Ushering in the next generation of computing at Google I/O
May 15th, 2013 | by Jane Smith | published in Uncategorized
Posted by Urs Holzle, Senior Vice President
(Cross-posted on the Google Cloud Platform Blog and Google Developers Blog)
Watch the live stream of the Cloud track kickoff now
Over the last fourteen years we have been developing some of the best infrastructure in the world to power Google’s global-scale services. With Google Cloud Platform, our goal is to open that infrastructure and make it available to any business or developer anywhere. Today, we are introducing improvements to the platform and making Google Compute Engine available for anyone to use.
Google Compute Engine – now available for everyone
Google Compute Engine provides a fast, consistently high-performance environment for running virtual machines. Later today, you’ll be able to go online to cloud.google.com and start using Compute Engine.
In addition, we’re introducing new Compute Engine features:
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Sub-hour billing charges for instances in one-minute increments with a ten-minute minimum, so you don’t pay for compute minutes that you don’t use
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Shared-core instances provide smaller instance shapes for low-intensity workloads
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Advanced Routing features help you create gateways and VPN servers that enable you to build applications spanning your local network and Google’s cloud
- Large persistent disks support up to 10 terabytes per volume, which translates to 10X the industry standard
We’ve also completed ISO 27001:2005 international security certification for Compute Engine, Google App Engine, and Google Cloud Storage.
Google App Engine adds the PHP runtime
App Engine 1.8.0 is now available and includes a Limited Preview of the PHP runtime – your top requested feature. We’re bringing one of the most popular web programming languages to App Engine so that you can run open source apps like Wordpress. It also offers deep integration with other parts of Cloud Platform including Google Cloud SQL and Cloud Storage.
We’ve also heard that we need to make building modularized applications on App Engine easier. We are introducing the ability to partition apps into components with separate scaling, deployments, versioning and performance settings.
Introducing Google Cloud Datastore
Google Cloud Datastore is a fully managed and schemaless solution for storing non-relational data. Based on the popular App Engine High Replication Datastore, Cloud Datastore is a standalone service that features automatic scalability and high availability while still providing powerful capabilities such as ACID transactions, SQL-like queries, indexes and more.
Over the last year we have continued our focus on feature enhancement and developer experience across App Engine, Compute Engine, Google BigQuery, Cloud Storage and Cloud SQL. We also introduced Google Cloud Endpoints and Google Cloud Console.
With these improvements, we have seen increased usage with over 3 million applications and over 300,000 unique developers using Cloud Platform in a given month. Our developers inspire us everyday, and we can’t wait to see what you build next.
Android at Google I/O 2013: Keynote Wrapup
May 15th, 2013 | by Android Developers | published in Uncategorized
The last year has been an exciting one for Android developers, with an incredible amount of momentum. In fact, over 48 billion apps have been downloaded from Google Play to date, with over 2.5 billion app downloads in the last month alone.
This week, at Google I/O, our annual developer conference, we’re celebrating this momentum, and putting on stage a number of new features and advancements both for the Android platform and Google Play, to help you design, develop and distribute great apps to your users.
We just wrapped up the keynote, and wanted to share a number of those new features; we’ll be spotlighting some of them throughout the week both here, on Google+, and in 36 Android sessions and sandboxes at the Moscone center in San Francisco (with many of the sessions livestreamed at developer.google.com). Enjoy!
Google Play Services 3.1
Google Play Services is our platform for bringing you easier integration with Google products and new capabilities to use in your apps. Today we announced a new version of Google Play Services that has some great APIs for developers.
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Google Play games services give you great new social features that you can add to your games achievements, leaderboards, cloud save, and real-time multiplayer
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Location APIs make it easy to add location- and context-awareness to your apps through a fused location provider, geofencing, and activity recognition
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Google Cloud Messaging enhancements let you use bidirectional XMPP messaging between server and devices and dismiss notifications
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Cross-Platform Single Sign On, which lets your users sign in once, for all of their devices using Google+ Sign-In.
Android Studio: A new IDE for Android development
Today we announced a new Integrated Development Environment (IDE) built just for Android, with the needs of Android developers in mind. It’s called Android Studio, it’s free, and it’s available now to try as an early access preview.
