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Posted by Caesar Sengupta, Director of Product ManagementLearning online is transforming today’s classrooms. More than 1,000 schools are using Chromebooks, opening the door for their teachers and students to take advantage of the web’s vast educati…

While most people are working on productive New Year’s resolutions, scammers and bad actors will begin 2013 with the same old goal: make money with the help of bad ads.  Advertising helps fund businesses online and enables them to provide servic…

Last April we released panoramic imagery of sites and streets in Jerusalem, Haifa and Tel Aviv-Jaffa via the Street View feature of Google Maps. Since then, people from all over the world have explored historical and cultural sites such as the Western Wall in Jerusalem’s Old City, the Baha’i Gardens in Haifa and the beaches of Tel Aviv-Jaffa.

Today, as part of our ongoing effort to make Google Maps even more comprehensive and accurate, we’re publishing street-level imagery of hundreds more cities, towns, villages, heritage sites and tourist attractions across Israel.

You can now virtually tour the picturesque city of Safed in the North, the coral reef in Eilat in the South, visit the lowest point on earth at the Dead Sea, and wander around the narrow passageways of the old city of Acre.

Visit Tiberias, one of Judaism’s four holy cities; the Sea of Galilee where, according to the Gospels, Jesus walked on water; and stop off at Capernaum, the ancient fishing village believed to be the home of St. Peter, or the ancient battle site of Tel Meggido, better known as Armageddon.

The ancient Nabataean cities of Mamshit and Shivta, both of them UNESCO world heritage sites, can also now be seen directly in Google Maps. Tour around the Bet She’an National Park, one of the world’s largest archaeological sites; the Crusader fortress overlooking the excavations at Tzippori; or the sandstone and copper-rich nature reserve at Timna. Enjoy the colorful Druze market town of Daliyat El Carmel, the Bedouin town of Rahat, or take a ride down the ‘Burma Road’, a makeshift bypass road to Jerusalem built in 1948.

Sports fans can even go inside Ramat Gan Stadium or Bloomfield. And museum lovers can take in Haifa’s National Museum of Science, Technology & Space, the Holocaust Museum at Kibbutz Yad Mordechai, the Ghetto Fighters Museum at Kibbutz Lochamei Ha’getaot, the Museum of Bedouin Culture in the Negev desert, or take a tour around the Egged Bus Museum.

We’ve added imagery from cities, towns and villages including Ashdod, Ashkelon, Be’er Sheva, Bnei Brak, Eilat, Isfyia, Kfar Qasem, Kiryat Gat, Nazareth, Netanya, Ofakim, Petah Tikva, Rishon LeTsiyon, Sderot, Tira, and many, many more. And stay tuned – we hope to expand coverage to still more of the region’s sites, streets, cities and towns in the future.

Posted by Ulf Spitzer, Street View Program Manager

We are excited to announce that Professor Registration for the 2013 Google Online Marketing Challenge (GOMC 2013) is now open.Now in its 6th year, the Google Online Marketing Challenge is a yearly global online marketing competition for students from h…

Originally posted on the Google Online Security BlogProtecting user security and privacy is a huge responsibility, and software security is a big part of it. Learning about new ways to break applications is important, but learning preventative skills …

Video game entrepreneur Gaspard de Dreuzy and financial technologist Serge Kreiker had a thought: why not use the gaming experience to break the traditional online investing mold? Their idea took hold and Wall Street firm Kapitall, Inc. was born in 200…

Posted by Matthew Stepka, VP, Google.orgCross-posted from the Google.org blogThe Internet is redefining citizenship in the 21st century. Technology is helping people to connect, engage, and contribute to society and each other like never before.We’v…

Posted by Martijn Nykerk, Senior Consultant Group IT Editor’s note: Our guest blogger this week is Martijn Nykerk, Senior Consultant Group IT at Randstad, the Netherlands-based global provider of HR services and the second largest staffing organiza…

Over the last 24-hours concerned members of the public and the media have been speculating on the fate of a donkey pictured in Street View in the Kweneng region of Botswana.Because of the way our 360-degree imagery is put together, it looked to some th…

Simplicity and speed are two principles we love when it comes to design at Google. Today, we’re excited to announce the new CSE layout that displays results in an overlay, on top of any content on your page.

