GoogleServe 2013: Giving back on a global scale

Every year in June comes a week where Googlers around the world stop reviewing code, ignore their inboxes and leave their cubicles behind to participate in GoogleServe, our global week of service.

This year, more than 8,500 Googlers from 75+ offices participated in 500 projects. Not only was this our largest GoogleServe to date, but it was also one of the more unique, as many projects were designed to expand the notion of what it means to give back to the community. Here’s a glimpse at some of what we were up to this year:

• In Thimphu, Bhutan, Googlers led a workshop about media literacy at the Bhutan Centre for Media and Democracy helping youth prepare to participate in shaping the future of this young democracy.
• Googlers in Mountain View, Calif., created a bone marrow donation drive and partnered with the Asian American Donor Program to raise awareness about the need for more donors from diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds.
• Googlers from our Hyderabad, India office volunteered at Sri Vidhya's Centre for the Special Children, helping children who suffer from a wide range of cognitive disabilities to learn how to identify colors, write their own names, and prepare meals for themselves.
• A team of Googlers walked the New York, N.Y., streets gathering information to improve AXS Map, a crowd-sourced platform for mapping wheelchair accessibility which is populated with data from Google Maps and Google Places APIs.
• In Lagos, Nigeria, Googlers mentored entrepreneurs at Generation Enterprise, a small business incubator that equips at-risk youth to start sustainable businesses in slum communities.
• In Randwick, Australia, Googlers taught computer and Internet skills with the Australian Red Cross Young Parents Program which aims to develop the capacities of young parents to live independently and to parent successfully.
• A group of gourmet Googlers cooked a meal for families with children undergoing cancer treatment with Ronald McDonald House in London, U.K.
• Googlers tutored and mentored youth in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, with the Dignity For Children Foundation.
• Googlers partnered with Un Techo Para Mi País to help build a new house for a family living below the poverty line in Bogota, Colombia.
• In Dublin, Ireland, Google engineers taught youth how to program interactive stories and games with Scratch in partnership with Coder Dojo.

Click for more photos from this year's GoogleServe

Over the past six years, GoogleServe has transformed from a single week of service into a week of celebration and inspiration for ongoing giving. Googlers also give back year-round through our GooglersGive programs which include 20 hours of work time annually to volunteer with an approved charitable organization. If you’re inspired to join us, please check out All for Good or VolunteerMatch for opportunities to give back in your community.

Posted by Zanoon Nissar, on behalf of the GoogleServe Global Leadership Team

Connecting across continents

There’s only so much students can learn about the world from the static pages of a textbook. Meeting people from other countries face-to-face provides unique insight into the world’s varied cultures, and the Internet is making this possible in unprecedented ways. To increase global connections, we’re working with First Lady Michelle Obama, the State Department and the Global Nomads Group, to connect students across continents over Google+ Hangouts.

As a keystone event in The White House’s Africa Tour, the First Lady will host a Google+ Hangout On Air from the SciBono Discovery Center in Johannesburg this Saturday at 9:30 a.m. EDT. After Mrs. Obama shares her thoughts on the importance of education, students in Johannesburg, L.A., Houston, New York, and Kansas City will get the chance to talk with one another directly, sharing ideas about education in their countries face-to-face-to-face—it’s a 21st-Century pen pal program, hosted by the First Lady. (RSVP to watch.)

The discussion won’t stop there. This Hangout On Air kick-starts a series of global exchanges on Google+, organized by the State Department and the Global Nomads Group, a nonprofit organization that facilitates cultural exchanges, launching early in the new school year. During the summer, students are encouraged to join the Global Nomads Group’s Google+ Community, “Connecting Continents,” to discover and connect with peers around the world. We look forward to announcing the next hangouts in the near future—stay tuned to the Global Nomads Community for details.

Posted by Will Houghteling, Lead, Google+ Education Partnerships

Meet 15 Finalists and Science in Action Winner for the 2013 Google Science Fair

Creating a world-class science project is no easy task, but this year thousands of 13-18 year olds from more than 120 countries submitted their project to the third annual Google Science Fair. After further judging and deliberation, today we’re announcing the 15 finalists from our top 90 regional finalists, as well as the winner of the Scientific American Science in Action Award.

From the creation of an exoskeletal glove to support the human hand to managing the impact of infrastructure projects on endangered species to an early-warning system for emergency vehicles, the caliber, ingenuity and diversity of this year’s projects is a testament to the fact that young minds really can produce world-changing ideas.

The 15 finalists will join us at our Mountain View headquarters on September 23 to present their projects to an international panel of esteemed scientists for the final round of judging. The Grand Prize winner will receive a 10-day trip to the Galapagos Islands with National Geographic Expeditions, $50,000 in scholarship funding and more.

Congratulations to our finalists:

Age 13-14
Alex Spiride (USA): Squid-Jet: Bio-Inspired Propulsion System for Underwater Vehicles
Venkat Sankar (USA): Ecology or Economy: Managing the Impact of Infrastructure Projects on Endangered Species
Kavita Selva (USA): Superconductor Tapes: A Solution to the Rare Earth Shortage Crisis
Liza Sosnova and Tina Kabir (Russia): Lyytinen - Universal hydrostatic densitometer
Viney Kumar (Australia): The PART (Police and Ambulances Regulating Traffic) Program

Age 15-16
Elif Bilgin (Turkey): Going Bananas!-Using Banana Peels in the Production of Bio-Plastic As A Replacement of the Traditional Petroleum Based Plastic
Ann Makosinski (Canada): The Hollow Flashlight
Yi Xi Kang, Kwok Ling Yi and Tricia Lim (Singapore): Efficacy of Estrogens and Progesterone in Hepatic Fibrosuppression
Valerie Ding (USA): Rapid Quantum Dot Solar Cell Optimization: Integrating Quantum Mechanical Modeling and Novel Solar Absorption Algorithm
Shrishti Asthana (India): Solar Light Assisted nanoZnO Photo Catalytic Mineralization - The Green Technique for the Degradation of Detergents

Age 17-18
Charalampos Ioannou (Greece): An Exoskeleton Glove which Enhances and Supports the Movement of the Human Palm
Esha Maiti (USA): Stochastic Monte Carlo Simulations to Determine Breast Cancer Metastasis Rates from Patient Survival Data
Elizabeth Zhao (USA): A Novel Implementation of Image Processing and Machine Learning for Early Diagnosis of Melanoma
Eric Chen (USA): Computer-aided Discovery of Novel Influenza Endonuclease Inhibitors to Combat Flu Pandemic
Vinay Iyengar (USA): Efficient Characteristic 3 Galois Field Operations for Elliptic Curve Cryptographic Applications

We’re also announcing the winner of the Scientific American Science in Action Award, which honors a project that makes a practical difference by addressing an environmental, health or resources challenge. An independent panel has selected Elif Bilgin from Turkey for this award for her work using banana peels to produce bioplastics. Congratulations to Elif, who will receive $50,000 and and a year’s worth of mentoring from Scientific American to help develop her project. Elif’s project is also one of the 15 finalists, and she is still in the running for the Grand Prize Award.

