Europe Blog
Our views on the Internet and society
Big Tent braves the beach in Cannes
Friday, June 22, 2012
When the advertising world convened this week in the South of France for the
Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity
, we pitched up our
Big Tent
to debate innovations in social media and the marriage of technology and creativity.
Our first session featured Noelle Jouglet from
Kony 2012
sharing how their documentary
video
garnered 100 million hits in 6 days and mobilised thousands of young people around the world to take part in advocacy work against the
Lord’s Resistance Army
.
Bradley Horowitz
from the Google+ team shared his insights into how the social web is providing new ways for everyone from Barack Obama to Cadbury to interact with their supporters in meaningful ways. Both speakers shared important lessons about how to empower audiences for the marketers in the audience.
In the second of our Big Tents in Cannes,
Arianna Huffington
and Iain Tait from Google’s
Creative Lab
took part in perhaps a counterintuitive conversation for a technology company: how to best disconnect from technology in order to recharge your creative juices. After sharing how long each speaker slept the night before, Arianna and Iain’s conversation explored issues as diverse as breaking our obsession with being ‘always on’, the Tetris challenge of your inbox and making time for your soul.
After this busy week of
Big Tents
we’ll be recharging our batteries ahead of our next event in Sendai, Japan on the role of technology in preparing and responding to crises.
Posted by Jon Steinberg, External Relations
Commemorating Alan Turing at London’s Science Museum
Thursday, June 21, 2012
As Steven Pinker, the Harvard professor and popular science author,
recently wrote
:
“It would be an exaggeration to say that the British mathematician Alan Turing explained the nature of logical and mathematical reasoning, invented the digital computer, solved the mind-body problem, and saved Western civilization. But it would not be much of an exaggeration”.
For proof, look no further than the stunning new exhibition “
Codebreaker - Alan Turing’s Life and Legac
y” which opens to the public today at London’s Science Museum. This tells the story of Turing’s vast achievements in a profoundly moving way, through an amazing collection of artifacts -- including items never before on display.
Photos from last night’s gala opening
This exhibition is especially close to our hearts at Google, since not only is Turing a founding father of computing, in a way he is also the father of our collaboration with the Science Museum.
A few years ago one of Google’s senior engineers heard there was an idea to stage an exhibition about Turing. He got in touch and volunteered to help; and from that small seed, Google’s association with the Science Museum has now blossomed into a fully-fledged partnership.
In this, the centenary of Turing’s birth,
we’re proud to sponsor
such a fitting tribute to one of computing’s true heroes. The exhibition will be open until the end of June 2013, and entry is free, so do visit if you can.
Posted by Lynette Webb, Senior Manager, External Relations
Big Tent - from Ireland to Israel
Thursday, June 21, 2012
Our second Big Tent of the week took place in Tel Aviv, where we delved into the impact of the Internet on democracy, civil society and education. Large public protests, sparked by online social networks and similar in some ways to the protests sweeping the Arab world, have swept over Israel.
By enabling each of us to express ourselves, and reach a national and global audience, participants agreed that the Internet allows new voices to influence the political process. Israel’s Education Minister
Gideon Sa’ar
invoked the philosopher
John Stuart Mill
to describe how the net is providing the means for a move from representative to direct democracy. This bottom-up revolution, he said, poses a challenge for politicians and the media who were previously the gatekeepers of information.
Our Big Tents aim to voice diverse views, and we certainly heard a wide range of opinions in Israel. Representatives from politics, traditional and new media posed powerful questions. Do extreme and violent voices dominate the online debate? Is traditional media more scared than leading in the face of the online challenge? Why did the Arab Spring not deliver a single new democracy?
Journalist
Ilana Dayan
put those points and more to our Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt, who was making his first visit to Israel following a trip to Afghanistan and Pakistan. While he accepted it’s impossible to predict exactly the impact the internet will have on society, he described villages he had visited which - with the advent of smart mobile devices - have gone from having access to no information to all the world’s information. That, he said, must mean a better future.
The Big Tent rolls on, next stop is a beach on the south of France where we’ll be debating innovation and creativity at the
Cannes Lions Festival
. You can view all previous debates on our
Big Tent YouTube channel
.
Posted by Doron Avni, Head of Policy and Government Relations
Hacking for child safety online
Wednesday, June 20, 2012
Fri June 22, 16:00, correction made in final paragraph, names of MEPs added.
