Google and Brazil celebrate Carnival 2013

Ask any person who’s never traveled to Brazil what he knows about the country and it’s likely that one of their first responses is: Carnival (or Carnaval in Portuguese). It's no wonder: Carnival is one of the largest celebrations on the planet. As a Brazilian, I can also say that it represents much of what’s wonderful about our country—joy, cultural richness and musical diversity.

From Feb 7-12, YouTube will bring Carnival to the world for the third year in a row—giving you a front-row seat to the entire celebration on the YouTube Carnival channel.

The best Carnival is the one you choose, anytime, anywhere
What better way to experience a party the size of Brazil than by connecting to the rhythms and local traditions of six different cities—from Rio de Janeiro’s samba and Salvador’s axé to southern Brazil’s frevo. This year, you’ll be able to enjoy the festivities of Salvador, Rio de Janeiro, Olinda, São Luís do Maranhão, Ouro Preto and Pirenópolis.

Pick from a series of live feeds, camera angles and performances from the city of your choice, right in the middle of the party. Channel feeds are made possible by a combination of YouTube Live and Google+ Hangouts. In total, you can access a total of 150 hours of live Carnival feeds—from your laptop, tablet or smartphone.

Here’s a little more detail on some of the celebrations:

• YouTube from Rio de Janeiro—From Feb 8-12, you can dance as much samba as you want, as you watch the attractions of the Circo Voador concert hall or check out the calmer celebrations of Terreirão do Samba, a venue that receives various samba musicians and afternoon concert sessions throughout the year.
• YouTube from Salvador de Bahia—For the third year in a row, you’ll be able to check out the best of Salvador’s famed Carnival route, Barra-Ondina. However this time, you’ll be able to choose from four different camera feeds located throughout the Carnival route, so you don’t miss your favorite carnival band. Follow Salvador’s most famous carnival artists such as Claudia Leitte, Chiclete com Banana, Asa de Águia, Ivete Sangalo and others as their mobile stages advance through the circuit.

Google+ joins the party
Everyone knows that a good party generates great photos. That’s why we’ve also joined with photographers who will be uploading pictures daily of Carnaval’s best moments from 20 different Brazilian cities at Google+ Carnaval.

Find the entire agenda of this year’s Carnival events at www.youtube.com/carnaval. To keep track of your favorite events and the artists you want to see, download the Carnaval 2013 extension from the Chrome Web Store, and make sure not to miss a beat.

Posted by Lauren Pachaly, Consumer Marketing Manager, Google Brazil

Tour Brazil and prehispanic Mexican cities with more Street View imagery in Google Maps

Our ongoing effort to build great maps—ones that are accurate, easy to navigate and cover every corner of the world—continues to progress. Over the last few months, Google Maps has taken people everywhere from the Amazon to Antarctica, and we’re continuing to add imagery of even more places around globe. Beginning this week, you can dive even deeper into Latin America with new Street View imagery of Brazil and Mexico.

Street View first became available for Brazil in 2010, and as of this week, we’ve grown our collection of panoramic imagery to more than 70 cities throughout the country. You’ll now find colonial cities like Fortaleza, architecturally compelling cities like Brasilia and coastal landmarks like Recife, Natal and Salvador. You can even virtually travel to the west side of Brazil and visit Foz de Iguaçu, or if you’re planning an upcoming trip, preview the the area around your hotel as well as nearby shopping malls, historic monuments, restaurants and more. With so many upcoming events, like the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics, we’re excited to share the riches of Brazil’s cities not only with tourists from around the world, but also with locals who might want to visit a city, neighborhood or landmark they’ve not yet experienced.

Street View imagery of Brazil available before mid-August 2012

Street View imagery of Brazil available beginning mid-August 2012

We’ve also introduced Street View imagery of 30 Mesoamerican archaeological sites in Mexico. Start your adventure by exploring Kukulkan’s Temple, a 1,100-year-old pyramid whose peak is reached by climbing 365 steps, one for each day of the year. When visitors clap their hands, the architectural acoustics at the base of the pyramid’s steps are designed to mimic the sound of the Quetzal, a bird that the Mayans regard as representative of their gods.




