Google Street Roo - exploring the outback one bounce at a time

After announcing tens of thousands of 360-degree panorama pictures of the Great Barrier Reef in Google Maps earlier this year and launching Street View imagery for the Amazon last week, one of the final frontiers we have yet to bring to your favourite computing device has been the Australian outback. One of our top requests from our users is the ability to roam the vast Australian continent. Unfortunately, the remoteness of the outback has posed a challenge for our traditional Street View cars and trikes.

Today, we’re happy to announce that Google has found an innovative way to capture a special collection of images from the back of beyond to include in Google Street View.

Over the next four weeks, more than a thousand Big Red kangaroos will be equipped with a 360-degree head camera that will automatically capture images when the marsupial is on the move during daylight hours.

What’s up, Skippy?

The cameras on our Street Roo collection team will be powered by solar panels stitched into the back pocket of custom-made roo jackets. Images will be wired to Google in real-time. A GPS tracker embedded into the jacket will match the location of the kangaroo to ensure the image is accurately uploaded onto the new Street View layer.

To ensure a seamless experience - and to avoid motion sickness - we have also developed software that will smooth over the bouncing effect experienced with the raw data. Users will be able to move backwards or forwards in Google Street Roo as they would use Street View, like this:

(original picture by Ryan Wick)

Leading marsupial specialists undertook extensive research to ensure that the image capture activity would not interfere with the roo’s grazing, sleeping or breeding activities. The cropped jackets that the kangaroos will wear have been designed to keep the pouch area completely accessible for the joey at all times.

The deployment of the ‘roo force’ will begin today and we believe 98% of the Australian outback will be captured on Google Maps within three years.

Posted by Andrew Foster, Product Manager, Google Maps

Australia’s cultural boom

As I was growing up in Newcastle in the 1970s, my access to information and entertainment was limited to a handful of media outlets — two television channels, one newspaper, and a handful of radio stations. Given that airtime and column inches were scarce and expensive resources, it’s not surprising that I had so few choices.

Fast forward a few decades, and the situation could not be more different. There’s been an unprecedented explosion of content. On YouTube alone 4 billion videos are viewed every day, and 60 hours of video are uploaded every minute. My family has endless choices of what to watch, listen to, play, and read.

This is obviously an era of major change, and, rightly, many questions are being asked about how the media sector is evolving and what the future holds for Australian consumers and content creators. These are important questions that go beyond mere economics. We’re talking about the building blocks of our culture and identity. A strong, diverse media sector is central to that.

Wanting to better understand the current landscape, we commissioned the Boston Consulting Group to prepare an independent, fact-based report — which we believe is the first of its kind in the world -— on the impact of Internet media on consumers, artists, and the industry in Australia.

Here’s some of what BCG’s “Culture Boom: How Digital Media Are Invigorating Australia” found:

• Australians like the new media world, where their access to, and choice of, media has never been greater. We’re consuming more media than ever before, and we’re happier with both the quantity and quality of material available.
• Australians love Australian content. We are choosing to watch Australian-made content, despite the fact that we can easily watch content from anywhere in the world.
• Overseas they love Australian content too. Australian content performs so well overseas that we have a trade surplus: overseas they watch more hours of Australian-made online video than Australians watch of overseas-made online video.

This dynamic new media world is creating tremendous opportunities for new and existing media businesses. According to the report, the media industry will grow over the next four years, with revenue projected to rise to $29.1 billion and 15,000 new jobs created. The Internet will be a key driver of that growth.

Furthermore, BCG calculates that new media is generating a consumer surplus of $24 billion — this is the value that Australian consumers believe they’re deriving from new media above what they already pay. As new content, new distribution platforms, and new monetization mechanisms come together, there’s a lot of opportunity ahead. Existing companies stand to gain, but we’re also seeing a generation of new artists and entrepreneurs emerge here in Australia, from Brisbane games developer Halfbrick to Perth’s Nick Bertke, alias POGO, whose remixes on YouTube earned him work with Disney and Pixar, as well as an exhibition at the Guggenheim in New York.

It’s clear that Australian consumers, media businesses, and content creators are all benefiting from the Internet, but just as exciting is that Australian content — and the Australian culture and identity — is staking out an even stronger place in the world.

Go here to read more and download the full report.

Posted by Nick Leeder, Managing Director, Google Australia & New Zealand

Half of Australia’s small businesses now benefit from the digital economy

What do a bicycle shop in Newcastle, a coffee roaster near Melbourne and an eyelash extension salon in Brisbane have in common?

For one, they’re all Aussie-owned small businesses. And second, you can find all of them online--something that wasn’t true one year ago.

Business owners Brian Birrell, Dean Scholes, and Amy Asperios are part of a growing tide of small businesses making the move online. We just learned how large this tide is: in a recent survey of small business owners, we found that 52% had a website. That represents growth of 50% year over year; a study conducted in 2011 by MYOB put that number at 35%.