The
EUhackathon
is back in Brussels - and this time, it’s about online child safety.
A year ago, we hosted an inaugural EU
Hack4Transparency
, bringing together crack coders from all over the world with the goal increasing transparency on the Internet. Today and tomorrow, programmers are at the Google Brussels office for 30 hours of continuous coding.
Entries
this year come from 11 countries: France, the UK, Romania, Poland, Finland, Italy, Spain, Belgium, Germany, Sweden and even Cambodia.
The new hackathon is part of the European Commission’s
Better Internet for Kids
initiative. Five civil society organisations: eSkills, Family Online Safety Institute, European Schoolnet, eNACSO and Missing Children Europe, are lending their support. Corporate contributors include Facebook, Orange and Vodafone, all of whom have dispatched engineers are to assist.
The coder’s task is to develop the best tools, websites or applications that will enhance children’s safety and creativity online. Our goal is to raise awareness of child safety and online creativity - and generate innovative ideas and solutions. European Commission Vice President Neelie Kroes is a keen supporter.
Children are central to this latest EUhackathon and are being given the opportunity to participate in the competition. Our youngest hacker is 13 years old! A total of 25 teenagers from the European schools in Brussels, aged between 12 and 15, will assist, participate and get first hand experience of computer coding.
These children and their teachers - ultimately, the people who will use the tools created during the hackathon - will get to vote for their favourite entries, and their opinions will be taken into account by the
jury
in their deliberations. On 16:15 on 21st June, MEPs Sabine Verheyen, Róża Maria Gräfin von Thun und Hohenstein, Sean Kelly and Petru Luhan will hand out EUR 5,000 prizes to the first prize-winning teams at an award ceremony in the European Parliament.
Posted by Marco Pancini, Senior Policy Manager, Google Brussels
Big Tent brings transparency debate to Dublin
Tuesday, June 19, 2012
(Throughout this week, we’ll be presenting posts on our Big Tent and its travels around the world. The first dispatch comes from Ireland.)
It was a historic venue for a 21st century debate. We brought our
Big Tent
to the famed “Round Room” of Ireland’s
Mansion House
to coincide with the
Organization of Security and Cooperation’s
meeting on Internet Freedom. Here the
First Dáil
assembled on 21 January 1919 to proclaim the
Irish Declaration of Independence
. This week, here we assembled the Irish high tech community with diplomats and officials from 56 member countries to launch the update of our
Transparency Report
and to debate the danger of government control over the Net.
The danger is certainly rising. More than 40 countries now censor or filter the web, up from only four a decade ago, according to the
Open Net Initiative
. Our Transparency Report details the requests we receive from governments around the world to censor content or collect information on Internet users. This report has proven a powerful tool for freedom of expression. This biannual update shows how some Western governments, not just the usual suspects are censoring legitimate Internet search results.
As the report’s creator Dorothy Chou explained, Google’s report represents only a narrow snapshot. It is limited to a single company. Imagine, she asked the audience, if an entire country came clean. This would give a global look at freedom in their country. The more transparent a government is, the less likely it will be to censor or request information on users. At least, the authorities will think twice before cracking down on the Net.
From this starting point, the Big Tent explored the danger of international organizations, and specifically the International Telecommunications Union, to undermine the bottom-up, sometimes messy system of governing the Internet. Our own chief Internet evangelist
Vint Cerf
outlined the issue in a video address that followed up from his recent New York Times
op ed
.
Estonia’s President
Toomas Hendrik Ilves
and State Department advisor
Alec Ross
continued to debate the issue. The Estonian president warned of “computer savvy despots” who would destroy Internet freedom, harkening back to another United Nations organization, UNESCO, and its attempt to strangle media freedom with a “
new world information and communications order
” in the 1980s.“ In Ross’s view, the free Internet faces an imminent attack from “monsters under the bed.”
The evening ended with an emotional and lyrical exploration of free expression from War Horse author
Michael Morpurgo
. He weaved together a tale about illiteracy, libraries and unicorns, ending with the vow to pursue his right to to say what he wants, and even “believe in unicorns.” The Irish band
Hudson Taylor
, who came to prominence on YouTube, closed the evening.
Big Tent now moves to Israel and to Cannes, to coincide with the world’s largest advertising meeting. Keep a watch out for upcoming reports of these events bringing together diverse viewpoints to debate the impact of the Internet on our world.