Which of the 15 finalist projects do you think has the potential to change the world? While the official judges will decide the 2013 Grand Prize Winner, in August you’ll be able to participate in this year’s competition by voting for the Voter's Choice Award. Visit the Google Science Fair website August 1-30 to vote for the project you think has the greatest potential to change the world.

Check back for more details, and tune in live to see the finalist gala on September 23, which will be broadcast on our website, Google+ page and YouTube channel. Congratulations to all our finalists. We look forward to meeting in Mountain View!

Posted by Clare Conway, Google Science Fair team

Update July 30: Updated the name of the Voter's Choice Award (previously the Inspired Idea Award).

Securing your WiFi network

This post is part of a regular series of privacy and security tips to help you and your family stay safe and secure online. Privacy and security are important topics—they matter to us, and they matter to you. Building on our Good to Know site with advice for safe and savvy Internet use, we hope this information helps you understand the choices and control that you have over your online information. -Ed.

More than a quarter of Internet users worldwide use WiFi at home to connect to the web, but many aren't sure how to protect their home network, or why it is important to do so. The best way to think of your home WiFi network is to think of it like your front door: you want a strong lock on both to ensure your safety and security.

When data is in transit over an unsecured WiFi network, the information you’re sending or receiving could be intercepted by someone nearby. Your neighbors might also be able to use the network for their own Internet activities, which might slow down your connection. Securing your network can help keep your information safe when you’re connecting wirelessly, and can also help protect the devices that are connected to your network.

If you’re interested in improving your home WiFi security, the steps below can help make your home network safer.

1. Check to see what kind of home WiFi security you already have.
Do your friends need to enter a password to get on your network when they visit your house for the first time and ask to use your WiFi? If they don’t, your network isn’t as secure as it could be. Even if they do need to enter a password, there are a few different methods of securing your network, and some are better than others. Check what kind of security you have for your network at home by looking at your WiFi settings. Your network will likely either be unsecured, or secured with WEP, WPA or WPA2. WEP is the oldest wireless security protocol, and it’s pretty weak. WPA is better than WEP, but WPA2 is best.

2. Change your network security settings to WPA2.
Your wireless router is the machine that creates the WiFi network. If you don’t have your home network secured with WPA2, you’ll need to access your router’s settings page to make the change. You can check your router’s user manual to figure out how to access this page, or look for instructions online for your specific router. Any device with a WiFi trademark sold since 2006 is required to support WPA2. If you have a router that was made before then, we suggest upgrading to a new router that does offer WPA2. It’s safer and can be much faster.

3. Create a strong password for your WiFi network.
To secure your network with WPA2, you’ll need to create a password. It’s important that you choose a unique password, with a long mix of numbers, letters and symbols so others can’t easily guess it. If you’re in a private space such as your home, it’s OK to write this password down so you can remember it, and keep it somewhere safe so you don’t lose it. You might also need it handy in case your friends come to visit and want to connect to the Internet via your network. Just like you wouldn’t give a stranger a key to your house, you should only give your WiFi password to people you trust.

4. Secure your router too, so nobody can change your settings.
Your router needs its own password, separate from the password you use to secure your network. Routers come without a password, or if they do have one, it’s a simple default password that many online criminals may already know. If you don’t reset your router password, criminals anywhere in the world have an easy way to launch an attack on your network, the data shared on it and the computers connected to your network. For many routers, you can reset the password from the router settings page. Keep this password to yourself, and make it different from the one you use to connect to the WiFi network (as described in step 3). If you make these passwords the same, then anyone who has the password to connect to your network will also be able to change your wireless router settings.

5. If you need help, look up the instructions.
If you’ve misplaced your router’s manual, type the model number of your base station or router into a search engine—in many cases the info is available online. Otherwise, contact the company that manufactured the router or your Internet Service Provider for assistance.

Please check out the video below to learn more about the simple but important steps you can take to improve the security of your Internet browsing.



For more advice on how to protect yourself and your family online, visit our Good to Know site, and stay tuned for more posts in our security series.

Posted by John Munoz, Technical Program Manager

Only clear skies on Google Maps and Earth

To celebrate the sunny days of summer (in the northern hemisphere at least), today we're launching new satellite imagery for Google’s mapping products. This stunning global view is virtually cloud-free and includes refreshed imagery in more locations—giving you an even more accurate and comprehensive view of our planet's landscape.

The new, even more beautiful global view in Maps and Earth.

Our satellite imagery is usually created like a quilt: we stitch together imagery of different parts of the world. Using a process similar to how we produced the global time-lapse imagery of the Earth, we took hundreds of terabytes of data from the USGS's and NASA’s Landsat 7 satellite—sometimes dozens of photos of a single spot in the world—and analyzed the photos to compute a clear view of every place, even in tropical regions that are always at least partly cloudy.

The result is a single, beautiful 800,000 megapixel image of the world, which can be viewed in Earth and Maps when you're zoomed out to a global view. This global image is so big, if you wanted to print it at a standard resolution of 300 dots per inch you’d need a piece of paper the size of a city block! This image is then blended into our highest resolution imagery, giving a beautiful cloud-free global view and detailed images in the same seamless map.

Central Papua, Indonesia: before and after.

This update also includes refreshed imagery in many regions of the world, especially in areas where high-resolution imagery is not available, including parts of Russia, Indonesia and central Africa.

Saudi Arabia: before and after, showing increased agricultural expansion

You can see the new satellite imagery by going to Google Maps and turning on satellite view, or by opening Google Earth, and zooming out. And to read more about what went into creating this imagery, check out our detailed post on the Lat Long blog. Have fun exploring!

Posted by Matt Hancher, Tech Lead, Google Earth Engine

Wednesday's Child

A Quick Wave

Today I am packing, printing out boarding passes and making sure I have everything for my vacation. I think I have delegated all my interests over the next two weeks so this will be my final blog post for a while. I had planned to blog every work day of 2013 but I did not think about holidays :)  I will make up for it on my return with more cool videos and perhaps a few betas for you lovely pledger's!

Signing Off

As a farewell for the moment, I have linked a video that made me smile and was also informative to existing FPSC users:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3ChyudNMLI

Until my return, good luck with your projects and see you soon!

