Spreading holiday cheer with charitable donations

The past couple of years have been a challenging stretch for charitable organizations as giving tends to decline during economic downturns when the need is highest. Charitable giving was down 3.6% in 2009, only the second year there’s been a drop since Giving USA began their reports in 1956. We continue to be inspired, however, by organizations that have stepped up with creative and effective programs to address today’s challenges. We’re grateful for the millions of Google users who helped continue our success in 2010, and we want to do our part to help charitable organizations that are working tirelessly to meet increased need with decreased funding.

In this spirit, our global sales team led by Nikesh Arora is giving a $20 million holiday gift that will provide:

• Schooling for 15,000 kids in poor communities in India through Bharti Foundation.
• Access to vital medication and health services, especially for women and girls, in post-conflict areas in Africa through Global Strategies for HIV Prevention.
• Vaccines to protect 50 million children from polio through UNICEF.
• Strategic support and online tools for 1.5 million social entrepreneurs through partners including Ashoka, NTEN, APC and LASA.
• Environmental education in the National Parks for 40,000 students through NatureBridge.

We will exceed our 2010 target this year with charitable giving, with more than $145 million going to non-profits and academic institutions, and more than $184 million in total giving when including Google Grants, Google.org technology projects and product support for non-profits. Some of our major initiatives include:

• Supporting science and math education and education reform through partners including New Schools Venture, Teach for All, Citizens Schools and Posse Foundation. We provide scholarships to help dismantle barriers that keep women and minorities from entering computing and technology fields. We also support the next generation of engineers and maintain strong ties with academic institutions worldwide that are pursuing research in areas relevant to our mission.
  
  
• Responding to natural disasters in Pakistan, Haiti, China and Chile and humanitarian crises through partners such as Rural Development Institute, Eastern Congo Initiative, Engineers without Borders and Nahdet El Mahrousa.
  
  
• Promoting technology solutions that empower underserved groups and emerging economies such as Camfed, Digital Divide Data, igotITtoo and Samasource.
  
  
• Strengthening communities where we live and work, such as Friends of the High Line in New York and Age Action in Dublin.

To keep up with Googlers’ generosity in their personal giving, we also increased our charitable matching to $12,000 per employee. We thank our partners and all those who use Google for their continued business and wish everyone a happy, healthy holiday season.

Posted by Jacquelline Fuller, Director, Charitable Giving

Governments shouldn’t have a monopoly on Internet governance

The beauty of the Internet is that it’s not controlled by any one group. Its governance is bottoms-up—with academics, non-profits, companies and governments all working to improve this technological wonder of the modern world. This model has not only made the Internet very open—a testbed for innovation by anyone, anywhere—it's also prevented vested interests from taking control.

But last week the UN Committee on Science and Technology announced that only governments would be able to sit on a working group set up to examine improvements to the IGF—one of the Internet’s most important discussion forums. This move has been condemned by the Internet Governance Caucus, the Internet Society (ISOC), the International Chamber of Commerce and numerous other organizations—who have published a joint letter (PDF) and launched an online petition to mobilize opposition. Today, I have signed that petition on Google’s behalf because we don’t believe governments should be allowed to grant themselves a monopoly on Internet governance. The current bottoms-up, open approach works—protecting users from vested interests and enabling rapid innovation. Let’s fight to keep it that way.

Posted by Vint Cerf, Chief Internet Evangelist

electric blue

zac posen

YouTube Highlights 12/16/2010

This is the latest in our series of YouTube highlights. Every couple of weeks, we bring you an update on new product features, interesting programs to watch, and tips you can use to grow your audience on YouTube. Just look for the label “YouTube Highlights” and subscribe to the series. – Ed.

Since our last update, we’ve taken a look at the year on YouTube, asked for your ideas on how to make the world a better place, launched a series of contests and announced a wave of new features. We have a lot to cover!

The year on YouTube
From videos that blew our minds to ones that made dreams come true, the Top 10 YouTube videos show what video stars captured the world’s attention this year. In the past year, viewers watched more than 700 billion YouTube videos, and uploaded more than 13 million hours of video. See what people watched in 2010:



We are also counting down YouTube highlights for the year with the New Year’s Countdown.

