Tag Archives: Event

Calling European game developers, enter the Indie Games Contest by December 31

Posted by Matteo Vallone, Google Play Partner Development Manager

To build awareness of the awesome innovation and art that indie game developers are bringing to users on Google Play, we have invested heavily over the past year in programs like Indie Corner, as well as events like the Google Play Indie Games Festivals in North America and Korea.

As part of that sustained effort, we also want to celebrate the passion and innovation of indie game developers with the introduction of the first-ever Google Play Indie Games Contest in Europe. The contest will recognize the best indie talent in several countries and offer prizes that will help you get your game noticed by industry experts and gamers worldwide.

Prizes for the finalists and winners:

  • An open showcase held at the Saatchi Gallery in London
  • YouTube influencer campaigns worth up to 100,000 EUR
  • Premium placements on Google Play
  • Tickets to Google I/O 2017 and other top industry events
  • Promotions on our channels
  • Special prizes for the best Unity game
  • And more!

Entering the contest:

If you're based in Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France (coming soon), Germany, Iceland, Israel, Netherlands, Norway, Poland (coming soon), Romania, Spain, Sweden, Turkey, or UK (excl. Northern Ireland), have 15 or less full time employees, and published a new game on Google Play after 1 January 2016, you may now be eligible to enter the contest. If you're planning on publishing a new game soon, you can also enter by submitting a private beta. Check out all the details in the terms and conditions. Submissions close on 31 December 2016.

The process:

Up to 20 finalists will get to showcase their games at an open event at the Saatchi Gallery in London on the 16th February 2017. At the event, the top 10 will be selected by the event attendees and the Google Play team. The top 10 will then get the opportunity to pitch to a jury of industry experts, from which the final winner and runners up will be selected.

Even if someone is NOT entering the contest:

Even if you're not eligible to enter the contest, you can still register to attend the final showcase event in London on 16 February 2017, check out some great indie games, and have fun with various industry experts and indie developers. We will also be hosting a workshop for all indie games developers from across EMEA in the new Google office in Kings Cross the next day, so this will be a packed week.

Get started:

Enter the Indie Games Contest now and visit the contest site to find out more about the contest, the event, and the workshop.

Dart Developer Summit 2016 Videos: Soundness, AngularDart 2.0, and the Fastest Growing Language at Google

Posted by Filip Hracek, Program Manager, Dart
Videos from last month’s Dart Developer Summit are up on YouTube and we thought we’d cherry-pick the highlights for you. The summit keynote is a summary of all the major news and of the direction the team is taking now. It’s where we announced that Dart is the fastest growing language at Google. Teams switching to Dart report up to twice the productivity and development speed of what they had previously.

Next, AngularDart 2.0 was launched in a presentation by Ferhat Buyukkokten and Matan Lurey. They showed how they made the framework’s output 40% smaller and 15% faster in the 4 months since AngularDart got its own dedicated team. They also showed our 60 fps table using setState(), and the new testing framework called NgTestBed.
Later in the day, Ted Sander launched AngularDart Components — the material design widgets Google is using in customer-facing apps like AdWords and AdSense. Hundreds of Google engineers work with these components every day. Watch the video to learn how they make our teams more productive, and our web apps more performant.
If you’re interested  in language design, watch Sound Dart, a talk by Leaf Petersen in which he explains Dart’s strong mode. With strong mode, Dart’s type system becomes sound, so that when you write types they are guaranteed to be correct (while still allowing you to write dynamically typed code where you want the flexibility). This differentiates strong-mode Dart from many popular compile-to-JavaScript languages, and improves both performance and developer productivity.

Another presentation that made waves was the Flutter keynote from Day 2 of the summit. Eric Seidel impressed the audience by showing just how fast mobile development can be with Flutter.

After Eric’s talk, John McCutchan and Todd Turnidge went into details about Flutter hot reloading. They also showed, for the first time, code rewind in Dart.

These are just 6 out of the 18 talks that are available on YouTube. For example, Will Ekiel’s talk titled Learnings from building a CRM app at Google gives a perspective on managing a product built with Dart and deploying it across both web and mobile. Another interesting practical presentation on using Dart in production is the one given by Faisal Abid and Kevin Birch about their large-scale JS-to-AngularDart rewrite. And the list goes on. We’re very happy how the event went, and we’re already looking forward for next year’s summit. In the meantime, follow our blog, our Twitter account, our G+ page, or join the conversation in any other way. We want to hear from you. Thanks for building in Dart.

Chrome Dev Summit 2016: The Mobile Web Moves Forward

Originally posted on Chromium Blog
Posted by Darin Fisher, VP Engineering, Chrome
Last week at the 4th annual Chrome Dev Summit, we were excited to share a glimpse of what’s possible with over 1,000 developers in person, and thousands more on the livestream. Each year this is a time to hear what developers have been building, share our vision for the future of the web platform, and celebrate what we love about the web...


