Paving the way for Aussie non-profits

Last year a group of Google employees began a series training session for non-profits. The aim was to show how the web - and Google’s products and technologies - can help these important organisations better reach their goals.

So far we’ve run training sessions in Melbourne, Canberra, Brisbane and Parkes. We’ve talked to hundreds of people from the non-profit sector about how tools like YouTube, Google Apps and Google Earth can be used to make collaboration easier, cut costs and help their operations run more efficiently.

Through these Google for Non-Profits sessions, we've noticed that demand for this type of information has been high. When we announced our first session, more than 400 organisations registered in the space of 48 hours. We also know there are many rural and regional organisations (often the ones who have the most to gain by embracing technology), who have not been able to travel to attend these workshops.

That’s why we’ve decided to bring our Google for Non-profit training directly to you via Google+ Hangouts. With these hangouts, anyone anywhere can watch and take part.

Our first Google+ Hangout for Australian Non-Profits will run on October 4th at 2:00pm. The ninety minute session will provide a broad overview of the Google products most useful to non-profits, as well as information about the specific grants and programs that are available.

The hangout is aimed at leaders within these organisations - not necessarily the technical folk - who are interested in learning more about how Google tools could be used to help fulfil their objectives.

To register for the Google for Non-Profits Hangout and to share the event invite, click here.

Scott Riddle, Strategic Partner Manager, Google Australia and New Zealand

Sydney’s Girl Geek Dinner

The Google Sydney offices recently played host to a Girl Geek Dinner, a networking event that allows women who are passionate about tech to meet each other, hear about new ideas and generally to geek out together.

These dinners first began in London in 2005, when software engineer Sarah Blow got fed up attending tech events as one of only a handful of women. So rare, in fact, that others present assumed she couldn’t have been an engineer. So after brainstorming on the train home one night, Girl Geek Dinners was born. Since its humble beginnings, Girl Geek Dinner groups have opened up all over the world including the United States, South Africa and Croatia.


The recent Sydney dinner saw more than 75 attend, and aside from everyone receiving the popular squishable Android plushie as a take-home gift, there was a series of useful tech-talks.
For example, the event’s keynote speaker Sasha Bermeister spoke about the Twitter Bootstrap framework, telling us what it is, how it works and, in her own words, “why it’s so awesome”. She took us through some of the more compelling features and showed us how easy it was to get a responsive website up and running in no time. Googler Grace Chung spoke and demoed Google's Knowledge Graph, and Nicky Ringland talked about attracting high school students, particularly girls, into computer science through the NCSS Challenge.

Silvia Pfeiffer covered how next-generation browser technology and HTML5 can enable plugin-less videoconferencing. For something different, Kris Howard revealed the science of knitting geekery and how technology is being used to solve the first-world problem of using your smartphone’s touchscreen while wearing gloves.

Girl Geek Dinners continue to grow here in Australia with groups springing up in Adelaide, Brisbane, Canberra, Melbourne, and Perth. For more information about future Girl Geek Sydney meetups, you can sign up here as well as follow @GGDSydney on Twitter.

Posted by Eddy Mead and Katie Bell, software engineers and Geek Girl Dinner organisers, Google Australia

These days, we’re all in “the Internet Group"

Earlier this week, 450 people joined Nick Leeder, Managing Director of Google Australia, and Tim Reed, CEO of MYOB, at an Australia Israel Chamber of Commerce luncheon under the theme of “Getting Australian business online.”  The clear message?  Regardless of whether you’re in the business of selling pizza, offering financial advice, or unblocking kitchen sinks, it’s now more important than ever to build a successful online presence for your business.

Nick Leeder argued that it is no longer good enough to just have one “internet group” of young and energetic people in one corner of the business. While different companies react differently to technology changes, the most important point is that business owners take the time to understand technology and the options that are available to them -- many of them simpler than you might think.

Tim Reed talked about our generation being part of a “technology revolution” that is fundamentally influencing the way that Australians do business. He came armed with eye-opening statistics: your business is 50% more likely to succeed in Australia these days if you have a website.  MYOB’s research shows that businesses with a website receive around 40% more leads than those who don’t have one.

Both speakers agreed that businesses need to respond proactively to the rise in consumer smartphone and tablet usage.  This is a fundamental shift and it’s not going to slow down.  The one easy way to respond is to...you guessed it...make sure your business can be found online.  

You can watch the full video of the panel discussion here. If you’d like to learn more about how to get and grow your business online, visit this site.

Richard Flanagan, Head of Small and Medium Business Marketing

Catholic Education Network (CEnet) takes to the cloud!

Today’s guest post is by Ian Gregory, Manager of IT Systems for CEnet


The Catholic Education Network (CEnet) provides and manages shared IT systems for over 300,000 students and 30,000 teachers and staff throughout Australia. Our users are spread across more than 740 sites in metropolitan, regional and rural areas of NSW, Queensland, Northern Territory and the ACT. 

