Europe Blog
Our views on the Internet and society
Let’s fill London with startups...
Thursday, March 29, 2012
London has become one of the world's great digital capitals. The Internet accounts for eight percent of the U.K. economy and has become, in these days of tough public finances, a welcome engine of economic growth.
We believe there is even more potential for entrepreneurs to energize the Internet economy in the U.K., and to help spur growth, today we’re opening
Campus London
, a seven story facility in the east London neighborhood known as Tech City. Google began as a startup in a garage. We want to empower the next generation of entrepreneurs to be successful by building and supporting a vibrant startup community. Our goal with Campus is to catalyze the startup ecosystem and build Britain's single largest community of startups under one roof.
The U.K.’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Rt. Hon. George Osborne MP, launched Campus at this morning's official opening. The Chancellor toured the building, meeting some of the entrepreneurs currently making their home in Campus and learning more about their innovations, ranging from fashion trendsetting websites to personalized London leisure guides. He then flipped the switch on a commemorative graffiti plaque.
Campus is a collaboration between Google and partners Central Working, Tech Hub, Seedcamp and Springboard. It will provide startups with workspace in an energizing environment and will also host daily events for and with the community. We will run a regular speaker series, alongside lectures and programing, as well as provide mentorship and training from local Google teams.
Visitors will have access to a cafe and co-working space, complete with high speed wifi. We welcome members of the startup community: entrepreneurs, investors, developers, designers, lawyers, accountants, etc. and hope that this informal, highly concentrated space will lead to chance meetings and interactions that will generate the ideas and partnerships that will drive new, innovative businesses.
The buzz around Campus from within the startup community has meant that today, on day one, Campus is already at 90% capacity, with more than 100 people on site and an additional 4,500 who have signed up online to visit.
We are looking forward to getting to know the community. East London is emerging as a world-leading entrepreneurial hub, and we’re excited to be a part of it. Take a photo tour of Campus
here
, and if you’d like to learn more, visit us at
www.campuslondon.com
.
Let’s fill this town with startups!
Posted by Eze Vidra, Head of Campus London
Honoring Innovation for Free Expression
Wednesday, March 28, 2012
Update, Thursday, March 29
: Kubatana's FreedomFone won the first Google-sponsored Innovation Award given out last evening at the Index on Censorship's annual Freedom of Expression awards.
FreedomFone's Upenyu Makoni-Muchemwana accepted the prize, describing how their product allows information to "be shared and received at anytime in any language wherever there is mobile coverage. Traditional roadblocks of licensing, regulation and literacy are bypassed, and freedom of expression is broadened."
Judges explained the reasons behind their choice in this video:
Index on Censorship
holds its annual awards this evening in London, celebrating the work of journalists, artists and activists who champion free expression, often at great personal risk.
This is the third year that Google is sponsoring the awards evening. We're delighted that this year's edition includes a new Google-sponsored innovation award which recognises the original use of new technology to foster debate, argument or dissent.
Nominees come from all across the globe. They include Zimbabwean NGO
Kubatana
, which has developed a Freedom Fone. It uses open-source software to help organisations share pre-recorded audio information in any language via mobile phones and landlines. Another nominee is ObscuraCam, a free smartphone application developed in the United States that uses facial recognition to blur individual faces automatically. This helps protect activists who fear reprisals but want to safely capture evidence of state brutality. A full list of the nominees is
here
.
The Awards ceremony takes place on Wednesday 28 March at 6.30pm at the
St Pancras Renaissance Hotel
in King’s Cross, London. We’ll begin with champagne and canapés, followed by the Awards ceremony at 8pm hosted by BBC presenter Jonathan Dimbleby with a keynote from the author of War Horse, Michael Morpurgo. We will be on hand to celebrate the winners.
Posted by William Echikson, Head of Free Expression, Europe, Middle East and Africa
Explore Mandela's archives online
Tuesday, March 27, 2012
Last year we
announced
a $1.25 million grant to the
Nelson Mandela Centre of Memory
to help preserve and digitize thousands of archival documents, photographs and videos about Nelson Mandela. Based in Johannesburg, South Africa, the Nelson Mandela Centre of Memory (NMCM) is committed to documenting the life and times of one of the world's greatest statesmen and spreading his story to promote social justice throughout the world.
Today, the Mandela archive has become a reality. Along with historians, educationalists, researchers, activists and many others around the world, you can access a wealth of information and knowledge about the life and legacy of this extraordinary African leader. The
new online multimedia archive
includes Mandela’s correspondence with family, comrades and friends, diaries written during his 27 years of imprisonment, and notes he made while leading the negotiations that ended apartheid in South Africa. The archive will also include the
earliest-known photo of Mr. Mandela
and
never-before seen drafts
of Mr. Mandela's manuscripts for the sequel to his autobiography
Long Walk to Freedom
.
