Two weeks in Silicon Valley: Startups from many nations join together at Blackbox

Entrepreneurs have transformative power to build great products and companies that change our communities and improve our lives. With Google for Entrepreneurs, we’re working in more than 100 countries, in cities from Raleigh to Ramallah, Krakow to Cairo, to fuel the global entrepreneurial movement.

One of our goals is to connect our thriving partner network of entrepreneur communities worldwide with one another, and back to Silicon Valley. Today we’re taking another step in that direction with a partnership with Blackbox, a global startup accelerator.

Blackbox Connect brings founders from top accelerators around the world to take part in a two-week, fully immersive program where they live and work at the “Blackbox Mansion” in Silicon Valley, collaborate with like-minded entrepreneurs, investors, experts and executives from the Silicon Valley community. They then return home to their native countries to scale their big ideas.

Google for Entrepreneurs is teaming up to power Blackbox Connect’s summer 2013 program. Several of our partners around the world have each nominated a top startup from their program, and eight startups have just arrived for the program kickoff today. Over the course of the next two weeks, they’ll receive pitch coaching, hear from over a dozen founders and investors, pitch their companies to the Silicon Valley community, even cook and dine together.

We’d like to congratulate the selected teams:

• Inpris (from Campus Tel Aviv in Israel)
• Melusyn (from Le Camping in France)
• Avocarrot (from Campus London in U.K.)
• EgzoTech (from the Google for Entrepreneurs Krakow Program in Poland)
• Eyedeus Labs and TunaCode (from P@SHA in Pakistan)
• Instabug (from Flat6Labs in Egypt)
• MyDoorHandle (from 88mph in South Africa)

These companies represent the thriving startup communities growing around the world. For example, EgzoTech is a Polish startup designing robots to help patients doing muscle recovery. They've developed robots integrated with video games to motivate patients to test and improve muscle control. You can check our EgzoTech's product video and learn more about all the selected startups on YouTube.

We’ve already seen the power that individual communities have in elevating successful entrepreneurs. We can’t wait to see the impact of bringing these communities together to live, learn and share insights. Stay tuned for more updates this week on our Google+ page.

Posted by Mary Grove, Director of Google for Entrepreneurs

A new Google Maps app for smartphones and tablets

Today we’re introducing a new Google Maps app for Android smartphones and tablets, also coming soon to iPhone and iPad. It’s a new mapping experience that makes exploring the world and getting to the places that matter to you a lot faster and easier. The app is gradually rolling out globally in Google Play and will be available soon in the App Store.

The new Google Maps for mobile builds on the design we released for iPhone last December and improves on it with a few useful search and navigation features. And it's the first dedicated app for Android tablets and iPads. We’re also retiring Latitude and are making some changes to offline and My Maps which we’ll explain in more detail below.

First, here are a few highlights that make this release stand out:

Explore: Explore is a fast and easy way to visually browse and discover new places without even typing. Simply tap the search box and you’ll see cards showing great places to eat, drink, sleep and shop.

Enhanced navigation: In addition to current traffic conditions, we’ve added two new features to help you navigate around traffic. You can now see reports of problems on the road that you can tap to see incident details. While on the road, Google Maps will also alert you if a better route becomes available and reroute you to your destination faster. This feature is available only on Android and is coming soon to iOS.

Designed for tablets: A dedicated tablet design brings all the features of this new app to Android tablets and iPads, which makes exploring the world from the comfort of your living room much more fluid, smooth and fun.

Reviews, Zagat and Offers: There’s a new 5.0 star rating system that gives you a quick read on how your friends and others rate places like restaurants, bars and cafes. For an expert’s opinion, the Zagat badge of excellence and curated lists are integrated into search results so you can quickly spot the very best places. From “Best Restaurants to meet for a drink in NYC” to “Best Restaurants in the Mission” in San Francisco, Zagat’s there to help you uncover the local gems.

And finally, Google Maps for mobile is a great way to discover valuable Offers from national brands like Macy's, Michael's and Toys "R" Us, labeled right on the map. All these features can make it a lot easier to navigate the world, no matter what adventure comes your way.

