Hanging out for Jewish-Arab dialogue in Israel

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Despite the fact that Israeli Arab and Jewish youth live in the same country and even study at the same universities, they often grow up without meeting. When tensions rise in the region, this lack of mutual understanding can lead to stereotyping, hostility and even violence.

We believe the Internet can help break down these barriers. In honor of today’s 30th annual International Day of Peace, we’re partnering with the Peres Center for Peace, a non-profit organization founded by the President of Israel and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Shimon Peres. The center promotes cooperation and peacebuilding between Jewish and Arab citizens of Israel as well as between Israel and its Arab neighbors.


Together, we’ll be holding a series of Hangouts on Google+ designed to enable dialogue between Israeli Arab and Jewish students. “Hanging Out for Peace” is a six-month project that will involve nearly 150 Israeli university students, women and men, with an equal number of Arabs and Jews. Students will be divided into mixed Jewish and Arab ‘circles’, matched with other students who study the same subject at university.

The circles will meet via Hangouts on Google+, led by instructors from the Peres Center, and will undertake online and offline projects related to the circle’s area of academic focus. After a series of Hangouts, the students will meet face to face, present the projects they’ve developed to the larger group of participants and discuss issues that arose during their work together.

The Internet provides a perfect platform for dialogue and cooperation. It can help overcome physical barriers and connect people from different cultures who have shared interests and common values. We’re excited to see how this project develops and hope that, in a small way, it will help foster coexistence and understanding between Israeli Jews and Arabs and, in the future, build bridges between other communities, too.

Posted by Doron Avni, Head of Policy, Israel

Arts and entertainment take the stage at our most recent Big Tent

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What happens when you bring together the head of the Metropolitan Opera, YouTube creators, Comedy Central and Justin Bieber’s manager to discuss the Internet’s impact on arts and culture?

In partnership with the NYC Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment, our Big Tent in New York City, held this week, fostered a constructive and sometimes challenging conversation that saw more opportunities than challenges for artists through the Internet and technology.

While the speakers recognized the disruptive force of the Internet, they also saw the possibilities that technology creates for artists of all stripes to connect with audiences and tell stories in creative ways. As Scooter Braun, manager to artists including Justin Bieber, said, “I don’t think the music industry has changed as much as people think it has. It starts with music. All we have to do today is study interaction, which is the same thing we’ve always had to do.”

Many speakers saw the Internet as essential to their own creative endeavors. YouTube creators like Michelle Phan, Issa Rae and Julia Nunes all used online platforms to launch their careers.

Newsweek Daily Beast’s art and design critic Blake Gopnik, while seeing benefits to new cultural platforms like Google Art Project, reminded the audience of the importance of appreciating the space that contextualizes a work of art. His message of the communality and shared experience of viewing art live was one that resonated with speakers from the performing arts who stressed that the live experience could not be replicated or replaced by technology.

Google chairman Eric Schmidt made a surprise appearance and emphasized the power of mobile and new platforms to change the way we live. He highlighted how the Internet has led to an increase in content and lower costs of distribution. One of the accompanying challenges, he noted, is how, in this shift to abundant content and cheaper distribution, business models adapt to build audiences and deliver value.

The afternoon ended with drinks under a literal big tent, hosted by Cirque du Soleil, which launched Movi.Kanti.Revo—a new sensory Chrome experiment—to close out the day.



Each Big Tent gives us the opportunity to engage with our audience on the impact of the Internet and society. Our next event is on innovation and entrepreneurship in Seoul, South Korea. Keep up with us at www.google.com/+googlebigtent.

Posted by Peter Barron, Director, External Relations, Europe Middle East and Africa

Google News turns 10

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Google News launched on September 22, 2002—exactly a decade ago.

Inspired by the widespread interest in news after the September 11 attacks, we invested in technology to help people search and browse news relevant to them. Google News broke new ground in news aggregation by gathering links in real time, grouping articles by story and ranking stories based on the editorial opinions of publishers worldwide. Linking to a diverse set of sources for any given story enabled readers to easily access different perspectives and genres of content. By featuring opposing viewpoints in the same display block, people were encouraged to hear arguments on both sides of an issue and gain a more balanced perspective.

In the last ten years, Google News has grown to 72 editions in 30 languages, and now draws from more than 50,000 news sources. The technology also powers Google’s news search. Together, they connect 1 billion unique users a week to news content.

Google News today
As we have scaled the service internationally, we have added new features (Local News, Personalization, Editors’ Picks, Spotlight, Authorship, Social Discussions), evolved our design, embraced mobile and run ancillary experiments (Fast Flip, Living Stories, Timeline). In parallel, we have monitored our quality and challenged our engineers to improve the technology under the hood—increase freshness, group news better, rank stories more accurately, personalize with more insight and streamline the infrastructure.

Take a look back at the past decade in Google News through the top stories from each year and a few notable features that have launched in the interim:



It’s undeniable that the online news landscape has changed immensely. Smartphones and social networks have transformed how news is accessed and sourced, and shifted the relationship between readers and authors. Open journalism is the norm, and aggregation by humans and machines is an integral part of the ecosystem. New technologies such as Hangouts on Air have the potential to connect users, journalists and opinion makers and transform how stories are discussed.

