I/O 2012: Innovation for Agencies

Google I/O 2012, held last month in San Francisco, was a veritable smorgasbord of innovation – from Chrome’s iOS debut to the unveiling of the Nexus 7, from the launch of Google+ Events to our most ambitious product demo yet, our annual developers’ conference wowed its 5,500 attendees with over 130 technical sessions, 20 code labs, and 155 Sandbox partners. This year, we were also pleased to introduce I/O Live, which brought each day’s events and announcements directly to our agency partners via live streaming, along with exclusive online content such as backstage interviews, product demos, some easter egg surprises, and a live blog on +Creative Sandbox with Christian Haas, Executive Director at Goodby, Silverstein & Partners.



AdWeek’s Tim Peterson recently sat down with Torrence Boone, Managing Director of Agency Business Development – Americas, to understand how a developers’ conference can hold as much significance for agencies as it does for tech enthusiasts. Long a passionate advocate of integrating digital platforms into the agency landscape, Torrence explains:

On agencies, digital, and Google platforms:

We believe that we’re creating this amazing toolkit, or palette, for agencies to do really fantastic things. And we have also seen agencies become a lot more technologically oriented, and they are investing in technology-driven approaches to the way that they’re developing campaigns.


On collaborating with agency partners:

We absolutely spend a lot of time with agencies in soliciting their input and perspective on existing products and on our product road map…They bring fantastic insights at scale because they’re working across various industries and they’re confronting different marketing problems on a day-to-day basis, so we actively solicit their perspective. Their feedback is a powerful source for us in driving the innovation engine that we have going at Google.


On the introduction of I/O Live:

The time felt ripe…to really elevate the new things that we’re introducing because, again, they enable this amazing opportunity to create new experiences and highlight for them that it’s not just about developers; that Google, even though fundamentally we’re a technology company, our desire is to allow agencies in partnership with their clients to create beautiful, seamless, immersive experiences that connect brands to consumers. Particularly given the nature of the announcements this year, it felt particularly important to amp up the visibility of the conference with our agency partners and get them in the mindset of thinking of Google I/O as a way for them to stay on the cutting edge and make sure they’re constantly pushing the envelope with what they’re doing for their clients.

Check out the full interview to learn more about how agencies are leveraging Google platforms, and what we’re doing to help take that innovation to the next level!



Posted by Kelly Duane, Americas Agency Team

Map data updates for parts of Europe, Africa, and Asia

More maps!



As part of Google's mission to provide the most complete and authoritative maps to everyone, we’re excited to announce upgraded maps for Croatia, the Czech Republic, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Lesotho, Macau, Portugal, San Marino, Singapore, and the Vatican City.



Today’s update follows previous updates in North America, Europe, and Australasia, and is part of an ongoing project we call Ground Truth: in which we source data from regional partners, supplement the data with satellite and Street View imagery, and apply a mix of algorithms and human judgement to produce a consistent and reliable geographic dataset which we can update quickly and corresponds as closely as possible to, well, the truth on the ground. In this case you’ll find our maps now include more precise area boundaries, greater coverage of road networks, and more comprehensive local points of interest. To capture and quickly fix errors reported by our users, we’ve also enabled the Report a Problem tool for these countries.



What does this mean for you, our 800,000 developers? For most of you, these updates will simply roll out over the next 24 hours and your Maps API applications will automatically display the latest imagery; however, for those developers who have cached results from any of our Maps API Web Services, please refresh your cache as soon as possible to ensure your results include the latest information.



As always, if you have any questions or concerns, please post them to our Google Maps API forums and we’ll be happy to respond.



Posted by Arthur Patterson, Software Engineer, Google Maps

Protecting yourself and others in YouTube videos

[Cross-posted from the Google Public Policy Blog]



YouTube is proud to be a place where citizens and activists come to tell their stories -- stories that may otherwise go unnoticed. A study released this week by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism found that YouTube is a top destination for news and that “citizens play a substantial role in supplying and producing footage.”