Great News! AGK V2 Funded!

To our delight and surprise, the AGK V2 Kickstarter project was entirely funded in less than 24 hours!  It looks like Kickstarter users are now aiming for one or more of the stretch goals, and looks like Paul will have his work cut out :) Here is the link to the Kickstarter page:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/tgc/app-game-kit-v2

I will be sure to check on this from time to time when I'm in WiFi range, as I am morbidly curious as to just how far this project will be 'stretched' ;)  If you pledged as a direct result of my plea, my extra special thanks to thee!

Transparency Report: Making the web a safer place

Two of the biggest threats online are malicious software (known as malware) that can take control of your computer, and phishing scams that try to trick you into sharing passwords or other private information.

So in 2006 we started a Safe Browsing program to find and flag suspect websites. This means that when you are surfing the web, we can now warn you when a site is unsafe. We're currently flagging up to 10,000 sites a day—and because we share this technology with other browsers there are about 1 billion users we can help keep safe.

But we're always looking for new ways to protect users' security. So today we're launching a new section on our Transparency Report that will shed more light on the sources of malware and phishing attacks. You can now learn how many people see Safe Browsing warnings each week, where malicious sites are hosted around the world, how quickly websites become reinfected after their owners clean malware from their sites, and other tidbits we’ve surfaced.

Sharing this information also aligns well with our Transparency Report, which already gives information about government requests for user data, government requests to remove content, and current disruptions to our services.

To learn more, explore the new Safe Browsing information on this page. Webmasters and network administrators can find recommendations for dealing with malware infections, including resources like Google Webmaster Tools and Safe Browsing Alerts for Network Administrators.

Posted by Lucas Ballard, Software Engineer

Tuesday's Child

Cleaning Up My Brain

I am finding my run up to the holidays a time for backing up, sorting out my desk and generally getting all those loose ends tied off.  Part of that is to assign some jobs to my team mates before I swan off to hotter climbs in a few days.  I wanted to let you in on some internal inspiration material I have passed about which should give you an idea of the quality bar we are setting ourselves:

Just to be clear, this is not another preview of Reloaded :)  It is a game currently in development and set to be released for the XBOX ONE. Having created our tracer and explosion prototypes, we confidently moved onto pastures new. Having seen the above video, we promptly decided to backtrack and see if we could not make our tracer, explosions and fire modules a little bit better.

Bearing in mind the above production took hundreds of talented dudsters and probably tens of thousands of person-hours, you might think it quite insane to even dream of getting near this level of quality. I believe that having a mentor is a good thing, and if you're going to be mentored, it may as well be the best you can find.

Reloaded Work

Apart from cleaning, packing, thinking and delegating, I will be cramming in some Reloaded work this evening when I attempt to build up the ODE replacement to the physics engine. Using the all powerful Bullet Physics, I am hopeful to add enough commands to the 'Bullet Physics Plugin for DBP' to be able to add terrain physics and character controller physics to the prototype you saw in the video yesterday.  I think it makes sense to do this as my return in 2 weeks will see me start the terrain module of the engine which will add deformable terrain geometry and variable vegetation to the level system. In order to be able to test the result of this, having a physics system in place to allow my player to walk around the terrain would be a great benefit and also tick off one of those grey area boxes that asks 'can I generate terrain on the fly, and also generate the physics element of the terrain as well'.

A Head Full Of Oculus

I finally found time last night to unbox and set-up my Oculus VR headset, mainly to tick it off my list and see what the fuss was about. Now I know what the fuss was about and it deserves to be fussed about. I have tried VR headsets before and even have a product out right now that uses what I considered the best consumer device for VR. Well the script has been permanently rewritten with the Oculus Rift.  I will not wax lyrical over it as you can find plenty of that elsewhere on the Inter-web, and I will be putting it back in it's box now to prevent myself from being too distracted from my mission to complete Reloaded.  

What I can say is that combining this hardware with Reloaded would be momentous!  As I sat there, wearing the device, now standing on a balcony overlooking a Mediterranean sea with the soft wind blowing sugar stealer's around my head, calling up an on-screen HUD which magically floated there in front of my eyes, I started to imagine a product that allowed you to create worlds with a wave of your hand, the sound of your voice and a gentle nod of the head. For the first time I saw how a real holo-deck could be built and it was good.

Alas, I must put aside these flights of fancy and get my head back in the game. We have a killer product to produce and it won't write itself (yet)!

Signing Off

As an aside to my regular blog and sign off, you will find over the next 44 days an extra section which you will find below.  As you may know, the Reloaded project owes a lot to the Kickstarter concept, which indirectly breathed life into the idea by finding us a champion investor and we are now knee deep in development goodness. My colleague who now runs the AGK Development effort needs a similar boost, and we have chosen Kickstarter to fund that acceleration. If you can help him get those early pledges, even if it's just £3, it should put us on the Kickstarter radar and get some good exposure during the campaign.

Our Kickstarter Campaign

Rather than a banner and a link, I thought it better if I actually say something about what this evolved AGK product is about.  But first, here is a banner and a link:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/tgc/app-game-kit-v2

As you can see, thanks to a strong AGK community, we've already pushed past the half way point and we only launched it this morning :)  I think what makes AGK so special is that it has all the ease and friendliness of Dark Basic, combining some of the best cross platform technology and made accessible by it's relatively low price and awesome community. 

It ain't no toy either! The last thing I made in AGK is now charting across multiple platforms, is battling healthily in the Educational paid top ten on iOS and is raking in a truck of money every week (admittedly for the publisher, not us poor impoverished developers) :) We've already had number one positions in the free charts, and that was before V108 added over a hundred new commands.  I am looking forward to seeing what Paul does with this accelerator funding, and especially keen to see what the AGK community creates with this awesome development tool, especially on the new platforms such as Ouya!

From Sutton Hoo to the soccer pitch: culture with a click

Museums, libraries and galleries are a tourist staple of the summer holiday season. Often they’re the first place we head to when visiting a new city or town in order to learn about the heritage of that country. Though only a lucky few have the chance to travel to see these treasures first-hand, the Internet is helping to bring access to culture even when you can’t visit in person.

At the Google Cultural Institute, we’ve been busy working with our partners to add a range of new online exhibitions to our existing collection. With more than 6 million photos, videos and documents, the diversity and range of subject matter is large—a reflection of the fact that culture means different things to different people. What the exhibitions have in common is that they tell stories; objects are one thing but it’s the people and places they link to that make them fascinating.