To build Android Studio, we worked with with JetBrains, creators of one of the most advanced Java IDEs available today. Based on the powerful, extensible IntelliJ IDEA Community Edition, we’ve added features and capabilities that are designed specifically for Android development, to simplify and optimize your daily workflow for creating Android apps.
Google Play Developer Console: a better distribution experience
Building awesome Android apps is only part of the story. Today we announced great new features in the Google Play Developer Console that give you more control over how you distribute your app and insight into how your app is doing:
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App translation service: a pilot program that lets you purchase professional translations for your app directly from the Developer Console.
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Revenue graphs: a new tab in the Developer Console gives you a summary of your app global app revenue over time.
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Alpha and beta testing and staged rollouts: you can now distribute your app to controlled alpha and beta test groups, or do staged rollouts to specific percentages of your userbase.
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Optimization tips: design your app for tablets and understand how to expand your app into new language markets.
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Google Analytics: launching later this summer, your Google Analytics usage stats will be viewable right in the Developer Console.
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Referral tracking: also launching later this summer, you’ll get a new report in Google Analytics to show what blogs, campaigns, and ads are driving your installs.
Follow the Android Sessions
Join us for the Android sessions today and through the week by livestream. Visit the I/O Live Stream schedule for details.
May 15th, 2013 | by Ken Hoetmer | published in Uncategorized
For nearly eight years, developers around the world have used the Google Maps APIs to build beautiful, powerful, and impactful apps. From the early mashups to today’s on-location mobile apps, these developers have continuously re-imagined the map. In fact, you’ve created more than one million active sites and apps, which now reach one billion unique visitors every week. One billion! That’s nearly half the Internet.
As we celebrate your maps, we’re also introducing the largest visible change in our eight year history: a fresh new look and feel for the JavaScript and Static Maps APIs, in line with the launch of the new Google Maps. The new look is available for opt-in today, and is a simple one line code change: google.maps.visualRefresh=true;.
We’ve carefully designed the change to work seamlessly with all existing sites, and as such all third party customizations such as custom markers, overlays, map types, and the like will continue to function as they did before. Four major changes are involved in the refresh:
- new base map tiles
- new default marker
- new info window style
- style refresh of the controls
Static Maps API base maps and markers have also been refreshed, and can be enabled by adding &visual_refresh=true as a URL parameter.
This new look will become default in our experimental branch (used by most standard Maps API developers) with the next scheduled release on August 15, 2013, and default in the release branch (used by most Maps for Business customers) three months later in November. The Static Maps API will follow the same schedule in both cases.
A complete list of specific changes is available in the documentation, where they’re discussed with examples and in more detail. In the meantime, here’s to the one million that reimagined the map. Enjoy!
Posted by Ken Hoetmer, Product Manager, Google Maps API
P.S. We migrated our Webby-Award-winning morethanamap.com showcase site to the new look. Check it out!
May 15th, 2013 | by The Gmail Team | published in Uncategorized
Posted by Travis Green, Product Manager, Google Wallet
Paying back your friends is now as simple as sending an email, whether you’re chipping in for lunch or reimbursing your roommate for your share of the rent.
Google Wallet is now integrated with Gmail, so you can quickly and securely send money to friends and family directly within Gmail — even if they don’t have a Gmail address. It’s free to send money if your bank account is linked to Google Wallet or using your Google Wallet Balance, and low fees apply to send money using your linked credit or debit card.
To send money in Gmail, hover over the attachment paperclip, click the $ icon to attach money to your message, enter the amount you wish to send, and press send.
While sending money in Gmail is currently only available on desktop, you can send money from Google Wallet at wallet.google.com from your phone or laptop. You will need to have set up Google Wallet to send and receive money, and Google Wallet Purchase Protection covers you 100% against eligible unauthorized payments.
We’re rolling out this feature over the coming months to all U.S. Gmail users over 18 years old, so keep an eye out for the $ icon in the attachment options. You can also get earlier access if your friends have the feature and send money to you.
To learn more, visit our website.