One important change you should know about is that Latitude and check-ins will be retired. These features will no longer be a part of the new Google Maps app, and will stop functioning in older versions by August 9. We understand some of you still want to see your friends and family on a map, which is why we've added location sharing and check-ins to Google+ for Android (coming soon to iOS). More details about Latitude and check-in changes can be found in our help center.

The offline maps feature for Android is also no longer available. Instead we’ve created a new way for you to access maps offline by simply entering “OK Maps” into the search box when viewing the area you want for later. Finally, My Maps functionality is not supported in this release but will return to future versions of the app. People who want to create powerful custom maps can still do so with Maps Engine Lite on desktop.

Helping you find great places is what we love to do. And as more of us use mobile phones and tablets in our daily lives, information that’s useful to you isn't just about what you need, but also where you might find it. Today’s update is an exciting step forward for Google’s maps—one that we hope will make it faster and easier for you to explore and discover places you want to go.

Update July 16: The new Google Maps app for iPhone and iPad is now live. Visit the App Store today to download it.

Posted by Daniel Graf, Director, Google Maps

*The new Google Maps for mobile is compatible with Ice Cream Sandwich and Jelly Bean Android devices and iOS 6+ when available. Please note some of the features mentioned in this post aren’t available in all countries.

More ways to catch up, share and come together during Ramadan

Getting together for meals and laughs, telling stories, and simply spending time with loved ones—this is what holidays mean to many of us.

This year, as families around the world celebrate Ramadan, we have some tips on how you can more easily keep in touch and share moments with the people you care about.

Check out our new page for Ramadan 2013 for suggestions on how to catch up with friends and family no matter where you are, drop in to live cook-along Hangouts with celebrity chefs from around Southeast Asia, easily discover and watch videos on YouTube, and find the best commute routes that will get you home in time to share a meal with loved ones.

You can also experience the atmosphere of Al-Masjid Al-Haram by tuning in to the live stream from the Grand Mosque in Mecca, Saudi Arabia on the Saudi Ministry of Culture and Information's YouTube channel, also available directly on our new page.



And if you’d like to see how people around the world are celebrating Ramadan, search for #breakingfast on Google+ to see the latest stream of posts and photos. You can also send through your own special moments: Simply share your favorite photo or post on Google+ and tag your post with #breakingfast.

Posted by Hadi Raad, Head of Marketing, Emerging Arabia

A few easy tools the whole family will love

This summer we’re posting regularly with privacy and security tips. Knowing how to stay safe and secure online is important, which is why we created our Good to Know site with advice and tips for safe and savvy Internet use. -Ed.

Summer is here, and with kids out of school it is a great time for families to explore the web together—from learning what makes fireflies glow to playing online games together. But while there is a lot of entertaining, educational content online, there are also materials I’d rather not see when I’m surfing the web with my family. Google has built a number of tools that parents can use to help keep content they would rather not see from popping up on the family computer. It takes less than five minutes to turn them on, so follow the steps below to help make your search results more family-friendly this summer.

1. Turn on SafeSearch in Google Search
Turning on SafeSearch is an easy way to help you hide images, search results and videos intended just for adults. It’s especially helpful if you’re concerned about the content that might pop up on your family computer, and it’s easy to turn on. Just visit the Google Search Settings page, go to the "SafeSearch filters" section, and check the box to filter mature content from Google Search result pages. These preferences will apply for any searches done using that browser on your computer. If you have multiple browsers on your family computer, you might want to turn SafeSearch on for each one.

You can turn SafeSearch on or off from the Search Settings page

2. Save and lock your preferences
Once you’ve set your preferences, make sure to click the Save button at the bottom of the page. And if you're signed in to your Google Account, you can also lock the SafeSearch filter so others can’t change your preferences—just click “Lock SafeSearch.” Now the setting is protected with your Google Account password. While no filter is 100 percent perfect, with SafeSearch on you can feel more confident browsing the web with your family.