What this means for developers:

• Takes seconds to create. We simplified the creation interface to get you going faster.
• One snippet for search box and results. Place it where you want your search box to appear.
• Powerful features now come by default: autocomplete, image thumbnails and results sorting.

What this means for your users:

• Uninterrupted browsing experience.
• Faster, more simple search means more chances for your users to discover great content from your site.

You may visit W3Schools to see the new layout in action or use the CSE below which searches our blog.

Try out the new layout by creating a new search engine. It takes less than a minute. Once you have your search engine snippet ready, simply paste it on your website.

Posted by Manolis Kounelakis and Neelesh Bodas, Custom Search team

Check out our latest Android developer story, this one from Smule, creators of AutoRap, Magic Piano, and Songify.

In this short video, the Smule team talks about their experiences launching on Android, the explosive global growth they’ve seen on Google Play, and some of the techniques they use to market and monetize their products effectively across the world.

Visit the Spotlight pages in the Android Developers site to see our growing list of developer stories.

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Following up from last week’s scholarships announcement, we are very excited to announce the launch of three more Google scholarships for underrepresented students in computer science!Google Hispanic Scholarship Fund Scholarship – Deadline: March 4, …

We’re always thinking about ways to make everyday life a little easier and a little more fun. But what would the perfect day look like? We thought we’d ask the most creative folks out there: today we’re announcing our 6th annual U.S. Doodle 4 Goo…

Posted by R. Jason Sams, Android Renderscript Tech Lead

It’s been a year since the last blog post on Renderscript, and with the release of Android 4.2, it’s a good time to talk about the performance work that we’ve done since then. One of the major goals of this past year was to improve the performance of common image-processing operations with Renderscript.

Figure 1. Renderscript image-processing benchmarks run on different Android platform versions (Android 4.0, 4.1, and 4.2) in CPU only on a Galaxy Nexus device.

Figure 2. Renderscript image-processing benchmarks comparing operations run with GPU + CPU to those run in CPU only on the same Nexus 10 device.

When you set out to improve performance, the first task is to measure it. To do this, we built a image-processing benchmark suite. The tests measure how long it takes to apply a given image processing operation to a roughly 1.7 million pixel bitmap. We then ran the benchmark using the same APK on the Galaxy Nexus and normalized the results from Ice Cream Sandwich to 1.0.

We made a few major improvements between ICS and Jelly Bean, which significantly reduced the overhead of short scripts as well as the cost of getting elements out of allocations. Going from Android 4.1 to Android 4.2, we added a number of performance improvements to the math library. Our hardware partners also made major contributions; ARM in particular provided numerous compiler improvements which greatly improved our ability to generate vector code.

Android 4.2 introduced another much more important change: For the first time on any mobile platform. we can use the GPU as a compute device. When run on a device that supports GPU compute, that same benchmark APK will run on the GPU. The chart in Figure 2 is normalized to the same basis as Figure 1.

The Cortex A15 in Nexus 10 is a very good CPU. However, that doesn’t mean we should leave resources idle. The Mali T604 is a very flexible and capable compute device capable of executing a large subset of RenderScript functionality. The green bar in Figure 2 shows what we can do when the Mali is enabled for RS compute. No effort is required on an app developer’s part to enable this acceleration; the device will inspect each script and decide which processor to run things automatically. It’s important to note that some scripts can’t be run on the GPU, and such scripts will automatically run on the CPU.

The best part is it doesn’t end here. Performance work is an ongoing effort. RenderScript performance in applications will continue to improve over time as we continue to improve the platform.

To learn more about using Renderscript, see the Renderscript Computation developer’s guide.

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