Live from Google I/O: Mo’ screens, mo’ goodness
May 15th, 2013 | by Google Chrome Blog | published in Uncategorized
[Cross-posted from the Official Google Blog]
This morning, we kicked off the 6th annual Google I/O developer conference with over 6,000 developers at Moscone Center in San Francisco, 460 I/O Extended sites in 90 countries, and millions of you around the world who tuned in via our livestream. Over the next three days, we’ll be hosting technical sessions, hands-on code labs, and demonstrations of Google’s products and partners’ technology.
We believe computing is going through one of the most exciting moments in its history: people are increasingly adopting phones, tablets and newer type of devices. And this spread of technology has the potential to make a positive impact in the lives of people around the world—whether it’s simply helping you in your daily commute, or connecting you to information that was previously inaccessible.
This is why we focus so much on our two open platforms: Android and Chrome. They enable developers to innovate and reach as many people as possible with their apps and services across multiple devices. Android started as a simple idea to advance open standards on mobile; today it is the world’s leading mobile platform and growing rapidly. Similarly, Chrome launched less than five years ago from an open source project; today it’s the world’s most popular browser.
In line with that vision, we made several announcements today designed to give developers even more tools to build great apps on Android and Chrome. We also shared new innovations from across Google meant to help make life just a little easier for you, including improvements in search, communications, photos, and maps.
Here’s a quick look at some of the announcements we made at I/O:
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Android & Google Play: In addition to new developer tools, we unveiled Google Play All Access, a monthly music subscription service with access to millions of songs that joins our music store and locker; and the Google Play game services with real-time multiplayer and leaderboards. Also, coming next month to Google Play is a special Samsung Galaxy S4, which brings together cutting edge hardware from Samsung with Google’s latest software and services—including the user experience that ships with our popular Nexus devices.
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Chrome: With over 750 million active users on Chrome, we’re now focused on bringing to mobile the speed, simplicity and security improvements that we’ve seen on the desktop. To that end, today we previewed next-generation video codec VP9 for faster video-streaming performance; the requestAutocomplete API for faster payments; and Chrome Experiments such as “A Journey Through Middle Earth” and Racer to demonstrate the ability to create immersive mobile experiences not possible in years past.
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Google+: We unveiled the newly designed Google+, which helps you easily explore content as well dramatically improve your online photo experience to give you crisp, beautiful photos—without the work! We also upgraded Google+ Hangouts—our popular group video application—to help bring all of your real-life conversations online, across any device or platform, and with groups of up to 10 friends.
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Search: Search has evolved considerably in recent years: it can now have a real conversation with you, and even make your day a bit smoother by predicting information you might need. Today we added the ability to set reminders by voice and we previewed “spoken answers” on laptops and desktops in Chrome—meaning you can ask Google a question and it will speak the answer back to you.
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Maps: Today we previewed the next generation of Google Maps, which gets rid of any clutter in order to put your individual experience and exploration front and center. Each time you click or search, our technology draws you a tailored map that highlights the information you need. From design to directions, the new Google Maps is smarter and more useful.
Technology can have a profound, positive impact on the daily lives of billions of people. But we can’t do this alone—developers play a crucial role. I/O is our chance to come together and thank you for everything you do.
Posted by Sundar Pichai, SVP, Android, Chrome & Apps
Live from Google I/O: Mo’ screens, mo’ goodness
May 15th, 2013 | by Emily Wood | published in Uncategorized
This morning, we kicked off the 6th annual Google I/O developer conference with over 6,000 developers at Moscone Center in San Francisco, 460 I/O Extended sites in 90 countries, and millions of you around the world who tuned in via our livestream. Over the next three days, we’ll be hosting technical sessions, hands-on code labs, and demonstrations of Google’s products and partners’ technology.
We believe computing is going through one of the most exciting moments in its history: people are increasingly adopting phones, tablets and newer type of devices. And this spread of technology has the potential to make a positive impact in the lives of people around the world—whether it’s simply helping you in your daily commute, or connecting you to information that was previously inaccessible.
This is why we focus so much on our two open platforms: Android and Chrome. They enable developers to innovate and reach as many people as possible with their apps and services across multiple devices. Android started as a simple idea to advance open standards on mobile; today it is the world’s leading mobile platform and growing rapidly. Similarly, Chrome launched less than five years ago from an open source project; today it’s the world’s most popular browser.
