Google New Zealand Blog: 2012

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

Saturday, December 22, 2012

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”

The next billion Internet users

Wednesday, December 5, 2012

From 2010 to 2015, we estimate that one billion people from emerging markets will get online for the first time. While these new web users will be unlike those from developed countries in many ways, including the fact that they’ll probably access the web for the first time from a mobile device, they’ll share with the first two billion Internet users the desire to preserve and promote their culture and grow their businesses online. On Monday we held a press event in Singapore to discuss this shifting Internet landscape and what Google is doing to support these new citizens of the web.

Nelson Mattos, Vice President of Product & Engineering for Europe and Emerging Markets, talked about efforts to make the Internet faster and cheaper to drive adoption. This includes Free Zone powered by Google, in places such as the Philippines, which provides free access to Google Search, Gmail, and Google+ on feature phones. Nelson also talked about new tools to make it easier to get more local information onto the web, including Google+ pages for businesses, and Trader, which lets SMBs post goods for sale without needing a separate website.

Lalit Katragadda, Country Head, India Product, later spoke of the need for a more visual Internet experience, like that offered by YouTube and Google+ Hangouts, and how these services will make the Internet more engaging across language and cultural barriers. He also talked about how crowdsourcing will be critical to building a web that will be relevant and useful for these new emerging market users. Google Map Maker, for example, relies on citizen cartographers to map their world, and since starting in India as a way to make better maps of the subcontinent, it has become an important part of crisis response including efforts from the United Nations.

Finally Adam Smith, Head of YouTube in Asia Pacific, discussed how online video gives emerging market users a voice and helps spread and preserve culture. Telugu content lovers no longer have to be in India to watch their favorite Tollywood films or vegetarian cooking videos. And PSY — from Korean local star to the most-watched YouTube video of all time in just six months — shows how global culture now better reflects the true diversity of the globe.

With a billion more Internet users coming online, the global marketplace for ideas will grow from two to three billion people — that means a billion more people contributing and benefiting from the world’s best ideas, talents and more. “Gangnam Style” proves that the next big global entertainment phenomenon can come from anywhere. Next time, it might be from India’s Bollywood or Tollywood film industries. And what about the next Khan Academy? With many of the world’s best education systems located in Asia, it is a safe bet there is plenty to learn from the next billion people coming online.

Or, it may not be entertainment or education at all — it may be a world-changing business insight or a better way to prevent the spread of disease. The Internet's about to get a lot larger, while at the same time bringing us all closer together.
Posted by Julian Persaud, Managing Director, Google Southeast Asia

Kiwi wins post-grad Anita Borg Scholarship

Tuesday, December 4, 2012

While women are half of the overall workforce, they make up only a fraction of people in I.T.Now in its seventh year, the Google Anita Borg Scholarship was established to help right this imbalance and encourage women to pursue careers in computer science and technology.
Last week, thirty Anita Borg Scholarship finalists and our NCSS Junior Anita Borg Scholars came together at Google Sydney as part of a retreat designed for women computer science students to connect and build relationships and receive professional development and training.

At the retreat, we also announced the final winners of our 2012 Anita Borg winners who received a scholarship towards their studies:

Karla Burnett, University of New South Wales - undergraduate Anita Borg Scholar Scholar

Mahsa Mohaghegh, Massey University in New Zealand - post grad Anita Borg Scholar

Congratulations also go to our finalists:

Undergraduate

Chantel Garcia, Monash University
Charlotte Pierce, Swinburne University of Technology
Jade Loyzaga- University of New South Wales
Jenna Bermeister, University of Sydney
Livia Lam, University of Technology Sydney
Mithila Nicole Fox, University of Queensland
Nicky Crawford, University of Otago
Sarah Heimlich, Macquarie University

NCSS Google Junior Anita Borg Scholars

Davina Adisusila, University of New South Wales
Janette Chiu, University of New South Wales
Julia Wong, University of Technology, Sydney
Madisson Spanhel, University of Technology, Sydney
Marie Jo Ta, University of Sydney
Vanessa Ung, University of New South Wales

