For the last three months, the NewMe Accelerator class of spring 2012 has been fully immersed in the entrepreneurial process. The NewMe “founders” have been busy working long days at The Hub in San Francisco and living together in a house nearby. The goal: to develop, design and launch new startup companies.
Last week these NewMe founders held their demo day in the Google San Francisco office, where they presented the fruits of their efforts—seven brand new companies—to an audience of more than 100 investors, entrepreneurs and supporters.
This is the second year of NewME, a program designed by founder and CEO Angela Benton to be an accelerator in Silicon Valley for minority-led startups from around the country. We’ve been delighted to participate in and sponsor both seasons.
Some NewME products have already launched in beta and are live in market. Founder Naithan Jones of AgLocal has 20 farms using the beta version of his Local Meat Lovers Service, which is running in his hometown of Kansas City and in the Bay Area. Similarly, Butlr, Ubi, Helpr, Kairos, Citizen Made and PictureMENU have all hit the ground running. In addition, the reach of NewME has gone beyond Silicon Valley. Through NewMe Communities entrepreneurs all across the U.S. have been getting together monthly to share stories and support.
Google supports NewMe as part of our Google for Entrepreneurs and Accelerate with Google programs, which help minority-owned and underrepresented small businesses use online tools to grow. We are committed to supporting diversity in entrepreneurship through great programs like NewMe, and we’re excited to continue working together to ensure diversity of perspectives, talent and experiences within the tech community.
Posted by Mary Himinkool, Head of Global Entrepreneurship Outreach
One of the best parts of my job working on the Google Education team has been hearing inspiring stories time and again of great teachers who build strong relationships with and bring out the best in their students. We recognize that there are many factors that can impact a student's ability to learn, and that technology can be a valuable assistant in overcoming educational barriers, but that it’s really teachers, not technology, who help students realize their full potential. In honor of National Teacher Day today in the U.S., we wanted to showcase a few amazing stories of dedicated teachers who have shown us how they used technology to make learning magical for their students.
At Eastfield Global Magnet School in North Carolina, seventh-grade teacher Elaine Waters was looking for a way to help a student of hers named Malachi, who struggled when it came to putting pen to paper. Elaine decided to have Malachi try using a Chromebook to write—watch what happened below:
Across the country at Xavier College Prep in Arizona, beloved history teacher Gina Nunez had to take a medical leave of absence. With her students panicking over their final exam, Gina found a way to help them study from afar:
We'll be posting more of these stories on our Google in Education +page and encourage you to share your stories in the comments. We’re always eager to hear about excellent educators who have used technology in ways small and large to make a difference in the lives of students. If you're interested in learning about more ways to integrate technology in school, you can watch recordings from our first Education On Air conference, a free education technology conference held entirely online from our Google in Education page last week. Watch the sessions on our YouTube channel.
Thanks to all the creative teachers out there who find a way to spark each student’s passion—we hope to hear more stories from you soon.
Posted by Cristin Frodella, Group Marketing Manager, Google Education
Posted by Prabhakar Raghavan, Vice President of Engineering
More than forty members of Google’s technical staff gathered in Lyon, France in April to participate in the global dialogue around the state of the web at the World Wide Web conference (WWW) 2012. A decade ago, Larry Page and Sergey Brin applied their research to an information retrieval problem and their work—presented at WWW in 1998—led to the invention of today’s most popular search engine.
As I've watched the WWW conference series evolve over the years, a couple of larger trends struck me in this year's edition. First, there seems to be more of a Mobile Web presence in the technical program, relative to recent years. The refereed program included several interesting Mobile papers, including the Best Student Paper Awardee from Stanford University researchers: Who Killed My Battery: Analyzing Mobile Browser Energy Consumption, Narendran Thiagarajan, Gaurav Aggarwal, Angela Nicoara, Dan Boneh, Jatinder Singh.
Second, one gets the sense that the WWW community is moving from the classic "bag of words" view of web pages, to an entity-centric view. There were a number of papers on identifying and using entities in Web pages. While I'm loathe to view this as a vindication of "the Semantic Web" (mainly because this has become an overloaded phrase that people elect to interpret as suits them), the technical capability to get at entities is clearly here. The question is -- what is the killer application? Finally, it’s nice to see that recommendation systems are becoming a major topic of focus at WWW. This paper was a personal favorite: Build Your Own Music Recommender by Modeling Internet Radio Streams, Natalie Aizenberg, Yehuda Koren, Oren Somekh.