Posted by William Echikson, Head of Free Expression, Europe, Middle East and Africa.
Energy efficiency in the cloud
Tuesday, June 19, 2012
At Google, we’re obsessed with building
energy efficient datacentres
that enable
cloud computing
. Besides helping you be more
productive
, cloud-based services like
Google Apps
can reduce energy use, lower carbon emissions and save you money in the process. Last year,
we crunched the numbers and found that Gmail is up to
80 times more energy-efficient
than running traditional in-house email.
We’ve sharpened our pencils again to see how Google Apps as a whole - documents, spreadsheets, email and other applications - stacks up against the standard model of locally hosted services. Our
results show
that a typical organisation can achieve energy savings of about 65-85% by migrating to Google Apps.
Lower energy use results in less carbon pollution and more energy saved for organisations. That’s what happened at the
U.S. General Services Administration
(GSA), which recently switched its approximately 17,000 users to Google Apps for Government. We found that the GSA was able to reduce server energy consumption by nearly 90% and carbon emissions by 85%. That means the GSA will save an estimated $285,000 annually on energy costs alone, a 93% cost reduction.
How is the cloud so energy efficient? It’s all about reducing energy use for servers and server cooling. Here’s how it works:
A typical organisation has a lot more servers than it needs—for backup, failures and spikes in demand for computing. Cloud-based service providers like Google aggregate demand across thousands of people, substantially increasing how much servers are utilised. And our datacentres use equipment and software specially designed to
minimise energy use
. The cloud can do the same work much more efficiently than locally hosted servers.
In fact, according to a
study
by the Carbon Disclosure Project, by migrating to the cloud, companies with over $1 billion in revenues in the U.S. and Europe could achieve substantial reductions in energy costs and carbon emissions by 2020:
US companies
could save $12.3 billion and up to 85.7 million metric tonnes of CO2
UK companies
would save
£1
.2 billion and more than 9.2 million metric tonnes of CO2
French companies
could save nearly
€700
million and 1.2 million metric tonnes of CO2
We’ve built efficient datacentres around the world, even designing them in ways that make the
best use of the natural environment
, and we continue working to improve their performance. We think using the super-efficient cloud to deliver services like Google Apps can be part of the solution towards a more energy efficient future.
Posted by Urs Hoelzle, Senior Vice President for Technical Infrastructure
Where roads aren't - and why it matters
Monday, June 18, 2012
(Throughout this week we'll be publishing a series of posts on our
Green Blog
about our activities at Rio+20, the
United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development
. Our full schedule at the conference is available
here
, and follow our activities as they happen at #googleatrio20.)
On Friday, we unveiled at the Rio+20 Conference the initial fruits of a unique collaboration with a member of the European Parliament and the Society for Conservation Biologists: a global, interactive map of the world’s “Roadless Areas.”
The project came about when we were approached by
MEP Kriton Arsenis
, the European Parliament´s Rapporteur on forests. He explained that, while most people using Google Maps want to know which roads will get them from point A to point B, the same information is useful for conservationists who want to know where roads
aren’t
. In his words:
The concept of "roadless areas" is a well-established conservation measure coming from conservation biologists from all around the globe. The idea is that roads in most parts of the world lead to the unmanageable private access to the natural resources of an area, most often leading to ecosystem degradation and without the consent of the local and indigenous communities. Keeping an area roadless means that the specific territory is shielded against such exogenous pressures, thus sustaining its ecosystem services at the maximum possible level. An important tool which will drive environmental, development as well as global climate change policy forward will be the Google development of an interactive satellite map of the world's roadless areas.
We were intrigued by Kriton’s idea, so we decided to give it a try.
Start with where the Roads ARE
We started by taking all the road data (plus rail and navigable waterways) in Google maps today, and importing that into our
Google Earth Engine
platform for analysis. For example, here is what the road network in Australia looks like when zoomed out to country-scale:
Australia road network – coastal population centers such as Sydney, Perth and Adelaide show up as dense road networks, whereas the interior “Outback” is more sparse.
