Europe Blog
Our views on the Internet and society
An evening with the UK’s computing pioneers
Wednesday, July 3, 2013
It was fish and chips, ice-cream and popcorn all round as we celebrated the UK’s computing heritage on Monday with a night of film and stories from some of the country’s pioneers.
The evening began with unveiling a new display showcasing the extensive contributions the UK has made to computing—from
Charles Babbage
and
Ada Lovelace
, to
Donald Davies
and
Tim Berners-Lee
. It now has pride of place in the reception of Google’s Central St Giles office in London, and we hope will help make these achievements better known.
Following came more formal sessions, beginning with those who first brought the Internet to the UK. The
pioneering work of the National Physical Laboratory
was described by Roger Scantlebury and Peter Wilkinson, both members of Donald Davies’ team who built the NPL network—the first Internet-like thing in the UK. They were joined
by Peter Kirstein from UCL
and
Vint Cerf
who recounted the story of how the US Arpanet came to be connected to NPL’s network, via Peter’s workaround gateway at UCL.
It was a thrill to have these four pioneers together, reminiscing about their early work and the creative ways they overcame the many challenges, bureaucratic and technological. If you’d like to hear the inside scoop on how the Internet got started in the UK, enjoy this video:
The evening was rounded off with
some film screenings
, interspersed with presentations by Tilly Blyth from the
Science Museum
, and David Hartley from
TNMOC
, describing the great work they’re doing to help preserve and promote the UK’s computing heritage. Finishing with a lively Q&A session with Vint Cerf where we talked about the Internet’s future.
Thanks to everyone who came, and all who shared their stories, making it such a memorable night.
Posted by Lynette Webb, Senior Manager, External Relations
Joining the European Union - live on YouTube
Wednesday, July 3, 2013
Croatia
this week became the 28th member of the European Union, with crowds joining celebrations in the capital Zagreb. Fireworks lit the sky as membership became effective - and the celebrations were streamed live on YouTube.
Thousands of people assembled in Zagreb's main square for the accession ceremony."Welcome to the European Union!,"
European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso
said in Croatian to the cheering crowd.
Croatia’s President Ivo Josipovic
said it was "a great and joyful day for our homeland".
More and more European politicians are using YouTube and other Google tools to get their message across. Lithuania this week took over the rotating six month presidency of the European Union’s Council.
Lithuanian President Dalia Grybauskaite
welcomed the moment, naturally, on YouTube.
“Europe is going through tough times,” the President said. “We Lithuanians know exactly what it means. We have survived a number of occupations. We fought for our freedom. We have never doubted our European path.” We hope these stirring words will signal six months of success for Europe.
The
opening ceremony
of the Lithuanian presidency of the EU Council will be live-streamed via Hangout on Air on Friday afternoon. Watch it on
YouTube
or
Google+
from 4 PM Central Eruope Time. Guests are expected to include European Commission President Borroso, and
European Council President Herman van Rompuy
.
Posted by Marta Poslad, Policy Analyst, Central and Eastern Europe
Campaigning for Innovation in Central and Eastern Europe
Friday, June 28, 2013
Two decades ago, Central and Eastern Europe threw off the shackles of communism. Today, the region is among Europe’s most dynamic, and we recently held our first Big Tent in the region to investigate how Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary could play a leadership role in driving forward innovation on the web.
This newfound freedom encourages the region to embrace the Internet, Polish ministers said. “We prefer freedom,”
Michal Boni
, the digitisation minister, repeated twice in the keynote address.
Deputy Foreign Minister Henryka Mościcka-Dendys
argued that new technologies helping “civic initiatives gain wider ground for their actions.” A concrete example is opening up public data. By examining online license plate records Zuzana Wienk, a Slovak anti-corruption campaigner, demonstrated the bidding for street cleanup services was rigged.
The Internet already is driving economic progress. At the Big Tent, we showcased successful Internet startups and social innovators. They ranged from Polands’ game startup
Dice+
and audio books pioneer
Audioteka
to Hungarys’ to
K-Monitor
transparency project and presentation tools developer
Prezi
. From Slovakia, traditional
Ultra Plast
plastic maker showed how to leverage its net presence to boost exports.
