo Team
Google Crisis Response: a small team tackling big problems
April 4, 2011
This is the latest post in our
series
profiling entrepreneurial Googlers working on products across the company and around the world. Speed in execution is important for any Google product team, but as we learned after the recent earthquakes in both Japan and New Zealand, it’s even more critical in crisis response. This post is an inside look at the efforts of our year-old Crisis Response team, and what they’re doing to make preparedness tools available to anyone at the click of a button. - Ed.
The Google
Crisis Response Team
came together in 2010 after a few engineers and I realized that we needed a scalable way to make disaster-related information immediately available and useful in a crisis. Until a little over a year ago, we responded to crises with scattered
20 percent time
projects, but after the Haiti earthquake in January 2010 we saw the opportunity to create a full-time team that would make critical information more accessible during disaster situations.
For us to help during a crisis, it’s vital to get things done really quickly, and we’ve been able to do that as a small team within Google. Working from a standard already developed by one of the Google engineers, Person Finder was built and launched in 72 hours after the Haitian earthquake, and it launched within three hours after the New Zealand earthquake in February. Unfortunately, there have been an unusually high number of disasters over the last year, forcing us to learn and get even faster.
Within minutes of hearing about the 9.0 magnitude earthquake off the coast of Japan in March, Googlers around the world—from engineers to webmasters to product managers—immediately started organizing a Google Crisis Response
resource page
with disaster-related information such as maps and satellite imagery, Person Finder and news updates and citizen videos on YouTube. In Japan,
Person Finder
went live within an hour of the earthquake. More than 600,000 contact entries have been made since then—more than all other disasters combined—and there have been
several
reports
of people finding their loved ones safe. I was inspired by my colleagues’ ability to launch tools about an hour after the earthquake struck; the Tokyo office, in particular, has really been helping to drive the rapid response and provided real-time information to teams across the globe, even while aftershocks were rocking the city and buildings were still swaying.
But we’re eager to find other ways of helping. In addition to these efforts focused on specific situations, we’ve worked hard this past year to more broadly organize the information most helpful during crisis situations and make it possible for people to use that data in near real-time. If people are asking for information, then in our view, it’s already too late. In these situations, it’s incredibly important that things happen fast.
So in addition to building products, we collaborate with many incredible organizations to make technology useful for responding to a crisis. For example,
Random Hacks of Kindness
is a collaboration between technology companies and government organizations which encourages teams around the world to create software solutions to problems that arise during a crisis. Recent “RHoKstars” have created all sorts of useful tools—from
HeightCatcher
, which helps identify malnourishment of children in relief camps by accurately assessing height and weight through a mobile device, to new features for
Person Finder
, such as email notifications, automatic translation and phonetic name matching—which have all been extremely useful in Japan. These projects present a real opportunity to improve lives by employing crowd-sourcing technology and real-time data during a crisis.
The sheer number of major natural disasters in 2010 and early 2011 demonstrates just how important it is for those involved in relief efforts to have real-time access to information no matter where they are. The Google Crisis Response team has worked over the past year to develop open source initiatives that encourage collaboration with larger crisis response efforts, including relief organizations, NGOs and individual volunteers. And although we’re a small team and still relatively new to the crisis response ecosystem, we hope the resources and support we receive from Google and our community partners around the world will make a difference in preparedness efforts.
Posted by Prem Ramaswami, Product Manager, Google Crisis Response Team
20 percent time spent coding in the clouds
March 24, 2011
This is the latest post in our
series
profiling entrepreneurial Googlers working on products across the company and around the world—even 35,000 feet above the ground. Read how one engineering director tried Google App Engine for the first time to build an Android app—now used by nearly half a million people—during a 12-hour plane ride to Japan. -Ed.
A 12-hour plane flight may seem daunting to some, but I look at it as uninterrupted time to do what I love—code new products. My bi-monthly trips from London to Tokyo and California are how I spend my
20 percent time
—what I consider my “license to innovate.” It was on a flight to Tokyo that I first built what became
Chrome to Phone
, an Android app and Chrome extension that allows you to instantly send content—like a webpage, map or YouTube video—from your Chrome browser to your Android device.
As an engineering director, I spend the bulk of my time managing software engineers and various projects. As a result, there’s not a lot of time to just sit at my desk and code, and it’s possible for my technical skills to become rusty. So on one of my frequent cross-continent trips, I decided to take the opportunity—and time—to brush up on my engineering skills by exploring device-to-device interaction, an area that has a lot of potential in our increasingly connected world. I’d never written a Chrome extension or used
App Engine
, a platform that allows developers to build web applications on the same scalable systems that power Google’s own applications and services. But rather than sleeping or reading a book, I spent my flight figuring it out. And somewhere over Belgium on my way to Japan, I had a working prototype of Chrome to Phone.
A few days later, on my trip back to London, I emailed my prototype to Andy Rubin and Linus Upson, who lead the Android and Chrome engineering teams. Before my plane even landed, they’d both given the product their blessing. With a little help from a developer in Mountain View and a user interface designer back in London, we tidied things up and ultimately launched the
open source code for Chrome to Phone
at Google I/O just two months later.
As an engineering director, I don’t always have the time to get deeply involved in every aspect of a product launch. Chrome to Phone gave me a unique opportunity to be actively involved at the grassroots of product development at Google—from concept to launch—working directly with the legal, internationalization and consumer operations teams. With few restrictions on how I spent my time, I was able to build a prototype and launch it quickly, adding more features based on user feedback. Today, more than 475,000 people use the extension, and that number is still growing.
