Google New Zealand Blog

Showcase your business with a 360-degree perspective

Wednesday, May 18, 2011

This is a cross-post from the Google Australia blog

The George Hotel, South Melbourne.

Last week we launched Business Photos in Australia and New Zealand, a new use of Street View technology where businesses can let people who visit their Places pages walk virtually into their restaurants or shops.

With our Business Photos pilot, we’ve been busy photographing businesses, with their permission, to highlight the qualities that make their locations stand out.

We can look at Melbourne, the city of alleyways and arcades, as a great example of how you can research shops, restaurants and bars right from your computer or smartphone. Looking for a birthday cake? You can have a look at the desserts right up close at the Melbourne Bake House. Researching where to hang out with some mates? You can take a peek inside the Railway Hotel. You can even admire the baby grands at Melbourne Piano Sales!

With this pilot, you'll begin to see additional photo experiences on the Place pages of a growing number of businesses. As additional imagery becomes available for more locations in the coming months, you’ll also be able to enter the interior perspective of businesses directly from the Street View images of nearby roads on Google Maps.

We’re continuing this program with businesses in select cities in the United States, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, UK, South Korea, and France. If you would like to highlight your business to Google Maps users, please visit the Business Photos site to learn more and apply.

Posted by Andrew Foster, Product Manager for Google Maps.

3D dreams in the modern browser

Monday, May 16, 2011

This is a cross-post from the Official Google Blog

Some of the most compelling experiences on the web come when inspirations of old are brought to life with modern technologies. Last August, “The Wilderness Downtown” brought the wistful feeling of nostalgia to the browser as you run down the streets where you used to live in an HTML5 music experience based on the Arcade Fire song “We Used to Wait.”

“3 Dreams of Black” is our newest music experience for the web browser, written and directed by Chris Milk and developed with a few folks here at Google. The song, “Black,” comes off the albumROME, presented by Danger Mouse & Daniele Luppi, featuring Jack White and Norah Jones on vocals and soon to be released on the record label Parlophone/EMI. ROME is inspired by Italian soundtracks from the 1960s and the classic Italian Western genre. In fact, the album was recorded with the original orchestra from Italian director Sergio Leone’s westerns (remember The Good, The Bad & The Ugly?).

“3 Dreams of Black” is a visual voyage through three dream worlds, told through rich 2D drawings and animations that are interspersed with interactive 3D sequences. At various points in this web experience, you can take control with your computer’s mouse and guide your journey through the unfolding narrative. You can even contribute to the dream by creating your own relics using a 3D model creator. Some of the best user creations will be integrated into the experience and become a part of others’ “3 Dreams” exploration.

In “3 Dreams in Black”, the browser is transformed into a theater for these lucid virtual dreams through WebGL, a new technology which brings hardware-accelerated 3D graphics to the browser. With WebGL in modern browsers like Google Chrome, you can interact with 3D experiences with no need for additional software. For curious web developers out there, we’ve made all the code completely open and available so that you can dig in, have a look around and try it out for yourself.

Because “3 Dreams in Black” is an experiment built with the latest web technologies, it requires a browser that supports WebGL like Chrome, and Windows Vista / Mac OS X 10.6 or above to help ensure that your computer has up-to-date graphics drivers. For those of you who may have hardware constraints, we’ve put together a short video that we hope will provide a glimpse into this unique experience. To explore these dreamscapes, visit www.ro.me.

Posted by Aaron Koblin, Google Data Arts Team

Young Kiwis take their science project global

Tuesday, May 10, 2011

Two young Kiwis, Jun Bing and Alec Wang, are global semi-finalists in the Google Science Fair.
The team entered a project in the competition to research, design and develop a working model of a device capable of filtering out carbon dioxide from car exhausts. Their aim is to reduce the rate of climate change due to global warming and the greenhouse effect by reducing a significant proportion of the global CO2 emissions.

They are among 60 projects that were selected from a pool of over 7500 entries from more than 90 countries around the world. Their project is included among innovative and engaging entries on a wide range on topics from cancer treatment to renewable oceanic energy to aeronautic auto-pilot algorithms.

You can see the semi-finalists at google.com/sciencefair and vote for your favourite Google Science Fair project. The team or individual with the most votes will win the People’s Choice Award and bring home a $10,000 scholarship. Public voting will only be open until 20 May 2011 so make sure to cast your vote today to ensure your favourite project is in the running.

Check back on the 23rd May, 2011 to see which teams will be flown out to Google’s headquarters in California for the final round of judging conducted by our panel of renowned scientists and innovators and the celebratory finalist event.
Posted by Kate Mason, Google Australia

Seven Days of Searching

Friday, May 6, 2011

In the last seven days, one of the busiest news week of the year, the fastest rising search term on Google worldwide has been “bin laden”. Osama-related searches have rated as the fastest rising search term this year.

Australia and New Zealand have followed this trend, with Osama bin Laden rating as the fastest rising search, followed by the Royal Wedding. In Australia, the Logies made it into the top ten list, and in New Zealand. Auckland’s Albany tornado activity came in a no. 7.

Pippa Middleton is clearly an Aussie and Kiwi favourite, with searches for the Duchess’s sister also coming in above Kate Middleton!

Times have definitely changed: while the only viewing platform for the wedding of Charles and Diana was television back in 1981, last week’s royal wedding had us watching the live stream of the service and procession on YouTube - with the British Monarchy’s official YouTube channel TheRoyalChannel receiving almost 28 million views.

The week leading up to the wedding saw an abundance of royal wedding-related searches including everything from Kate’s dress to Prince Harry. Now, amidst the flurry of post-game analysis, people are focusing on highlights from the day - with the Middleton sisters being a standout in search even a week after the event.

