A little help from Google on your New Year’s resolutions

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The new year has arrived, and with it all the resolutions that we hope to tackle in 2013.

But resolutions can be hard to keep. And since eating better, taking control of personal finances, travelling more and learning something new regularly top the list of New Year’s resolutions, we've pulled together some of our best tips and tricks across Google to make 2013 the year you succeed with your goals.

Eat better

• Counting calories? Apps such as Diet Diary can be easily accessed through Chrome or your Android device—that way it’s with you when it‘s on your mind. If spreadsheets are more your style, try one of several Google Docs templates, like this weekly meal planner.
• Find recipes for healthy meals and how-to-cook videos with apps like BBC’s Good Food for Chrome or food channels like Show me the Curry on YouTube.
• Rely on the Google+ community for motivation and learn from others via hangouts on how to prepare healthy meals.
• We know how easy it is to fall off track. Check out Google Play to find apps, books and music to keep you motivated.
  

Get fiscally fit

• To control your finances, you need to know exactly where money is coming in and out. This simple budget template in Google Drive already has you halfway there.
• If you prefer a more detailed budget, try using an app like Mint to track your finances on the go, available on both Android and Chrome.
• Keep track of your stock portfolio and related market news via Google Finance or with brokerage apps like E*TRADE from Google Play.

Travel more

• Use Google Flight Search to quickly compare flight times and costs across airlines. Try the “tourist spotlight” feature on Google Hotel Finder to find a room near the hottest spots in the city.
• Simply type [tourist attractions <city name>] into Google Search to see some of the top points of interest. Once you have a list of the things you want to do and see, keep it in one place and share it with your travel buddies using Google Sheets. 
• Never get lost with Google Maps. Whether your plans are local or international, indoors or out, comprehensive and accurate Google Maps can help you find your way.

Learn something new

• Learn how to hone your yoga practice or crochet a granny square by following the steps of experts on YouTube. If classroom style learning works better for you, try joining a Google+ Hangout or Community to learn how to paint, cook or knit from people who share your interests and passions.
• Try a free language learning app like the Que Onda Spanish app for Chrome or the Busuu Portuguese language app for Android.
• Keep up with current events or hone in on specific interests by personalizing your Google News and setting up Google Alerts to receive information on specific topics directly in your email. If your inbox is already on overload, try the Google Currents app for news on the go.
• Learning something new doesn’t have to break the bank. Check out Google Offers for deals on classes for dancing, cooking, bartending and more. 

If your resolution wasn’t listed here, try checking out SELF Magazine’s Google+ page with tips from experts, live via Google+ hangouts, for 13 more resolutions starting on January 13.

Research shows that you’re more likely to achieve your resolutions if you write them down and have support. Try sharing your goals with communities around you. When you’re ready to share your new year’s ambition with the world, or if you're interested in seeing what resolutions look like around the globe, add it to the interactive resolution map on our 2012 Zeitgeist website.


No matter who you are, the web can help you do anything.

Posted by Liz Wessel, Associate Product Marketing Manager

Our November featured On The Rise partner is polcan99!

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Congratulations to Tom Antos of polcan99, our featured “On The Rise” partner for this month. His channel is featured on the “Spotlight” section of the YouTube homepage today.

Tom has been a YouTube partner for three years, but has dedicated his entire career to film direction, cinematography, and VFX. His expertise has earned Tom an array of awards as he’s worked on both large productions and small-budget projects including Hollywood features, short films, and music videos. On YouTube, Tom goes one step further, uploading tutorials to share his experience and knowledge with his filmmaking peers. He can help you design great-looking music video shots, entertain you with a Dragon Ball remake action video, or even let you choose your own real-life Angry Birds adventure! No matter what you choose to watch, you’ll be impressed with Tom’s innate talent and his dedication to both entertaining and educating his viewers.



Here are a few words from Tom:

I'm a filmmaker, and I love good entertainment. Doesn't matter if it's a good TV show, film, stage play or a book, I enjoy it all. Now I try to create entertainment on the internet... more specifically on YouTube, mainly because of their great tools. I now have 2 channels; Polcan99 is where I put up my action and VFX filled films along with filmmaking tutorials... and GalgaTV is where I put up comedy videos. I feel very fortunate to be able to entertain others for a living, and I'm thankful for being chosen by YouTube as the November "On The Rise" Partner. If you like what you see on any of my channels then please subscribe! 

If you’ve enjoyed this monthly On The Rise blog series and want to see more rising YouTube partners, check out our On The Rise channel. Keep an eye out next month for a chance to nominate some of your favorite channels for On The Rise in 2013 - we’ll be coming back to you in January with another round of rising talent.

