Google New Zealand Blog

Judging Doodle 4 Google

Tuesday, October 18, 2011

Earlier this year we announced the popular Doodle 4 Google 2011 competition, which gives New Zealand students the chance to have their version of the Google logo on our homepage and win prizes for their school.

There was excitement in Auckland today as our judges Michael McCormack, Ingrid Berzins and Christa Napier Robertson had the hard job of choosing from 100 finalists to pick our 20 winners. Now it’s up to you to vote for your favourite in each age group and narrow it down to the top four.

(L-R: Christa Napier Robertson, Michael McCormack and Ingrid Berzins)

This year our volunteers who sorted through the 2000 ‘doodles’ that came in were also given a chance to pick their favourite. This special packing room mention goes to 8-year-old Archer Pascoe from Waikari School, who writes about his entry:

“My wish for New Zealand is that we have more kiwis and other native animals and plants. I want it to be kept green and warm. I want to protect our endangered animals. New Zealand is the best place in the world”.

Voting will begin on October 24th so make sure to get voting for your favourite doodle to appear on the Google New Zealand homepage.

To vote for your favourite, visit http://www.google.co.nz/doodle4google.

Posted by Leticia Lentini, Events Marketing Manager, Google New Zealand

Google Earth downloaded more than one billion times

Thursday, October 6, 2011

This is a cross-post from the Google LatLong blog.
How large is one billion? One billion hours ago modern humans were living in the Stone Age. One billion minutes ago, the Roman Empire was flourishing. If you traveled from Earth to the Moon three times, your journey would measure one billion meters.

Today, we’ve reached our own one billion mark: Google Earth has been downloaded more than one billion times since it was first introduced in 2005. That’s more than one billion downloads of the Google Earth desktop client, mobile apps and the Google Earth plug-in—all enabling you to to explore the world in seconds, from Earth to Mars to the ocean floor.

We’re proud of our one billion milestone, but we’re even more amazed at the way people have used Google Earth to explore the world. When we founded Keyhole, Inc. back in 2001 (the company was acquired by Google in 2004), we never imagined our geospatial technology would be used by people in so many unexpected ways. At www.OneWorldManyStories.com, we’ve collected stories from people all over the world who use Google Earth to follow their dreams, discover new and distant places, or make the world a better place.

Visit www.OneWorldManyStories.com to learn about people like Professor David Kennedy of the University of Western Australia, who’s used Google Earth to scan thousands of square kilometers in Saudi Arabia and Jordan. Professor Kennedy has discovered ancient tombs and geoglyphs dating back at least 2,000 years, all without leaving his desk in Perth. Architect Barnaby Gunning, after the April 6, 2009 earthquake near L’Aquila Italy, encouraged his fellow citizens to start rebuilding the city virtually in 3D. Their online urban planning will aid city planners and architects. Retired English teacher Jerome Burg created Google Lit Trips, which uses Google Earth to match places in famous books to their geographical locations, encouraging students to create connections between the stories they read in school and the world they live in.

We hope you enjoy the site, and that it illustrates how some of those one billion downloads of Google Earth have been making a difference. You can explore these stories right in your browser with the Google Earth plug-in or download the KML files to view in Google Earth.

If you have a Google Earth story you’d like to share, we’d love to hear from you. If you don’t have Google Earth, download it now and be part of the next billion stories. While it’s inspiring to see how Google Earth has touched the lives of so many, we know the best is yet to come.

Posted by Brian McClendon, VP of Engineering, Google Earth and Maps

M-Lab and Victoria University help New Zealand get better broadband data

Wednesday, September 28, 2011

Suddenly, it's taking forever to reach your bank's website. What’s going on? How do you know whether it's a problem with your device, with the service you're trying to access, with the network, or with something else? The answer for a long time was: you don’t.

Measurement Lab (M-Lab) is trying to change that. M-Lab hosts open source tools that consumers access to measure broadband health and performance. Each test run gives consumers real-time information about their connection. And while they help consumers, they also collect rich data for researchers -- over 400 terabytes, available in the public domain, comprising a treasure trove that allows scientists to do deep analysis of the state of broadband networks.

Now, all of this is available in New Zealand. John Hine, Dean of Engineering at Victoria University of Wellington, understood the need for better data broadband data for researchers and consumers. He and his colleagues, working with local Google engineers, helped set up M-Lab servers in Wellington. With servers close enough to ensure accurate results, New Zealanders can now reliably access and run M-Lab's tests, and New Zealand's research community can dig into robust data about local broadband performance and make data-based suggestions on how to improve broadband performance.

Check out the M-Lab tools and see for yourself.

Posted by Josh Bailey, Google Software Engineer

Trying on the new Dynamic Views from Blogger

Wednesday, September 28, 2011

BloggerLaunched todaysend us some emailBlogger Buzz postPosted by Kate Mason, Consumer Communications Manager for AU/NZ

Happy third birthday, Chrome!