But this level of exposure can be risky to the citizens shooting the footage and the people who appear in their videos.



Today, we announced a new face blurring tool that represents a first step toward providing visual anonymity in video.



Of course, anonymity is never a guarantee, and people who capture sensitive video footage should consider taking other precautions to keep themselves and their subjects safe. Here are three suggestions:




1. Assess your risk. You and the people you film may face risk by posting video online. You may risk your own safety and that of your subjects while filming sensitive footage, during the editing process, and when you distribute your film online. After assessing the vulnerability you and your subjects face, you can make more informed decisions about when to film, whether to distribute your footage, and how widely you want to share it.



2. Consider other information which may give away identity. Video footage of your face is not the only way someone can detect your identity. Other factors that may be caught on video can also identify you or your subjects. Watch out for vocal identifiers, like recognizable voices or saying someone’s name on camera. Other footage can give away identity like a license plate, a name tag, or even the background scenery. Make sure that the imagery in your videos does not give away information about your location or identity.



3. Protect yourself when uploading. Consider, for example, local laws that may allow authorities to track the mobile device from which you upload. In certain countries, merely purchasing a sim card puts users at risk of tracking by government.



Over the past seven years, YouTube has evolved into a destination for citizen reporting. Along with curating projects like the Human Rights Channel and CitizenTube, we hope that the new technologies we’re rolling out will facilitate the sharing of even more stories on our platform.



Posted by Victoria Grand, Director, Global Communications and Policy, YouTube

Let Us Know How To Make Social More Useful For You

Google Analytics users are a digitally savvy bunch. As such we’re lucky to have a passionate community of marketers, analysts and developers that follow us across social platforms. Thousands of you read our blog posts, Tweets, and Google+ updates daily and we always use engagement data to refine what we share (and how we share it).

However, in social numbers are best paired with qualitative feedback and understanding more about who you, our most passionate users are. That’s why for the first time we’re taking feedback directly from you on how we can make our social participation even more useful.

Want more tips? More trends and opinion pieces? Video guides? Let us know and we’ll try and fulfill it. 

As a thank you for your time, we’ll be shipping 50 random respondents who complete the entire survey Google Analytics t-shirts. 

Posted by Adam Singer, Google Analytics Team




Update: this survey is now closed and we've removed the link -- thanks everyone for your feedback! We'll be using your ideas to improve how we participate in social.

Customize your posts with permalinks

Earlier this year we introduced a suite of new SEO features that help ensure your blog, posts, and images are accurately indexed so they appear correctly in search results. Today we’re happy to introduce another feature that enables you to more effectively customize your search preferences - custom permalinks.

When you write a post, Blogger automatically generates a permalink based on the title of the post. Until now, blog authors have had no control of the permalink. Custom permalinks give you more control of your blog and posts. These new custom links also provide readers with more information about your post when scanning search results.

If you prefer to use a custom permalink, you can do so via the “Permalink” option in the Post Settings box. 

To create your own URL for a specific post, simply select “Custom URL”, and enter your new URL in the field below. If you wrote the post in June of 2012, your new URL will look like this:

www.nameofblog.blogspot.com/2012/06/customURL.html

The bolded area is the portion of the URL that is customizable.

If the custom permalink you entered already exists, Blogger will attempt find a free one for you.

At present, the characters allowed in a custom URL are limited to: a-z, A-Z, 0-1. The only special characters available are underscore, dash, and period.

Click here to read more about custom permalinks in the Blogger Help Center.

Happy blogging!

Develop in the cloud with eXo’s Cloud IDE

Today’s post comes from Mark Downey of eXo, creator of Cloud IDE. Cloud IDE is an online IDE for Java, Python, PHP, Ruby or Javascript, and for nearly two years it has been used by developers to build applications for a number of PaaS environments. They recently added support for deploying code to Google App Engine.