At the same time, the region needs to improve its education and regulation. While universities produce excellent engineers, they rank low in equipping graduates with needed business skills. Too few offerings exist for adult education. “If there is no lifelong learning, there is no lifelong earning,” quipped
Jan Figel
, Deputy Speaker of the Slovak Parliament. Other panelists wanted to see government change regulations to make it easier for companies to take risks, to start new businesses and to wind them down if and when they fail.
Our Big Tent took place in the wake of revelations that the U.S. intelligence agencies had conducted an online surveillance campaign. Google’s chief legal officer
David Drummond
stressed that the threats to the open web are not always from autocratic regimes and that any limitations to freedom online should be set narrowly. He acknowledged the dangers of online radical and racist speech. But he said that the Internet offers the best vehicle for dealing with the issue - “counter-speech” denouncing the hate.
Most of the debate had an optimistic tone, with faith in future innovation. The audience appreciated a demonstration of
Google Glass
. Slovakia’s Figel, who previously served as a European Commissioner, tried on a pair and checked the weather in the European Union’s capital Brussels. It was sunny outside in Warsaw - and grey and overcast in Brussels.
Posted by Agata Wacławik-Wejman, Head of Public Policy, Central and Eastern Europe
Celebrating the heights of modern and ancient Arab culture
Thursday, June 27, 2013
What does it feel like to stand on top of the tallest building in the world? Or to visit virtually one of the the world’s most historic sites? We took
Street View
to the Burj Khalifa in Dubai and Spain’s Alhambra, our first-ever collection in the Arab World. Described as a “vertical city,” the
Burj Khalifa
is the world’s tallest manmade structure, towering over the Dubai skyline at 828 meters (2,716.5 ft).
View Larger Map
This is the first time we’ve captured a skyscraper on Street View—making Google Maps even more comprehensive and useful for you. The imagery was collected over three days using the Street View Trekker and Trolley, capturing high-resolution 360-degree panoramic imagery of several indoor and outdoor locations of the building.
Visit the highest occupied floor in the world on the 163rd floor, experience being in the fastest-moving elevators in the world (at 22 mph) and check out the highest swimming pool in the world on the 76th floor. In addition to the breathtaking views from the world’s tallest observation deck on the 124th floor, you can also see what it feels like to hang off one of the building’s maintenance units on the 80th floor, normally used for cleaning windows!
Explore more at the
Burj Khalifa Street View collection
.
The Arab world long has produced awe-inspiring monuments.
La Alhambra
, a World Heritage Site since 1984, is one of them. We recently brought the Google Trekker into Spain to start taking pictures in Granada. Pictures will be published in coming months. The trekker is a backpack of about 15 kg which has a camera system based on Android with 15 lenses and it’s specially used for reaching inaccessible places or those ones which are protected.
Even if you’re afraid of heights, or bored by most palaces, we hope you enjoy the view from the top or Dubai and the beauty of the Alhambra!
Posted by Tarek Abdalla, Head of Marketing - Middle East & North Africa, Google and Daniele Rizzetto, Operations Manager, Street View EMEA.
Our commitment to growth and jobs in Europe
Wednesday, June 26, 2013
Europe faces historically high unemployment, and we’re keen to help. We’ve just joined the European Commission’s
Grand Coalition for Digital Jobs
, and we are committing to a range of initiatives that will help Europeans - particularly young Europeans - to create businesses and find jobs.
Our first commitment is to support 20,000 European entrepreneurs this year. Entrepreneurs account for a high proportion of job creation - according to an OECD survey of 11 European countries, companies less than two years old account for 5% of total private-sector employment. Our
Google for Entrepreneurs programme
funds start-up hubs in London (
Campus London
), Krakow (
Google for Entrepreneurs, Krakow
), Berlin (
The Factory
) and Paris (
Silicon Sentier
). Through these centers, we’ll provide entrepreneurs with training programmes, mentorship, and improved access to capital and talent. We’ll also run additional start-up events with our partners,
Startup Weekend
and
Startup Grind
.
Another priority is developing digital skills among Europe’s youth. Our
RISE programme
, will work with six computer science and STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths) education organisations in Europe to reach 100,000 young people by the end of the year, up from the current 32,000.