Your ticket to Davos, Switzerland
Do you have an idea about how to close the poverty gap? If so, submit it to the Davos Debates program for a chance to win an all-access pass to the World Economic Forum in Davos. To enter, submit a one-minute video sharing your ideas about the importance of inclusive growth—economic growth that benefits everyone—a key theme of this year’s event. The deadline to submit your ideas is January 14, so visit the Davos channel today.

Your vote counts on YouTube
Your opinion can help determine bragging rights for artists of all stripes. Get the chance to weigh in on your favorite music star, auditions for the YouTube Symphony Orchestra—and find out who won another recent competition.

• Rihanna or Justin Bieber? Show these artists how devoted you are with the MyYouTube contest. Artists score points if you subscribe to their channels and share with your friends. You, in turn, get their latest videos delivered to your YouTube homepage and get to win some great prizes.
• We’re down to 336 finalists from 46 countries for the YouTube Symphony Orchestra, and voting ends on December 17. The winners will perform for a global audience at the Sydney Opera House in March 2011.
• The winner of this month’s “On the Rise” competition is the irresistible Jack Russell terrier, Jesse. Check out some of his fun antics.

Creating an efficient, healthy home
Ask any working parent and they’ll tell you they have two jobs: the day job, and the one that takes up all the other hours of the day—that of “Chief Household Officer” (CHO). A new YouTube series from HP takes you inside the lives of women who meet the demands of work and family using new media know-how.

Eating right can also be a challenge for busy families. Sesame Street and Chef Art Smith have teamed up to raise awareness about how families can eat healthy food on a budget. See what Elmo and Chef Art have to say.

New features for YouTube
We’ve made a handful of updates over the last two weeks to make your viewing experience and more robust:

• Enhanced the video discovery experience in Leanback with Personalized Channels.
• Allowing selected users to upload videos that are longer than 15 minutes.

• Improvements to annotations including a new annotation editor and a new title annotation type.

And we announced the three-year anniversary of Content ID, a technology that lets rights holders control their content online.

Google Apps for YouTube
Businesses and organizations using Google Apps can now use YouTube. YouTube can help Google Apps customers in lots of ways—whether archiving company videos, marketing their company through branded video channels, or assisting with private, internal communications.

We’ll update you again in a few weeks. Till then, for more information on what we’re up to, head on over to our YouTube Blog. Happy holidays and see you in 2011!

Posted by Serena Satyasai, Marketing Manager, The YouTube Team

Celebrating 10 years in Chicago

These days, you probably know the city of Chicago as the home of great comedy, amazing parks, soaring skyscrapers, championship hockey and—no matter what our colleagues at Google NYC say—the greatest pizza in the world. But you might not know that Chicago is also home to one of Google’s oldest U.S. offices: this week Google Chicago celebrated its 10th anniversary. To mark the event, we celebrated with a party, a giant anniversary cake (18 lbs of butter, 100+ eggs and 60 lbs fondant) and most importantly, 10 community grants to 10 organizations in Chicago.


Over the past 10 years, Google Chicago has grown in terms of both size and responsibilities—we started with just two members of our nascent sales team, but today we have more than 400 employees in our office across engineering, sales and operations. Chicago too has certainly come a long way from Carl Sandburg’s days and we’re proud to be playing a small part in making the city a center for technological innovation.

Along the way, we’ve been fortunate to work with folks from around the region to make things better for users. Our Apps team has helped bring our email and app solutions to students at both Notre Dame University and Northwestern University, we’ve built a project with the Chicago Transit Authority and last year, we announced, alongside Mayor Daley, Google’s $3.2 billion economic impact on Illinois.

We’re also particularly proud of our contributions to Google. Our Chicago-based engineering team launched the Data Liberation Front, which allows users to export their data from our products, from the ground up. With those efforts, the team has begun to change the way consumers think about web services and data portability. In 2007, we acquired Chicago-based FeedBurner, and today the product has been fully integrated into Google’s ad platform. And Google’s acquisition of DoubleClick included what is now the Chicago-based Google Affiliate Network, whose deals have helped consumers across the globe.

Google Chicago couldn’t have come this far without a talented group of employees. We’ve been very fortunate to find top-notch talent in the Midwest to build out our sales and engineering teams, and we don’t expect that to stop anytime soon. Come join and help us build the next 10 years in Chicago!