3. Turn on YouTube Safety Mode
YouTube Safety Mode helps you and your family avoid videos that might be OK with our Community Guidelines, but you might not want popping up on your family computer. Turning on Safety Mode in YouTube takes just one step. Scroll down to the bottom of any YouTube page and click on the button that says “Safety” at the bottom of the page—now you can choose your preferences for Safety Mode.

Click the button that says “Safety” at the bottom of any YouTube page, and then choose your preferences

4. Lock your Safety Mode preferences
Just like with Safe Search, you can also log in with your Google Account and lock YouTube Safety Mode on each one of your computer’s browsers. It will filter videos with mature content, so they won’t show up in video search results, related videos, playlists, shows or films. YouTube Safety Mode will also help hide objectionable comments.

5. Turn on SafeSearch on mobile
SafeSearch is available on your phone or other mobile device, as well as the web. You can turn on SafeSearch for Google on your mobile device by opening your phone’s browser and visiting google.com/preferences. Scroll to the SafeSearch Filters section to select what level of filtering you would like to enable. Be sure to tap “Save Preferences” after you’ve made your selection.

To enable SafeSearch on YouTube’s mobile app, first open your settings, then press “Search.” From there, select “SafeSearch Filtering” and select moderate or strict filtering.

Helping your family have a positive and safe experience with Google is important to you, and it’s important to us, too. That’s why we’ve partnered with parents and experts on free and easy to use tools and resources to help your family stay safe and secure when browsing online. If you’re interested in even more of our tools and tips, please see our Good to Know site, and stay tuned for more security tips throughout the summer.

Posted by Matthias Heiler, Staff Software Engineer

Google Databoard: A new way to explore industry research

Posted by Adam Grunewald, Mobile Marketing Manager

It’s important for people to stay up to date about the most recent research and insights related to their work or personal lives. But it can be difficult to keep up with all the new studies and updated data that’s out there. To make life a bit easier, we’re introducing a new take on how research can be presented. The Databoard for Research Insights enables people to explore and interact with some of Google’s recent research in a unique and immersive way. The Databoard uses responsive design to to offer an engaging experience across devices. Additionally, the tool is a new venture into data visualization and shareability with bite-sized charts and stats that can be shared with your friends or coworkers. The Databoard is currently home to several of Google’s market research studies for businesses, but we believe that this way of conveying data can work across all forms of research.

Here are some of the things that make the Databoard different from other ways research is released today:

Easy to use
All of the information in the Databoard is presented in a bite-sized way so that you can quickly find relevant information. You can explore an entire study or jump straight to the topics or data points you care about. The Databoard is also optimized for all devices so you can explore the research on your computer, tablet or smartphone.

Meant to be shared
Most people, when they find a compelling piece of data, want to share it! Whether it’s with a colleague, client, or a community on a blog or social network, compelling insights and data are meant to be shared. With the databoard, you can easily share individual charts and insights or collections of data with anyone through email or social networks, just look for the share button at the top of each chart or insight.

Create a cohesive story
Most research studies set out to answer a specific question, like how people use their smartphones in stores, or how a specific type of consumer shops. This means that businesses need to look across multiple pieces of research to craft a comprehensive business or marketing strategy. With this in mind, the Databoard lets you curate a customized infographic out of the charts or data points you find important across multiple Google research studies. Creating an infographic is quick and easy, and you can share the finished product with your friends or colleagues.

The databoard is currently home to six research studies including The New Multi-screen World, Mobile In-store shopper research and Mobile search moments. New studies will be added frequently. To get started creating your own infographic, visit the Databoard now.

A new way to experience the 100th Tour de France

This year, the Tour de France is celebrating its 100th edition with a special route, from Corsica to Les Champs-Elysées, giving people around the world the chance to admire beautiful sights as well as amazing athletic feats.

Our recent Doodle celebrating the 100th edition of the Tour de France

The Tour de France is using a variety of Google products to help you experience the race like never before, including a YouTube channel, a Google+ page and an Android app where you can keep up with this 100th edition. We’ve also used Google Maps and Street View to create a new interactive experience that lets you feel what it’s like to pedal alongside the greats. Put on your helmet and cycle along at g.co/yourtour.