CEnet’s members wanted to move to a next-generation messaging and collaboration platform that went beyond the realms of just plain old email. We have always been aware of the challenges involved in deploying services on a grand scale – IT in education is a big operation that is often underestimated. Naturally, maintaining systems of this scale requires a significant investment in time, cost and effort. The need to apply regular updates and patches, manage storage, plan for capacity and maintain individual staff and student access was something we dealt with on a day-to-day basis and something we believed was far more complex than it really needed to be. 

Working with our members, we decided to look for a solution that would establish a centralised resource for communication and collaboration and ultimately reduce the risk and cost of our on-premise services. Importantly, any solution needed to be aligned with a virtual learning environment paradigm that would evolve to support the learning initiatives of our members. It also needed to accommodate the expectations of the highly tech savvy generation Y and Z students who expect the same level of technology access in the classroom as they have at home. 

In the end, we selected Google Apps; its cost effectiveness, time-to-deploy and inherent capabilities were the key drivers behind the decision. The cloud computing solution lowers our management overheads, maintenance costs and effort. Importantly the functionality of Google Apps’ is also valuable and we can, and have, readily extended the system by utilising the Google Apps Marketplace. We also have the assurance that we’re staying in touch with the most up-to-date technology and meeting the needs and expectations of our students. As Google is constantly innovating, so are we. 

The initial rollout of Google Apps took only two weeks, a record in terms of delivering a platform of this scale- 330,000 users across our network. Our staff and students have the full suite of Google Apps at their fingertips: Gmail, Google Drive, Google Sites, Google Groups and Google’s email content filtering capabilities. We are already seeing that Google Talk for instant messaging is becoming a popular way for staff and students to interact. The biggest benefit of Google Apps is the ability for our staff and students to share their ideas through a power-to-the-user philosophy. This is very different to the way we have operated in the past. Google Drive is now serving as a central resource for file storage, enabling planning and collaboration for both staff and students. This in itself makes group work for students easier, as they can create and edit their work wherever they are and the one central document is updated in real-time. 

As the IT managers and service providers, we have reduced the number of physical servers or virtual machines from over 30 to just the four. The whole IT ecosystem requires far less maintenance and the constant innovations and upgrades from Google do not require patches or hands-on IT staff time. CEnet, like the community it serves, is constantly changing. We are delighted with the benefits our decision has delivered already and know Google Apps will evolve as we do.

Introducing the Knowledge Graph: things, not strings

Editor's note: Originally cross-posted on the Inside Search Blog on May 17, 2012. Knowledge Graph results are now available in Australia for English language searches. Try a search like [Sydney Opera House] or [AC/DC] or [cloudstreet].

Search is a lot about discovery—the basic human need to learn and broaden your horizons. But searching still requires a lot of hard work by you, the user. So today I’m really excited to launch the Knowledge Graph, which will help you discover new information quickly and easily. 

Take a query like [taj mahal]. For more than four decades, search has essentially been about matching keywords to queries. To a search engine the words [taj mahal] have been just that—two words.

But we all know that [taj mahal] has a much richer meaning. You might think of one of the world’s most beautiful monuments, or a Grammy Award-winning musician, or possibly even a casino in Atlantic City, NJ. Or, depending on when you last ate, the nearest Indian restaurant. It’s why we’ve been working on an intelligent model—in geek-speak, a “graph”—that understands real-world entities and their relationships to one another: things, not strings. 

The Knowledge Graph enables you to search for things, people or places that Google knows about—landmarks, celebrities, cities, sports teams, buildings, geographical features, movies, celestial objects, works of art and more—and instantly get information that’s relevant to your query. This is a critical first step towards building the next generation of search, which taps into the collective intelligence of the web and understands the world a bit more like people do.

Google’s Knowledge Graph isn’t just rooted in public sources such as Freebase, Wikipedia and the CIA World Factbook. It’s also augmented at a much larger scale—because we’re focused on comprehensive breadth and depth. It currently contains more than 500 million objects, as well as more than 3.5 billion facts about and relationships between these different objects. And it’s tuned based on what people search for, and what we find out on the web.

The Knowledge Graph enhances Google Search in three main ways to start:

1. Find the right thing
Language can be ambiguous—do you mean Taj Mahal the monument, or Taj Mahal the musician? Now Google understands the difference, and can narrow your search results just to the one you mean—just click on one of the links to see that particular slice of results:

This is one way the Knowledge Graph makes Google Search more intelligent—your results are more relevant because we understand these entities, and the nuances in their meaning, the way you do.