The British Museum is the U.K.’s most popular visitor attraction and the 4th most visited museum in the world. It’s well known for housing one of the most spectacular archaeological discoveries ever made—the 1,400 year old Anglo-Saxon burial from Sutton Hoo, untouched until its discovery in 1939. Their online exhibition “Sutton Hoo: Anglo-Saxon ship burial” explores the discovery of the ship, featuring videos of the excavation and photos of the iconic helmet and a solid gold belt buckle. All this tells the story of how the burial and its contents changed our understanding of what Anglo-Saxon society was like.

From archaeology we take you to sport, which is integral to the culture of many nations, including Brazil. In the lead-up to Brazil's hosting of the 2014 World Cup, the Museu do Futebol has told the story of how the “beautiful game” came to Brazil. The photos, videos and posters in “The Game and the People” track the social impact of the sport and its transition from a past time for the wealthy (with their pleated pants and satin belts) to the modern game.

Science remains a perennially fascinating topic and the Museo Galileo in Italy has put together a series of three exhibitions looking at the link between art and science. The Medici Collections, the Lorraine Collections and the Library Collections examine the beginnings of science and technology 500 years ago and chart developments from the discovery of the sun dial to the Google Maps of today. As well as being informative, the exhibitions include beautiful objects such as the Jovilabe, which was used to calculate the periods of Jupiter’s moons.

So if broadening your cultural horizons through travel isn’t in the cards this summer, settle down in your armchair and browse through through some of the world’s heritage and history online. Keep up to date with new material on the Cultural Institute Google+ page.

Posted by James Davis, program manager, Google Cultural Institute

Monday's Child

The Tease Is Over

I know I have been teasing over this video for a few days now, so let me stop the silliness and show you a video of the demo I have been mucking about with over the weekend. Big thanks to Mark B. who really helped me pull this visual prototype together in such a short space of time.

As you can see, we have a few things going on here. Parallax mapping on the sand, objects, buildings and walls. Soft shadow mapping on everything, including the players weapon. The weapon has all manner of subtle and clever effects to bring it to life including cube mapping for the reflective lens. The sky uses real cloud generation and you can see some experimental grass on the outside of the compound.  Floor vegetation really brings out the terrain and we'll be finding ways to make this look great and render fast.

More Than Candy

Fear not, this was not a quick demo to show off some eye candy, but to get to grips with the format and scope required for the art assets. Before we can produce more buildings, objects and scenery, we need to know the demands of the shader and renderer to see where our bottlenecks and limits are. Already we have discovered you cannot cast real shadows on a field of grass using a forward renderer due to the insane amount of overdraw and pixel shader meltdown.

The more we study the demands on the shader, the more deferred rendering makes sense, and is clearly indicated as something that will need prototyping to see if we can get a sizeable performance gain.  Don't worry about the 30fps frame-rate, fraps was taking it down from a VSYNC 60 FPS. I have higher rates, but I found creating the DirectX device with VSYNC produces a very smooth experience where something at 70-80 fps looked ever so slightly choppy on close examination.

Next Steps

I am off on vacation for two weeks in a few days, so I am tinkering with what the best thing for me to wrap up with. I have a basic Bullet prototype working with terrain and a kinematic player controller, so I might move that into the prototype, or finish the grass shader, or add some particle experiments such as dust bowls, smoke and atmospheric effects.

My brain is a little fuzzed from the half day meeting (and what feels like all day talking) so I will make the above decisions on Tuesday when my head is clear and I've got the hunger for code again.  Right now I have the hunger for sleep and I really ought to think about packing (or at the very least looking for a suitcase).

Signing Off

Let me know if you spot anything horrid in the video. There are a few shadow artefacts at the extreme edges of the render (due to the cascade scope not accounting for the wide field of view being used here), and don't comment on the grass yet as I was in the middle of integrating it when I found every blade was an intense expense in processing power.  I've also seen some grass in a recent you tube video that really crammed it in and made it look good, so I am also going to try to ramp it up and cover the whole terrain, then see what looks like using a basic shader.

Also an open question to you guys and gals. Would you prefer us to work on one genre only, and provide a very high level of quality and design finish on those assets, or have the work spread over a few genre's during the initial release. Of course we will be producing dedicated model 'super' packs to explore genre's in detail after release, but I am curious what you would expect in the V1 default asset library?  Bear in mind that asking for three genre's means you get a third less in each one, and your levels might have to be spread a little thin from time to time.

Experience stunning new heights with Street View in Dubai

What does it feel like to stand on top of the tallest building in the world? To give you a better sense of how that may feel, we took Street View to the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, 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 (2,717 ft).

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.

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!



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.

Even if you’re afraid of heights, we hope you enjoy the view from the top! To see highlights from the Burj Khalifa Street View collection, visit www.google.ae/streetview.

Posted by Tarek Abdalla, Head of Marketing - Middle East & North Africa, Google

Saturday And The Art Arrives

Fly By

Just a quick blog to say plenty stuff done today but I'm keeping it hush hush for a few days, after which I promise a video.  To keep you guessing, here is a shot of a building that is now populating my prototype:

Plenty more where that came from, and with the shadows, cloud cover shading and all laid out in a small level, it really starts to create the impression of what could be, and if all goes well what will be.

Physics Like A Bullet

I also found time last night to open up the Bullet SDK and combine the terrain and kinetic player controller, and insert it into a hijacked ODE DLL. The three commands ODE START, ODE UPDATE and ODE END now contain Bullet code which compiles and runs in the background though presently does nothing. I figured a simple INTERSECT OBJECT command to find the current terrain height was sufficient for my Monday meeting demo. Technically all physics work is scheduled for July but I could not resist taking a peek to see if I could get my fancy new controller and dynamic terrain, and I can :)

Signing Off

I think I will make a nice cup of tea now and watch Monty Python's Holy Grail on NetFlix (a special treat to myself for not BSODDING another PC). My old new PC created further havok as well today which now refuses to boot after a de-fragmentation exercise. I then tried to run Windows repair only to find Windows refused to accept the disc as the build versions we out 0.00001 (thanks again MS) and to cap it all after I reformatted the drive to install a new Windows on there, the Windows installer refused to accept a partition existed.  You can't make this stuff up!! Next job here is to open up the case, disconnect all the drives except the MAIN drive, then try installing again. With a little luck the other drives will still be there, and more importantly all the data there in. Fortunately it's all backed up here and there, so this is simply a resurrection exercise only.  It looks like I made the right call switching to the old machine and carrying on with my little project.

Friday Unchanged For Millions Of Years

A Good Day

Measured by my yardstick that decrees any day which does not contain a BSOD is now a good day.  Friday was a good day.  As some of you know, I am recovering from a system crash of mysterious origin and have updated my SATA controller driver in the hope this solves it. The stress test went well, as did my creation of a new SVN repository to hold the entire project off-site and on both machines.  For now disaster has been averted.