Postgraduate

Amy Dee Fu, Australian National University
Caroline Bentley, Queensland University of Technology
Jessica Katherine Frawley, University of Technology Sydney
Jyoti Joshi Dhall, University of Canberra
Kat Reiner, Queensland University of Technology
Mahboobeh Moghaddam, University of Sydney
Mahtab Mirmomeni, University of Melbourne
Marnie Lea Lamprecht, University of Queensland
Nasrin Moradmand, University of Western Australia
Shohreh Seyedeh Zahra Hosseinifard, RMIT University
Upuli Gunasinghe, Monash University
Vasanta Gayatri Chaganti, Australian National University
Vinita Nahar, University of Queensland

Posted by Stephanie Borgmann, Talent & Outreach Programs Specialist, Google Australia & New Zealand.

Explore the Great Barrier Reef and more with underwater imagery in Google Maps

Wednesday, September 26, 2012

Sea turtles, manta rays, jellyfish - these are some of the magnificent (and sometimes lethal) creatures that await the millions of snorkelers, divers, and ocean enthusiasts that visit our shores each year. But what if you could experience some of this wonder without ever getting wet?

Today we’re adding the very first underwater panoramic images to Google Maps. The Catlin Seaview Survey used a specially designed underwater camera, the SVII, to capture underwater imagery around the world, as part of their expedition to document the composition and health of coral reefs.
With these vibrant and stunning snapshots now on Google Maps, anyone can now take a virtual dive from their desktop or mobile and explore six of the world’s most incredible underwater spots, including coral reefs in Australia, the Philippines and Hawaii.

Get up close and personal with sea turtles at Heron Island, Great Barrier Reef

You can find a sea turtle swimming among a school of fish, follow a manta ray through the ocean and experience the reef at sunset. We’re also including other ocean sites from around the world: on 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; halfway across the Pacific, in Hawaii, you can join snorkelers in Hanauma Bay and drift over the vast coral reef in the Molokini Crater. From shore to sea, you can dive in and explore this world - without ever putting on a pair of fins!

Over 1.4 million people have also joined the Catlin Seaview Survey community on Google+ to enjoy underwater animal life, coral reefs and even go on live virtual dives through Google+ Hangouts.

Here’s a look at how this group of ocean enthusiasts are sharing their passions with the world:

All of this imagery will be available at maps.google.com/ocean. 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.
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.

Posted by Nabil Naghdy, Product Manager for Google Maps Australia & New Zealand

Introducing a new YouTube app for your iPhone and iPod touch

Tuesday, September 11, 2012

[Cross Posted from the Official YouTube Blog]
For all you diehard YouTube fans out there who can’t get enough YouTube on your mobile, we’ve got some great news: starting today, you can download the official YouTube app for iPhone and iPod touch from the App Store, bringing you more of the videos you love and more ways to share them with the people you care about.

The new app is built by YouTube engineers, to give our iPhone and iPod touch users the best mobile experience. Here’s what you’ll find:

Tens of thousands more videos: Watch official music videos like Taylor’s latest hit.New YouTube channel guide: Swipe your finger from the left edge of the screen to reveal a guide with your subscribed channels on YouTube, giving you instant access to everything from Alli Sports to YOMYOMF. Find awesome videos faster: Get to videos like “Gangnam Style” faster with new search tools that give suggestions while you type, and let you sort through videos or channels. Flip through related videos, comments and more info, all while watching a video. More ways to share with the people you love: Share that incredible video you found on YouTube on Google+, Facebook or text message in the app, as well as from Twitter and email. There’s even more to explore with the new YouTube app for iPhone and iPod touch, available for download from the App Store today. We’re working on an optimized version of the YouTube app for iPad in the coming months, and stay tuned for more details.
You’ve already shown us you love YouTube on mobile—to the tune of 1 billion mobile views a day—so we can’t wait to see what you think about this new experience.

Andrey Doronichev, head of YouTube mobile, recently watched “One-Shot // Goodbye, beloved sister.”