Friday, September 2, 2011

This is a cross-post from the Official Google blog.

It’s that time of the year again for the Chrome team, when we pause on our anniversary to reflect on the amazing life and times of the web. It’s hard to believe that it’s already been three years since we launched our open source web browser, Chrome.

In that time, the web community has continued to inspire us, bringing the power of the web into all kinds of apps and experiences, with all modern browsers making great strides in speed, simplicity and security. To pay homage to the goodness of the web, we’ve put together an interactive infographic, built in HTML5, which details the evolution of major web technologies and browsers:

(With thanks to our friends at Hyperakt, Vizzuality, mgmt design, and GOOD)

In our third year, we’ve also brought Chrome's principles of speed, simplicity and security to a new model of computing: the Chromebook. The Chromebook is pure Chrome—a computer built for everything you ever need to do on the web while doing away with all the usual annoyances of an old, slow PC.

Here’s a quick fly-by through the some of the highlights of the past 12 months on the Chrome platform:

Faster and faster

We kick off the Year of the Rabbit with a new compilation infrastructure for the V8 JavaScript engine, codenamed “Crankshaft,” which improves JavaScript performance by up to 66 percent.
Chrome’s new settings interface helps you find the right settings quickly with an integrated search box. It also provides direct links to each settings page, which can be copied and pasted for easy troubleshooting.
The omnibox is improved to better suggest partial matches for webpage titles and URLs.
You can optionally enable Chrome Instant, which shows relevant content in the browser window as you type, before you press Enter.
Chrome’s built-in prerendering technology enables sites to build even faster experiences for their users—such as Instant Pages in Google search, which in some cases makes search results appear to load almost instantly.

Simpler and more accessible

An even more secure platform

Our integrated and sandboxed PDF viewer enables you to view PDF files on the web without installing additional software. Furthermore, we built an additional layer of security around the PDF viewer called a “sandbox” to help protect you from security attacks that are targeted at PDF files.
Adobe Flash Player is sandboxed on Windows, further protecting you from security attacks and malware targeted at Flash content on the web.
Chrome warns you before downloading some types of malicious files with enhanced Safe Browsing technology. In order to protect privacy, malicious content is detected without Chrome or Google ever having to know about the URLs that you visit or the files you download.
To provide greater transparency and control over the data that websites store on your computers, Chrome lets you delete Local Shared Objects created by Adobe Flash Player using the browser’s built-in setting dialogs.

Wowzah, the modern web!

The Chrome Web Store is an open marketplace where you can search for and discover web applications, both free and paid, along with ratings and reviews. Developers can add in-app payments to their apps for a flat 5 percent transaction fee.
Chrome supports WebGL, which brings hardware-accelerated 3D graphics to the browser with no additional software needed. For a taste of what WebGL can do, check out “3 Dreams of Black,” a 3D music experience for the web browser.
Chrome’s support for the HTML speech input API enables developers to give web apps the ability to transcribe your voice into text. Try it out on www.google.com by clicking on the microphone icon in the search box.
Hardware-accelerated 3D CSS enables snazzier experiences in webpages and apps which use 3D effects.

Delivering a new, simpler model for computing

Chrome is enterprise ready, with an MSI installer and support for managed group policies. Many organizations such as Vanguard and Proctor & Gamble have successfully deployed Chrome to thousands of users in an enterprise setting.
As of this past July, Chromebooks are now available for purchase in eight countries—the U.S., U.K., France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands and South Korea. And just like Chrome, the Chromebook always keeps getting better. When you turn your Chromebook on, it updates itself automatically: you get the latest and greatest version of the operating system without having to think about it.

There’s more to come. Keep an eye on the Chrome blog to hear about new features and performance improvements as we continue to ship stable channel updates every six weeks. As always, on both Chrome and Chromebooks you’ll be automatically updated to the new versions as soon as they’re released.

Posted by Ben Goodger and Darin Fisher, Software Engineers

Privacy Impact Assessment for Street View in New Zealand

Friday, August 12, 2011

Last year, we worked with the Privacy Commissioner to support her investigation into what happened with our mistaken collection of publicly broadcast payload data (information sent over unencrypted WiFi networks) through our Street View cars. When the Commissioner concluded the investigation last year, we committed to working even more closely with her on the privacy implications of our product launches going forward. This blog post is an update on what has happened since that time.

First, you may remember that our ultimate goal was to delete the payload data. We can report that this was completed in February under independent supervision.

Second, one of the commitments we made to the Commissioner was to conduct a Privacy Impact Assessment (PIA) on any further Street View activities in New Zealand. Today we are publishing that PIA. We have carefully considered the potential privacy impact of Street View and how to manage present and future privacy issues.