However, I am sure you want to learn about Reloaded development so here is the latest screen shot:

I am not tempting you with a video just yet, I am holding it back until I have more final artwork in the prototype. You will understand when you see it.  Don't worry about the insane specular coming off the sand, there will be much playing around with shaders all the way up to final beta.

So What Do You See

Well you probably recognize the wall and the monolith from the previous demo, but the sandy terrain is new and so is the sky.  Mark came through with some lovely undulating terrain, parallax textures and a matching sky box.  After much shifting of dev kit linkages, I managed to recompile my code and I do not seem to have lost any of my progress so the shadows cast just fine.

What you perhaps don't see is that the clouds in the sky are not part of the sky box but are in fact real dynamically generated clouds using our DarkCLOUDS module from Dark Basic Pro. Not only is this module capable of producing clouds, but has day/night cycles, sun simulation and a whole host of settings to affect how many clouds you have and what they do.  You can even accelerate time, or even reverse time from within the command set. Very powerful, very fast and just the job. I had to mask out the old sky box sky, and in doing so realized I need some really high resolution mountains for the final product but I think the effect is really cool. You get foreground terrain, then background mountains and finally a realistic sky.

I have been REALLY tempted to add extra stuff to the shader (bloom, depth of field, sun flare, etc) but I have a product to finish and the visuals are already looking top draw so I will leave those for tweaks and polish when we have more the product shape in place.

Under Control

The final part of my deliverable for the Monday meeting is the player controller system which will allow the user to wander around the level. The old one will be thrown out and my new one will take it's place. This one has been written quickly and to my exact requirements, and allows the player to walk and run, mouse look and jump will follow soon. The best feature of the new controller is that I've added smoothing maths so everything feels slick and professional. This is now in the demo and Saturday and Sunday will be spent tweaking the prototype and adding Mark Art as it comes in.

Signing Off

It's that time of year where a small office like mine starts to heat up really bad. The sunny days, coupled with having three PCs on, two large skylights and an overworked coder all contribute to the oven I now write from. Unfortunately, I have a product to finish so I must fight through it to the next battle in this war. I've downloaded the latest Bullet Physics SDK 2.8 and have run through a few of the demos. It seems the first two things I will need is the terrain demo and the kinetic character controller class. Whether it's an easy cut and paste job, or a nightmare on earth remains to be seen.  I've also been tinkering with the idea of writing a sand-storm particle effect for the demo as well, but perhaps this is one bridge too far for the weekend.

As a mini quiz, can anyone figure out the name of the game I was thinking about when I wrote the title?

“You’ve come a long way, Baby”: remembering the world’s first stored program computer

Sixty-five years ago today, the Manchester Small Scale Experimental Machine—nicknamed “Baby”—became the earliest computer in the world to run a program electronically stored in its memory. This was a flagship moment: the first implementation of the stored program concept that underpins modern computing.

Earlier computers had their instructions hardwired into their physical design or held externally on punched paper tape or cards. Reprogramming them to do a different task entailed internal rewiring or altering the physical storage media. The Baby marked a new computing era, described by some as the “birth of software,” in which swapping programs was far simpler—requiring only an update to the electronic memory. Both instructions and data were held in the Baby’s memory and the contents could be altered automatically at electronic speeds during the course of computation.



Developed at Manchester University by “Freddie” Williams, Tom Kilburn and Geoff Tootill, in size the Baby was anything but: more than 5m long and weighing a tonne (PDF). Its moniker was due to its role as a testbed for the experimental Williams-Kilburn tube, a means of storing binary digits (“bits”) using a cathode ray tube. This was a big deal because up until this point, computers had no cost-effective means of storing and flexibly accessing information in electronic form.

In technical terms, the Williams-Kilburn tube was the earliest form of random access memory, or RAM. The Baby’s memory consisted of one of these tubes, able to store up to 1,024 bits—equivalent to just 128 bytes. In contrast, the average computer today has RAM in multiples of gigabytes, more than a billion times bigger.

The Baby was only ever intended to be a proof-of-concept rather than to serve as a useful calculation tool. So once it had shown the new memory was reliable, attention shifted to building a more powerful and practical machine using the same concepts. This resulted in the Manchester Mark 1, which in turn was the model for the Ferranti Mark 1, the world’s first computer to be sold commercially, in February 1951.

While today nothing remains of the original Baby, a working replica is on display at the Museum of Science and Industry (MOSI) in Manchester. It’s well worth a visit to reflect on just how far computing has come.

Posted by Lynette Webb, Senior Manager, External Relations

Thursday Blue Crash No 2

Darn Hardware!

A successful day, and then disaster.  After executing my plan to copy in a working proto into the engine and then slowly migrate it over, the plan worked just fine and I was able to see shadows quite quickly in the main engine. It turns out that if you use PRINT or CENTRE TEXT commands, it royally messes up the pixel shader and who knows what else.

I managed to then move all the proto code out and have my regular Instance Stamp geometry textured and lit by the new shader, complete with shadows. The only remaining artefact is the first one/two cascades are using corrupt depth buffers for some reason, but there is a pattern there which will give me a clue as to who is putting it there and why.

Stop The Press

All this wonderful developer stuff ground to a halt when I experienced my second Blue Screen Of Despair, and after three attempts at a reboot I finally used Safe Mode to inspect my most key files, and of course, sods law struck again and had completely wiped out the main shadow mapping source file, not the header this time but the main file with all the clever stuff in.

To make matters worse, the PC had time to trigger the automated backup system which promptly copied the corrupt (empty) key file to the remote network backup, erasing my reserve copy.  My local copy was way out of date (four days old) and I was pretty much up the creek.

After over two decades of being paranoid about back-ups, I had a backup plan (pun intended) which was my GIT repository which I usually refresh each evening as a matter of course (and to get used to this popular rival to SVN). Lo and behold, a 2 day old copy of the missing file was intact and sitting there waiting to bring me happiness. Granted it had also managed to take the corrupt file as well somehow (maybe a panic sync after the horse had bolted), but both GIT and SVN have the rather cool feature of recording every version of the file you commit, so I was once again saved.

Emergency Protocol

What adventures we are having, and no mistake!  I instantly made the decision to move my entire Reloaded development files and work to my old machine which I strategically kept to one side and used daily for things like wiring blogs, answering emails and accessing older projects I did not want on the new 'super' machine.  It only has 400MB left on drive C so it looks like my evening will be spent freeing some drive space, moving over some files, ensuring everything compiles again and of course set up a triple redundant backup scheme for it all.