In line with that vision, we made several announcements today designed to give developers even more tools to build great apps on Android and Chrome. We also shared new innovations from across Google meant to help make life just a little easier for you, including improvements in search, communications, photos, and maps.
Here’s a quick look at some of the announcements we made at I/O:
-
Android & Google Play: In addition to new developer tools, we unveiled Google Play Music All Access, a monthly music subscription service with access to millions of songs that joins our music store and locker; and the Google Play game services with real-time multiplayer and leaderboards. Also, coming next month to Google Play is a special Samsung Galaxy S4, which brings together cutting edge hardware from Samsung with Google’s latest software and services—including the user experience that ships with our popular Nexus devices.
-
Chrome: With over 750 million active users on Chrome, we’re now focused on bringing to mobile the speed, simplicity and security improvements that we’ve seen on the desktop. To that end, today we previewed next-generation video codec VP9 for faster video-streaming performance; the requestAutocomplete API for faster payments; and Chrome Experiments such as “A Journey Through Middle Earth” and Racer to demonstrate the ability to create immersive mobile experiences not possible in years past.
-
Google+: We unveiled the newly designed Google+, which helps you easily explore content as well dramatically improve your online photo experience to give you crisp, beautiful photos—without the work! We also upgraded Google+ Hangouts—our popular group video application—to help bring all of your real-life conversations online, across any device or platform, and with groups of up to 10 friends.
-
Search: Search has evolved considerably in recent years: it can now have a real conversation with you, and even make your day a bit smoother by predicting information you might need. Today we added the ability to set reminders by voice and we previewed “spoken answers” on laptops and desktops in Chrome—meaning you can ask Google a question and it will speak the answer back to you.
-
Maps: Today we previewed the next generation of Google Maps, which gets rid of any clutter in order to put your individual experience and exploration front and center. Each time you click or search, our technology draws you a tailored map that highlights the information you need. From design to directions, the new Google Maps is smarter and more useful.
Technology can have a profound, positive impact on the daily lives of billions of people. But we can’t do this alone—developers play a crucial role. I/O is our chance to come together and thank you for everything you do.
Posted by Sundar Pichai, SVP, Android, Chrome & Apps
Meet the new Google Maps: A map for every person and place
May 15th, 2013 | by Lat Long | published in Uncategorized
What if we told you that during your lifetime, Google could create millions of custom maps…each one just for you?
In the past, such a notion would have been unbelievable: a map was just a map, and you got the same one for New York City, whether you were searching for the Empire State Building or the coffee shop down the street. What if, instead, you had a map that’s unique to you, always adapting to the task you want to perform right this minute?
This is what you will have with the introduction of the new Google Maps – a mapping experience that helps you find places you never would have thought to search for.
The new Google Maps is full-screen and fully interactive
Every click draws a new map highlighting the things that matter most
Like a friend drawing you a map to her favorite restaurant, with only the roads and landmarks you need to get there, the new Google Maps instantly changes to highlight information that matters most.
And the more you interact with the map, the better it gets. When you set your Home and Work locations, star favorite places, write reviews and share with friends, Google Maps will build even more useful maps with recommendations for places you might enjoy.
The map is tailored to you and gets better with use
Easier to find the best local places
In addition to a customized map, we’ve also made it easier to uncover the best local gems. Search results are labeled directly on the map with brief place descriptions and icons that highlight business categories and other useful information – like restaurants that are recommended by your Google+ friends. Info cards provide helpful information such as business hours, and ratings and reviews so you can quickly decide where to eat, drink and play.
Search results appear labeled right on the map
Amazing imagery for exploring the world
Of course, no map would be complete without amazing images for exploring the world. The new carousel gathers all Google Maps imagery in one spot enabling you to fly through cities, walk canyon trails, climb mountains, and even swim the oceans. And on a WebGL-enabled browser, like Google Chrome, the carousel is also where you’ll find the Earth view which directly integrates the beautiful 3D experience from Google Earth into the new maps.
