The self-driving car logs more miles on new wheels

Technology is at its best when it makes people’s lives better, and that’s precisely what we’re going for with our self-driving car project. We’re using advanced computer science to try and make driving safer and more enjoyable.

Our vehicles, of which about a dozen are on the road at any given time, have now completed more than 300,000 miles of testing. They’ve covered a wide range of traffic conditions, and there hasn’t been a single accident under computer control.

We’re encouraged by this progress, but there’s still a long road ahead. To provide the best experience we can, we’ll need to master snow-covered roadways, interpret temporary construction signals and handle other tricky situations that many drivers encounter. As a next step, members of the self-driving car team will soon start using the cars solo (rather than in pairs), for things like commuting to work. This is an important milestone, as it brings this technology one step closer to every commuter. One day we hope this capability will enable people to be more productive in their cars. For now, our team members will remain in the driver’s seats and will take back control if needed.

And while these team members are commuting, many of them will be testing our algorithms on a new type of vehicle we’ve added to the self-driving car family over the past few months to help us refine our systems in different environments and on different terrain: the Lexus RX450h.

With each breakthrough we feel more optimistic about delivering this technology to people and dramatically improving their driving experience. We’ll see you on the road!

Posted by Chris Urmson, Engineering Lead

The tree versus the shadow

Character is like a tree and reputation like its shadow. The shadow is what we think of it; the tree is the real thing. —Abraham Lincoln

When I was looking for investors for my startup in 1997, I was a lot more interested in the values and character of my potential investors than in the name of the firm on the door. My first investors were not from Sand Hill Road or Palo Alto, but were people I knew would support my company (and me) in the ways we most needed help.

As an entrepreneur, you want to know if your investors will be there for you, help you do the right things, and encourage you to persist and evolve when things seem dark. Perhaps most of all, you want to know they’ve been there before, and that they’ll be calm and confident when things go wrong—when giving up sounds like a pretty good option.

At Google Ventures, we try to be the kind of hands-on investors that quietly help to build companies. We try to be the kind of investors we sought as entrepreneurs ourselves. Starting a company can be a lonely business, and it helps to know you’ve got someone on your side who has been through it before.

Today, we're launching a new Google Ventures blog as an experiment, hoping it will help you get to know the people and companies at Google Ventures a little better. We’ll share how we think about things and why, if you’re an entrepreneur, you might want to talk to Joe, Rich, Kevin and the rest of the team.

Posted by Bill Maris, Managing Partner, Google Ventures

(Cross-posted from the Google Ventures Blog)

A new way to visualize the global arms trade

Did you know that 60 percent of all violent deaths are due to small arms and light weapons? Small arms, such as revolvers, assault rifles and light machine guns, and ammunition represent a multi-billion dollar industry, and three quarters of the world’s small arms lie in the hand of civilians—more than 650 million civilian arms. As part of the Google Ideas initiative on illicit networks, we’ve created an interactive data visualization of global small arms and ammunition trading to better understand and map the global arms trade.

The tool was produced by Google’s Creative Lab team in collaboration with the Igarape Institute. More than 1 million data points on imports and exports of small arms, light weapons and ammunition between 1992 and 2010 and across 250 states and territories across the world were provided by the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) small arms database. The visualization reveals patterns and trends in imports and exports of arms and ammunition across the world, making it easy to explore how they relate to conflicts worldwide. More of the implications of this data are discussed in this video from the INFO summit hosted by Google Ideas last month:



You can explore these data points by zooming in and out of the globe, clicking on any country to readjust the view, and using the histogram tool at the bottom to see trading patterns over the years. You can see, for example, that the scale of the global trade in ammunition rivals the scale of trade in actual weapons, an insight underexplored by policymakers today in conflict prevention and resolution.

We built this visualization using the open source WebGL Globe on Google’s Chrome Experiments site; since it is open sourced, we hope to see others use the globe as a platform for bringing other complex datasets to life.

Update 8/16/12: This post has been updated to reflect more accurate numbers.

Posted by Scott Carpenter, Deputy Director, Google Ideas

Giving you a better Google

We work every day to create a more seamless, beautiful user experience—to give you a better, easier-to-use Google. This means continuously improving the products we offer, and recognizing when users of one product might have a better experience with another. Over the past year, we’ve made changes to around 50 products, features and services—donating, merging and shutting things down so we can focus on the high-impact products that millions of people use, multiple times a day. Today, we’re announcing a few more changes:

• We introduced Google Apps for Teams in 2008 to allow people with a verified business or school email address to collaborate using non-email applications from Google like Google Docs, Google Calendar and Google Talk. Over time, we realized that Google Apps for Teams was not as useful for people as we originally anticipated. Beginning September 4, 2012, we'll start converting existing Google Apps for Teams accounts into personal Google Accounts, and shutting down Google Apps for Teams. This change does not affect other editions of Google Apps.
• We launched Google Listen through Google Labs in August 2009, to give people a way to discover and listen to podcasts. However, with Google Play, people now have access to a wider variety of podcast apps, so we’ve discontinued Listen. People who have already installed the app can still use it, but after November 1, podcast search won’t function. You can access your podcast subscriptions in Google Reader in the “Listen Subscriptions” folder and download them from the Import/Export tab.
• Google Video for Business is a video hosting and sharing solution that allowed Google Apps for Business and Google Apps for Education customers to use video for internal communication. Starting this fall, we’ll migrate all videos hosted on Google Video for Business over to Google Drive, which has similar storage and sharing capabilities. All migrated videos will be stored for free and will not count against a user’s Google Drive storage quota.
• Finally, Google maintains 150+ blogs and other communications channels about our products and services, and so over time we'll also be closing a number of Google-created blogs that are either updated infrequently, or are redundant with other blogs. This doesn't mean that we'll be sharing any less information—we'll just be posting our updates on our more popular channels.