These programmes nurture coding skills, use robotics to teach engineering and maths, and help teachers with STEM education tools. Our partners in RISE range from the UK’s
Code Club
to Romania’s
Uniristii Association
, to Croatia’s
Science and Society Synergy Institute
, and Germany’s
Technik Begeistert
.
Not everyone wants to a computer scientist. Even so, the Internet can help all types of job seekers develop new skills. By the end of 2013, we’ll have partnered with universities across Europe to launch 25 Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). These MOOCs will cover subjects including entrepreneurship, digital marketing and law - with the aim of reaching tens of thousands of people across Europe.
The courses will employ
Course Builder
, an open source tool created by Google staff that has already been used by more than a dozen universities in Italy, France, Germany, Spain, Switzerland and the UK to create online courses. In Spain, more than 20,000 people have already participated in a
free business skills MOOC
created last year by the University of Alicante, with our support.
The European Commission deserves credit for demanding concrete action, not platitudes, in dealing with Europe’s job crisis. We’re determined to help make her initiative a success - and contribute to getting the continent back to work.
Posted by Angela Steen, Government Relations Manager
Helping make the history of computing relevant
Wednesday, June 26, 2013
A global group of museum curators, academics and others working to preserve computing’s past recently converged on
London’s Science Museum
to discuss ways to make the history of computing relevant to a wider audience.
Google helped fund and organise
the gathering
, in partnership with the Science Museum, the
Computer Conservation Society
and the
International Federation for Information Processing
(IFIP) working group on computer history.
Discussion during the two days was lively and wide-ranging. Topics included:
Shifting emphasis away from pure technology to focus on stories of inventors and people who used the machines—explaining what happened and why it mattered in a wider, more engaging context.
Collecting personal histories of computing in the form of oral and video accounts, to glean a deeper understanding of people’s motives and interests, and the challenges they faced.
Pros and cons of maintaining and demonstrating working models of early computers in a museum setting—what is practical and when is it worth the effort?
Helping educators to inspire students by including reference to computing’s pioneers in their classes, the same as happens in other (older) fields of science.
The full programme for the conference, plus links to papers and presentations, can be
viewed here
.
While Google’s focus is firmly on the future, we also care about preserving our industry’s past. Tales of ‘machine dinosaurs’ and the people who created and used them can spark a wider interest in computer science. Showcasing the contributions of women and other minorities in computing history can overturn stereotypes. Finally, we believe it is also important to pay tribute to computing’s forgotten pioneers, many of whom—especially in Europe—have not had the recognition they deserve.
It's for these reasons that over the past several years Google has been quietly looking for ways to help preserve and promote computing heritage. We have
partnered
with
museums
and
other
organisations
, and have sought to contribute directly through our series of
short films
and
blogposts
. Our sponsorship of this conference is a natural extension of our
partnership with London’s Science Museum
and we were delighted to take part.
Posted by Lynette Webb, Senior Manager, External Relations
Hacking the newsroom at the Global Editors Network summit
Wednesday, June 26, 2013
What's the least friendly US state to live in if you're gay? Can you calculate your social class based on your taste in music? Who are the best connected families in China? We supported two initiatives at the
Global Editors Network summit
held last week in Paris's magnificent Hotel de Ville aimed at helping journalists answer such questions by making more use of data.
GEN’s Data Journalism Awards
, now in their second year, are the only international awards in this fast-growing field. The winning entries showed the power that data analysis and visualization can have in telling stories and engaging readers. You can see all the winning projects
here
, including the one the public voted best - the
Art Market for Dummies
.
In the next room - connected to the main event by Google+ Hangouts - journalists, developers and designers competed in the final of GEN’s Editors' Lab Hackathon.
The Editors' Lab has been running Google-supported hack events in newsrooms around the world over the last nine months, bringing journalists and coders closer together to explore new ways of creating and presenting the news. Eleven teams - the winners from each of the national events - came to Paris to fight it out for the top prize. Their challenge: to rebuild their news organisation’s home page in the context of user engagement.
The winner was the team from the Netherlands’
De Volkskrant
. Judges commended for the way they were able to incorporate personalization, social and mobile trends into their homepage. Take a look at the finalists’ entries
here
- they offer a vision of how news websites may look in the future.
Posted by Peter Barron, Director, External Relations, Europe, Middle East and Africa
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