Google Europe Blog

Campaigning on the net

Thursday, November 26, 2009

Personal Democracy Forum Europe Conference

Founder Andrew RasiejFacebookTwitterYouTubeGoogle of course strongly believes in the enabling power of information. Greater transparency and availability of information to the public and the ability for citizens to engage directly in the conversation leads in our view to greater knowledge, democratic accountability & better-informed decision-making. Many of our products - blogger, Gmail, search, YouTube, our translation technologies are designed to allow citizens to do just that - get involved and have their say. We were proud to select 20 innovators as Google Fellows and pay for their travel and participation at the Barcelona conference.
At the Forum, we also took the opportunity to remind delegates of just what makes the Internet such a unique platform - its openness, low barriers to entry, and a decentralised structure that allows innovation and great ideas to come from any place at any time and for any user to discover these. Fantastic examples of great grassroots projects came from all corners of the Internet globe. One, dubbed mobile micro-volunteering, encouraged computers to spend the empty hours in transit using a smart phone to sending text and images to support small NGO projects. The Personal Democracy Forum just has posted its own interesting post-mortem. We look forward to learning about more success stories at the next Forum meeting in Europe.

Posted by Susan Pointer, Director, Public Policy & Government Relations,

Helping kids surf the net

Tuesday, November 24, 2009

In order to help, Google, Calysto and the Voix de l'Enfant joined together to produce a video offering advice to help youngsters adopt an informed and responsible attitude to surfing the net. It includes demos of tools and testimonies of children. Bruno Solo, ambassador of the association la Voix de l'Enfant, narrates. We timed the release to the 20th anniversary of the International Convention on the Rights of the Child.
You can watch here the YouTube channel of La Voix de l'Enfant.

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We are longtime partners with Calysto, an agency specialising in Internet safety. Over the past five years, Google has participated in Calypso's "Tour de France" of schools. This initiative has allowed to more than one million children and 300 000 parents to benefit from an educational session about a safe use of the internet.

In a similar spirit, more than 25 000 students participated this year to the second edition of the "ChercheNet". Fifth and six grade students participated in a competition learned to develop to protect themselves and respect others on the Internet. They have solved puzzles around the theme of sustainable development and become the responsible authors of a collective blog. The third edition of ChercheNet will be launched in January 2010.
Internet is central to the life of our children. Let's accompany them in the discovery, use, and practise of this extraordinary tool, an open door to the world and its cultural diversity in order to contribute to a "sustainable development" of the Internet.
Anne-Gabrielle Dauba Pantanacce, Corporate Communications Manager & Olivier Esper, Public Policy ManagerAccompagnons nos enfants dans l'apprentissage d'InternetConvention internationale des droits de l’enfantCalystoVoix De l’EnfantGrâce aux conseils de Bruno SOLO, ambassadeur de la Voix De l’Enfant, les enfants et les adultes découvriront les règles de « savoir vivre » sur Internet et des conseils utiles pour une meilleure utilisation de cet outil.
Retrouvez cette video sur la chaîne YouTube de la Voix de l'Enfant.

Permettre qu’Internet reste d’abord une grande opportunité pour tous est également notre but poursuivi tout au long de l’année avec la société Calysto. Depuis 5 ans, Google est l'un des partenaires fidèle et engagé dans le « Tour de France des établissements scolaires ». Cette opération a permis de rencontrer plus d’1 million d’enfants et 300 000 parents qui ont bénéficié dans toute la France de sessions d’animation dynamiques et engageantes pour la pratique d’un Internet plus sûr : www.tousconnectes.coml’initiative de GoogleCherche Nethttp://www.cherchenet.fr/

Designing the Future

Monday, November 23, 2009

The European Union has dubbed 2009 as the European Year of Creativity and Innovation, organizing a year-long celebration of conferences and exhibitions. Creativity and innovation are subjects of significant interest and importance to us at Google, and to European policymakers, so we were delighted to travel to Brussels today for an EU-sponsored event titled Beyond the crisis: design for a sustainable future.