Earth view brings full 3D to the browser
There’s so much more to discover, including smarter directions and tours generated from user-submitted photos. It’s the biggest change we’ve made to Google Maps since we launched eight years ago. In case you didn’t catch all of that, here’s a quick tour:
The quest to build the perfect map will never be over, but we’re excited about the steps we’re taking towards building the next generation of maps. Please visit this page to request an invite and we hope you have fun with the new Google Maps.
Happy exploring,
Bernhard Seefeld, Google Maps Product Management Director & Yatin Chawathe, Google Maps Engineering Director
May 15th, 2013 | by The Gmail Team | published in Uncategorized
Posted by Thijs van As, Product Manager
Today we announced Hangouts, a big improvement to Google’s real-time communication services. Instead of different versions of chat, video chat and calling across Google products, Hangouts gives you one consistent way to connect with the people you care about.
What does this mean for your Gmail? You now have the option to switch from the current version of chat to Hangouts. Simply click “Try it out” next to your chat list to switch to Hangouts and give your chat an instant facelift (literally!). You’ll now see the profile photos in the order of your most recent conversations. With Hangouts, you’ll also be able to quickly send messages, have video calls with up to ten people at once, and share photos. You can start a conversation with just one friend or even a whole group.
Hangouts transition effortlessly between desktop and mobile — in fact, Hangouts will be available in Gmail, Google+, Android phones and tablets, iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch and as a Windows, Mac or Linux desktop application using the Chrome extension. You can start a Hangout on your phone, and pick it up in Gmail right where you left off!
The new Hangouts experience in Gmail is rolling out as an optional switch starting today. Click the “Try it out” button when it appears next to your chat list to switch right away, or you can switch later. Learn more about the new Hangouts here.
Doing more with the reporting dimensions in your account
May 15th, 2013 | by Inside AdSense Team | published in Uncategorized
The performance reports in your AdSense account are key to understanding your earnings and to identifying optimization opportunities. We’re continuously reviewing your feedback in order to improve the reporting functionality for you. Today, we’re excited to announce the launch of two new, long-awaited features that provide you with a more detailed segmentation of traffic in your reports.
Combining different reporting dimensions
The Countries report shows your performance broken down by the country of users who engaged with the ads on your pages. In addition to viewing a country breakdown for reports by ad type, bid type, and targeting type, you’ll now also be able to see a Countries report when viewing the reporting dimensions URL channel, custom channel, and ad unit. This will allow you to segment your traffic further and get a better understanding of your account performance in different locations.
Please note that the country breakdown of reports by URL channel, custom channel, and ad unit will only be available for reports with date ranges starting March 9th and later.
Introducing a new reporting dimension
In order to help you get more granular insights into your performance on a site level, we’re introducing a new reporting type for Owned sites. “Owned” sites are all sites specified as owned in the site management feature, and the new reporting dimension for Owned sites will be a subset of the Sites report. In contrast to the Sites report, however, you’ll be able to combine the Owned sites report with the Countries report. This will allow you to segment your traffic in more detail and understand the performance of your sites across different countries
Please note that historical data in Owned sites reports will be available from the date that a site was added or claimed as “owned”. You’ll only be able to view country breakdowns for Owned sites for reports with date ranges starting March 22nd 2011 or later. If a site is removed from the “Owned” sites list, it will no longer show in the report.
We hope that the improvements to our reporting features will help you better segment and understand where your users are coming from and whether there are performance differences across different countries. You can also use this information to isolate potential invalid activity. Unexpected use can be a sign that you are receiving potential invalid activity. Please share your feedback on our AdSense+page and let us know what you found out thanks to these new functionalities.
Posted by Matt Goodridge – AdSense Product Manager
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New way to access the Admin console
May 14th, 2013 | by Jane Smith | published in Uncategorized
Google Apps administrators can now access the Admin console by visiting admin.google.com and logging in. If you are already logged in, this new URL will automatically take you to the Admin console. The old URL (www.google.com/a/) will continue to work …
Google Analytics at Google I/O
May 14th, 2013 | by Adam Singer | published in Uncategorized
We’ve been working hard getting ready for Google I/O! We’re livestreaming our presentation on how to optimize web and mobile apps across devices using Google Analytics on Thursday, May 16 at 1:40pm PT and we’d like to invite everyone to join us.
