Europe Blog
Our views on the Internet and society
Defending digital freedom with Index On Censorship
Friday, March 21, 2014
It’s not always that a private corporation and a civil rights NGO see eye to eye on key issues. But this is the case for Google and
Index on Censorship.
For the fourth year in a row, we worked with Index on its
annual awards event
, which took place last evening at London's Barbican Centre. This ongoing relationship reflects our common concerns about the ongoing and increasing government crackdown against the free and open Internet. Index has made a strong move to invest in the defense not just of print, radio and tv freedom - but also with us in defence of online freedom.
When we first learned about Digital Freedom Award, we were immediately impressed with its motto - celebrating the fundamental right to "write, blog, tweet, speak out, protest and create art and literature and music." Google aims to provide a platform to promote just such a fundamental right.
The Digital Freedom Award
recognizes the original use of new technology to foster debate, argument or dissent.
Google Digital Journalism Award winner Shubhranshu Choudhary
Let’s be clear: Total editorial control remains with Index. Index, not us, chooses the nominees. Until now, distinguished juries have selected winners. But this year, we worked with Index on an innovation - asking the public to vote by filling in an online form.
This year’s nominees came from China, India, the U.S., and appropriately enough, cyberspace! There was whistleblower
Edward Snowden
, whose actions are well-known.
There was the Chinese microblogging
Weibo
, an uncensored version of China’s biggest social network, SinaWeibo. Free Weibo keeps track of and publishes everything which has been censored and deleted by the government, providing a fascinating insight into the regime’s priorities and fears.
There was
TAILS
- the Incognoto Amnesiac Live Operating System. Its open-source encryption tool helps protect the free online communication of journalists and sources in any country, regardless of official limits on free expression.
The winner came from India, journalist
Shubhranshu Choudhary
. He’s the brains behind CGNet Swara (Voice of Chhattisgarh) a mobile-phone (no smartphone required) service that allows citizens to upload and listen to local reports in their own dialect.
Please join us in congratulating Shubhranshu - and all the free-expression champions who shines a light on their ongoing struggle against censorship around the world.
Posted by William Echikson, Head of Free Expression, Europe
Partnering in Belgium to create a capital of culture
Thursday, March 20, 2014
The Belgian city of
Mons
becomes a European capital of culture next year, ushering in 12 months of festivities. One of Google’s two major European
data centers
is located just down the road from the city, making us a major local investor and employer. It is only natural that we want to help put some sparkle into the city’s ambitious capital of culture plans.
At today’s press conference launch of the
Mons 2015 program
, we launched something special and sparkling - new Indoor
Street View
images. Street View cars and trikes captured new imagery of some of Mons’s most famous buildings - both their exteriors - and for the first time, their interiors. These include the splendid Grand Place, including the inside of the the
City Hall
, the
Collégiale Sainte Waudru
, and the
BAM
art museum.
Mons is an architectural treasure. The canonesses of the Sainte Waudru religious community began their first church in 1450 and the Brabant Gothic style church remains of the most beautiful buildings in Mons. Inside, the exceptional Treasure of Sainte Waudru houses a precious collection of gold and remarkable 16th-century alabaster statues from the artist and Mons resident
Jacques du Broeucq
.
View Larger Map
View Larger Map
The historic city centre is dominated by the
Grand Place
and its remarkable City Hall. Commissioned by
Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy
, famed architect Matthijs de Layens designed the imposing edifice.
View Larger Map
View Larger Map
Throughout the coming year and a half, we’ll continue to support the Mons 2015 adventure, in particular by working with our longtime partners, the
Mundaneum
archive. More than a century ago, two visionary Belgians envisioned the World Wide Web’s architecture of hyperlinks and indexation of information, not on computers, but on paper cards. Their creation was called the Mundaneum.
The Mundaneum plans an exciting “Mapping Knowledge” exhibition. Together, we are bringing high-level speakers to the city to explore Internet issues. Our own chief Internet evangelist and “father of the Internet”
Vint Cerf
recently visited and presented his vision of the future to a packed audience at the city’s 600 seat Manege Theater. Mons’ time on the big stage of European culture promises many more exciting events.
