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It’s now easier to connect with co-workers and discuss important business decisions face-to-face with some new updates to Google+ and Hangouts. In the past, some of you may have noticed an admin option to enable a preview of “Google+ premium features.” Today we’re rolling out these premium features to everybody. It won’t change the way you’ve previously interacted with Google+ or Hangouts, but it will let you access several great business-specific features you may have missed out on before now.

These changes will let organizations do two things: first, you’ll have a more tailored Google+ experience with enhanced control options, like making Google+ posts restricted to your domain by default or the ability to hide employee profiles in external searches.

Second, you can save time and money while meeting face-to-face with colleagues using 15-person HD video calls with Google Hangouts. So the next time you need to quickly chat with a colleague or hash out a decision, you can just jump into a Hangout with one click from Calendar or an email invitation.

All new Google Apps customers will see these updates from the moment they register, and current users will see these great updates in the next month. Read more about these changes in our Help Center.

Editor’s note: Today’s guest blogger is from FiLIP, maker of the first smart locator for kids. See how other forward-thinking organizations are investing in mapping technology and transforming their business: Maps are Going Google.

The inspiration behind a company comes in many different forms and at FiLIP we have a unique story. It all began the day I lost track of my 3-year-old son at a shopping mall. We found him safe and sound, but those 30 minutes were heart-stopping, terrifying and something a father should never experience.

No parent should ever feel that way — especially in today’s hyper-connected world. Businesses now use mapping technology to monitor of all their valuable assets. Parents need the same tools to protect the most precious assets of all: their children. This is the idea behind the FiLIP watch, a location-aware, communication device developed just for kids.

Millions of people today have smart phones with Google Maps already installed. Knowing this, we developed a similarly-sophisticated piece of technology for kids — one with Wifi, a mobile network and mapping APIs that can provide real-time location data. This lets parents see exactly where their children are at all times, on the same Google Maps interface they already know and understand how to use. Kids can also call their parents directly from their watch. By combining voice capabilities with location technology, families have a simple, yet powerful way to communicate.

Because kids tend to lose or forget things, it made sense to develop a product they would want to wear, rather than a device they would have to carry. That’s why we embarked on a whole new frontier — wearable technology.

Partnering with Google gave my team access to developers who have been at the forefront of wearables and data analysts who could help us understand how to optimize location data and get it on a map. Using their insights, we created a product that lets parents keep tabs on their most important possession, while being fun for kids and parents to use together.

My son, Filip, still remembers the day he got lost. Recently, when his teacher asked all the kids what they want to be when they grow up — Filip said he would be chairman for the company his father named after him. I love knowing my products help parents be truly connected with their children. But the thing I love most about my job is developing something my son is so connected to. As a father, that’s a great thing.

(Cross-posted on the Google Cloud Platform Blog)

Editor’s note: Today’s guest post is from Daniel Viveiros, Head of Technology at CI&T, a Google Cloud Platform Partner of the Year LATAM 2013. In this post, Daniel describes how CI&T in partnership with Coca-Cola built the ‘Happiness Flag’ for the Coca-Cola 2014 FIFA World Cup™ campaign in Brazil. To learn more about the Happiness flag visit this website.


As part of the ‘The World’s Cup’ campaign, Coca-Cola wanted to do something that would visually illustrate soccer’s global reach. Coca-Cola invited fans around the world to share their photos to create the Happiness Flag — the world’s largest mosaic flag crafted from thousands of crowdsourced images submitted by people in more than 200 countries. The flag, 3,015 square meters in size, was unveiled during the opening ceremony of the 2014 FIFA World Cup™.

A project of this scale calls for high performing and reliable technology, so when we started working with Coca-Cola to build the infrastructure for the Happiness Flag campaign, we knew we had to use Google Cloud Platform. By using Google Cloud Platform, we turned a big, innovative idea into reality on a global scale.

To create the Happiness Flag, we leveraged the whole Google Cloud Platform stack as shown below:

Google App Engine enabled us to handle the computing workload, capable of handling millions of images via Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and email, to the searches for images and view requests. The architecture was scalable to meet this kind of transaction demand and the fluctuations in traffic. We stored all the images in Google Cloud Storage, where integrated edge caching support and image services made it an ideal choice for serving the images. Meanwhile, Google Compute Engine gave us the capability for long-running processes, such as the Twitter integration and advanced image transformations. We were able to show how powerful the creation of hybrid environments can be, using both Platform-as-a-Service (Google App Engine) and raw virtual machines (Google Compute Engine) in the cloud.

We used other out-of-the-box Google Cloud Platform technologies like Memcache, Datastore and Task Queues to ensure outstanding levels of performance and scalability. We know that many fans will be viewing the Happiness Flag on their mobile devices, so we needed a platform that would offer different capacities of computational power. The system provides amazing user experience with high performance and low latency, regardless of the device and its location. Using Google Cloud Platform, the campaign runs smoothly 24/7 and includes redundancy, failover techniques, backups and state-of-the-art monitoring. Plus, it’s affordable.