Googlers were also active member of the vibrant research community at WWW:
David Assouline delivered the keynote for the Demo Track -- to a standing-room-only crowd -- on the Google Art Project, which uses a combination of various Google technologies and expert information provided by our museum partners to create a unique online art experience. Googler Alon Halevy served as a program committee member. Googlers were also co-authors of the following papers:
Google Image Swirl by Yushi Jing, Henry Rowley, Jingbin Wang, David Tsai, Chuck Rosenberg, Michele Covell (Googlers)
At the conference, we also paid homage to the founding of the World Wide Web and the strong community and enterprise it’s created since the 1990s, seen in the Euronews report: Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee on imagining worlds. Through our products and support of WWW in 2013, we look forward to continuing to nurture the world wide web’s open ecosystem of knowledge, innovation and progress.
Add Research at Google to your circles on G+ to learn more about our academic conference involvement, view pictures from events, and hear about upcoming programming and presence at conferences
Last year we introduced Hangouts On Air to a limited number of broadcasters, enabling them to go live with friends and fans, for all the world to see. Since then, this small community has grown the feature in lots of creative ways. And they’ve made one thing crystal clear: when groups of passionate individuals can broadcast live, together, the results are truly remarkable:
Today we're excited to launch Hangouts On Air to Google+ users worldwide. So if you have something to say—as an aspiring artist, a global celebrity, or a concerned citizen—you can now go live in front of a global audience. With just a few clicks, you’ll be able to:
Broadcast publicly. By checking "Enable Hangouts On Air," you can broadcast your live hangout—from the Google+ stream, your YouTube channel or your website—to the entire world.
See how many viewers you’ve got. During your broadcast, you can look inside the hangout to see how many people are watching live.
Record and re-share. Once you're off the air, we’ll upload a public recording to your YouTube channel, and to your original Google+ post. This way it's easy to share and discuss your broadcast after it's over.
Of course, launching millions of live stations takes some doing, so we're rolling out Hangouts On Air gradually, over the next few weeks. In the meantime you can save the date for an upcoming hangout...
… sign in to Google+ to see what’s live right now, or find inspiration in the many broadcasts that have already aired.
A news van for everyone. KOMU-TV anchor +Sarah Hill invited locals to share live coverage of the recent protests in Montreal; Fox 11 LA anchor +Maria Quiban invites viewers to join her on Good Day LA.
Town halls with today’s leaders. President +Barack Obama, Governor +Mitt Romney, UN Secretary-General +Ban Ki-moon, and many others have connected with citizens via hangout.
Live concerts from your living room. Musical artists like +Suite 709 and +Daria Musk perform live for those inside the hangout, and for everyone else tuning in.
Classes anyone can attend. Chef +Larry Fournillier, Professor +Noah Diffenbaugh, and +FAWN share their cooking, climate change and fashion expertise, respectively, via hangout.
Roundtables about any topic. Photographer +Trey Ratcliff, soccer football enthusiast +Sabotage Times and celebrity trend spotter +Young Hollywood talk about the issues they find interesting.
Posted by Matthias Grundmann, Vivek Kwatra, and Irfan Essa, Research at Google
One thing we have been working on within Research at Google is developing methods for making casual videos look more professional, thereby providing users with a better viewing experience. Professional videos have several characteristics that differentiate them from casually shot videos. For example, in order to tell a story, cinematographers carefully control lighting and exposure and use specialized equipment to plan camera movement.
We have developed a technique that mimics professional camera moves and applies them to videos recorded by hand-held devices. Cinematographers use specialized equipment such as tripods and dollies to plan their camera paths and hold them steady. In contrast, think of a video you shot using a mobile phone camera. How steady was your hand and were you able to anticipate an interesting moment and smoothly pan the camera to capture that moment? To bridge these differences, we propose an algorithm that automatically determines the best camera path and recasts the video as if it were filmed using stabilization equipment. Specifically, we divide the original, shaky camera path into a set of segments, each approximated by either a constant, linear or parabolic motion of the camera. Our optimization finds the best of all possible partitions using a computationally efficient and stable algorithm. For details, check out our earlier blog post or read our paper, Auto-Directed Video Stabilization with Robust L1 Optimal Camera Paths, published in IEEE CVPR 2011.