Explore with the Knowledge Graph carousel in NZ

Friday, September 7, 2012

[Cross posted from the official Inside Search Blog]

Last month, we showed how you can now get answers to your questions with the help of the Knowledge Graph even when the best answer is not just a single person or thing, but a collection or list of items. When looking for [cedar point rides], you see a carousel of popular roller coasters at the amusement park, drawing on our Knowledge Graph and the collective intelligence of the Web. The feature was initially available in English on google.com, and we’re now taking our first steps to make it available more widely around the world. Over the next couple days, we’ll begin showing the carousel for factual lists to our English users on all Google domains across the world.

This works for a variety of locally interesting lists like [Sam Neil Movies] and the [Cast of Shortland Street] or more general queries like [saturn’s moons] or [dog breeds]. The carousel makes it easy to explore the items in the list -- it stays attached to the top of the search results page so you can flip through the items easily and dive in deeper if something catches your interest. Happy exploring!

Calling all Kiwis! Map Maker and Cycling Directions available in New Zealand

Wednesday, September 5, 2012

From the beaches of Goat Island and the slopes of Mount Eden to the hallowed soil of Eden Park, New Zealand is filled with both natural and man-made wonders. This week we’re bringing two new features to Google Maps in New Zealand that we hope will help Kiwis better explore their world: cycling directions and Google Map Maker. Biking routes improve the overall comprehensiveness and usability of the map, while the ability to contribute your local knowledge via Map Maker will help ensure that the maps remain accurate and up-to-date.

First up is cycling directions which starts rolling out today. Cycling Directions gives you a brand new way of getting around town. Until now the Get Directions button has helped Maps users find their way to places by car, foot and public transport, but now we can help you find the best way to ride your bike from different locations. This should be helpful if you want to bike to work or local shops, or simply want to spend more time outdoors on the weekends.

Thanks to the cycle data we received from organizations such as Wellington Regional Council, Auckland Transport, The National Cycle Trails Project, and Hastings City Council, we can provide efficient routes, allow riders to customize their trip, make use of dedicated cycle lanes and calculate rider-friendly routes that avoid big hills. If you want to get a look at bike trails, dedicated bike lanes and bicycle-friendly streets, you will be able to turn on the Bicycling layer on the right-hand side.

As an example: when I commute from Remuera in Auckland to the Google office, biking directions will show me the most convenient and efficient route that makes use of dedicated cycle lanes and avoids hills whenever practical.
Our second new feature for New Zealand is Google Map Maker. This service is available in over 200 countries and lets users contribute their local knowledge to make a more detailed and comprehensive map of the changing world around us. Get started by looking at your own neighbourhood. Add building footprints for all the restaurants along the beach, update the one way street that just recently became a two-way, or even map the local rugby club before heading off to a game.

Once your contributions are approved, they will appear on Google Maps, Google Earth and Google Maps for mobile to more accurately reflect your neighbourhood. To find out more and see some time-lapse mapping of the world, check out the Map Maker YouTube Channel.

The great thing is that these two new launches work very well together — if you want to add bicycle lanes or trails in your local town, just go to Map Maker and put them in.

We hope these new features in Google Maps help Kiwis get even more familiar with their surroundings — either seeing leisurely from a bicycle seat or from more detailed maps.

Posted by Nabil Naghdy, Product Manager for Google Maps Australia & New Zealand

Google Apps domain registration has gone global

Friday, August 17, 2012

[Cross posted from the Google Enterprise Blog]
A country code top-level domain (ccTLD) such as .co.uk or .jp helps companies build a local footprint on the web, and ccTLD support is one of the most-requested features for Google Apps. We’re delighted to announce that today – thanks to a partnership with domaindiscount24.com – that we now offer 30 top-level domain (TLD) options, including 22 ccTLDs, with prices starting at $8 per year.

Now, businesses that wish to sign up for Google Apps but don’t yet have a domain name have plenty of local options to choose from during sign-up. Your new domain comes configured with all Google Apps services, including Gmail for your custom email addresses (@yourcompany.com). Your domain will be registered with domaindiscount24.com.

Here is the full list of TLDs now available when you sign up for Google Apps:

Global	Asia-Pacific	Latin America	Europe
.com	.in	.co	.be
.info	.co.in	.com.co	.ch
.org	.org.in	.com.mx	.cz
.net	.net.in	.mx	.de
.mobi	.co.nz		.es
.biz	.com.tw		.com.es
.name	.jp		.me
.cc			.nl
.tv			.pl

We hope this gives new Google Apps more flexibility in their domain registration to help them boost their local presence on the web.