Technology has the power to change people’s lives. But to make a difference, we need to carefully consider what to focus on, and make hard decisions about what we won’t pursue. This enables us to devote more time and resources giving you products you love, and making them better for you.

Posted by Max Ibel, Director of Engineering

Our roots go global: Apply for a RISE Award today

The application for the 2013 Google RISE (Roots in Science and Engineering) Awards is now open. Given once a year, Google RISE Awards are designed to promote and support education initiatives in two key areas: Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics (STEM) and Computer Science (CS). Google grants awards of $5,000 - $25,000 USD to organizations around the world working with K-12 and university students in these fields.

This year, our community welcomed more than two dozen organizations from around the world, from Denmark to Uganda and California to Romania. The RISE grants have helped these groups to scale their reach by allowing for more scholarship recipients, to deepen their impact by providing hands on robotics kits, and to ultimately inspire their students by creating a community for CS outreach.

Now, the RISE Awards have expanded to include applicants from Latin America and the Asia Pacific region, bringing our total to six continents and 243 countries. All eligible nations are listed on our website.

The growth of technology is undoubtable, and the impact technology will have on our future is equally undeniable. We believe it’s our duty to support students who have the uncanny ability not only to consume technology, but also to create it. We believe that inspiring the next generation of computer scientists will enrich the lives of not only individual students, but also the communities and countries they live in.

Show us what you can do to get students excited about STEM and CS! Submit your application by September 30, 2012. Awardees will be announced by January 2013.

Posted by Roxana Shirkhoda, K-12 Education Outreach Specialist

Celebrate the Kennedy Space Center’s 50th birthday with Street View

For fifty years, NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida has been the launch point for a generation of space technology and exploration. Countless enthusiasts (including this one) grew up longing to see a space shuttle up close and walk in the paths of astronauts. Today, a collaboration between NASA and Street View is enabling people around the world to take a trip to the doorway to outer space, and see Kennedy as it transitions into a multipurpose launch complex for the next 50 years of space innovation. This location is our largest special collection of Street View imagery to date, totaling 6,000 panoramic views of the facilities, and expanding our mission to document the world’s most amazing places.

Street View fleet at Kennedy Space Center

Among the images you can now explore online with the click of your mouse are the space shuttle launch pad, Vehicle Assembly Building and Launch Firing Room #4. Gaze down from the top of the enormous launch pad, peer up at the towering ceiling of the Vehicle Assembly Building (taller than the Statue of Liberty) and get up close to one of the space shuttle’s main engines, which is powerful enough to generate 400,000 lbs of thrust. From these vantage points, anyone can live out his or her childhood dream of becoming an astronaut.

Atlantis Orbiter in the Vehicle Assembly Building - View Larger Map

Saturn V rocket on display in the Apollo/Saturn V center - View Larger Map

Even though they recently entered retirement, you can still get an up-close, immersive experience with two of the Space Shuttle Orbiters—the Atlantis and Endeavour —with Street View.

We’d like to thank NASA for making this project possible and giving all of us the chance to digitally walk in the shoes of all of the pioneering astronauts, scientists, engineers and technicians that made our space dreams possible. To explore more of our largest special collection yet, visit our Street View gallery at maps.google.com/nasa.

Posted by Ryan Falor, Product Manager, Google Street View

Google+ Hangouts and the NFL: fantasy football, face-to-face-to-face

The 2012 NFL season is just over a month away, which means one thing for millions of fans around the world: it’s time for fantasy. Fantasy football has been around since the 1960s, and has become a great way to follow your favorite athletes—and stay in touch with the people you care about. This year, alongside the NFL, we're giving fantasy football fans a new way to connect throughout the season: Google+ Hangouts. Here’s how it works in a nutshell:

• From any NFL.com/fantasyfootball page—including the Draft and Game Centers—you can now click a single button to start a hangout with your league
• Later this month, you’ll see a live indicator on NFL.com/fantasyfootball if anyone in your league is already hanging out

Because most fans select their fantasy rosters in real time, and many leagues consist of people from across the globe, we think you'll find that hangouts are a natural extension of your (healthy) obsession. Not only can you connect live with your friends on draft day; you can actually gloat celebrate in person, regardless of where your league members are located. We're also upping the number of hangout participants from 10 to 12 on NFL.com/fantasyfootball, since the standard fantasy league has a dozen players.

Fantasy football hangout (top window), live indicator on NFL.com (right), chat bar on NFL.com (bottom-left)

Fantasy football hangouts don’t stop at the draft, however. Throughout the season you’ll be able to:

• Hang out with your friends to conduct trades, review league business or just chat while watching the game on TV
• Enjoy fantasy hangouts on the go or on the couch using the new Google+ app for phones and tablets (Android, iOS)
• Get advice from top NFL Fantasy commentators as they hang out with fans and discuss the week’s results

The +NFL Network will broadcast weekly highlights from some of these commentator hangouts. And of course, you can always share fantasy articles and tips with your circles—either from the NFL’s site, or their newly-launched Google+ page.

Visit NFL.com/fantasyfootball today to sign up, and to prep for your draft via hangout. If you like football but haven’t yet played fantasy, this year’s a great time to start. After all, hangouts help make fantasy football about more than just the game; they’re a great way to build lasting relationships on any given Sunday (and every day in between).

Posted by Nikhyl Singhal, Google+ Product Director