The next time you upload your videos to YouTube, try stabilizing them by going to the YouTube editor or directly from the video manager by clicking on Edit->Enhancements. For even more convenience, YouTube will automatically detect if your video needs stabilization and offer to do it for you. Many videos on YouTube have already been enhanced using this technology.
More recently, we have been working on a related problem common in videos shot from mobile phones. The camera sensors in these phones contain what is known as an electronic rolling shutter. When taking a picture with a rolling shutter camera, the image is not captured instantaneously. Instead, the camera captures the image one row of pixels at a time, with a small delay when going from one row to the next. Consequently, if the camera moves during capture, it will cause image distortions ranging from shear in the case of low-frequency motions (for instance an image captured from a driving car) to wobbly distortions in the case of high-frequency perturbations (think of a person walking while recording video). These distortions are especially noticeable in videos where the camera shake is independent across frames. For example, take a look at the video below.
Original video with rolling shutter distortions
In our recent paper titled Calibration-Free Rolling Shutter Removal, which was awarded the best paper at IEEE ICCP 2012, we demonstrate a solution to correct these rolling shutter distortions in videos. A significant feature of our approach is that it does not require any knowledge of the camera used to shoot the video. The time delay in capturing two consecutive rows that we mention above is in fact different for every camera and affects the extent of distortions. Having knowledge of this delay parameter can be useful, but difficult to obtain or estimate via calibration. Imagine a video that is already uploaded to YouTube -- it will be challenging to obtain this parameter! Instead, we show that just the visual data in the video has enough information to appropriately describe and compensate for the distortions caused by the camera motion, even in the presence of a rolling shutter. For more information, see the narrated video description of our paper.
This technique is already integrated with the YouTube stabilizer. Starting today, if you stabilize a video from a mobile phone or other rolling shutter cameras, we will also automatically compensate for rolling shutter distortions. To see our technique in action, check out the video below, obtained after applying rolling shutter compensation and stabilization to the one above.
Posted by Maggie Johnson, Director of Education and University Relations
The Bodleian Library is the main research library at the University of Oxford. It is also one of the oldest libraries in the world, dating back to the 14th century. But the staff of the Bodleian operates very much in the 21st century, using the latest technology to solve their unique problems.
A few years ago, the library acquired a set of 4,000 popular piano pieces from the mid-Victorian period. There’s very little information available on these pieces, so Bodleian staff decided to use crowdsourcing to collect information on this corpus of music. Through a Google Focused Award, they have digitized and made the entire set of music available online.
By visiting the What’s-the-Score website, which opened yesterday, ‘citizen librarians’ can help by describing the scores and contributing to the creation of an online catalogue. They can also include links to audio or video recordings. This is the first time the Bodleian has used this approach to collect catalog information. Typically, a large group of researchers are required to find this information.
Martin Holmes, Alfred Brendel Curator of Music at the Bodleian Libraries, commented: ‘In making the scores available online, they will not only be accessible for academic study and research but will also be there to enjoy for anyone who is interested in various aspects of Victorian music, culture and society.’
The Bodleian Library is one of dozens of recipients of Google Focused Awards. These awards are for research in areas of study that are of key interest to Google as well as the research community. These unrestricted gifts are for two to three years, and the recipients have the advantage of access to Google tools, technologies, and expertise. The Bodleian’s experiment in crowdsourcing to build up data on a specialized collection is timely and interesting, given the number of such collections becoming available on the web.
The Google Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship honors the memory of Dr. Anita Borg, who devoted her life to encouraging the presence of women in computing and founded the Institute for Women in Technology in 1997. Anita passed away in 2003, and we created the Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship in 2004 to honor her memory. Anita’s legacy lives on today through this scholarship and the organization she created, which has since been re-named the Anita Borg Institute for Women in Technology.
This year we’d like to recognize and congratulate the 70 Google Anita Borg Memorial scholars and the 79 Google Anita Borg Memorial finalists, all of whom attend universities in the United States, Canada, Europe, the Middle East or Africa. These students will attend the annual Google Scholars Retreat this summer, where they will have the opportunity to attend tech talks on Google products, network with other scholars and participate in social activities. Students from the U.S. and Canada will attend the retreat in Mountain View, Calif., and students from Europe, the Middle East and Africa will attend the retreat in Zurich, Switzerland.
Here’s a full list of this year’s scholars and finalists along with the institutions they attend. In the coming months, we’ll also announce the recipients of the Google Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship in Asia, Australia and New Zealand.