We’ve worked closely with the NMCM to create an interactive online experience which we hope will inspire you as much as us. You can search and browse the archives to explore different parts of Mandela’s life and work in depth:
Early Life
,
Prison Years
,
Presidential Years
,
Retirement
,
Books for Mandela
,
Young People
and
My Moment with a Legend
.
For example, you might be interested in Nelson Mandela’s personal memories of the time he was incarcerated and click into the
Prison Years
exhibit. You can immediately see a curated set of materials threaded together into a broader narrative. These include handwritten notes on his
desk calendars
, which show, for example, that he met President F.W. De Klerk for the first time on December 13, 1989 for two and a half hours in prison; the
Warrants of Committal
issued by the Supreme Court which sent him to prison; the earliest known
photo of Nelson Mandela’s prison cell
on Robben Island circa 1971; and a
personal letter
written from prison in 1963 to his daughters, Zeni and Zindzi, after their mother was arrested, complete with transcript.
From there, you might want to see all the letters held by the archive, and click “See more” in the letters category, where you can discover all
personal letters
or use the time filter to explore his
diaries and calendars
written between 1988 and 1998, where you can see that in the
last page
of the last diary, he met with President Yoweri Kaguta Museveni of Uganda to exchange ideas about the situation in northern Uganda. If you were a researcher, you can search through various fragments of Madiba’s memory that relate to
Ahmed Kathrada
, his long-time comrade, politician and anti-apartheid activist, where you can find photos, videos, manuscripts and letters that relate to him.
Finally, by clicking into the exhibit,
My Moment with a Legend
, you can go beyond Madiba’s personal materials to get a diverse perspective through photos, videos and stories, via the memories of people like
Archbishop Desmond Tutu
,
F.W. De Klerk
and
Nomfundo Walaza
, a community worker.
The Nelson Mandela Digital Archive project is an initiative by the Nelson Mandela Centre of Memory and the
Google Cultural Institute
, which helps to preserve and promote our diverse cultural and historical heritage. Some of our other initiatives include the
Art Project
, digitizing the
Dead Sea Scrolls
and bringing the
Yad Vashem Holocaust
materials online.
You can start exploring the Nelson Mandela archive right now at
archive.nelsonmandela.org
. We hope you’ll be inspired by this influential leader—the face of South Africa’s transition to democracy.
Posted by Mark Yoshitake, Product Manager, Google’s Cultural Institute
Compete in the EUhackathon
Monday, March 19, 2012
Have you ever had an amazing idea for improving the experience of children on the Internet? Or perhaps you’ve wondered why a tool or platform for harnessing the limitless creativity of young people didn’t already exist?
Then you should apply to participate in this year’s
EUhackatho
n. The Hack4Kids event will be the second
hackathon
organised with the European Union institutions in Brussels and will take place on June 20 and 21, 2012 in Brussels.
Developers are invited to apply in one of two tracks: Child Safety or Child Creativity. The Child Safety Track focuses on building or improving tools that allow children, their parents and teachers enjoy a better Internet experience. Areas for focus include improved reporting mechanisms around cyberbullying, age verification tools and facilitating responsible web surfing.
The Child Creativity Track invites coders to create a tool or platform that enables children to create new online content such as a website, game, or video to be shared. Our ultimate goal is to unlock young people’s creativity.
Last year’s event
was a major success with hackers from across Europe developing tools to help measure network speeds and to improve global transparency tracking. You can check out last year’s winners of the transparency track’s game,
Beat the Censor
and
Internet Performance Analysis
.
Applications
are open until 16 April 2012 at noon CET. Good luck!
Posted by Marco Pancini, Senior Policy Manager, Brussels
Debating drugs on YouTube and Google+
Friday, March 16, 2012
Whether enabling voters to
interview their President
, or
connect underwater
to photograph the ocean floor,
Google+ Hangouts
are being used in amazing ways. Hangouts not only have the ability to connect people on opposite sides of the planet - they can also connect people on opposing sides of the social and political spectrum.
This week, we partnered with
Intelligence2
to launch
Versus
- our first in a new series of global policy debates using Google Hangouts and live streamed on YouTube. Our inaugural discussion asked whether
“It’s time to end the War on Drugs.”
Entrepreneur
+Richard Branson
, comedian
+Russell Brand
, Wikileaks founder
+Julian Assange
and the President of Columbia, participated. BBC newsreader and presenter
+Emily Maitlis
chaired.