So what are you waiting for? Line up and get started!

Posted by Raphaël Goumain, Consumer Marketing Director

Supercharge your summer at Maker Camp

We’re pleased to have Dale Dougherty, founder and publisher of MAKE magazine and Maker Faire, join us today to talk about Maker Camp—a free, online summer camp for teens on Google+. Last year, more than 1 million campers joined in, and this summer is looking even brighter. Maker Camp will officially kick off at 11 a.m. PDT / 2 p.m. EDT today in a live Hangout On Air from San Francisco’s Exploratorium and will go on for the next six weeks. - Ed.

Camping has long been a summer tradition that calls us to explore the outdoors, engage in fun activities and make new friends. Overnight camping might involve setting up tents and gathering around a campfire, while day camps can focus on areas of interest such as chess, computers, robotics or sports (we’ve worked with a lot of these at Maker Media). Yet no matter what kind of camp it is, or where it takes place, camp has to be fun and social.

Maker Camp is a whole new kind of camp: an online summer camp that is completely free and open to everyone. Maker Camp takes place wherever you are, by letting you do fun activities and share them with others through the Google+ platform. You’ll make cool projects, go on epic virtual “field trips” and meet awesome makers.

This is Maker Camp’s second summer, and the format is similar: Each weekday morning, we’ll post a new project or activity on our Google+ page—30 things to make over six weeks. Each weekday afternoon, tune in to a live Google+ Hangout On Air to meet expert makers who create amazing things. And like last year, our Field Trip Friday Hangouts will take you to new places that few of us get to see. For instance, we’re excited to take you to NASA Ames Research Center next week, and this week we’ll be checking out one of the world’s fastest sailboats, from Oracle Team USA.

We’ve added a few things to make this year's Maker Camp even better. There's a new Google+ Community for Maker Camp, so it will be even easier for you to chat with other campers and see what they’re working on. We also have a network of affiliate camps (we call them “campsites”), so you can create and make together in your local library, youth club or makerspace. If there’s a campsite near you, you’ll find it on this map. We’ve worked with Google to supply many of these campsites with maker equipment like soldering kits, LEDs, Raspberry Pi boards (mini Linux computers), and Arduino microcontrollers (good for making robots and other gadgets).



Maker Camp hopes to foster the DIY (do-it-yourself) spirit in young people. We want each camper to see how much there is that you can do and how much there is to explore all around you. Once you begin doing things, you’ll meet others who share your interests, and you can collaborate to work on projects together. We call that DIT (do-it-together). Google+ is a platform for that kind of collaboration, and it extends to any location and any time zone. And when Maker Camp comes to an end, you’ll have friendships that last beyond summer.

Maker Camp might not be surrounded by trees or near a lake, but it has many of the wonderful features of camping. For instance, you can think of your computer as the campfire that we gather around, and with more than a million campers, our virtual campfire is pretty big! Plus, like any camp, you’ll get the most out of Maker Camp by participating. Meet other makers, get involved in conversations, do things you’ve never done before and most of all, make something!

What each of us can do is pretty amazing, yet what we can do together is even more amazing. In that spirit, I invite you all to join us at Maker Camp, starting today. Just follow Make on Google+ to join, and let’s make this the best summer ever.

Posted by Dale Dougherty, founder and publisher of MAKE magazine and Maker Faire

Conference Report: USENIX Annual Technical Conference (ATC) 2013

Posted by Murray Stokely, Google Storage Analytics Team

This year marks Google’s eleventh consecutive year as a sponsor of the USENIX Annual Technical Conference (ATC), just one of the co-located events at USENIX Federated Conference Week (FCW), which combines numerous conferences and workshops covering fields such as Autonomic Computing, Feedback Computing and much more in an intensive week of research, trends, and community interaction.

ATC provides a broad forum for computing systems research with an emphasis on implementations and experimental results. In addition to the Googlers presenting publications, we had two members on the program committee of ATC and several keynote speakers, invited speakers, panelists, committee members, and participants at the other co-located events at FCW.