Opportunities abound, and we are excited for where we can take this product in the next decade. While change is inevitable, one thing remains the same: our mission is to bring you the news you want, when you need it, from a diverse set of sources.

Posted by Krishna Bharat, Distinguished Scientist and Founder, Google News

(Cross-posted on the Google News blog)

Celebrating the spirit of entrepreneurship with the new Google for Entrepreneurs

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Startups and entrepreneurs have the power to build technologies and creative solutions that transform the world and move us forward. Innovation is happening everywhere: There are approximately 400 million entrepreneurs across 54 countries, and 69 million early-stage entrepreneurs offering new products and services. As Google turns 14 this month, we’re celebrating this creative spirit and officially launching Google for Entrepreneurs, the umbrella for our several dozen programs and partnerships around the world that support startups and entrepreneurs.

Our focus is threefold:

1. Partnerships with strong organizations that serve entrepreneurs in local communities
2. Google-led programs to bring our teams and our tools directly to entrepreneurs
3. Placing relevant Google tools in the hands of startups as they are getting off the ground and ready to scale

We’re already on a roll, with current projects ranging from support for the annual journey of entrepreneurship through India by train, to partnering with a number of accelerator and incubator programs around the world, like iHub in Kenya and Le Camping in France. And, this week, we’re rolling out our newest partnership: teaming up with Women 2.0 to bring their Founder Friday events to more cities. These events bring together current and aspiring female entrepreneurs once a month to connect with mentors and one another to build community. We’re partnering to launch Founder Fridays in Detroit, New Orleans, Sao Paulo and Moscow over the next year.

To celebrate both our birthday and the spirit of entrepreneurship that’s helped get us where we are today, we are hosting our first annual Google for Entrepreneurs Week, which will bring together more than 3,000 entrepreneurs and Googlers around the world. We kicked off over the weekend with a Startup Weekend event hosted at the Google Ventures Startup Lab in Mountain View, Calif., where Bay Area entrepreneurs came together to create their own startups in 54 hours. Over the course of the next week, Googlers in 28 cities across 13 countries will be hosting an event in their communities to bring their passion and expertise to local entrepreneurs. We’re teaming with a number of partners to make this happen, including the Idea Village in New Orleans, Communitech in Waterloo, Tetuan Valley in Wroclaw, the Branson Centre of Entrepreneurship in Johannesburg and the Council Bluffs Chamber of Commerce in Iowa.

For more on these existing programs and to stay connected on upcoming events, visit google.com/entrepreneurs and follow us on G+.

Posted by Mary Grove, Head of Global Entrepreneurship Outreach

Dive into the Great Barrier Reef with the first underwater panoramas in Google Maps

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Today we’re adding the very first underwater panoramic images to Google Maps, the next step in our quest to provide people with the most comprehensive, accurate and usable map of the world. With these vibrant and stunning photos you don’t have to be a scuba diver—or even know how to swim—to explore and experience six of the ocean’s most incredible living coral reefs. Now, anyone can become the next virtual Jacques Cousteau and dive with sea turtles, fish and manta rays in Australia, the Philippines and Hawaii.


Get up close and personal with sea turtles at Heron Island, Great Barrier Reef
Starting today, you can use Google Maps to find a sea turtle swimming among a school of fish, follow a manta ray and experience the reef at sunset—just as I did on my first dive in the Great Barrier Reef last year. You can also find out much more about this reef via the World Wonders Project, a website that brings modern and ancient world heritage sites online.

At Apo Island, a volcanic island and marine reserve in the Philippines, you can see an ancient boulder coral, which may be several hundred years old. And in the middle of the Pacific, in Hawaii, you can join snorkelers in Oahu’s Hanauma Bay and drift over the vast coral reef at Maui's Molokini crater.



We’re partnering with The Catlin Seaview Survey, a major scientific study of the world’s reefs, to make these amazing images available to millions of people through the Street View feature of Google Maps. The Catlin Seaview Survey used a specially designed underwater camera, the SVII, to capture these photos.


The Catlin Seaview Survey team on location on the Great Barrier Reef, encountering a manta ray
Whether you’re a marine biologist, an avid scuba diver or a landlocked landlubber, we encourage you to dive in and explore the ocean with Google Maps. Check out our complete underwater collection, featuring a Google+ underwater Hangout from the Great Barrier Reef. And you can always explore more imagery from around the world by visiting maps.google.com/streetview.

Explore more underwater images
Posted by Brian McClendon, VP of Google Maps and Earth (and snorkeling enthusiast)

(Cross-posted on the Lat Long blog)

More renewable energy for our data centers

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We announced our commitment to carbon neutrality back in 2007, and since then we’ve been finding ways to power our operations with as much renewable energy as possible. In our latest step toward this end, we just signed an agreement with the Grand River Dam Authority (GRDA) to green the energy supply to our Oklahoma data center with 48 MW of wind energy from the Canadian Hills Wind Project in Oklahoma, which is expected to come online later this year.