Branson began by speaking on behalf of the motion “If my brother, or sister or children have a drug problem, I do not want them to go to prison. I want them to be helped.” Via Google+ Hangout, Brand agreed, saying that we need to “stop treating [addiction] as a crime as opposed to treating it as an illness.” He rejected the opposition argument that legalisation would increase drug consumption.
On the other side, former-New York Governor Eliot Spitzer wished former U.S. President Richard Nixon had never used the confusing term “war on drugs”. Spitzer called instead for a “nuanced” drug control policy, based on the range of tools already being used, that “evolves over time.” The former head of London’s police force, Lord Ian Blair, rubbished his opponents’ decriminalisation argument. “What they are proposing is probably an irreversible experiment, where the result could be complete catastrophe,” he said.
This Versus debate is just the first of many to be hosted on Google+ and streamed on YouTube in the coming months. We encourage all of you to visit the Versus Google+ page and have your say.
Posted by Anna Bateson, Director of Youtube Marketing, EMEA
Making our ads better for everyone
Thursday, March 15, 2012
Cross-posted from the
Official Google Blog
We believe that ads are useful and relevant information that can help you find what you’re looking for online—whether you’re comparing digital cameras or researching new cars. We also want you to be able to use Google and click on any ads that interest you with confidence. Just as we work hard to
make Gmail free of spam
and
malware
, we’re committed to enforcing rigorous standards for the ads that appear on Google and on our
partner sites
.
Like all other Internet companies, we’re fighting a war against a huge number of bad actors—from websites selling counterfeit goods and fraudulent tickets to underground international operations trying to spread malware and spyware. We must remain vigilant because scammers will always try to find new ways to abuse our systems. Given the number of searches on Google and the number of legitimate businesses who rely on this system to reach users, our work to remove bad ads must be precise and at scale.
We recently made some improvements to help ensure the ads you see comply with our strict policies, so we wanted to give you an overview of both our principles and these new technologies.
Ads that harm users are not allowed on Google
We’ve always approached our ads system with trust and safety in mind. Our
policies
cover a wide range of issues across the globe in every country in which we do business. For example, our ads policies don’t allow ads for illegal products such as
counterfeit goods
or harmful products such as
handguns or cigarettes
. We also don’t allow ads with misleading claims (“lose weight guaranteed!”), fraudulent work-at-home scams (
“get rich quick working from home!”
) or
unclear billing practices
.
How it all works
With billions of ads submitted to Google every year, we use a combination of sophisticated technology and manual review to detect and remove these sorts of ads. We spend millions of dollars building technical architecture and advanced machine learning models to fight this battle. These systems are designed to detect and remove ads for
malicious download sites
that contain
malware or a virus
before these ads could appear on Google. Our automated systems also scan and review landing pages—the websites that people are taken to once they click—as well as advertiser accounts. When potentially objectionable ads are flagged by our automated systems, our policy specialists review the ads, sites and accounts in detail and take action.
Improvements to detection systems
Here are some important improvements that we’ve recently made to our systems:
Improved “query watch” for counterfeit ads: While anyone can
report counterfeit ads
, we’ve widened our proactive monitoring of sensitive keywords and queries related to counterfeit goods which allows us to catch more counterfeit ads before they ever appear on Google
New “risk model” to detect violations: Our computer scanning depends on detailed risk models to determine whether a particular ad may violate our policies, and we recently upgraded our engineering system with a new “risk model” that is even more precise in detecting advertisers who violate our policies
Faster manual review process: Some ads need to be reviewed manually. To increase our response time in preventing ads from policy-violating advertisers, we sped up our internal processes and systems for manual reviews, enabling our specialists to be more precise and fast
Twenty-four hour response time: We aim to respond within 24 hours upon receiving a reliable complaint about an ad to ensure that we’re reviewing ads in a timely fashion
We also routinely review and update the areas which our policies cover. For example, we recently updated our
policy for ads related to short-term loans
in order to protect people from misleading claims. For short-term loans, we require advertisers to disclose fine-print details such as overall fees and annual percentage rate, as well as implications for late and non-payment.
Bad ads are declining
The numbers show we’re having success. In 2011, advertisers submitted billions of ads to Google, and of those, we disabled more than 130 million ads. And our systems continue to improve—in fact, in 2011 we reduced the percentage of bad ads by more than 50% compared with 2010. That means that our methods are working. We’re also catching the vast majority of these scam ads before they ever appear on Google or on any of our partner networks. For example, in 2011, we shut down approximately 150,000 accounts for attempting to advertise counterfeit goods, and more than 95% of these accounts were discovered through our own
detection efforts and risk models
.