Christine Wang and Devon Storbeck, YouTube Partner Support, recently watched “More Twilight - A Bad Lip Reading of The Twilight Saga: New Moon.”

YouTube automatic captions now in six European languages

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Captions are important to make sure everyone—including deaf, hard-of-hearing, and viewers who speak other languages—can enjoy videos on YouTube.

In 2009, you first saw a feature that automatically creates captions on YouTube videos in English, and since then we’ve added Japanese, Korean, and Spanish. Today, hundreds of millions of people speaking six more languages—German, Italian, French, Portuguese, Russian, and Dutch—will have automatic caption support for YouTube videos in those languages. Just click the closed caption button on any of these videos to see how it works:



Now in 10 languages, automatic captions are an important first step in the path toward high-quality captions for the 72 hours of video people upload per minute. As automatic captions will have some errors, creators also have several tools to improve the quality of their captions. Automatic captions can be a starting point, where creators can then download them for editing, or edit them in-line on YouTube. Creators can also upload plain-text transcripts in these languages, and the same technology will generate automatically-synchronized captions.

You now have around 200 million videos with automatic and human-created captions on YouTube, and we continue to add more each day to make YouTube accessible for all.

Hoang Nguyen, software engineer, recently watched “Completo, ilha das flores.”

The first-ever “spidernaut” safely returns to Earth

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Take eight steps back, Psy and Biebs. Another YouTube star is born today as Nefertiti, the first-ever “spidernaut” who was the key element to the winning YouTube Space Lab experiment has made it home safely and will live out the rest of her life at the Smithsonian Museum.

Nefertiti is the first jumping spider to successfully return from space and adjust to life on Earth after a 100-day stay aboard the International Space Station. “Neffi,” as she’s called by friends, will take up residence starting today at the Insect Zoo in the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History.

Courtesy of NASA. Nefertiti, the red-backed jumping spider hunting for flies inside her space flight habitat on board the International Space Station.

The jumping spider experiment was one of two winners from thousands of ideas submitted to YouTube last year with the hopes of being sent to space as part of the Space Lab competition. Relive the epic story of YouTube Space Lab below.



Dom Elliott, Marketing Manager, recently watched “Space Lab LIVE!: Behind the Scenes.”

5 Questions with Jeff Davidoff, Chief Marketing Officer of One.org

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More than 34 million people around the globe are living with HIV but only half of those eligible for life-saving treatment receive it. Today, on World AIDS Day, many organizations are using social media to convey the personal stories of those fighting to end the disease. We asked Jeff Davidoff, Chief Marketing Officer of One.org, about their new people-powered campaign, “my story. our fight.”

1. Why did you make video a core component if the "my story. our fight." campaign?

ONE is all about the power of voice. As we often say, "we're not asking for you money we're asking for you voice." And while it's true that your voice alone may struggle to be heard or make a difference, we have concrete proof that our voices together are impossible to ignore. Our over three million members around the world prove this time and again. The inspiration for this particular campaign was to get at why people are involved — the personal stories and experiences they have that changed their lives, and committed them to getting off the couch and doing some real good in the world. To us, video was the obvious solution to bring these unique stories to life in a way that people can experience them, share them, be inspired by them and make their own commitment to action because of them.

2. You empowered people to share their messages and experiences. How did you encourage them to promote the campaign's goals while still allowing the campaign to feel organic and authentic?

Great question. Authenticity is really at the heart of this idea. And the answer is simple: don't write scripts. Instead, just ask people to share their own stories, and really push them to open up and be personal. I remember asking Cleve Jones, "Do you have a particular experience or memory that got you started on the path of AIDS activism?" And he said, "Absolutely." I said, "Great why don't you sit at my computer and share it?" And as he shared his beautiful and very personal story right in front of me, I knew we were onto something.


3. What actions are you asking viewers to take and how are you measuring the success of these videos?

We're using the call to action: "Watch one. Share one. Join ONE." We want people to be inspired by the stories we've curated, share them with their friends and, most importantly, take action by signing our petition to protect funding for lifesaving AIDS programs. There's a lot of talk now in America about the "fiscal cliff." This can seem like a vague and distant idea. Let's put it in concrete terms: if an agreement is not reached, and cuts to life-saving programs goes into a effect, real lives will be lost. These aren't numbers, these are people. That's why we're in the fight, and that's why we're hoping more people will join us.




4. Did you promote the campaign videos outside of YouTube as well? How do you think about distribution and helping the videos find their audience?