At the same time (though probably next week now) I need to investigate why my new monster machine is unstable.  The clues are that both BSOD crashes seemed to be memory related and on the first event it had to repair sectors of Drive C.  This narrows the possible culprits to a dodgy SSD, dodgy memory or an unstable over-clock.  As the machine was running fine for over 6 months, I am inclined to suspect the SSD as the villain of the piece. Unfortunately I am in a self imposed 'no more hardware' mode so a new SSD is out the question as they are a few hundred quid for a decent one.  I will probably steal a secondary SSD and reformat the whole machine (which means at least 1/2 days of reinstalling all the darn software too).  Before any of that, I am going to do all the software only stuff first like run a full virus scan, deep disc scan and any free stress tests I can find to put the PC through. The perfect solution is that I find the exact cause and swap out the dodgy part and carry on, though just like a stuttering car, once you are left stranded on the motorway you find it very hard to get the confidence back.

Back On Track From Friday

The priority must and is the Reloaded development schedule, so I will have finished my restoration tonight and be ready to continue Reloaded development in the afternoon.  These bumps in the road are inevitable when you are a developer, and it's about how you respond to them that separates the experienced guys who do it for a living, and the guys who kick and scream at the world for being so cruel.  The kicking and screaming is absolutely essential however, as it's the only way to learn the harsher lessons development throws at you.

Art-vine

I have heard a whisper that some artwork is being massaged into life this week to compliment our new parallax & shadow shader. I have a few objectives for a demo I am producing for a Monday meeting, so if you are short on time I highly recommend checking out the Blog on Monday/Tuesday for some visual candy.

Signing Off

I'm sure certain parties will conclude that because I built the PC in the first place, the BSOD and wasted half-day is entirely my fault. Sure enough, I make a point of buying dodgy hardware from time to time to keep me on my toes and provide exciting material for my blog ;)  In fact, I'm already planning my next massive system failure and mass deleting of a few weeks work!

America’s businesses are growing. The web is helping.

Michael Edlavitch was a middle school math teacher in Minnesota when he started a website with free math games to engage his students. With free online tools, a passion for math and an initial investment of just $10 to register his domain, www.hoodamath.com was born. Eventually Michael’s website became popular with more than just his students. So Michael gave Google AdSense a try as a way to earn money by placing ads next to his content. As word spread and traffic grew, the revenue generated from his site allowed Michael to devote himself full time to Hooda Math. Today, www.hoodamath.com has more than 350 educational games and has had more than 100 million unique visitors to the site. Beyond building a business for himself, Michael is helping students everywhere learn math while having fun.

Over in New York, Roberto Gil designs and builds children’s furniture—loft beds, bunk beds and entire custom rooms. Casa Kids’ furniture is custom designed for the family to grow along with the child. Roberto works out of his Brooklyn workshop and doesn’t sell to large furniture stores, which means the Casa Kids website is an essential tool for him to connect with potential customers. To grow even further, Roberto began using AdWords in 2010. In the first few months traffic to his site went up 30 percent. Today, two-thirds of his new customers come from Google. Meet Roberto and learn more about how he’s making the web work for Casa Kids:



These are just two examples of how the web is working for American businesses. According to a McKinsey study, small businesses that make use of the web are growing twice as fast as those that aren’t on the web. That’s because the web is where we go for information and inspiration—from math games to practice over the summer to someone to design and build that perfect bunk bed for your kids. Ninety-seven percent of American Internet users look online for local products and services. Whether we’re on our smartphones, tablets or computers, the web helps us find what we’re looking for.

Here at Google, we see firsthand how the web is helping American businesses grow and thrive. Through our search and advertising programs, businesses like Casa Kids find customers, publishers like Hooda Math earn money from their content, and nonprofits solicit donations and volunteers. These tools are how we make money, and they’re how millions of other U.S. businesses do, too.

In 2012, Google's search and advertising tools helped provide $94 billion of economic activity for more than 1.9 million American businesses—advertisers, publishers and nonprofits. This represents a 17 percent increase from 2011. Check out the impact made in each state, along with stories of local businesses using the web to grow.

Whether it’s building skills or building furniture, Google helps to build businesses. We’re thrilled to be part of such a vibrant industry and are committed to continuing to help make the web work for people and businesses everywhere.

Posted by Allan Thygesen, Vice President, Global SMB Sales

Wednesday Obstacle

Two Missions

I had several little tasks today, with the two largest being a major update of my Reloaded development schedule so I can plan and track the remaining part of this project, and to move the shadow goodness into the map editor so I can see the shadows in a live-editing setting.

The Schedule

Creation of the new spreadsheet went fine, and I was able to plot out in detail all remaining tasks required including Terrain, AI, Physics, Encryption, Module work and testing.  I have planned for October as per the original deadline, but with the 'extreme research direction' we've been going that deliverable will be a stretch. I am still aiming for it to put myself under some healthy pressure but I am not too concerned if I step over the line a little. As long as I can put some great game creation software in your hands by Christmas I will be happy.

The Map Editor Shadows

Now this one was (and still is) a pig. I moved over the few bits of code which would have allowed shadows to spring to life, placed the light somewhere suitable and presto, nothing. No shadows, nada. Okay, I missed a value somewhere, back I go. The best part of five hours later and I am not only still finding the solution, but the underlying problem is the maddest one I've seen in over ten years of DirectX coding.

The spheres you can see are placed there for my debugging efforts, the problem is the orange rectangle in the top left which seems to only want to render the first 256x256 units of the object universe. Not only that, it wants to render it upside down, untransformed and use incomplete UV data.  That red to yellow stripe is actually a pixel shader plotting the UV coordinates as the RG of an RGB colour.  Clearly, it has an issue interpolating the R from zero to one and just sticks at ONE. Grr.  The bottom orange square was an early image were/where I managed to get 'something' from the spheres I was rendering, see the few pixels in the top left corner.

My best guess right now is that unlike my prototype, my main engine has a much more complicated shader hierarchy and somewhere along the way the engine is messing up the shader I am using (identical shader works fine in the prototype). It seems to take in the raw model coordinates fine, but extra things like constants and secondary vertex data seem to be missing or partially incomplete.  I've checked everything four times and the code looks just as it should. Furthermore, I am running out of clever ideas to trick this shader back to life.

Lee's Last Stand

I have one more trick up my sleeve which is to transplant the entire prototype inside the engine code (as is) to get the exact object set-up working and casting shadows. Once I have shadows, I slowly remove the prototype objects and introduce the engine objects until something breaks. When it breaks, whatever I transposed last is the culprit.  No doubt this issue will take me into the early hours but it will be worth it to see shadows being cast in real-time as you add and remove segments, rendering using a gloriously cool parallax depth mapper.