In the paper Janus: Optimal Flash Provisioning for Cloud Storage Workloads, Googler Christoph Albrecht and co-authors demonstrated a system that allows users to make informed flash memory provisioning and partitioning decisions in cloud-scale distributed file systems that include both flash storage and disk tiers. As flash memory is still expensive, it is best to use it only for workloads that can make good use of it. Janus creates long term workload characterizations based on RPC samples and file age metadata. It uses these workload characterizations to formulate and solve an optimization problem that maximizes the reads sent to the flash tier. Based on evaluations from workloads using Janus, in use at Google for the past 6 months, the authors conclude that the recommendation system is quite effective, with flash hit rates using the optimized recommendations 47-76% higher than the option of using the flash as an unpartitioned tier.

In packetdrill: Scriptable Network Stack Testing, from Sockets to Packets, Google’s Neal Cardwell and co-authors showcased a portable, open-source scripting tool that enables testing the correctness and performance of network protocols. Despite their importance in modern computer systems, network protocols often undergo only ad hoc testing before their deployment, in large part due to their complexity. Furthermore, new algorithms have unforeseen interactions with other features, so testing has only become more daunting as TCP has evolved. The packetdrill tool was instrumental in the development of three new features for Linux TCP—Early Retransmit, Fast Open, and Loss Probes—and allowed the authors to find and fix 10 bugs in Linux. Furthermore, the team uses packetdrill in all phases of the development process for the kernel used in one of the world’s largest Linux installations. In the hope that sharing packetdrill with the community will make the process of improving Internet protocols an easier one, the source code and test scripts for packetdrill have been made freely available.

There were also additional refereed publications with Google co-authors at some of the co-located events at FCW, notably NicPic: Scalable and Accurate End-Host Rate Limiting, which outlines a system which enables accurate network traffic scheduling in a scalable fashion, and AGILE: Elastic Distributed Resource Scaling for Infrastructure-as-a-Service, a system that efficiently handles dynamic application workloads, reducing both penalties and user dissatisfaction.

Google is proud to support the academic community through conference participation and sponsorship. In particular, we are happy to mention one of the other interesting papers from this year’s USENIX FCW, co-authored by former Google PhD fellowship recipient Ashok Anand, MiG: Efficient Migration of Desktop VM Using Semantic Compression.

USENIX is a supporter of open access, so the papers and videos from the talks are available on the conference website.

Natural Language Understanding-focused awards announced

Posted by Massimiliano Ciaramita, Research Scientist and David Harper, Head University Relations (EMEA)

Some of the biggest challenges for the scientific community today involve understanding the principles and mechanisms that underlie natural language use on the Web. An example of long-standing problem is language ambiguity; when somebody types the word “Rio” in a query do they mean the city, a movie, a casino, or something else? Understanding the difference can be crucial to help users get the answer they are looking for. In the past few years, a significant effort in industry and academia has focused on disambiguating language with respect to Web-scale knowledge repositories such as Wikipedia and Freebase. These resources are used primarily as canonical, although incomplete, collections of “entities”. As entities are often connected in multiple ways, e.g., explicitly via hyperlinks and implicitly via factual information, such resources can be naturally thought of as (knowledge) graphs. This work has provided the first breakthroughs towards anchoring language in the Web to interpretable, albeit initially shallow, semantic representations. Google has brought the vision of semantic search directly to millions of users via the adoption of the Knowledge Graph. This massive change to search technology has also been called a shift “from strings to things”.

Understanding natural language is at the core of Google's work to help people get the information they need as quickly and easily as possible. At Google we work hard to advance the state of the art in natural language processing, to improve the understanding of fundamental principles, and to solve the algorithmic and engineering challenges to make these technologies part of everyday life. Language is inherently productive; an infinite number of meaningful new expressions can be formed by combining the meaning of their components systematically. The logical next step is the semantic modeling of structured meaningful expressions -- in other words, “what is said” about entities. We envision that knowledge graphs will support the next leap forward in language understanding towards scalable compositional analyses, by providing a universe of entities, facts and relations upon which semantic composition operations can be designed and implemented.