After the physical flag was unveiled before the opening match, the digital mosaic was made available with a Google map-like zoom in and out with eleven levels of detail. Anyone who submitted an image can now search for themselves on the virtual flag and the search results will show up as pins in the mosaic, like locations found in a Google map. By clicking on the pin, their photos open up in an overlay and they are taken to the maximum level of zoom in to see the “neighborhood” around their image in the flag. After the match, a link to the Happiness Flag site was sent to each participant as a souvenir.

Our goal was to help Coca-Cola create a project that would celebrate the 2014 FIFA World Cup™ by enabling fans from all over the world to express their creativity in a show of unity and art. What better way to open the games than by displaying the Happiness Flag, which is a symbol of the spirit of the game and its fans.

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Editor’s note: Today’s guest blogger is David Markle, Director of Retail Experience for Hayneedle, an online retailer of home furnishings. See what other organizations that use Google Search Appliance have to say.

Hayneedle.com offers millions of home products, requiring a robust shopping experience to help customers discover exactly what they’re looking for. The name “hayneedle” contains the seed of a promise – a perfect find for each customer’s unique needs and tastes. To that end, Hayneedle has embarked on a process of continuous improvement of our site’s discovery tools, including the addition of a much better search solution, powered by Google Search Appliance.

Our previous search solutions couldn’t handle the large amount of content indexing and diversity of search queries that hayneedle.com customers entered. Performance lagged, and the search results weren’t highly relevant. Our customers demanded better, and we set out to fix the situation.

We considered every possible search provider in the market, grading them on a list of more than 100 features with a focus on performance and search relevancy. We evaluated each for its potential to provide us a scalable solution that could grow with our business. Google Search Appliance emerged as the leader in the areas that mattered most to our customers and clearly offered the best return on investment.

Since we began using Google Search, hayneedle.com has seen revenue per search increase by more than 20%. In addition, the conversion rate for shoppers who use search has increased by 12%, and the average order value for shoppers who use search has gone up 5%. Google is the perfect partner as we seek to continually improve our retail search solution and help our customers find the perfect products for their home.

Google Apps Vault helps businesses, schools, and governments of all sizes archive, retain and manage business business-critical information. Vault also helps with continuity, compliance, and regulatory purposes. Last January, the introduction of targeted legal holds gave our customers even more control over the emails they retain by restricting holds to searchable criteria.

Now, Vault customers can assign Vault privileges based organization units (OU). This allows customers to limit specific administrators to search and export only specific OUs, addressing privacy and security concerns over allowing administrators to access all licensed Vault users in a domain. Last month, we launched OU-based search, which lets Vault administrators search for data within a specific OU. Vault’s OU-based search and OU-restricted search reduce the number of irrelevant search results that a domain-wide search can produce, and eliminates the need to specify individual accounts. For example, if your OUs are structured by geography, you can restrict your administrator based in London to only search your users in Europe.

To learn more about Vault, please visit our Vault Help Center.

What can you do with 24 hours? Google teamed with the States of Colorado and Wyoming to ask more than 100 passionate developers at our inaugural GovDev Challenge, a live coding competition in Denver on May 17 and 18. After an all-nighter cranking out ideas, the coders came up with solutions to transform the way state governments work by using technology to bring innovative ideas to life.

Google collaborated with the State of Colorado and State of Wyoming to host the Challenge. We worked closely with the CIO Offices of both Colorado and Wyoming to identify tough problems that were meaningful to the states and able to be addressed during the 24-hour coding challenge. We’d like to give programmers from across the country the unique chance to make a real difference. To support the event, Wyoming CIO Flint Waters sent a school bus packed with programmers and spectators to Denver to attend. “It’s a great example of how to increase public engagement to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of government,” said Brandon Williams from the Colorado Governor’s Office of Information Technology.

As they coded their way to better government services, participants got the chance to master tools like Google Cloud Platform, which enables developers to build, test and deploy applications on Google’s reliable infrastructure. They also used other Google solutions such as Google Maps, Google Apps and the Google Search Appliance.

The specific challenges weren’t announced until game day, so participants showed up having no idea what kinds of applications they’d be developing. Colorado requested tools for managing records and tracking donations during natural disasters. “We’re looking to you to make the lives easier of citizens and volunteers who show up at disaster assistance centers,” Williams told the crowd.

Winners included the GovSafe team, who created a website that allows victims from disasters and volunteers to fill out a form online that could spare them the hassle of entering the same information multiple times for various paper documents. Recognizing that the government is not quite ready to go fully paperless, GovSafe incorporated hard copies into their system and used a printer to demonstrate the impact.