Signing Off

I've been waiting for a few deliveries today, and one of them was the game S.T.A.L.K.E.R which was one of the classic examples of excellent deferred rendering in it's day.  I have decided not to implement deferred rendering until I get back from my holiday, mainly because I want to continue working on the shader, the shadow system and the new artwork coming from Mark to create a nifty demo to leave you all drooling over.  Deferred rendering is simply another way of solving the lighting question in a game engine. If I can get the current forward renderer producing fast shadows for outdoor and indoor use, and get to keep my parallax mapper for universe rendering, we may not need to defer at all. Performance will be the key decider here, so let's carry on with the eye candy and see were/where we are when we decide to stop adding.  I was almost tempted to add depth of field and bloom to the prototype, then stopped myself in the nick of time. Plenty time for final polish once the guts of the rendering engine are running fast!

Google scholarships recognize 84 computer science scholars in Europe, Middle East, and Africa

We’d like to recognize and congratulate the 84 recipients and finalists of the Google Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship and Google Scholarship for Students with Disabilities in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. The full list of the 2013 scholars and finalists and the universities they attend can be found in this PDF.

Both scholarships aim to encourage underrepresented students to enter the computing field. The Google Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship honours the memory of Dr. Anita Borg who devoted her life to encouraging the presence of women in computing; we recently announced the U.S. recipients of this scholarship. The Google Europe Scholarship for Students with Disabilities aims to help dismantle barriers for students with disabilities as well as encourage them to excel in their studies and become active role models and leaders in creating technology.

All of the students receiving the scholarships are pursuing degrees in computer science or related fields at universities across Europe, the Middle East and Africa. This summer, they’ll attend the annual Google EMEA Scholarships Retreat in Zurich, where they’ll have the opportunity to attend tech talks on Google products, participate in developmental sessions, network with Googlers and attend social activities. Notable speakers at the 2013 retreat include Alan Eustace, SVP of Knowledge, Megan Smith, VP of Google [x], and Caroline Casey, Founder of Kanchi.org.

Applications for the scholarships will be open again in just a few short months. Learn more about how the scholarships impacted the lives of previous recipients:



For more information on all of our scholarships and programs, please visit the Google Students site.

Posted by Efrat Aghassy, EMEA scholarships program manager

Tuesday Tweaks

More Shadow Stuffs

After I posted my blog, I carried on cleaning up code and improving the shadow rendering for another 14 hour plus marathon, and although there are inevitable tweaks still to come I am happy with the final result.

We now have 'Percentage Closer Filtering (3x3)' for a nice soft shadow and cascade blending to remove the banding artifacts as the shadows steps into the lower quality levels in the distance (kind of like LOD for shadows).

Here is a video (minus the new art) as I was very excited to show you the latest version (and also to show off the technique below):

Notice how the shadow goes into the brickwork? By using the depth map information from the Parallax Mapping fragment shader, I was able to hijack these most previous variables and use them for my shadows.

Shadows in the Depth Map

One of the many articles I read on this subject had the idea of using the normal map (depth map) as part of the shadowing operation, so that the shadows could fall into the grooves of the normally flat surface. Although I did not read up on the correct math, my own idea seemed sensible enough, which was to shift the world position of the texel into the surface of the polygon using the tangent aligned normal. The shadow mapper would then assume that pixel was further away (deeper) and thus shade it as such, and it did. Imagine my delight when the shadow now contoured around the details in the texture depth map as well as the large blocks.

The only noticeable issues I have now is that at extreme angles the shadow calculation stops short of the width of the cascade but it's rare to see this artifact. A more serious one though is the edge bleed you can see at the base of the objects where they meet the floor. As I am using Clockwise Culling to defeat self shadowing on the side facing the light source, I only get a polygon thick wall to cast the actual shadow which bleeds non-shadow values thanks to the new PCF effect. There are numerous solutions but each one carries a side effect that is worse than the fix, so I am going to let that one brew a while. The current fix is to shrink the geometry slightly when I render the depth views, which helps a little but it's now what I am after. I am sure the solution will present itself before too long.

Signing Off

My mission now is to clean the code up some more (as there is a lot of commented out experimental code that never worked), and then see if I can apply this process to the main engine (just to see what happens). My new implementation does almost all of the shadowing in the C++ DLL side or the shader, so it should be as simple as placing a light and calling a few commands in the main engine to get my shadows in there.

Celebrating 10 years of shared success

Ten years ago we launched AdSense to help publishers earn money by placing relevant ads on their websites. I can still remember the excitement and anticipation as AdSense went live that first day. Our small team huddled together in a cramped conference room, and right away we saw that publishers were as excited about AdSense as we were.

Fast-forward 10 years, and AdSense has become a core part of Google’s advertising business. The AdSense community has grown to include more than 2 million publishers, and last year alone, publishers earned more than $7 billion from AdSense. AdSense is a community that thrives because of all the content creators we are so fortunate to partner with. Their stories inspire us to do our part to make AdSense great.

On this occasion, it’s especially inspiring to hear the stories of partners who have been with us since the very beginning—like a retiree in New Zealand who was able to pursue her dream of writing about her garden, a tech support expert in Colorado who can spend more time with his kids, and a theme park reviewer who now sends employees around the world to test and review rides—all thanks to money earned from AdSense.

As part of our 10th anniversary celebration, we hope you’ll tune into our live Hangout on Air today at 10 a.m. PDT (5 p.m. GMT) on the AdSense Google+ page. I look forward to joining several of our partners to share stories from the early days of AdSense, talk about how we’ve all grown since then, and discuss the future for publishers and online advertising. And if you want even more 10th anniversary celebration, just visit our AdSense 10th anniversary page at any time.

Posted by Susan Wojcicki, SVP, Ads and Commerce

Chromebooks: coming to more stores near you

In Northern California where I live, summer is here, which means family vacations, kids’ camps, BBQs and hopefully some relaxation. But it also means back-to-school shopping is just around the corner. So in case you’re on the hunt for a laptop in addition to pens, paper, and stylish new outfits, your search just got a whole lot easier. Chromebooks—a fast, simple, secure laptop that won't break the bank—will now be carried in over 3 times more stores than before, or more than 6,600 stores around the world.

In addition to Best Buy and Amazon.com, we’re excited to welcome several new retailers to the family. Starting today, Walmart will be making the newest Acer Chromebook, which has a 16GB Solid State Drive (SSD), available in approximately 2,800 stores across the U.S., for just $199. Look for Chromebooks coming to the laptop sections of a Walmart near you this summer.