The research is timely, given it’s been 1 year since Google and MYOB launched the “Getting Aussie Business Online” program to help SMBs make the move online. Our goal is to help businesses throughout the nation realize all the benefits that an online presence brings: the chance to reach new customers, make more sales, and save money and time. Over the past year, more than 30,000 businesses have created free websites through the program.

So who are these businesses and where are they? We took a look at the numbers and here’s what we found:

• Tempting tourists: Queensland may be top of mind when it comes to holidays, but Tasmania claimed the highest proportion of tourism sites created. 9% of all Getting Aussie Business Online sites in Tassie are tourism-related, which is nearly 3 times the national average. It also took top prize in retail--nearly 1 in 4 websites created in Tasmania came from retailers, a rate roughly 25% higher than the national average.
• Swinging the hammer: Western Australia leads the rest of the country in websites created in the construction and trades category, which represented nearly 1 in 4 websites created there.
• Country mouse, city mouse: Two-thirds of businesses who’ve taken advantage of Getting Aussie Business Online hail from areas outside of major cities. Queensland had the highest percentage of websites created outside the capital city (84%). South Australia had the lowest at 49%.

Coffee roaster Dean can attest to the difference a website can make to a small business. Before he got his site up and running with Getting Aussie Business Online, his business was strictly local; there was no way for him to reach people outside of Melbourne. “The response has been phenomenal; starting my own website has allowed me to get my name out to potential customers all over Australia,” he says. Amy Asperios, owner of Glamm Lash eyelash extension salon, uses her web presence as a free marketing tool, adding “There has been an increase in clients coming through since I started my website; the ‘contact us’ option has proved to be a great tool and I get a steady flow of enquiries from it.”

Posted by Claire Hatton, Head of Local Business, Google Australia

Test your site’s smartphone savvy with Google’s GoMoMeter

While on holidays, a tourist uses her smartphone to find a dive shop that provides snorkel tours in Queensland. She searches, finds your site, and clicks through, prepared to research and reserve a package, or find your store nearby and arrange one from there. But, after she clicks to your site she runs into trouble - it doesn't load fully, and she spends more time zooming-in and squinting than she does studying your snorkel packages! Frustrated, she gives up and looks for another shop. You lose a potential customer.

This happens hundreds, even thousands of times every day in Australia, because 4 out of 5 businesses’ websites don’t work well on smartphones. With half the population of Australia now owning a smartphone, the most important thing you can do to grow your business using the mobile web is to create a mobile-friendly website: a website designed specifically for mobile users and mobile devices. It should be fast to load and easy to use—no pinching and zooming required.

Not everyone knows how to get started on mobile, so today we’re launching an initiative called GoMo that helps businesses “Go Mobile” by showing them how their website looks on mobile with a smartphone simulator called the GoMoMeter, and then providing a personalised report to help you figure out what to do to make make your site more accessible on mobile.
To find out whether you’re ready to Go Mo, visit www.howtogomo.com/au. Enter your website’s URL to see how your site performs on mobile phones with the GoMoMeter. The GoMoMeter will analyse your site and give you customised recommendations on how to make your site more mobile-friendly. You can even download a free customised report!

Every day more and more of your customers are looking for you using their mobile devices, and if your site isn’t mobile-friendly chances are you’re missing out. So don’t shut the door on mobile: visit www.howtogomo.com/au and take the first steps towards going mobile, today.

Posted by Jason Pellegrino, Head of Mobile Ads, Google Australia

Supporting Mardi Gras

From Gayglers to Greyglers to VetNet (that’s the Google Veterans Network), Google has a whole range of interest groups in our company because diversity matters to us and our users. Representing different perspectives and ideas is fundamental to our mission to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.

Here in Australia, we’re proud to support +Sydney Mardi Gras for the second year. Tomorrow night we’ll join half a million people on the streets of Sydney with our very own float. Our hundred dancing Gayglers will march down the famous Oxford Street strip to show our support for the LGBT community and you’ll be able to join us via a Google+ Hangout (add +Google Australia to your circles to see details on how to take part).

Last month, the Google team also was out at Fair Day, attended by 70,000 people, to talk about diversity in the workplace.

As part of our partnership with the Mardi Gras Festival, we also recently hosted two Queer Thinking seminars on Activism in the Internet Age and Queer Careers. Experts joined us on stage and via a Google+ Hangout to talk about how the web has changed campaigning for a cause and what it means to be a LGBT business leader.

Thank you to the speakers who participated -- Alex Greenwich from Australian Marriage Equality, Aaron Hulse of GetUp! Australia (who were behind the It's Time campaign that went viral), Alan Seah and Paerin Choa from Pink Dot Singapore, Senator Louise Pratt, Washington D.C based Bob Witeck, Feyi Akindoyani of Kreab Gavin Anderson, and Megan Smith, Google’s VP of Business Development.

You can see highlights from the Hangout here.

Happy Mardi Gras!

Verne Smith, Gayglers Sydney lead, Google Australia and New Zealand.