Here’s David Baker, Engineering Director, who can explain more about how we detect and remove scam ads:
What you can do to help
If you’re an advertiser, we encourage you to review our
policies
that aim to protect users, so you can help keep the web safe. For everyone else, our
Good to Know site
has lots of advice, including tips for avoiding scams anywhere on the Internet. You can also report ads you believe to be fraudulent or in violation of our policies and, if needed, file a
complaint
with the appropriate agency as listed in our
Web Search Help Center
.
Online advertising is the commercial lifeblood of the web, so it’s vital that people can trust the ads on Google and the Internet overall. We’ll keep posting more information here about our efforts, and developments, in this area.
Posted by Sridhar Ramaswamy, SVP, Engineering
Honoring and supporting Belgian Internet pioneers
Tuesday, March 13, 2012
It’s not everyday that a Prime Minister visits your office. Today, Googlers in our Brussels office were honoured by a visit from Belgium’s
Prime Minister Elio Di Rupo
to celebrate and revive the memory of two unique Belgian inventors and pioneers.
Decades before the creation of the World Wide Web,
Paul Otlet
and
Henri La Fontaine
envisaged a paper archival system of the world’s information. They built a giant international documentation centre called
Mundaneum
, with the goal of preserving peace by assembling knowledge and making it accessible to the entire world. For us at Google, this mission sounds familiar.
The two Mundaneum founders met in 1895 and created the modern library
universal decimal classification system
, building from John Dewey’s early work. When La Fontaine won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1913 for his work as an activist in the international peace movement, he invested his winnings into the Mundaneum project, which was already underway. La Fontaine and Otlet collected 3-by-5 inch index cards to build a vast paper database which eventually contained some 16 million entries, covering everything from the history of hunting dogs to finance. The Belgian government granted them space in a government building and Otlet established a fee-based research service that allowed anyone in the world to submit a query via mail or telegraph. Inquiries poured in from all over the world.
World War II and the deaths of La Fontaine in 1943 and Otlet in 1944 slowed the project. Although many of these archives were stored away, some of them in the Brussels subway, volunteers kept the dream alive. In 1998, Belgium’s French community government revived the Mundaneum’s memory, bringing most of the archives to a beautiful Art Deco building in the city of Mons.
That brings us to today. The Prime Minister came to our office to announce a major partnership with the Mundaneum and the University of Ghent. Google will sponsor and partner in both the upcoming exhibition at the Mundaneum headquarters in Mons and a speaker series on Internet issues at the Mundaneum and the University of Ghent. Web pioneers
Louis Pouzin
and
Robert Cailliau
are already scheduled to speak.
Mundaneum will use Google to present and promote its conferences and exhibitions. It has also constructed an
online tour
of its dazzling premises. At today’s event in the Google Brussels office, Prime Minister Di Rupo said he hopes that the Google-Mundaneum cooperation becomes a “wonderful forum for experimentation.” Di Rupo himself is passionate about the Mundaneum; as mayor of Mons, he was instrumental in preserving the archive.
If information was important a century ago, it is even more important in the 21st century. In his remarks, the Prime Minister made the connection between the past and the future, and called on Belgium to embrace the digital economy. We showed him our recently-launched Belgian version of
Street View
. In Belgium, the internet accounts for 2.5% of GDP—and its contribution is expected to grow by more than 10% a year for the next five years. “If all our companies could take better advantages of these new technologies, its sure that our exports would get a boost,” Di Rupo said.
Our partnership with Mundaneum is part of a larger project to revive the memory of Europe’s computing pioneers. Europe played a crucial role in the invention of computers and the Internet, yet all too often has forgotten its innovators. Last year marked the 60th anniversary of
LEO
, the world’s first business computer, built by
J.Lyons & Co
, a leading British food manufacturer at the time that also ran a famous chain of tea shops. This past December, we celebrated the 60th anniversary of the formal recognition of Ukraine’s
Sergey Lebedev’s pioneering MESM project
. We’ve also given our support to help restore
Bletchley Park
, the site of the U.K.’s wartime codebreaking and home of
Colossus
, the world’s first electronic programmable computer.
Now we’re moving to the heart of Europe. “This is a beautiful story between Google and us, which allows us to recognize the memory of the Mundaneum,” says the Mundaneum’s director Jean-Paul Deplus. For Google, it’s just as exciting to rediscover our own roots.
Posted by William Echikson, External Relations, Brussels
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