You probably hear terms like “the cloud” or “cloud computing” being used a lot these days. While the idea of the cloud may seem abstract, many things you already do on your computer and smartphone today, such as email, photo sharing and video streaming, are made possible by the cloud.
At the heart of it, Google is about cloud computing—helping people live online and get things done in the cloud. Whether you need to add “milk” to a shared shopping list from the train, collaborate with your teammate back in the office to finish your presentation from a hotel lobby, or chat face-to-face with your mom from halfway around the world, we believe that getting stuff done in the cloud is a better way. We like to call it “going Google.”
We’ve built cloud-based tools like Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Docs to help you connect and collaborate online with others more quickly and easily, without having to deal with the hassles and frustrations of installing and managing traditional software. Last week’s launch of Google Drive is the next step: Google Drive brings together many Google services—documents, spreadsheets, images and more—all in one place so you can easily create, collaborate, and share in real-time. Files are saved automatically, and friends, teammates, roommates, families and co-workers can do things together—even when they’re not. If you haven’t already tried it, Google Drive is a great place to start going Google.
Today, hundreds of millions of people, including 16 million students and teachers at 66 of the top 100 U.S. universities, employees at more than 4 million businesses worldwide including Burberry, Costco and National Geographic (and maybe even your 13-year-old daughter and her entire soccer team) have all already gone Google.
If you’re going Google to build a company, great. If you write your grand opus poem, even better. If you have to turn a project around from different time zones overnight, awesome. And if you video-chat with grandma while you do—well, that’s just showing off.
So go on. See what it’s like to get stuff done and go Google.
Did you know Open Flow has its roots in academia? Back in May 2006 Vint Cerf was visiting Stanford to deliver an invited lecture. Following the talk he met with Stanford Professor Nick McKeown and learned about the Clean Slate Internet project. Nick was looking for support and Google’s involvement in what he described as a lab for “radical new ideas in networking”. Vint felt the program looked “intellectually healthy but might be a very long term matter to bear fruit”. Vint explained that for us to get involved we would want to have Google engineers excited and engaged.
Professor McKeown met with Google networking and infrastructure experts to present his ideas. Everybody knew that Software-Defined Networking (SDN) had great promise but the Open Flow effort seemed a bit ambitious for a professor and a couple of grad students. Googlers Dave Presotto and Stephen Stuart agreed to take a chance on it and sponsor a small research grant to fund another student and to get Google engaged. As Google and the industry got more involved, Open Flow began to gain traction. In June 2008 Google provided another grant to support more students and in late 2009 Google joined the initiatives consortium with other industry members.
Google engineers Stephen Stuart and Jim Wanderer worked closely with Stanford and lead Google’s Open Flow development and deployment. In 2011 the Open Networking Foundation (ONF) was formed to accelerate Software-Defined Networking standards and foster a robust market and ecosystem. Google’s own Urs Hölzle became ONF’s first President and Chairman of the Board.
Google involvement and support of this academic effort was a key factor to the speedy development and deployment of Open Flow and SDN - technology that made it from a university research project to running Google’s WAN in record time.
Today we’re excited to announce the 50 State Winners of the 2012 U.S. Doodle 4 Google competition. We received a record-breaking 114,000 submissions from all corners of the country—from North Pole, Alaska, to Suwanee, Ga. Young artists doodled their way from the prehistoric to the futuristic and everywhere in between with this year’s theme, “If I could travel in time, I’d visit...”.
To recognize the amazing level of talent, Googlers are celebrating the young artists at school events in their communities along with thousands of their teachers, parents, friends and classmates.
Now it’s time for your voice to be heard. From today until May 10, we invite the public to vote and help us select the five National Finalists. On May 17 at our national award ceremony in New York City, we’ll announce the National Winner. You’ll be able to see the winning doodle on the Google homepage on May 18.
We also hope everyone gets a chance to see these State Winners’ masterpieces, so at the end of the contest, all of the 50 State Winners will have their doodles displayed in an exhibit at the New York Public Library. And, for the first time this year, the artwork of all 250 State Finalists (including the 50 State Winners) will be displayed in local exhibitions in their respective states.
We’d like to thank the countless teachers, parents and administrators for supporting their young artists as they doodled their way through time for this year’s contest. Please join us in congratulating all participants—they did a fantastic job of inspiring us with their creativity.
Posted by Marissa Mayer, Vice President of Product Management