2. Get the best summary
With the Knowledge Graph, Google can better understand your query, so we can summarize relevant content around that topic, including key facts you’re likely to need for that particular thing. For example, if you’re looking for Marie Curie, you’ll see when she was born and died, but you’ll also get details on her education and scientific discoveries:

How do we know which facts are most likely to be needed for each item? For that, we go back to our users and study in aggregate what they’ve been asking Google about each item. For example, people are interested in knowing what books Charles Dickens wrote, whereas they’re less interested in what books Frank Lloyd Wright wrote, and more in what buildings he designed.

The Knowledge Graph also helps us understand the relationships between things. Marie Curie is a person in the Knowledge Graph, and she had two children, one of whom also won a Nobel Prize, as well as a husband, Pierre Curie, who claimed a third Nobel Prize for the family. All of these are linked in our graph. It’s not just a catalog of objects; it also models all these inter-relationships. It’s the intelligence between these different entities that’s the key.

3. Go deeper and broader
Finally, the part that’s the most fun of all—the Knowledge Graph can help you make some unexpected discoveries. You might learn a new fact or new connection that prompts a whole new line of inquiry. Do you know where Matt Groening, the creator of the Simpsons (one of my all-time favorite shows), got the idea for Homer, Marge and Lisa’s names? It’s a bit of a surprise:

We’ve always believed that the perfect search engine should understand exactly what you mean and give you back exactly what you want. And we can now sometimes help answer your next question before you’ve asked it, because the facts we show are informed by what other people have searched for. For example, the information we show for Tom Cruise answers 37 percent of next queries that people ask about him. In fact, some of the most serendipitous discoveries I’ve made using the Knowledge Graph are through the magical “People also search for” feature. One of my favorite books is The White Tiger, the debut novel by Aravind Adiga, which won the prestigious Man Booker Prize. Using the Knowledge Graph, I discovered three other books that had won the same prize and one that won the Pulitzer. I can tell you, this suggestion was spot on!

We’ve begun to gradually roll out this view of the Knowledge Graph to U.S. English users. It’s also going to be available on smartphones and tablets—read more about how we’ve tailored this to mobile devices. And watch our video (also available on our site about the Knowledge Graph) that gives a deeper dive into the details and technology, in the words of people who've worked on this project:



We hope this added intelligence will give you a more complete picture of your interest, provide smarter search results, and pique your curiosity on new topics. We’re proud of our first baby step—the Knowledge Graph—which will enable us to make search more intelligent, moving us closer to the "Star Trek computer" that I've always dreamt of building. Enjoy your lifelong journey of discovery, made easier by Google Search, so you can spend less time searching and more time doing what you love.

Posted by Amit Singhal, SVP, Engineering

Going for Mobile Gold: 10x increase in Olympics mobile searches globally

[Cross posted from the Google Mobile Ads Blog]

At the 2012 Olympics we’re seeing new records set everyday, not only in athletic performance, but also in global search behavior.  It's clear that these are the first multi-screen Olympics, as users are engaging across TV, computers, smartphones and tablets, often at the same time!

And as users watch TV, or watch their laptops at work, they're searching for information about athletes, sports, events and records -  on their tablets and smartphones. In fact, at some moments during the Games, there have been more searches performed on tablets and smartphones than on computers.  We’ve seen large spikes in global mobile search volume during recent major sporting events, like the Super Bowl, and the Olympics certainly continued this trend - in its first week, Olympics related searches on mobile devices (smartphones and tablets) grew by 10x from the previous week.

Mobile devices vault ahead

We’ve crunched some data from the past week, and the opening ceremony is a great illustration of how mobile devices have taken center stage. Fans turned to their smartphones and tablets to find more information about the incredible feats and celebrities that they saw on screen.

Below is one such example where searches for Paul McCartney surge in line with his performance of Hey Jude at the end of the opening ceremony. Whether watching the Olympics at home on TV or on a desktop livestream, or at a bar with friends, users  searched on one screen for things they saw happening on another screen. Comparing searches by device type, smartphone searches surged, and in the US, viewers were searching almost as much on their tablets as on their computers for Paul McCartney.

Global searches for Paul McCartney during local broadcasts of the Olympics opening ceremony (based on PST)


Mobile is global

The infographic below gives a snapshot of the percentage of total searches that occurred on smartphones and tablets during the first two days of the Games, for Olympics-related searches.

(click here to download infographic)

We see these trends in many multi-screen events (such as the Super Bowl, Oscars, and Eurovision) but the Olympics represents an even more pronounced trend and one we can see happening at a global level.

European countries showed especially high mobile search volume with most countries having one-third or more of their Olympics-related searches occurring on a tablet or smartphone. In some European countries this number was substantially higher - in the UK, 46% of Olympics searches happened on mobile.  In Asia, South Korea (36%) and Australia (45%) saw mobile search volume spikes, while Japan (55%) was at the front of the pack.