Editor’s note: domaindiscount24.com is a member of the KeyDrive Group. All registrars of the KeyDrive Group manage together more than 6 million domains for more than 300,000 customers worldwide.

Posted by: Hugues Vincent, Google Apps team

Introducing the Knowledge Graph: things, not strings

Friday, August 10, 2012

Editor's note: Originally cross-posted on the Inside Search Blog on May 17, 2012. Knowledge Graph results are now available in New Zealand for English language searches. Try a search like [Richie McCaw] or [Auckland Sky Tower].
Search is a lot about discovery—the basic human need to learn and broaden your horizons. But searching still requires a lot of hard work by you, the user. So today I’m really excited to launch the Knowledge Graph, which will help you discover new information quickly and easily. Take a query like [taj mahal]. For more than four decades, search has essentially been about matching keywords to queries. To a search engine the words [taj mahal] have been just that—two words.But we all know that [taj mahal] has a much richer meaning. You might think of one of the world’s most beautiful monuments, or a Grammy Award-winning musician, or possibly even a casino in Atlantic City, NJ. Or, depending on when you last ate, the nearest Indian restaurant. It’s why we’ve been working on an intelligent model—in geek-speak, a “graph”—that understands real-world entities and their relationships to one another: things, not strings. The Knowledge Graph enables you to search for things, people or places that Google knows about—landmarks, celebrities, cities, sports teams, buildings, geographical features, movies, celestial objects, works of art and more—and instantly get information that’s relevant to your query. This is a critical first step towards building the next generation of search, which taps into the collective intelligence of the web and understands the world a bit more like people do.Google’s Knowledge Graph isn’t just rooted in public sources such as Freebase, Wikipedia and the CIA World Factbook. It’s also augmented at a much larger scale—because we’re focused on comprehensive breadth and depth. It currently contains more than 500 million objects, as well as more than 3.5 billion facts about and relationships between these different objects. And it’s tuned based on what people search for, and what we find out on the web.The Knowledge Graph enhances Google Search in three main ways to start:1. Find the right thingLanguage can be ambiguous—do you mean Taj Mahal the monument, or Taj Mahal the musician? Now Google understands the difference, and can narrow your search results just to the one you mean—just click on one of the links to see that particular slice of results:

This is one way the Knowledge Graph makes Google Search more intelligent—your results are more relevant because we understand these entities, and the nuances in their meaning, the way you do.2. Get the best summaryWith the Knowledge Graph, Google can better understand your query, so we can summarize relevant content around that topic, including key facts you’re likely to need for that particular thing. For example, if you’re looking for Marie Curie, you’ll see when she was born and died, but you’ll also get details on her education and scientific discoveries:

How do we know which facts are most likely to be needed for each item? For that, we go back to our users and study in aggregate what they’ve been asking Google about each item. For example, people are interested in knowing what books Charles Dickens wrote, whereas they’re less interested in what books Frank Lloyd Wright wrote, and more in what buildings he designed.The Knowledge Graph also helps us understand the relationships between things. Marie Curie is a person in the Knowledge Graph, and she had two children, one of whom also won a Nobel Prize, as well as a husband, Pierre Curie, who claimed a third Nobel Prize for the family. All of these are linked in our graph. It’s not just a catalog of objects; it also models all these inter-relationships. It’s the intelligence between these different entities that’s the key.3. Go deeper and broaderFinally, the part that’s the most fun of all—the Knowledge Graph can help you make some unexpected discoveries. You might learn a new fact or new connection that prompts a whole new line of inquiry. Do you know where Matt Groening, the creator of the Simpsons (one of my all-time favorite shows), got the idea for Homer, Marge and Lisa’s names? It’s a bit of a surprise:

We’ve always believed that the perfect search engine should understand exactly what you mean and give you back exactly what you want. And we can now sometimes help answer your next question before you’ve asked it, because the facts we show are informed by what other people have searched for. For example, the information we show for Tom Cruise answers 37 percent of next queries that people ask about him. In fact, some of the most serendipitous discoveries I’ve made using the Knowledge Graph are through the magical “People also search for” feature. One of my favorite books is The White Tiger, the debut novel by Aravind Adiga, which won the prestigious Man Booker Prize. Using the Knowledge Graph, I discovered three other books that had won the same prize and one that won the Pulitzer. I can tell you, this suggestion was spot on!We’ve begun to gradually roll out this view of the Knowledge Graph to U.S. English users. It’s also going to be available on smartphones and tablets—read more about how we’ve tailored this to mobile devices. And watch our video (also available on our site about the Knowledge Graph) that gives a deeper dive into the details and technology, in the words of people who've worked on this project:We hope this added intelligence will give you a more complete picture of your interest, provide smarter search results, and pique your curiosity on new topics. We’re proud of our first baby step—the Knowledge Graph—which will enable us to make search more intelligent, moving us closer to the "Star Trek computer" that I've always dreamt of building. Enjoy your lifelong journey of discovery, made easier by Google Search, so you can spend less time searching and more time doing what you love.Posted by Amit Singhal, SVP, Engineering

Going for Mobile Gold: 10x increase in Olympics mobile searches globally

Tuesday, August 7, 2012

[Cross posted from the Google Mobile Ads Blog]

At the 2012 Olympics we’re seeing new records set everyday, not only in athletic performance, but also in global search behavior. It's clear that these are the first multi-screen Olympics, as users are engaging across TV, computers, smartphones and tablets, often at the same time!

And as users watch TV, or watch their laptops at work, they're searching for information about athletes, sports, events and records - on their tablets and smartphones. In fact, at some moments during the Games, there have been more searches performed on tablets and smartphones than on computers. We’ve seen large spikes in global mobile search volume during recent major sporting events, like the Super Bowl, and the Olympics certainly continued this trend - in its first week, Olympics related searches on mobile devices (smartphones and tablets) grew by 10x from the previous week.

Mobile devices vault ahead

We’ve crunched some data from the past week, and the opening ceremony is a great illustration of how mobile devices have taken center stage. Fans turned to their smartphones and tablets to find more information about the incredible feats and celebrities that they saw on screen.

Below is one such example where searches for Paul McCartney surge in line with his performance of Hey Jude at the end of the opening ceremony. Whether watching the Olympics at home on TV or on a desktop livestream, or at a bar with friends, users searched on one screen for things they saw happening on another screen. Comparing searches by device type, smartphone searches surged, and in the US, viewers were searching almost as much on their tablets as on their computers for Paul McCartney.

Global searches for Paul McCartney during local broadcasts of the Olympics opening ceremony (based on PST)

Mobile is global

The infographic below gives a snapshot of the percentage of total searches that occurred on smartphones and tablets during the first two days of the Games, for Olympics-related searches.

(click here to download infographic)

We see these trends in many multi-screen events (such as the Super Bowl, Oscars, and Eurovision) but the Olympics represents an even more pronounced trend and one we can see happening at a global level.

European countries showed especially high mobile search volume with most countries having one-third or more of their Olympics-related searches occurring on a tablet or smartphone. In some European countries this number was substantially higher - in the UK, 46% of Olympics searches happened on mobile. In Asia, South Korea (36%) and Australia (45%) saw mobile search volume spikes, while Japan (55%) was at the front of the pack.

Surf, sand, towels...and tablets

As we examined global Olympics search share we noticed an interesting pattern emerge from island nations. On many of the islands that serve as popular tourist destinations, tablet search share was almost equal to smartphone, or in some cases even exceeded it. This is different from most other countries where smartphone search share is typically significantly higher than tablet.

A possible explanation? Large numbers of tablet-toting tourists on summer vacation. Tablets have emerged as an important way of staying informed and connected for travelers, as well as for finding local information.

Olympics Mobile and Tablet Search Share by Device for Several Island Nations

Olympic fever is a global phenomenon, and mobile searches are letting everyone get immediate information, in real time, about what’s happening moment by moment. We hope to have more insights into how people are using their mobile devices during the Games!

Posted by: Dai Pham & Adam Grunewald, Google Mobile Ads Marketing

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