So we’ve just awarded over $1.2 million to support several natural language understanding research awards given to university research groups doing work in this area. Research topics range from semantic parsing to statistical models of life stories and novel compositional inference and representation approaches to modeling relations and events in the Knowledge Graph.

These awards went to researchers in nine universities and institutions worldwide, selected after a rigorous internal review:

• Mark Johnson and Lan Du (Macquarie University) and Wray Buntine (NICTA) for “Generative models of Life Stories”

• Percy Liang and Christopher Manning (Stanford University) for “Tensor Factorizing Knowledge Graphs”

• Sebastian Riedel (University College London) and Andrew McCallum (University of Massachusetts, Amherst) for “Populating a Knowledge Base of Compositional Universal Schema”

• Ivan Titov (University of Amsterdam) for “Learning to Reason by Exploiting Grounded Text Collections”

• Hans Uszkoreit (Saarland University and DFKI), Feiyu Xu (DFKI and Saarland University) and Roberto Navigli (Sapienza University of Rome) for “Language Understanding cum Knowledge Yield”

• Luke Zettlemoyer (University of Washington) for “Weakly Supervised Learning for Semantic Parsing with Knowledge Graphs”

We believe the results will be broadly useful to product development and will further scientific research. We look forward to working with these researchers, and we hope we will jointly push the frontier of natural language understanding research to the next level.

Celebrating Pride 2013

Thousands of Googlers, Gayglers (LGBT Googlers), and their families and friends took to the streets last month to participate in Pride parades and celebrations around the globe. Pride had a special buzz this year, as DOMA and Prop 8 were struck down by the Supreme Court three days before the parades, marking an important step toward equal rights for all.

We supported our fellow Gayglers and others around the world with recording-breaking attendance at parades in San Francisco (well over 1300 Googlers and allies) and New York (500+ participants). In other parts of the world, we marched in celebrations in London, Budapest, Dublin, Tel Aviv, and Tokyo Rainbow Week 2013. We floated along the canals in Amsterdam Pride parade, marched in the Mardi Gras parade in Sydney and will gather in Hong Lim park for Singapore's 3rd annual Pink Dot celebration.

New York Pride Parade

We had some big firsts this year all around the world as well:

• Gayglers hosted a Pride@Google Speaker Series for the month of June, where speakers ranging from NFL stars to community leaders to Prop 8 Plaintiffs Kris Perry and Sandy Stier came to share their messages at Google.
• LGBT celebrations were held for the first time in Hyderabad and Google was there! In India, our contingent of over 30 people made it to the cover of many local newspapers.
• Though we have participated in Sao Paulo’s Pride parade in previous years, this year, Google was proud to be the first corporate sponsor thanks to the hard work of the Sao Paulo Gayglers. More than 100 Googlers marched—doubling participation from last year.
• Google participated for the first time in celebrations in Mexico City, Paris and Hamburg.
• We kicked off a collaboration with two founding partners called 'We Are Open' in Hungary that joins together companies, organizations and communities that are committed to openness. More than 100 organizations signed up to make a stand for diversity and we'll show our united front at Budapest Pride on Saturday, July 6.

London Gayglers

Our LGBT efforts are not just once a year during Pride, either. Earlier this year, we worked with Creative Lab to create a grassroots employee video for TheFour.com, an organization supporting marriage equality in the four U.S. states where it was on the ballot this past year. Google also co-wrote an article to the United States Supreme Court explaining why Gay Marriage is Good for Business. We supported the citizens of France by hosting marriage ceremonies over Hangouts and we recently launched a YouTube Spotlight Channel and campaign, #ProudtoLove, dedicated to celebrating LGBT Pride.

We’re proud of all our Googlers and excited about what was accomplished this year! We’re glad to have ended Pride month on such an inspiring note of equality. For more photos, click here.

Posted by Heather Cain, Diversity Team