We're aggressively promoting the campaign both inside and outside of YouTube, including to our over three million members around the world via email, Facebook and Twitter and asking them to share with their much larger social networks. We're also rolling out an aggressive PR strategy that matches storytellers to particular audiences — movie stars to entertainment, AIDS activists to the AIDS community, college students to other students, etc. It's less about trying to bring people to us, and more about trying to get our story embedded in already-scaled audiences.

5. What advice do you have for cause-based campaigns in how they approach using YouTube?

We've been through quite a learning curve with YouTube. In the beginning I think we had a very old-world approach by making our own videos and trying to use YouTube as a free broadcast medium. We're now much more focused on tapping into the power of existing YouTube creators, and getting them to naturally include our message in their stories to their pre-existing audiences. It's a much more authentic and contemporary use of the medium. And we're already thrilled with the results.

Special note: DANCE (RED), SAVE LIVES this weekend. Watch the livestream of Tiësto and some of the biggest names in dance music from Stereosonic, Australia's biggest dance music festival. Live at youtube.com/joinred starting at 11pm ET on Friday, and looping all weekend long. 

Hunter Walk, director of product management, recently watched Are You Ready? Get Set, Let’s Go!

Gangnam Style Makes YouTube History: First Video to Hit 1 Billion Views

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A million views? You know what's cool? A billion views.

Today, a 34-year-old K-Pop artist made online video history when his viral video, Gangnam Style, smashed our records and became the first video ever to reach one billion views. Yup, that’s right one BILLION views!

PSY's success is a great testament to the universal appeal of catchy music-- and er, great equine dance moves. In the past, music distribution was mostly regional. It was more difficult to learn about great artists from around the world. But with a global platform at their fingertips, people are now discovering and sharing amazing music from all over the planet, by artists like Brazilian Michel Teló and Belgian-Australian Gotye.

One billion views is an incredible number, but the PSY-nomenon goes beyond that. Check out these stats:

• PSY was already big in Korea, but in 2012, he became a global celeb as Gangnam Style quickly spread from Seoul and the pacific to North America, South America, and Europe. It’s been seen at least 1 million times in close to 75 countries, making it one of the most global music sensations ever! 
• From a one-thousand person flash mob in Jakarta to cover videos from Ai Weiwei and Mitt Romney, hundreds of thousands of parodies have been uploaded to YouTube, some of which have tens of millions of views. In fact, fan tributes to Gangnam Style are now being viewed 20 million times every single day. 
• PSY's own remix with Hyuna has 200 million views alone. 
• "Gangnam Style" was YouTube's top rising search of 2012 and on October 6th, we saw more than five million searches for “gangnam style” in a single day. Check out this video demonstrating some of our most popular YouTube searches this year. 
• For those interested in the business side: a number of assessments and projections have been posted claiming “Gangnam Style” has generated over $8.1 million in advertising deals, hit more than 2.9 million in song downloads since July, and achieved other incredible feats! 
• Since late last month, people have clicked to buy the track on iTunes over 600,000 times helping make PSY the first Korean artist ever to rank #1 on the U.S. iTunes chart and #1 in over 30 more countries. 

Perhaps what’s most impressive about this feat is that it took just over five months to happen. To give this milestone some context, here’s a chart of Gangnam Style’s rise to popularity versus Justin Bieber’s “Baby,” the video that previously held the most-watched video title:



Congratulations to PSY, the flash mobbers, K-Pop fans and people who love fun across the globe. Considering the Gangnam Style dance was the number one dance-related search on YouTube this year, you better make sure you brush up on your moves before New Year's Eve.

The kind of amazing creativity and unique connection between people all over the world that resulted in this one billion views is only possible with an incredible community of people we're so lucky to have on YouTube. And we can't wait to see what you'll come up with next!

Kevin Allocca, YouTube trends manager, recently watched “Rewind YouTube Style 2012”

A Game of Thrones on Google Maps

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The Interactive Game of Thrones Map is a Google Map of the fictional continents of Westeros and Essos from George Martin's series of fantasy novels A Song of Ice and Fire.

As well as including all the locations in a Game of Thrones the map allows you to view the paths of all the characters as the story progresses. To view a character's path select their name from the map sidebar and use the timeline slider control.


The map used in this Google Map was drawn by TheMountainGoat based on previous work by Tear of the Cartographer's Guild. TheMountainGoat website includes files to view the map in Google Earth.


Westeros Map is another Google Map of the fictional continent of Westeros from George Raymond Richard Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire fantasy novels.

Westeros is the great continent in which the Seven Kingdoms resides and the map shows the location of important places in the novels. Clicking on a link in the map sidebar will zoom the map to the selected location.