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Chichén Itzá, Mexico

Find hundreds of magical stories like this one by visiting the colossal pyramids of Teotihuacan, emblematic sites for the Mayans such as Chichen Itza or seaside archaeological jewels like Tulum. These and other famous sites from around the world can be seen in our Street View Gallery.

We’re always improving the comprehensiveness of our maps so you can experience more imagery from around the world. Whether you’re planning a visit to one of these areas or touring these locations from the comfort of your armchair, we hope you enjoy these captivating new images of Latin America.

Posted by Ricardo Blanco, Communications Manager for Google in Latin America

The Surui Cultural Map

This week we're at Rio+20, the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development. We're sharing a series of posts about our activities at the conference on the Green Blog; in this cross-post we've gone into more detail about one announcement taking place there. -Ed.

This week at the Rio+20 conference, the Surui tribe of the Brazilian Amazon are launching their Surui Cultural Map on Google Earth. This represents the culmination of a unique five-year collaboration between the Surui people and Google, which began in June 2007 when Chief Almir Surui first visited Google and proposed a partnership. The story of that visit, and the remarkable project that followed, are told in a new short documentary also launching here at Rio+20: “Trading Bows and Arrows for Laptops: Carbon and Culture.”



Training the Surui youth as mapmakers
Over three visits to the Surui territory between 2008 and last month, our Google Earth Outreach team taught Surui youth how to take photos and videos and to collect stories from their elders (such as from the time before first contact with the modern world). Then they learned how to upload these to the Google cloud using tools like Picasa, Docs, and YouTube. From there we used Spreadsheet Mapper 3 to bind it all together to create a Google Earth KML of their map, which contains almost 300 sites.

Map highlights
Through this project, my team has learned that maps are an expression of culture. Mapmakers refer to the “atomic element” of a map as a point of interest, or POI. The Surui mapmakers created POIs that reflect their traditional culture’s close interdependency with their forest home. So instead of hotels and gas stations, on the Surui map you’ll find the locations of parrots and toucans, or the three kinds of trees necessary to make their bows and arrows. You’ll learn where to find the Acai trees (which provide delicious fruit as well as the thatch for their maloca longhouses), the locations of good hunting grounds for the porcao (wild pig), and where the jaguar roam (jaguars have particular spiritual significance to the Surui people and figure in their creation myth). There are also sites and stories of historical battles with other tribes and with the white settlers who started arriving after “first contact” in 1969. Here’s an example POI for the Jenipapo tree:

The text reads: “Jenipapo fruit is produced by the jenipapo tree, which reaches twenty feet high. From the meaty part of the green fruit, an ink is extracted with which human skin can be painted. This makes the fruit very important for the Surui, because the art of painting is always included in everything that they do, especially in celebrations and rituals. The art of painting is one of the things most valued by Paiter. Each occasion calls for a different type of painting.”

Here’s a rich storytelling tour of the Surui Cultural Map, narrated by Chief Almir and the Surui youth who were the star mapmakers:



As Chief Almir says at the conclusion of the Surui people’s Google Earth tour:

Without the forest, our entire culture would disappear. And without our culture, the forest would have disappeared a long time ago. It’s important to live in a sustainable way and to strengthen those whose livelihoods directly depend on a healthy ecosystem. We have a 50-year sustainability plan, which includes solutions for our territory. An example is the Surui Carbon Project, which uses technology to monitor the carbon stock of forest and trade it in the market for carbon credits. Our hope is that we can come together virtually and in person, and that we can find and implement solutions together.

It’s been a great honor for us to work with the Surui people and to experience their world view, especially to see how they blend their traditional knowledge and culture with modern technology. We’ve learned from Chief Almir that partnerships, consensus and collaboration are central; in that spirit, we’d like to thank our partners on this project: ECAM, Kanindé and Brazilian filmmaker Denise Zmekhol, who has documented the life of the Surui people for more than twenty years.

You can watch a video of the  tour or download it in English or Portuguese. To learn more about the Surui tribe, known as “Paiter Surui,” please visit www.paiter.org.

Posted by Rebecca Moore, Manager, Google Earth Outreach and Google Earth Engine

(Cross-posted from the Green Blog)