Surf, sand, towels...and tablets

As we examined global Olympics search share we noticed an interesting pattern emerge from island nations. On many of the islands that serve as popular tourist destinations, tablet search share was almost equal to smartphone, or in some cases even exceeded it. This is different from most other countries where smartphone search share is typically significantly higher than tablet.

A possible explanation? Large numbers of tablet-toting tourists on summer vacation. Tablets have emerged as an important way of staying informed and connected for travelers, as well as for finding local information.

Olympics Mobile and Tablet Search Share by Device for Several Island Nations

Olympic fever is a global phenomenon, and mobile searches are letting everyone get immediate information, in real time, about what’s happening moment by moment. We hope to have more insights into how people are using their mobile devices during the Games!

Posted by: Dai Pham & Adam Grunewald, Google Mobile Ads Marketing

Experience the London 2012 Games with Google

The Olympic Games are well underway and more than half the planet—some 4.8 billion people—will tune in to watch. To help you join in the excitement and glory of the Games, we’ve put together google.com.au/olympics. Here’s a quick look at the updates, results and other content we’re bringing you from London 2012.

Discover and learn more
Want to know what your team’s next medal prospect is, or if you’ve missed Oscar Pistorius making history in the 400m? Here are a few ways we’re helping you get all the hottest news in a flash:

• Search  from your desktop, phone or tablet for [london 2012], a country team like [Team AU], or a sport like [archery], and you’ll see up-to-the-minute detailed information.
• In the Hot Searches section of the site, we show you which topics, athletes or events are being searched for by fans around the world. The analysis is updated hourly, and you can click on any search to read associated news articles.
• On Google Play, find a collection of useful apps, including the Official Australian Olympic Team app, for download on your Android device.

Connect with your teams and favourite athletes
I’ll be cheering on both the stars and the underdogs, and closely following the updates from the Games:

• Get the latest posts from +The Olympics Games and the competing teams on Google+. I’ll be split rooting for my country men and women, Team USA AND for the local favourites and current home country, Team AU
• Show who you support by customising your cover photo on Google+ (or other social network)

Explore London like you’re there
Living in London, I’ve been lucky enough to see the transformation of the East End over the past few years, but for those of you who live outside the city, you can still see the sights online.

• Fly around the Olympic Park, explore the cycling and marathon courses or take a virtual tour of London landmarks in Google Earth.
• Compare aerial imagery of the London of 1948 (the last time London hosted the Games) to the London of today.

Watch the action as it happens—and see highlights from past Games
For the hundreds of millions of people unable to make it to London, YouTube is helping bring the games to you in a number of markets around the world. For those of you want to relive great moments from some of the previous 29 Olympiads, explore an archive on YouTube—some of my favourites are Derek Redmond’s inspirational finish of the 400m semi-final in Barcelona 1992, Cathy Freeman’s gold medal in the 400m at Sydney 2000 and Afghanistan's first-ever Olympic medal at Beijing 2008. And of course, I’ll never forget Team Americas memorable win in the 1980 Winter Olympics:



You can find it all at www.google.com.au/olympics

Ernesto Soriano, Product Marketing Manager, (and American expatriate) Google Australia

Finding users for the next big thing: highlights from our 2nd Google Sudo

For those with aspirations to create “the next big thing”, one of the biggest questions is how to grow a product from having just a few users to the hundreds and thousands.

The topic of user adoption was the focus of our second Google Sudo, a series of panels and workshops designed to help Aussie entrepreneurs. More than 170 entrepreneurs joined our event in Sydney (and many more via our Hangout on Air) to hear about how they too could scale their internet businesses and drive user adoption.

After a lively audience discussion on questions ranging from how to get your very first customer, to how much emphasis to put on marketing, to the merits of the “freemium model” we asked our panelists for their top tips on driving user adoption.

Mike Cannon-Brookes, CEO and co-founder of Atlassian advised the audience to “engineer your growth”. He stressed the importance of understanding how one user or customer leads to another.

Similarly our own Stuart McLean, Head of Google Enterprise for Australia and New Zealand (and former founder of NetReturn) spoke about the importance of having the customer be your best salesperson. “Make sure customer number one will sing your praises. Get them to help you get your next 10 customers”.

Paul Gray, CMO and Community Director, Bubble Gum Interactive, a children’s entertainment and games company, believes we all should take advantage of the knowledge and passion of your early users: “Make it easy for them to give you feedback and thank them for it”.

Lisa Frazier, Chief Innovation Officer, Equities and Margin Lending at Commonwealth Bank of Australia, and founder and former President & CEO of The Bay Citizen spoke about the importance of experimenting: “Don’t be shy to try different things,” she said, but never ask your employees to do something you wouldn’t.

If you missed the live event, you can still watch it here on YouTube.



Posted by Alan Noble, Engineering Director, Google Australia and New Zealand