An important part of the Google success story is linked to strong design, from our uncluttered home page and clear distinction between search results and sponsored links. We believe new, emerging technologies will rise - or fall - at least in part on the strength of their design. Both of us specialise in creating products and services for mobile phones, and the increasing computing power of hand held devices, tied to innovations such as touch screen interfaces, have opened bold new opportunities.

Europe launched the mobile phone era and long has been a mobile phone leader. But this leadership now is being challenged. Mobile web browsing first took off in Japan and is now rocketing in the United States, where flat-rate data plans proliferate and thousands of "app" developers are rushing to enhance the opportunity for consumers. Many new mobile phone services are personalised, depending on your location. Users must opt-in to these location-based services but the advantages of doing so are clear. After all, if you are searching for a book store or electronics outlet in the neighbourhood, you don't want the search on your phone to propose retailers an ocean away. In Europe, we need to understand the privacy balance required in order to achieve the most effective, useful searches.

In our Brussels talk, we focus on our process in developing the Google Mobile App - a tool giving quick access to Maps, Gmail, and more Google products on your phone. We explain how we went about designing the App - carrying out initial research, iterating our design based on user testing, and once launched, further refining the app's behaviour based on aggregated data of how users navigate through the app's icons and menus. For most users, one of the biggest problems they face with their mobile phones is the fiddly, time consuming process of typing into small keyboards. Even touch keyboards are slow and unwieldy. Often, too, it takes numerous steps to conduct a search.

Our goal was to minimize these barriers. We included functions such as voice search and providing access to previous searches a user has done via a history list. Speaking commands rather than typing a search query makes the whole experience dramatically quicker and more intuitive.
Google Mobile App also allows users who have chosen to opt in to location services to improve their search results. For example when I am in Brussels this evening and I want to find an Italian restaurant for dinner, I just speak 'Italian restaurant' into my phone, which conducts an automatic Google search, and up pops the relevant results. Pretty cool, no? Download from mobile.google.com for BlackBerry, Windows Mobile and Symbian Series 60 phones and give it a try.
Posted by Benedict Davies, Senior User Experience Designer and Elaine Montgomery, User Experience Design Manager

Virtual Vint in Egypt

Wednesday, November 18, 2009

Director of Public Policy and Government Relations,

An Internet Governance Forum status check

Tuesday, November 17, 2009

Internet Governance ForummandatePosted by Vint Cerf, Chief Internet Evangelist

Powering Electric Cars

Monday, November 16, 2009

We're proud of our Google TrendsGoogle Insight for SearchTransport and Environmentreport

Graph 1: Correlation between petrol prices in the UK (above) and public interest in electric cars, as illustrated by Google searches on the term ‘electric car’
Similarly, Google queries can help predict economic activity, providing a real time report on query volume, while economic data is typically released several days after the close of the month. Given this time lag, it is not implausible that Google queries in a category like "Automotive/Vehicle Shopping" during the first few weeks of November may help predict what actual November automotive sales will be like when the official data is released halfway through December. Our work to date is summarized in a paper called Predicting the Present with Google Trends. We find that Google Trends data can help improve forecasts of the current level of activity for a number of different economic time series, including automobile sales, home sales, retail sales, and travel behavior.
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Modifications to the Google Books Settlement

Sunday, November 15, 2009

Cross Posted from the Google Public Policy Blog
Google Books settlementhereFAQsupportersop-ed
If you'd like to hear more, you can join Chairman of the American Association of Publishers Richard Sarnoff, Authors Guild Executive Director Paul Aiken and me for a public conference call at 9:15 PM Pacific/12:15 AM Eastern to discuss our amended agreement.
hereherePosted by Dan Clancy, Google Books Engineering Director

Europe Blog

Campaigning on the net

Helping kids surf the net

Designing the Future

Virtual Vint in Egypt

An Internet Governance Forum status check

Powering Electric Cars

Modifications to the Google Books Settlement

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