Posted by William Echikson, Head of Community Relations, Europe
Working with news publishers in Madrid
Wednesday, March 19, 2014
High-quality content is important to the web and we are committed to working with publishers to ensure that readers find their content. Our Publisher Advisory Council, bringing together our advertising and product teams with top media executives, meets about twice a year since 2009 in different venues in Europe.
The Council’s next session opens tomorrow in Madrid. Although planned months ago, it comes at important time, just as a debate has opened in Spain about whether publishers should be paid for linking their content. At the Advisory Council, we will concentrate on forging win-win business deals.
Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy
recently made the same point, urging Internet companies and publishers to reinforce their commercial agreements.
The Council’s goal is to create a virtuous circle: more, better engaged users, generating more revenue, and ultimately enabling greater investment in higher quality content. Google drives 10 billion clicks a month to publisher websites for free. Each click represents a business opportunity, offering the chance to show ads, register users and win loyal readers. In 2013, we shared more than $9 billion with our
AdSense
publisher partners.
Beyond our AdSense advertising program, other Google tools allow publishers to make money from their content. DoubleClick offers ways to show display ads. Ad Exchange maximizes the value of ad space on an impression-by-impression basis. YouTube channels, video embeds and YouTube Direct create new opportunities for publishers to create new video sources of revenue.
We are keen to help news organisations make the transition to digital journalism. For 2014 our
Google Journalism Fellowship
will fund 11 students a summer internship with organizations steeped in everything from investigative journalism to press freedom and to those helping the industry figure out its future in the digital age. In Europe, we have partnered with the Global Editors Network on a series of "Editors Lab" events, including this recent
hackathon
in Barcelona. We funded Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism’s
report
on the future of journalism and Oliver & Ohlbaum’s
report
on the impact of the Internet on journalism.
The Internet lives on the oxygen of information. It needs quality journalism. Commercial agreements with publishers are a win-win solution and preferable to regulations that damage innovation as a pillar of the economic recovery. We are ready to play our part in working with the news industry to find a way for it to thrive in the new digital age.
Posted by Bárbara Navarro, Director Public Policy for Southern Europe
Apply now to explore our digital policy future
Wednesday, March 19, 2014
The Internet has generated a series of new opportunities and issues for policymakers, impacting everything from copyright to competition. As a company that started out in academia, we’ve long supported some of the world’s best computer science researchers in universities. Our
Google Research Awards
grant program only recently branched out into policy areas and we’re eager now to attract top notch researchers to submit applications on Internet policy matters.
Researchers can apply for up to $150,000. However most first time awards are funded at the amount needed to support basic expenses for one graduate student for one year, or around $50,000. Please see our
FAQs
for more details on eligibility and budgets.
Applications for the next funding round are due by April 15th.
Each funded project will be assigned a Googler as sponsor. The role of the sponsor is to support the project by discussing research directions, engaging with professors and students, and overseeing collaboration between the project team and Google. For more details, look at the FAQ for the question, What are Google contacts and potential Google sponsors, and what roles do they play?
A separate, but related program, for students is the
Google Policy Fellowship program
, which provides an exciting opportunity for paid internships. Inspired by Google’s Summer of Code with a public policy twist, the Google Policy Fellowship program offers undergraduate, graduate, and law students the opportunity to work at public interest organizations at the forefront of debates on broadband and access policy, content regulation, copyright and creativity, consumer privacy, open government, government surveillance, data security, data innovation, free expression and more. More information about the host organizations and the areas of focus for the fellows is outlined
here
.
The deadline is April 14th.
Both the Policy Fellowship Program and the Research Awards program aim to stimulate public debate around the exciting challenges born in the Internet age. Please do apply and participate in this adventure.
Posted by Max Senges, Internet Policy & Innovation Manager, Berlin
First time for everything at Cultural Institute
Tuesday, March 18, 2014
Today we’re celebrating a series of "firsts" at our Cultural Institute - our first Nigerian partner, our first Pakistani partner, and our first Native American partner.
Nigeria's
Pan-Atlantic University
is presenting its collection of rare historical documents and photographs that tell the story of
Nigeria’s formation as a colony
. A second exhibition documents through rare photographs
Lagos
's transformation
from a cosmopolitan colonial trading center to West Africa’s largest metropolis.