When you’re leaving your house to go out, you take your phone, keys and wallet. I don’t think it will be long before you just take your phone—it will contain everything that you need—and that’s our motivation to explore device-to-device interaction. In order to get there, we have engineers here in the U.K. and around the world examining the mobile space, both in their full-time roles and as 20 percent projects. There isn’t only one solution, so by encouraging engineers to work on new projects, we hope that ideas will come from all over the world—whether from a Google office or even 35,000 feet above one.
Posted by Dave Burke, Engineering Director, Android
Speech technology at Google: teaching machines to talk and listen
February 22, 2011
This is the latest post in our
series
profiling entrepreneurial Googlers working on products across the company and around the world. Here, you’ll get a behind-the-scenes look at how one Googler built an entire R&D team around voice technology that has gone on to power products like YouTube transcriptions and Voice Search. - Ed.
When I first interviewed at Google during the summer of 2004, mobile was just making its way onto the company’s radar. My passion was speech technology, the field in which I’d already worked for 20 years. After 10 years of speech research at SRI, followed by 10 years helping build Nuance Communications, the company I co-founded in 1994, I was ready for a new challenge. I felt that mobile was an area ripe for innovation, with a need for speech technology, and destined to be a key platform for delivery of services.
During my interview, I shared my desire to pursue the mobile space and mentioned that if Google didn’t have any big plans for mobile, then I probably wouldn’t be a good fit for the company. Well, I got the job, and I started soon after, without a team or even a defined role. In classic Google fashion, I was encouraged to explore the company, learn about what various teams were working on and figure out what was needed.
After a few months, I presented an idea to senior management to build a telephone-based spoken interface to local search. Although there was a diversity of opinion at the meeting about what applications made the most sense for Google, all agreed that I should start to build a team focused on speech technology. With help from a couple of Google colleagues who also had speech backgrounds, I began recruiting, and within a few months people were busily building our own speech recognition system.
Six years later, I’m excited by how far we’ve come and, in turn, how our long-term goals have expanded. When I started, I had to sell other teams on the value of speech technology to Google's mission. Now, I’m constantly approached by other teams with ideas and needs for speech. The biggest challenge is scaling our effort to meet the opportunities. We've advanced from GOOG-411, our first speech-driven service, to
Voice Search
,
Voice Input
,
Voice Actions
, a
Voice API
for Android developers,
automatic captioning of YouTube videos
,
automatic transcription of voicemail for Google Voice
and
speech-to-speech translation
, amongst others. In the past year alone, we’ve ported our technology to more than 20 languages.
Speech technology requires an enormous amount of data to feed our statistical models and lots of computing power to train our systems—and Google is the ideal place to pursue such technical approaches. With large amounts of data, computing power and an infrastructure focused on supporting large-scale services, we’re encouraged to launch quickly and iterate based on real-time feedback.
I’ve been exploring speech technology for nearly three decades, yet I see huge potential for further innovation. We envision a comprehensive interface for voice and text communication that defies all barriers of modality and language and makes information truly universally accessible. And it’s here at Google that I think we have the best chance to make this future a reality.
Update
9:39 PM
: Changed title of post to clarify that speech technology is not only used on mobile phones but also for transcription tasks like YouTube captioning and voicemail transcription. -Ed.
Posted by Mike Cohen, Manager, Speech Technology
Dialed up: the rapid launch and growth of Click-to-Call
February 9, 2011
This post is the first in our
series
profiling entrepreneurial Googlers working on products across the company and around the world. Here, you’ll get an in-depth look at how one of our most successful mobile advertising features was launched by one and a half engineers in a matter of months. -Ed.
I’ll always remember my first cell phone—a big, black brick that was really only good for making calls. While technology certainly has advanced since then, I still appreciate the speed of connecting to people and businesses instantly over the phone, something that I found harder and harder to do when I searched, for example, for the number of a restaurant to make a reservation.
So in June of 2009, a few engineers and I pooled our 20% time and worked to develop a prototype of what would eventually become
Click-to-Call
for smartphones, an ad unit that makes it easier for people to connect to a business by phone, rather than through a website.
Building the feature was the easy part; essentially, we developed an ad extension that allows advertisers to include a phone or location in their campaigns. However, it was launching it to advertisers that posed the biggest challenge.
With new products like Click-to-Call, we often choose to launch in beta, and incrementally roll out the features to a small subset of users, usually beginning at a 1% test and increasing from there. With Click-to-Call, we’d developed a mobile feature that we wanted to launch as soon as possible, but since mobile advertising was much smaller at that point—then with only about one-sixth as many search queries we get today—we calculated that it would take nearly
three years
to roll out to 10% and around
10 years
to actually launch it. At that rate, the feature would likely become antiquated long before it ever officially launched.
So I decided not to follow the usual process and took a risk, choosing to launch to 50% of Google’s mobile advertisers within the first week. In my view, there was simply no other way to collect enough feedback in a short period of time so that we could quickly iterate based on feedback. Thousands of advertisers—an unprecedented amount for a brand-new feature—were on board to try it out, and with a few engineers and some pretty massive spreadsheets, we started to see real results. Within a month, we had the magical ingredient—momentum—and from there we were collecting enough feedback to be on track to bring the feature to all advertisers in a matter of months.
This is one of the reasons I work at Google. Google gives me freedom to experiment, ownership of my ideas, and amazing resources and support. We built Click-to-Call in June 2009, began testing it in July, and had it up and running for all advertisers in January 2010. One year later, Click-to-Call ads on both search and the Google Display Network are generating millions of calls every month on mobile phones and
driving strong performance
for advertisers.
If you’re interested in exploring some of the most significant trends in mobile, you can watch our
Think Mobile
livestream this Thursday, February 10 at 1:05pm EST, where we’ll discuss why it’s “not too late for businesses to still be early” in this space.
Posted by Surojit Chatterjee, Senior Product Manager, Google Mobile Ads team
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