For the Wyoming challenge, competitors developed solutions allowing the public to see how taxpayer dollars are being spent. Although that data is publicly available, individuals can’t gather and visualize it without help from government workers. “This should really help us provide better information to our citizens so they know what’s going on,” explained Flint Waters, Wyoming’s CIO.

The CodeRangers team placed first for designing a mobile and desktop tool that displays the geographic distribution of public sector payments to private vendors. The public can easily see the location of vendors on a Google Map and can tell how much payment goes out of the state. They can drill down to the department level and see their spending patterns. They can also run queries by vendor names. “Governmental transparency is vitally important for citizen oversight of how our democratic process works,” said team member Anne Gunn. “The money comes from all of us, and we should know how it is being spent.”

Congratulations to everyone who took part in the GovDev Challenge, from the coders who traveled from far and wide to the officials who helped us with every step of the planning. We hope the event will serve as a blueprint for future partnerships between Google and the government, forged with the shared goal of solving tough problems with private sector talent. Together we help transform government, one innovation at a time.

Editor’s note: If you are thinking about going Google with Chromebooks, complete the interest form on our website and a member of our team will be in touch.

As students in the United States put down their pencils and head out for summer vacation, educators across the country are hard at work planning for the school year ahead. For some, it means putting together the summer reading list or having year-end conferences. For others, it means studying materials for a new syllabus or decorating the classroom. And for Chesterfield County Schools, one of the country’s 100 largest school systems, it means securing the best teaching materials and technology to greet students when they return to school next year — including 32,000 new Chromebooks.

Chesterfield, which serves students across 62 schools in Virginia, joins a number of other large districts who have chosen Chromebooks for the 2014-15 school year. They join Oakland Unified School District (8,000 devices), Boston Public Schools (10,000 devices), Milwaukee Public Schools (11,400 devices), Edmonton Public Schools (13,000 devices), and Chicago Public Schools (16,000 devices).

Chesterfield is one of many public school districts that believe providing access to technology for every student is possible even when budgets are tight. They chronicled their journey on a website they created, called “Anytime, Anywhere Learning,” so the community could engage in the project and efforts. One of the most important steps the District took was running an in-depth pilot study where teachers, students and administrators tested 6 pilot devices in the classrooms, to determine which were best for their schools.

Adam Seldow, Executive Director of Technology, letting younger students test the new Chromebooks

After testing and assessing the devices, Chesterfield selected Chromebooks for all 32,475 middle and high school students. What’s especially remarkable is that they were able to move to Chromebooks with existing funds — without requesting additional budget, since Chromebooks are nearly half the cost of PC desktops and laptop alternatives. Chesterfield also saved by reducing the amount of classroom peripheral devices such as interactive whiteboards, which they could replace with web-based tools. They selected Dell Chromebooks with local partner TIG, who committed to provide training and support for the journey to ensure students, teachers and administrators could take full advantage of the many benefits of the new technology.

Choosing Chromebooks wasn’t just about selecting a piece of hardware – it was about meeting Chesterfield’s goals at the right price to bring great education to all students. As Chesterfield Superintendent Dr. Marcus Newsome explained, “anytime, anywhere learning is a tenet of our strategic plan made possible by highly trained teachers, and actionable by our students’ access to Chromebooks.” And as Adam Seldow, Executive Director of Technology, said, “with Chromebooks, we are now able to provide students with more opportunities to pursue their interests both inside and outside of the classroom.”

While most schools eventually want to get to 1:1, it’s not always practical to start with a dedicated tablet for every student. Asking students to share a single account isn’t advisable either — too often the result is one-size-fits-all technology with more than a few management headaches.

That’s why we’re adding support for multiple accounts to tablets with Google Play for Education, making it possible for schools to provide personalized learning for up to five students on the same shared device.

With multiple accounts, schools can test out tablets at a meaningful scale before buying hardware for every student. Here’s how it works:

• “Bump” tablets together as usual to get them set up — you now have the option to specify the number of students who’ll be sharing each tablet (up to 5).
• Students complete setup by signing into one of the the tablets you’ve configured, then setting a pin code for individual access.
• From then on, each student can pick up their assigned tablet, select their account, and enter their pin to get back to all their stuff.

When each student has their own account it’s easy for them to collaborate on class projects using Docs, Drive, and other Google Apps. And teachers can use Google Play for Education to instantly send students the apps, books, and videos that match their academic needs and speak to their unique interests.

It’s easy for your school to scale to 1:1 when you’re ready — just set up any new tablets with the student accounts you’ve already been using. The apps teachers have already assigned to each student will download automatically.

You can read more about multiple accounts in the Google Play for Education Help Center or contact our sales team to learn about a starting trial at your school.

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https://support.google.com/a/answer/6000239?hl=en&ref_topic=4490889

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