Osama bin Laden and tornado coverage, both being breaking news, have immediately gone straight to the list of breakout searches. The three biggest news stories of the last week have certainly dominated search engine and newsrooms alike.

Fastest rising searches in Australia over the last seven days:
1. bin laden
2. bin laden dead
3. osama
4. osama bid laden
5. osama dead
6. pippa middleton
7. logies
8. royal wedding
9. kate middleton
10. biggest loser

Fastest rising searches in New Zealand over the last seven days:
1. bin laden
2. bin laden dead
3. osama
4. osama bin laden
5. osama dead
6. pippa middleton
7. tornado auckland
8. tornado
9. kate middleton
10. royal wedding
Posted by Kate Mason, Google Australia

Privacy Awareness Week 2011

Friday, May 6, 2011

You might have noticed the talk around privacy this week. It just so happens to have been Privacy Awareness Week.

Privacy Awareness Week 2011 is all about you: what can you do to protect your personal information?

This week we’ve been tweeting some tips about protecting your privacy:

The Google Dashboard is where you can change your privacy settings on all Google products from one easy location.
You can find more information about protecting your privacy online at Your Online Choices.
Check your privacy policy and settings on social networks you use.
Have a look at our Privacy Centre, which contains specific info about all of our privacy tools and products.

As part of Privacy Awareness Week, the Asia Pacific Privacy Authorities are interested in hearing about your experience of privacy and social media. Take part in their survey and tell your story here.

Posted by Ishtar Vij, Public Policy and Government Affairs.

The Royal Wedding live on YouTube

Wednesday, April 20, 2011

Cross-posted from the Official Google Blog
Google search trendspreviouslywww.youtube.com/theroyalchannelThe Royal ChannelPosted by: Rachel Ball, Partner Development Associate

Helping Christchurch businesses publish up-to-date information on Google

Wednesday, March 16, 2011

Detailed instructions on how to use Google Placeschristchurch-placepage-help@google.comStudent Volunteer Armyour information pageChristchurch Earthquake AppealNZ Red CrossPosted by Patrick Leung, Engineering Manager

Tips and tricks for searching from an expert

Monday, March 14, 2011

Dan Russell, a Google user experience researcher, spends his days watching people search. It might sound weird, but Dan talks to people, and they tell him what sorts of barriers they might come up against when searching for information. As an educator, Russell teaches sophisticated search techniques that can give people faster, better and more robust results.
While Google has a self-confessed obsession with speed, it’s not just the time-saving Russell educates on. As he says, “I show them what kind of features they can use to uncover research, I teach by doing. And now that they have the right strategy, they can solve a similar question right away. Once they have those skills they start to ask questions that they would never have even thought of before.”

Here are six top tips from Dan to help make using Google even easier:

Simplicity is the key - According to Dan there are two extremes when it comes to searching; while some of us use unnecessary words, others leave out important words or key concepts The trick is to use key words or even type in your entire question: be specific.

Use the tools available - Around 90% of users don’t know that they can key ‘control-F’ to search a word on a web page and many of us neglect to explore the left-hand side menu that appears after a search. As Dan says, “Feature rich functions are no good if you don’t know where they are or how to use them. Tools like these help searchers to refine their results.” Don’t forget there is also the ‘advanced search’ feature which narrows down results even further.

Searching through the results no more - One problem that many Googlers have is filtering through the results manually to find the pages they are after. Dan explains that this doesn’t have to be the case: “It doesn’t matter what you search for, there will always be a result of lots of data. To make things easier to manage, use the minus command which will exclude the unhelpful results”.

A picture really is worth a thousand words - We often forget that in addition to words, we can also search using images and to further narrow this down to what we are after, find something with the same features you’re after and click ‘similar’.

Goggles with Google - a feature many searchers are unaware of, Google Goggles is great when you want to search for something but are unsure of what you’re looking at. Whether it’s a landmark, logo or object, simply take a pic with your mobile camera and Google Goggles analyses the image and retrieves all kinds of data on it without you having to type anything.

One last tip - click on the ‘more’ menu and a range of search categories like blog, scholar and realtime are at your fingertips.

To read about Dan and pick up some more search tips, you can have a look here.

Responding to the Christchurch, New Zealand earthquake

Wednesday, February 23, 2011

Google Person Finderhttp://christchurch-2011.person-finder.appspot.com/an informational pagegoogle.co.nzGoogle Person Finder

Join Life in a Day today for its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival

Thursday, January 27, 2011

This is a cross-post from the YouTube Blog.
On July 24, 2010, thousands of people around the world uploaded videos of their lives to YouTube to take part in “Life in a Day,” an historic cinematic experiment to document a single day on earth. From Australia to Zambia, more than 80,000 videos, totaling 4,500 hours of footage, were submitted to the project. After months of hard work, Oscar-winning director Kevin Macdonald and a team of editors have created a 90-minute documentary film that gives a surprising, honest and entertaining self-portrait of our world.

While “Life in a Day” will be officially released later this year, tonight you have a very special opportunity to tune in to the world premiere direct from the 2011 Sundance Film Festival. The premiere will be followed by a live Q&A with Kevin Macdonald and key contributors to the film. You can submit questions for the Q&A here.

Today’s stream begins at 2pm on the Life in a Day channel. You can catch a rebroadcast on Friday, January 28, at 7pm in your local time zone, captioned and subtitled in 25 additional languages, with an additional option for audio description (AD) in English.

We hope you enjoy the film!

Tim Partridge, Product Marketing Manager, recently watched “Life in a Day: A new type of filmmaking”.

New Zealand Blog