Then figure out where the roads AREN’T
Based upon advice from Kriton Arsenis and his project collaborators in the Society for Conservation Biology, we decided to define a “Roadless Area” (for the purposes of this prototype map) as any area of land more than ten kilometers from the nearest road. Using the global-scale spatial-analytic capabilities of Google Earth Engine, we then generated this raster map, such that every pixel in the map is color-coded based on distance from the nearest road. Every pixel colored green is at least ten km from the nearest road, and therefore considered part of a Roadless Area. For example:
Prototype “Roadless Areas” in Australia - all green areas are at least 10 km from the nearest road
Or consider the island of Madagascar, home to some of the most unique species on Earth.
Prototype “Roadless Areas” on the island of Madagascar, home of the endangered Indri lemur.
From these maps it becomes more apparent how the simple construction of new roads can fragment and disturb habitats, potentially driving threatened species closer to extinction.
Finally we decided to try running this “Roadless Area” algorithm at global-scale:
Prototype “Roadless Area” interactive map at global scale.
Large roadless areas are readily apparent such as the Amazon and Indonesian rainforests, Canadian boreal forest and Sahara desert.
Caveats and Next Steps
The road data used to produce these maps inevitably contains inaccuracies and
omissions. The good news is that Google already has a tool,
Google Map Maker
, that can be used by anyone to submit new or corrected map data, and in fact this tool is already being used in partnership with the United Nations to support global emergency response.
We look forward to continued development of this prototype, which can help to turn the abstract concept of “Roadless Areas” into something quite concrete and, we hope, useful to policymakers, scientists and communities around the world.
To explore these Roadless Area maps yourself, visit the
Google Earth Engine Map Gallery
.
Posted by Rebecca Moore, Manager, Google Earth Outreach and Google Earth Engine
Labels
Academics
18
Advertising
10
Africa
26
Austria
7
Belgium
25
Big Tent
11
Bosnia and Herzegovina
2
Browsers
1
Brussels Tech Talk
7
Bulgaria
5
Campus
2
Child Safety
24
Cloud computing
17
Competition
16
Computer Science
35
Computing Heritage
37
Consumers
11
controversial content
2
COP21
1
copyright
34
Crisis Response
2
Culture
116
Czech Republic
16
Data Centre
15
Denmark
4
Digital News Initiative
6
Digital Single Market
1
Diversity
7
Economic Impact of the Internet
57
Economy
24
Elections
7
Energy + Environment
16
Engineering
6
Environment
5
Estonia
6
European Commission
21
European Parliament
14
European Union
104
exhibitions
1
Finland
13
France
77
Free Expression
88
Free flow of information
47
German
1
Germany
65
Google for Entrepreneurs
9
Google in Europe Blog
846
Google Play
1
Google TechTalk
2
Google Translate
1
Google Trends
3
Google+
4
Greece
16
Growth Engine
3
Hackathon
3
Hungary
16
Innovation
70
Internet Governance
7
IP
10
Ireland
16
Israel
17
Italy
42
Journalism
34
Latvia
1
Lithuania
1
Luxembourg
3
Maps
17
Middle East
18
Netherlands
6
News
2
News Lab
1
North Africa
6
Norway
3
online
1
Online Safety
2
Open data
8
Open Government
7
Open source
2
Poland
24
Portugal
6
Power of Data
25
privacy
49
Publishing
30
Right to be Forgotten
9
Rio+20
1
Romania
3
Russia
18
Safer Internet Day
4
San Marino
1
Science
5
Security
7
Single Market
7
Slovakia
16
Slovenia
2
SMEs
24
Spain
39
Startups
6
State of the Union
2
STEM Education
36
Street View
38
Surveillance
1
Sweden
13
Switzerland
11
Telecoms
11
The Netherlands
4
Tourism
1
Transparency
12
Tunisia
4
Turkey
3
Ukraine
3
United Kingdom
94
Vatican
2
Youth
2
YouTube
42
Archive
2016
Sep
Introducing YouTube Creators for Change
Announcing a Google.org grant for XperiBIRD.be, a ...
Bringing education to refugees in Lebanon with the...
Juncker embraces creators -- and their concerns
Tour 10 Downing Street with Google Arts and Culture
European copyright: there's a better way
Digital News Initiative: Introducing the YouTube P...
#AskJuncker: YouTube creators to interview the Eur...
An extinct world brought back to life with Google ...
Project Muze: Fashion inspired by you, designed by...
Come Play with us
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2015
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2014
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2013
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2012
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2011
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2010
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2009
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Feed
Give us feedback in our
Product Forums
.