Reach of the web
As we've talked about before, one of the superpowers of the web is its incredible reach. There are now more than two billion active Chrome browsers worldwide, with many more web users across other browsers. The majority of these users are now on mobile devices, bringing new opportunities for us to explore as an industry.

Mobile browsers also lead the way for the internet’s newest users. Exclusively accessing the internet from mobile devices, users in emerging markets struggle with limited computing power, unreliable networks, and expensive data. For these users, native apps can be a poor match due to their large data and storage requirements. And, it’s these constraints that have resulted in the developing markets leading the charge when it comes to innovating on the web.

Progressive

Instead, the web can fill these needs for all users through an experience we've been calling Progressive Web Apps (PWAs). These web apps provide the performance users have come to expect from their device, while also offering critical capabilities such as offlining, add-to-homescreen, and push notifications. We've been encouraged by the strong adoption of these capabilities, with push notifications recently exceeding 18 billion notifications per day across 50,000 domains.


Last year when we spoke about PWAs, things were just getting started. Now we're seeing the movement in full swing, with many large sites across the globe launching great new apps and feeling the success that PWAs can bring.

DAY 1 - THAO LOGOS.png

Alibaba.com, built a PWA and saw a 76% increase in conversion rates across browsers. The investment in the mobile web increased monthly active user rates on iOS by 14 percent. On Android devices where re-engagement capabilities like push notifications and Add to Homescreen were enabled, active user rates increased by 30 percent.


Another great example is The Weather Channel. Since launching a PWA they achieved an 80% reduction in load time and within three months, saw almost 1 million users opt in to receive web push notifications.


During the Summit, we also heard from Lyft, who shared their experience of building a PWA in less than a month, and using less than a quarter of the engineering support needed to build their native app. Learn more about our how partners are using PWA technologies to enhance their mobile web experience.


What can you do?
We also have a variety of tools, libraries, and APIs available to help you bring the benefits of PWAs to your site. For example, Chrome's DevTools provides assistance along every step of the development flow. DevTools has a ton of new features to help you build great mobile apps, such as network simulation, CPU throttling, and a PWA audit tool powered by Lighthouse.


For developers just beginning their web app or looking to rework an existing one, the Polymer App Toolbox provides a set of components and tools for easily building a Progressive Web App using web components. And Polymer 2.0 is right around the corner, making it easy to take advantage of the new Web Components v1 APIs shipping cross-browser and build mobile web apps with minimal overhead.


Finally, checkout can be a complicated process to complete and in the retail sector alone there are 66% fewer conversions on mobile than on desktop. With PaymentRequest, you can now bring a seamless checkout experience to your website with support for both credit cards and Android Pay, increasing odds for conversion.


Catch up
Finally, if you didn’t catch our live stream in real time, you can always check back on our YouTube channel for all the recordings or see the highlights from the event in 57 seconds.


Thanks for coming, thanks for watching, and most of all, thank you for developing for the web!

Chrome Dev Summit. Now Live Streaming

Posted by Paul Kinlan, Chrome Developer Relations

Good morning! Only one minute to go until Darin Fisher, VP of Chrome kick's off this year's keynote at Chrome Dev Summit 2016. Join us as we take a look at the latest web advancements with over 20 sessions presented by Chrome engineers. We're live streaming all sessions and posting videos throughout the next two days.

Get Ready for the Chrome Dev Summit 2016

Posted by Paul Kinlan, Chrome Developer Relations

Chrome Dev Summit is almost here! We'll kick off live from San Francisco at the SFJAZZ Center, at 10:00 AM PT this coming Thursday, Nov 10th. This year's summit will focus on key themes that matter to you: Progressive, to build high quality web apps; Performance, to increase user engagement; and What's Next, a look at how the Chrome team is thinking about the future of the web.

While we're putting the finishing touches on the keynote, sessions, and code labs, we wanted to provide you with some tips to get ready to experience Chrome Dev Summit, either in-person or via the livestream.

Navigate the summit with notifications

To get the most out of Chrome Dev Summit, make sure to check out the schedule and set up notificationsfor the sessions you don't want to miss. These will help you plan your schedule whether you're in person or tuning in via the livestream.

Can't join us in person?

Don't worry, we've got you covered! Here are some ways you can connect with Chrome Dev Summit in real-time:

  • Tune in to the livestream at any time throughout the 2 day summit on developer.chrome.com/devsummit. We will stream the keynote and all sessions over the course of the event. If you want us to send you a reminder to tune into the livestream, sign up here.
  • Subscribeto the Chrome Developers YouTube Channel to stay up to date as we'll be publishing all of the talks from the event.
  • Join the conversation and send us your web questions on Twitter that include the #ChromeDevSummit hashtag or join our Slack by signing up here and a team of onsite Googlers will do their best to track down an answer in real time for you.

We're looking forward to having you with us you for 2 days of web fun, soon!

Don't forget to join the social conversation at #ChromeDevSummit.