We’ve been working with GRDA, our local utility, to procure additional renewable energy since we “plugged in” our data center in 2011, and in February of 2012, GRDA approached us about purchasing power from Canadian Hills. In conjunction with the electricity GRDA already supplies Google to operate its data center, Google will pay GRDA a premium to purchase renewable energy generated by Canadian Hills. This brings the total amount of renewable energy for which Google has contracted to over 260 MW.

This agreement is a milestone for GRDA because it’s their first-ever wind energy project. It’s also a milestone for Google because it’s a little different from the previous Power Purchase Agreements (PPAs) we’ve signed, where we agreed to buy the energy directly from the developer who built the wind farm. This agreement, by contrast, marks the first time we’ve partnered with a utility provider to increase the amount of renewable energy powering one of our data centers.

Although both options can make sense depending on the circumstances, we’re excited about this collaboration because it makes the most of our respective strengths: utilities like GRDA are best positioned to integrate renewable energy into their generation mix and to deliver power; we’re a growing company with a corporate mandate to use clean energy for our operations in a scalable way. We’ve been working closely with all of our utility partners to find ways to source renewables directly, and we look forward to working with other suppliers to deliver clean energy to our data centers.

Posted by Gary Demasi, Director, Global Infrastructure team

5 Questions with Nirvan Mullick, the man behind 'Caine's Arcade'

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Q: How did the Caine's Arcade video catch fire? Did you have a distribution strategy in place or was it all organic? 
A: It was a mix. While making the film, I put together a flashmob invitation to surprise Caine with customers. The flashmob invitation went mini-viral, hitting reddit’s front page and HiddenLA’s facebook page. This brought Caine a global community of supporters that were waiting for the film to be finished. Once the film was finished, I submitted a follow up link to reddit and also sent the link to BoingBoing. BoingBoing re-posted the film right away, and it hit the front page of reddit shortly after. Then it just took off.

Q: What was the reaction of Caine & his family once the video became so popular and viewers donated hundreds-of-thousands of dollars to a college fund? 

A: None of us were expecting that level of response. I had been hoping to raise $25,000 for Caine’s Scholarship Fund over the course of maybe a year... the first day we raised over $100k. Caine’s dad was in tears, overwhelmed by phone calls from parents and media around the world; he had never experienced that level of kindness from strangers, who put together a college fund for his son overnight. George was the proudest dad in the world. Meanwhile, Caine couldn’t really process how much money had been donated- he just knew it was a lot. But he was super excited to have so many customers visiting his arcade. The first weekend after the film went viral, over a thousand people showed up to play. There was a 4 hour line stretching around the block. 5 months later, people still come every day from around the world. It’s amazing.

Q: Tell us about the Imagination Foundation. Was it always something you had hoped to launch or did it originate solely from the video? 

A: The formation of the foundation was inspired by the global response to the video. After the film went viral, I didn’t sleep the first 2 days. The response was overwhelming, and I was trying to take it all in and absorb as much of the feedback as I could. I got emails from thousands of people, including videos from kids around the world sharing their creativity. I began to think about ways that this project could transition from helping Caine to helping other kids as well. On the third day, I wrote the mission statement for the Imagination Foundation on a napkin: to find, foster, and fund creativity and entrepreneurship in more kids like Caine. While the Imagination Foundation wasn’t something I’d planned before the film, I have worked in the non-profit space for the past 12 years, and have always been interested in the intersection of media and social change. So when this happened, I knew there was an lightning-in-a-bottle opportunity to try and make something that could have an impact for more kids. Two days after I wrote the mission statement, I connected with the Goldhirsh Foundation, who recognized the opportunity to make an impact and put up a $250,000 Matching Challenge Grant (matching public donations to Caine's Scholarship Fund dollar-for-dollar) to help us start the Imagination Foundation. To date, we have raised $215k of the goal.

Q: How do you intend to use video going forward to tell the story of the Global Cardboard Challenge? 

A: I met Caine by chance when I went to buy a door handle. But there are so many more kids like Caine out there. We started the Imagination Foundation to build a discovery platform to help find amazing stories of creative kids like Caine, and to then share those stories with the world. With the Global Cardboard Challenge, we are inviting filmmakers and storytellers around the world to document local Cardboard Challenge events on video, and to then share those videos with us so we can celebrate the creativity of kids everywhere. Send us your videos by October 13th and we will have some cool prizes and opportunities to share the videos with our community. As we build our community further, we plan to continue using video to share inspiring stories of creative kids around the world while inspiring creative actions in line with our mission.

Q: Do you have any advice for fellow filmmakers who are looking to drive awareness for causes they care about? 

A: I think it is really important to be authentic and personal, and to find the details that communicate the heart of your story. It’s also important to have a clear call to action, and to keep it simple and engaging. The success of videos like Kony 2012 (30min) and Caine’s Arcade (11 minutes) show that videos don’t need to be super short to keep people’s attention. If your story is strong, your audience will stay with you, and you can take the time you need to tell your story. That said, don’t make it a second longer than it needs to be.

Arthur Woods, YouTube partner operations associate, recently watched "John Hockenberry: We are all designers"