In summary, we will continue to:

Ensure Street View images are not real time.
Use automated technology to blur faces and licence plates before publishing imagery. If one of our images contains an identifiable face (for example, that of a passerby on the pavement) or an identifiable licence plate, our technology will blur it automatically, meaning that the individual or the vehicle cannot be identified.
Provide the “Report a problem” tool which allows users to request further blurring or removal of any image or let us know if our detectors miss something.

In addition, we have made some changes to our Street View driving process. We removed all WiFi equipment from our Street View cars and will not be collecting any WiFi data via the Street View cars. We have also taken steps to strengthen our internal privacy controls. Last October Google appointed Alma Whitten as our director of privacy across both engineering and product management. Her focus is ensuring that we build effective privacy controls into our products and internal practices. We have also enhanced our privacy training program for employees, and we require every engineering project leader to maintain a privacy design document for each initiative they are working on. This document records how user data is handled and will be reviewed regularly by managers, as well as by an independent internal audit team.

We want to reiterate to New Zealanders that our collection of payload data was a mistake for which we are sincerely sorry. Maintaining people’s trust is crucial to everything we do, and we have to earn that trust every single day.

We are now looking forward to getting Street View cars back on the roads and continuing to provide a product that is useful for all New Zealanders.

Posted by Alan Eustace, Senior Vice President, Knowledge

Doodle 4 Google 2011 is open! Your Wish for New Zealand doodle

Monday, July 25, 2011

Today I’m so excited to announce that we’re running our second Doodle 4 Google in New Zealand. We’re inviting school students in years 1-10 to sharpen their pencils, use their imagination and artistic talent to create a Google doodle depicting their vision for “My Wish for New Zealand”. The winning doodle will be shown on the Google homepage for a day for millions of New Zealanders to enjoy.

Since 1998, when Google founders Larry and Sergey played with the corporate logo to indicate they were going to the Burning Man Festival in Nevada, USA, Google’s team of doodlers has been creating doodles to celebrate holidays, anniversaries, and the lives of famous writers and scientists.

This year, we’re really thrilled to have The Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki who are incredibly passionate about children’s art and education join us for all the doodling fun. Special judges, including Island Bay artist Michael McCormack, Christa Napier-Robertson from the Auckland Art Gallery and artist and children’s book illustrator Ingrid Berzins will select finalists across four age groups: Grades 1-3; Grade 4-6; Grades 7-8, and Grades 9-10, whose doodles will be shown online. We’ll ask the public to vote on their favourite doodles from each age group and the winners will receive fantastic technology prizes for themselves and their schools, including laptops, interactive whiteboards and $10,000 worth of technology for the National winner’s school. Google’s original doodler, webmaster Dennis Hwang, will select the overall national winner to be shown on the homepage.

During July, we’re sending out information packs to every New Zealand school. To take part, please register your school by 26 August, and all doodles must be submitted by 23 September. Please visit the Doodle 4 Google website for a full listing of all the contest rules and information.

Lucinda Barlow, Head of Marketing, Google Australia and New Zealand

Want to win an Anita Borg Scholarship?

Friday, July 8, 2011

Dr. Anita Borg devoted her life to revolutionising the way we think about technology and dismantling the barriers that keep women and minorities from entering the computing and technology fields. In honour of Anita's vision, we established the Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship in 2004, awarding scholarships to women who share her passion for technology. Once again, Google is proud to announce the Google Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship in Australia and New Zealand.

Scholarships will be awarded based on the strength of candidates’ academic background and demonstrated leadership. A group of female undergraduate and graduate student finalists will be chosen from the applicant pool. Each scholar recipient will receive a $5,000 AUD scholarship towards the following academic year. In addition all finalists and scholarship recipients will be invited to an expenses-paid networking retreat to be held at Google’s Sydney Engineering centre.

Who can apply?

Applicants must satisfy all of the following criteria to be eligible:

Be a female student at an Australian or New Zealand university who has completed one or more years of a Bachelors degree with at least one year of study remaining, whether as part of a Bachelors or postgraduate degree.
Be enrolled in full-time undergraduate or postgraduate study at an university or equivalent tertiary institution (please see FAQ for details) in Australia or New Zealand for the following year.
Be studying Computer Science, Software Engineering, Informatics, or a closely related technical field.

Citizens, permanent residents, and international students are eligible to apply. Past applicants and finalists are also encouraged to re-apply. If you have any questions, please email anitaborgscholarsanz@google.com.

For further information on this scholarship and how to apply, check out www.google.com.au/anitaborg .
Deadline to apply: July 31st, 2011.

Thank you for your support and good luck to applicants!

New Zealand Blog

Judging Doodle 4 Google

Google Earth downloaded more than one billion times

M-Lab and Victoria University help New Zealand get better broadband data

Trying on the new Dynamic Views from Blogger

Happy third birthday, Chrome!

Privacy Impact Assessment for Street View in New Zealand

Doodle 4 Google 2011 is open! Your Wish for New Zealand doodle

Want to win an Anita Borg Scholarship?

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