Colonial Lagos
Modern Lagos
Our first partner from Pakistan is the Citizen’s Archive. Its
exhibit
documents the emergence of new media after the country’s independence in 1948. During this period, traditional art forms were revived on radio and television, with series that addressed issues such as the role of women.
Pakistani TV medical drama from the 1980s
Mashantucket Pequot Museum's collection encompasses 20,000 years of Native American history. Its eye-opening exhibition on
Neetôpáwees
(pronounced nee-top-a-wees) means “Little Friends” in the Mohegan-Pequot language.
In the exhibition, we discover dolls from the past 125 years, and their myriad uses: as medicine dolls, possessing healing and protective powers, important tokens of exchange and respect between Northeastern Native American tribes, and interactive, educational toys. The dolls’ stories and meanings are as varied as their origins, design, and materials.
Two Indian dolls on exhibit
Posted by Lauren Nemroff, Program Manager, Google Cultural Institute
Driving data-driven innovation at CeBIT
Friday, March 14, 2014
CeBIT
is the worlds biggest IT-fair, attracting world leaders to make an annual pilgrimage to the Hannover Fair Grounds. This year, UK Prime Minister David Cameron joined German Chancellor Angela Merkel for the opening event. We came to advance the agenda of Data-Driven innovation.
In Germany, data all too often often is seen in a negative light. We believe it can be, properly used, a powerful motor for economic and social progress. We Accenture and Acatech that produced a
report on Data-Driven Innovation
, which was
handed over
during the fair to Chancellor Merkel. German corporate heavyweights including Deutsche Bahn, Deutsche Post, Siemens, Miele, Deutsche Telekom, SAP, and Thyssen-Krupp participated as well. The report’s conclusion was clear: Germany needs to embrace the value of data to remain competitive.
Data is not just a dry well of numbers. It can be used in exciting, dramatic and artistic ways as well. We partnered with
CODE_n
to run a DatenDialog in a hall surrounded by 50 start-ups under the topic of “driving the data revolution”.
Artists Kram/Weisshaar
visualized data from the
Ngram
viewer on a wall of 80mx20m, showcasing our partnership with the Bavarian State Library to digitise its priceless book collection.
Another priority for us at CeBIT was digital safety and literacy - closing the gap between the comfortable-with-Internet and the left-out less-comfortable-with-Internet. Federal Minister of the Interior Thomas de Maizière visited the booth of our NGO partner
Deutschland sicher im Netz
and learned about our joint initiative
"Digital Neighborhood."
It consists of a set of ready-to-use lesson plans for volunteer IT trainers who want to teach computer and Internet basics.
Germany needs to embrace the digital revolution in order to keep its position as one of the world’s economic and exporting powerhouses. In her keynote remarks, Chancellor Merkel acknowledged tremendous “respect” for the IT industry as a source of growth and praised is the emergence of a strong German Start-Up culture. Let’s hope these words soon will extend to praising the merits of data driven innovation.
Posted by Sandro Gianella and Sabine Frank, Public Policy, Berlin
Participating in the EU’s Innovation Summit
Monday, March 10, 2014
I’m excited to be traveling to Brussels this week to attend the
European Union’s flagship innovation summit
.
Under the patronage of European Commission President
Jose Manuel Barroso
, the Convention will gather more than 2000 innovators, thought leaders, policy makers, business and top researchers. We’re delighted that the goal is to create an innovation-friendly environment, allowing great ideas to be turned into products and services that will bring our economy growth and jobs.
)
My role representing Google at such a big event is a bit daunting - two years ago, our executive chairman Eric Schmidt gave the keynote address.
At this year's edition, I will present Google's initiatives to foster entrepreneurship and startups. Our
Google for Entrepreneurs
program includes four European tech hubs in
London
,
Krakow
,
Berlin
, or
Paris
. These initiatives are Google’s pledge to the
EU Grand Coalition for Digital Jobs
.
We’re not just coming to the summit to talk, either. We’ll be there to offer participants Google will an exclusive demonstration of the exciting
Google GLASS
demonstration. GLASS is one of the first examples of the development in wearable technology that is meant to make exploring and sharing the world around you faster and easier. It just the type of idea and product that we would like to see emerge here in Europe.
Posted by Eze Vidra, Head of Google for Entrepreneurs - Europe, and Campus London
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