We recently launched Universal Analytics, a new way to measure user interactions across any device / platform / environment. By measuring this data, developers can better optimize their applications. In this session we’ll discuss how to measure user-interaction from any device as well as demo new reports and best practices to optimize both web and mobile apps.
For those of you who are going to be at I/O, please stop by the Ads sandbox and say hi to the Analytics team! We’ll be around to answer questions, and we may even have some pretty cool Analytics gear to give out. Be sure to check out all of our Analytics sessions. You can find the full schedule here.
Posted by Aditi Rajaram, Google Analytics team
Google Maps locates Allianz Global Assistance
May 14th, 2013 | by Jane Smith | published in Uncategorized
Posted by Dean Peck, Senior Business Solutions Analyst and Project Manager, Allianz Global Assistance
Editor’s note: Today’s guest blogger is Dean Peck, Senior Business Solutions Analyst and Project Manager, for Allianz Global Assistance in Australia and New Zealand. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.
At Allianz Global Assistance, we have a simple and often rewarding task: we’re here to help people, anytime, anywhere. With over one million members in Australia and New Zealand, every year we help roughly 120,000 people stranded during car breakdowns and connect those in need with a complex network of service providers — from locksmiths to emergency medical personnel.
To make this happen, we rely on minute-to-minute mapping data to pinpoint our customers’ location and then find, dispatch and track service providers. We have thousands of service providers, and we store the information about them in our incident call centre system called ‘MIDAS’. Until recently, our mapping software was also embedded within MIDAS but it lacked some vital functionality.
We set out to look for a contemporary, cost-effective alternative that would integrate with MIDAS. After considering a range of options, we chose the Google Maps API because of its familiarity, reliability, accuracy, ongoing innovation and relationships with other data providers.
We use the Google Maps API to pinpoint the whereabouts of customer and service provider vehicles when they share their location with us. The Google Maps API is also used to overlay the incident address from MIDAS. Using different layer shadings, service assistants can quickly see which providers offer the needed services within the right coverage area. They can accurately calculate travel time and distance to the incident and overlay traffic information to warn service providers en route if they are about to encounter a slowdown.
The integration of Street View with Google Maps helps us deliver better customer service too. When our assistants are on the phone with stranded customers, they’re able to see exactly where the client is located and provide them with reassuring feedback.
Google Maps API is making a positive difference to agents, the business overall, and most importantly to customer satisfaction. The fluid, simple functionality, familiarity, visual nature, easy pan and zoom, and accuracy of Google Maps allows our agents to serve customers better. And these improvements have made us all realise that we can genuinely make a difference in our customers lives.
10 for 10 publisher stories: Expat blog expands horizons and its business
May 14th, 2013 | by Inside AdSense Team | published in Uncategorized
In each of the 10 weeks leading up to AdSense’s 10th anniversary on June 18th, we’ll be sharing a new publisher success story. Read on to meet this week’s featured publisher, and feel free to submit your own success story to our team.
After finding few sites devoted to expats around the world, in 2005 Julien Faliu decided to launch a community platform for that audience. An expat himself, Julien has since grown his site into a company based in Mauritius that now employs 15 members of staff. Expat blog receives 12 million pageviews per month and is now available in four languages.
Julien initially turned to AdSense as a way to cover the costs of running his website, but as his revenue increased, he decided to focus on advertising. Today, Julien is responsible for all of the advertising space on the site. “At the start, AdSense allowed me to get my website set up by covering my costs,” Julien says. “Now, I can truly say that AdSense has enabled me to grow and recruit staff.”
Beyond AdSense, Julien also uses a number of other Google tools to continue developing his business. For instance, Analytics enables him to view his site’s growth, and DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP) Small Business helps him manage all of the advertising on the site.
What’s next for Expat blog? Julien and his team are currently developing a strategy to monetize their mobile site, and looking towards bringing private investors on board to fund the next stage of growth.
For more details about Julien’s success with Expat blog, be sure to read the full story. We’ll be back again next Tuesday to introduce you to another AdSense publisher.