And beginning this weekend, Staples will bring a mix of Chromebooks from Acer, HP and Samsung to every store in the U.S.—more than 1,500 in total. You can also purchase via Staples online, while businesses can purchase through the Staples Advantage B2B program. In the coming months select Office Depot, OfficeMax, and regional chains Fry’s and TigerDirect locations will begin selling Chromebooks.

In the 10 other markets worldwide where Chromebooks are sold, availability in national retailers continues to expand. In addition to Dixons in the UK, now 116 Tesco stores are selling Chromebooks, as well as all Media Markt and Saturn stores in the Netherlands, FNAC stores in France and Elgiganten stores in Sweden. In Australia, all JB Hi-Fi and Harvey Norman stores will be carrying Chromebooks for their customers as well. We’re working hard to bring Chromebooks to even more countries later this year.

Chromebooks make great computers for everyone in the family—and now you shouldn’t have to look very far to find one. Happy summer!

Posted by David Shapiro, Director of Chromebook Marketing

Monday Shadow Success

Weekend Power

It took a long 8 hour stint on Saturday and most of Monday but I finally managed to crack the cascade shadow mapping trick. Phew!  It has been a while since I coded some deep 3D or shaders, and last week it was very much a case of cut and pasting my way to victory.

Alas when things start to go wrong, or shadows render in strange and unpredictable ways, you have nowhere to turn when you base your techniques on someone else's idea.  I resolved to sit down and learn every single field, call, transform and math step and really understand what shadow mapping. This approach worked, and mid-day Saturday I began to see how the shadow coordinates where calculated to produce the desired results.

Blue Screen Of Despair

It did not help the situation when close to the end of Saturday, my new machine did a massive BSOD and completely erased one of the header files I was working on. All gone. No back-ups that I could find and despair for me. Rewriting it would have taken another half a day, and then in my darkest hour I remembered that I had set-up a network backup system to grab the contents of the drive and copy it each night at 7PM. Amazingly I had a complete version from Friday night and was able to put it back in and continue working.

Monday 6PM

As of now, what I have you can see below. The clever stuff is invisible of course, but the shadow you see is actually generated from four depth render targets and seamlessly stitched together using orthographic projections and some clever 3D math.

In order to be able to read the depth buffer for this technique, I discovered a cool hack you can make on DX9 hardware to transfer the depth buffer contents over to a regular texture that can be passed to a shader. Using the same trick, it might be possible to do some really nice effects such as depth-sensitive smoke and particle effects to avoid those sharp polygons cutting into the scene. I will leave those for another day, but now I have access to the depth buffer from a single pass with no loss of performance, it's another tool in my Reloaded toolbox for the future.

The battle is far from over as the current prototype does not use PCF (percentage closer filtering), cascade blending (to make the cascade transitions invisible) and I still need to check out the depth ranges I am using to ensure I get the highest quality depth information from each cascade.

Signing Off

Sorry if you where expecting a video, but I am going to wait for some new artwork from Mark before putting something on YouTube as I think it will show off the shadow technique better with brighter more interesting objects.  I have just made a massive backup of my files so far (twice) in a bout of healthy paranoia and I am going to switch to a few emails that need my attention. I was hoping to get the shadow stuff cracked today, and my mission was a success. The lesson learned over the last few days is that as good as cut and paste is, there is no substitute for a piece of paper, a pen and a brain that wants to learn how to do the 'working out'.  Well done brain!

Happy Small Business Week.

Our first AdWords customer was a small business selling live mail-order lobsters. It’s been a long time since then, but a majority of our customers are still small businesses, who play a vital role not only for Google, but for the American economy. More than 60 percent of new jobs each year come from small businesses.



This Small Business Week, we want to celebrate you. We’re grateful to you for everything you do for us and our communities. Whether you fix people’s cars, offer music lessons to aspiring musicians, or make the world’s best homemade ice cream—when you do what you love, our lives get better.

As part of the celebration, we’ll be highlighting some amazing small businesses across the country, so keep an eye on the Google+ Your Business page. And in the meantime, check out some of the Google tools that are designed to help you take care of business.

Happy Small Business Week.

Posted by Lisa Gevelber, VP Marketing, Americas

Our continued commitment to combating child exploitation online

The Internet has been a tremendous force for good—increasing access to information, improving people’s ability to communicate and driving economic growth. But like the physical world, there are dark corners on the web where criminal behavior exists.

In 2011, the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children’s (NCMEC’s) Cybertipline Child Victim Identification Program reviewed 17.3 million images and videos of suspected child sexual abuse. This is four times more than what their Exploited Children's Division (ECD) saw in 2007. And the number is still growing. Behind these images are real, vulnerable kids who are sexually victimized and victimized further through the distribution of their images.

It is critical that we take action as a community—as concerned parents, guardians, teachers and companies—to help combat this problem.

Child sexual exploitation is a global problem that needs a global solution. More than half of the images and videos sent to NCMEC for analysis are found to have been uploaded to U.S. servers from outside the country. With this in mind, we need to sustain and encourage borderless communication between organizations fighting this problem on the ground. For example, NCMEC’s CyberTipline is able to refer reports regarding online child sexual exploitation to 66 countries, helping local law enforcement agencies effectively execute their investigations.

Google has been working on fighting child exploitation since as early as 2006 when we joined the Technology Coalition, teaming up with other tech industry companies to develop technical solutions. Since then, we’ve been providing software and hardware to helping organizations all around the world to fight child abuse images on the web and help locate missing children.

There is much more that can be done, and Google is taking our commitment another step further through a $5 million effort to eradicate child abuse imagery online. Part of this commitment will go to global child protection partners like the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children and the Internet Watch Foundation. We’re providing additional support to similar heroic organizations in the U.S., Canada, Europe, Australia and Latin America.

Since 2008, we’ve used “hashing” technology to tag known child sexual abuse images, allowing us to identify duplicate images which may exist elsewhere. Each offending image in effect gets a unique ID that our computers can recognize without humans having to view them again. Recently, we’ve started working to incorporate encrypted “fingerprints” of child sexual abuse images into a cross-industry database. This will enable companies, law enforcement and charities to better collaborate on detecting and removing these images, and to take action against the criminals. Today we’ve also announced a $2 million Child Protection Technology Fund to encourage the development of ever more effective tools.

We’re in the business of making information widely available, but there’s certain “information” that should never be created or found. We can do a lot to ensure it’s not available online—and that when people try to share this disgusting content they are caught and prosecuted.

Update June 17: Clarified language around NCMEC's Child Victim Identification Program and CyberTipline.

Posted by Jacquelline Fuller, Director, Google Giving