Oh, and one last thought: please ... when you visit us in Chicago, NEVER put ketchup on your hot dog. (In Chicago, we know a thing or two about our hot dogs!)

Posted by Jim Lecinski - Managing Director U.S. Sales (and Chicago Native)

Find out what’s in a word, or five, with the Google Books Ngram Viewer

Scholars interested in topics such as philosophy, religion, politics, art and language have employed qualitative approaches such as literary and critical analysis with great success. As more of the world’s literature becomes available online, it’s increasingly possible to apply quantitative methods to complement that research. So today Will Brockman and I are happy to announce a new visualization tool called the Google Books Ngram Viewer, available on Google Labs. We’re also making the datasets backing the Ngram Viewer, produced by Matthew Gray and intern Yuan K. Shen, freely downloadable so that scholars will be able to create replicable experiments in the style of traditional scientific discovery.

Comparing instances of [flute], [guitar], [drum] and [trumpet] (

blue, red, yellow and green respectively)

in English literature from 1750 to 2008

Since 2004, Google has digitized more than 15 million books worldwide. The datasets we’re making available today to further humanities research are based on a subset of that corpus, weighing in at 500 billion words from 5.2 million books in Chinese, English, French, German, Russian, and Spanish. The datasets contain phrases of up to five words with counts of how often they occurred in each year.

These datasets were the basis of a research project led by Harvard University's Jean-Baptiste Michel and Erez Lieberman Aiden published today in Science and coauthored by several Googlers. Their work provides several examples of how quantitative methods can provide insights into topics as diverse as the spread of innovations, the effects of youth and profession on fame, and trends in censorship.

The Ngram Viewer lets you graph and compare phrases from these datasets over time, showing how their usage has waxed and waned over the years. One of the advantages of having data online is that it lowers the barrier to serendipity: you can stumble across something in these 500 billion words and be the first person ever to make that discovery. Below I’ve listed a few interesting queries to pique your interest:

World War I, Great War
child care, nursery school, kindergarten
fax, phone, email
look before you leap, he who hesitates is lost
virus, bacteria
tofu, hot dog
burnt, burned
flute, guitar, trumpet, drum
Paris, London, New York, Boston, Rome
laptop, mainframe, microcomputer, minicomputer
fry, bake, grill, roast
George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln
supercalifragilisticexpialidocious

We know nothing can replace the balance of art and science that is the qualitative cornerstone of research in the humanities. But we hope the Google Books Ngram Viewer will spark some new hypotheses ripe for in-depth investigation, and invite casual exploration at the same time. We’ve started working with some researchers already via our Digital Humanities Research Awards, and look forward to additional collaboration with like-minded researchers in the future.

Posted by Jon Orwant, Engineering Manager, Google Books

Send a message of holiday cheer with Google Maps

(Cross-posted on the Lat Long Blog)

For me, celebrating the holidays is about spending time with family and friends. Along with sharing delicious meals and building snowmen in the backyard, getting into the season often means traveling to places both familiar and new, whether going to visit family or walking down the Champs-Élysées to see the holiday lights.

We’re sure many of you have holiday plans in the works, so we’ve designed greeting cards you can email to friends and family—to share those fun adventures or just to say hello from wherever you are around the world. In addition to choosing from 10 holiday covers and adding a personal message, you can include specific directions, a Street View image or a favorite place on the inside of the card.

Since I grew up in New England, the holidays always make me think of skiing. So I’ll send some of my friends cards with inspiring ski scenes in Street View, or directions to Squaw Valley for an upcoming ski trip.

Around this time of year, I also get nostalgic about specific places where great holiday memories were made, so the card I’ll send to my family will remind them of the amazing breakfasts we had at Lou’s during past holiday seasons. And the card to my friends in New York will suggest a restaurant we should try when I visit them in a couple of weeks.

Thanks to Christoph Niemann for inspiration

And of course, to share some winter weather with my friends in California, I’ll send a card with some wintry scenes of Antarctica and Whistler, and snowy greetings on the cover.


We hope these online cards help you stay connected and share holiday cheer with your loved ones, whether you send directions to a holiday party, winter imagery from Street View or the various places that signify the spirit of the season to you. Start sending at googlemapsholidays.appspot.com. Happy holidays!

Posted by Katie Mandel, Product Marketing Manager, Google Maps