Posted by Arlene Lee – Inside AdSense Team
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Meet the Mobile Champs: Introducing a new series of video interviews with mobile thought leaders
May 14th, 2013 | by Katie Miller | published in Uncategorized
What is top of mind for mobile leaders in the agency community? How are agencies helping their clients win with mobile? In an effort to better understand the challenges that agencies face when it comes to mobile, and to strengthen our efforts to help them tackle and overcome these challenges, we decided to bring together a group of mobile evangelists from the agency world. At a recent event in New York City, we asked a few of these mobile leaders what excites them – and what challenges them – about mobile today. Today, we are excited to share these interviews with you on Think Insights, Google’s hub for marketing insights and inspiration for advertisers and agencies.
One of the topics that we found to be top of mind for everyone is the challenge of mobile measurement in a multi-screen world. “We need to get beyond the old metrics of the Internet, television and print, and define what the new metrics are for mobile engagement,” shared Jeffery Hinz, Managing Partner & US Digital Director at MediaCom. Zach Morrison, VP & Director of SEM at Elite SEM, outlines the so-called “holy grail” of understanding consumer behavior across multiple devices to see the full customer journey. As Morrison says, “The first thing people do in the morning is wake up and grab their phones and the last thing they do at night is do something on their tablet – I think the next biggest thing is tying it all together.”
We also spoke with our mobile champs about topics ranging from brand building strategies to showrooming to where they think mobile is headed next. Be sure to check out the full interviews on Think Insights. We hope you will find what these mobile thought leaders had to say as interesting and thought-provoking as we did.
Posted by: Samantha Podos Nowak, Product Marketing Manager, Mobile Ads
This just in! Canadian Broadcasting Corporation moves 12,000 accounts to Google Apps in 90 days
May 14th, 2013 | by Jane Smith | published in Uncategorized
Posted by Jean-Martin Thibault, Senior Enterprise Architect at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
Editor’s note: Our guest blogger this week is Jean-Martin Thibault, Senior Enterprise Architect at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Canada’s oldest broadcasting network and national broadcaster, known commonly as CBC and officially as CBC/Radio-Canada. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.
Deeply rooted in the regions, CBC/Radio-Canada is the only domestic broadcaster to offer diverse regional and cultural perspectives in English, French and eight Aboriginal languages. As Canada’s national broadcaster, we bring Canadians programming when, where and how they want it ― through a comprehensive range of radio, television, Internet, satellite-based services and mobile devices. Our team is stationed all over the world, which means real-time communication is key for up-to-date, consistent reporting.
Achieving this at such a large scale isn’t always easy. For more than 10 years, we had been using an on-premise, corporate-wide system for email/calendar. We also had a separate system for collaboration, but neither solution was integrated and drove true inter-office collaboration.
With a company-wide goal to reduce infrastructure and a need for better messaging and collaboration, we decided to look at public cloud solutions, especially Google Apps. It was clear that Google Apps was the right solution for us based on cost, proven service level and availability guarantee and the breadth of tools the platform offered for collaboration. We also had great support from the media groups in our company (about 70% of our employees), as many of them had been using personal Google accounts to communicate already with external users. Once we decided to “go Google” we were able to complete a smooth 90-day deployment with the help of Google Apps reseller, Onix, by March 1, 2013.
Since we went live, adoption of the whole platform has well exceeded our expectations of email and calendaring. Google+ Hangouts has revolutionized the way that our employees interact with each other. Long conference calls are now becoming a thing of the past. We can now jump on a Hangout and have a face-to-face meeting with colleagues across the country via our smartphones, from home or the office, without getting on a plane. It’s cost-effective and more efficient without compromising our core business.
Additionally, Google Docs are helping our reporters become better and more efficient storytellers. For example, before, our writers and reporters in our newsroom brainstormed and drafted copy in separate Word documents, which inevitably led to version confusion and unnecessary time spent merging documents. Now, they use a single, shared Google Doc for all their stories, so the entire team can collaborate together, in real time, regardless of where they’re working. Our freelancers use Docs to make quick edits and communicate on the fly since it’s simpler for them to share content and edit in real-time.
We are proud to bring the best tools to our company and see the cultural shift that is happening amongst our employees. We are moving away from managing IT and into improving our core business of content creation. We’re excited about what this means for the quality of our reporting and the happiness of our employees.
Update [May 15]: A slight edit was made to this post.