Since eXo started the Cloud IDE project back in 2010, our objective has been to make developers more productive in building and deploying cloud-based apps. We’ve made it easy to import, build and debug code from Github and to deploy it to a PaaS. We have tried to make the development workflow as painless as possible by providing a smooth integration with popular Cloud services from source control to application hosting, and now we’re bringing that integration to the Google App Engine world.


Developers can now use Cloud IDE to build, debug and deploy App Engine apps without having to install and configure the App Engine SDK or any traditional desktop IDE. Everything happens right in the browser.



It’s easy to get started. Once you have a Cloud IDE account, start a new project and select a Google App Engine app (Java or Python) as the project type. Confirm that you want to deploy to Google App Engine, and you will then be asked to create an app with your App Engine account.

This opens the App Engine admin console in a new browser tab, where you get to choose your app ID (which will define the URL of your application). Upon completion, a callback in the URL automatically updates your appengine-web.xml with your app ID, inside Cloud IDE. 




That’s it! From there, just click deploy and enter your credentials to build and deploy your app on Google App Engine.

In Java, you can use auto-completion (alt+space) and have access to all the Google App Engine libraries. Many keyboard shortcuts are also available to help you develop efficiently (Help > Show Keyboard Shortcuts).


To run and debug your app on a development server, press Debug in the Run menu, and set your breakpoints. Your app will run in another browser tab and you’ll be able to inspect variables at runtime.

To re-deploy, just go to the App Engine menu in Project > PaaS > Google App Engine, and click Update Application.

The Google App Engine menu also enables you to view and update your App Engine services such as Indexes, PageSpeed, Queues, DoS, Resource Limits, Crons or Backends.

With eXo Cloud IDE, you can run, debug and deploy App Engine apps without having to install and configure the App Engine SDK or the Google Plugin for Eclipse (or, for that matter, Eclipse itself). Because everything related to your development activities is taking place on the Cloud IDE servers, your initial setup time is dramatically reduced. In a couple minutes you can be focusing on the things that matter most: coding and refining the app itself.  



- Contributed by Mark Downey, product manager for eXo Cloud Services @marksdowney

Moving Google Analytics Forward - Retiring The Old Version

After a year of supporting both the old and new versions of Analytics, we are now fully transitioning and leaving the old version behind. This means that as of tomorrow we’ll be removing the link to the previous version which sits at the bottom of Google Analytics pages and all your analysis will take place in the new version.



It’s been a long journey to this point, and we hope you’ll find value in all of the features that the new version of Google Analytics offers. And our help center is a great resource to be sure you’re getting the most out of these new features and reports. The new version has been completely rebuilt on a more powerful platform that lets us move faster and develop more amazing features including these recent launches:

• Real-Time shows you what’s happening on your site as it happens. Immediately see the impact that online campaigns, TV ads, or mentions at a live event can have on engagement with your website.

• Multi-Channel Funnels provides insight on the full path to conversion over a 30 day period. The variety of marketing channels used to find your website, and not simply the last click, so you can make better decisions on your marketing investments.

• Social Reports help you measure the impact of your social marketing initiatives and evaluate the effect social media has on the metrics which matter to your business.

• Mobile Reports show how visitors from mobile devices and AdWords mobile campaigns engage with your website. See how many pages they visit, how much time they spend, as well as conversion and ecommerce insights to help you optimize your mobile strategies.

• Content Experiments enables you to show different versions of a page to different visitors, then using a new advanced statistical engine measures the results of each to determine which is the most effective version.

We have received some really great feedback over the last year on what’s working and what’s not; we’ve been listening very closely and doing our best to incorporate the feedback and ideas.  We are continually working to improve upon Google Analytics and help provide you with tools to make better decisions for your website and marketing programs, so please keep providing the feedback.  You are our most important source of ideas for innovation!



Posted by Paul Muret, Director of Engineering, Google Analytics