Live from the Firebase Dev Summit in Berlin: Firebase, six months after I/O

Posted by Francis Ma, Firebase Product Manager

Originally posted to the Firebase blog

Our goal with Firebase is to help developers build better apps and grow them into successful businesses. Six months ago at Google I/O, we took our well-loved backend-as-a-service (BaaS) and expanded it to 15 features to make it Google’s unified app development platform, available across iOS, Android, and the web.

We launched many new features at Google I/O, but our work didn’t stop there. Since then, we’ve learned a lot from you (750,000+ projects created on Firebase to date!) about how you’re using our platform and how we can improve it. Thanks to your feedback, today we’re launching a number of enhancements to Crash Reporting, Analytics, support for game developers and more. For more information on our announcements, tune in to the livestream video from Firebase Dev Summit in Berlin. They’re also listed here:

Improve App Quality to Deliver Better User Experiences

Firebase Crash Reporting comes out of Beta and adds a new feature that helps you diagnose and reproduce app crashes.

Often the hardest part about fixing an issue is reproducing it, so we’ve added rich context to each crash to make the process simple. Firebase Crash Reporting now shows Firebase Analytics event data in the logs for each crash. This gives you clarity into the state of your app leading up to an error. Things like which screens of your app were visited are automatically logged with no instrumentation code required. Crash logs will also display any custom events and parameters you explicitly log using Firebase Analytics. Firebase Crash Reporting works for both iOS and Android apps.

Glide, a popular live video messaging app, relies on Firebase Crash Reporting to ensure user quality and release agility. “No matter how much effort you put into testing, it will never be as thorough as millions of active users in different locations, experiencing a variety of network conditions and real life situations. Firebase allows us to rapidly gain trust in our new version during phased release, as well as accelerate the process of identifying core issues and providing quick solutions.” - Roi Ginat, Founder, Glide.

Firebase Test Lab for Android supports more devices and introduces a free tier.

We want to help you deliver high-quality experiences, so testing your app before it goes into the wild is incredibly important. Firebase Test Lab allows you to easily test your app on many physical and virtual devices in the cloud, without writing a single line of test code. Beginning today, developers on the Spark service tier (which is free!) can run five tests per day on physical devices and ten tests per day on virtual devices—with no credit card setup required. We’ve also heard that you want more device options, so we’ve added 11 new popular Android device models to Test Lab, available today.

Illustration of Firebase Crash Reporting

Make Faster Data Driven Decisions with Firebase Analytics

Firebase Analytics now offers live reporting, a new integration with Google “Data Studio”, and real-time exporting to BigQuery.

We know that your data is most actionable when you can see and process it as quickly as possible. Therefore, we’re announcing a number of features to help you maximize the potential of your analytics events:

  1. Real-time uploading of conversion events
  2. Real-time exporting to BigQuery
  3. DebugView for validation of your analytics instrumentation
  4. StreamView, which will offer a live, dynamic view of your analytics data as we receive it

To further enhance your targeting options, we’ve improved the connection between Firebase Analytics and other Firebase features, such as Dynamic Links and Remote Config. For example, you can now use Dynamic Links on your Facebook business page, and we can identify Facebook as a source in Firebase Analytics reporting. As well, you can now target Remote Config changes by User Properties, in addition to Audiences.

Build Better Games using Firebase

Firebase now has a Unity plugin!

Game developers are building great apps, and we want Firebase to work for you, too. We’ve built an entirely new plugin for Unity that supports Analytics, the Realtime Database, Authentication, Dynamic Links, Remote Config, Notifications and more. We've also expanded our C++ SDK with Realtime Database support.

Integrate Firebase Even Easier with Open-Sourced UI Library

FirebaseUI is updated to v1.0.

FirebaseUI is a library that provides common UI elements when building apps, and it’s a quick way to integrate with Firebase. FirebaseUI 1.0 includes a drop-in UI flow for Firebase Authentication, with common identity providers such as Google, Facebook, and Twitter. FirebaseUI 1.0 also added features such as client-side joins and intersections for the Realtime Database, plus integrations with Glide and SDWebImage that make downloading and displaying images from Firebase Storage a cinch. Follow our progress or contribute to our Android, iOS, and Web components on Github.

Learn More via Udacity and Join the Firebase Community

We want to provide the best tool for developers, but it’s also important that we give resources and training to help you get more out of the platform. As such, we’ve created a new Udacity course: Firebase in a Weekend! It’s an instructor-led video course to help all developers get up and running with Firebase on iOS and Android, in two days.

Finally, to help wrap your head around all our announcements, we’ve created a new demo app. This is an easy way to see how Analytics, Crash Reporting, Test Lab, Notifications, and Remote Config work in a live environment, without having to write a line of code.

Helping developers build better apps and successful businesses is at the core of Firebase. We work hard on it every day. We love hearing your feedback and ideas for new features and improvements—and we hope you can see from the length of this post that we take them to heart! Follow us on Twitter, join our Slack channel, participate in our Google Group, and let us know what you think. We’re excited to see what you’ll build next!

GCP NEXT 2016: A sneak peak behind the scenes

I recently joined the Google Cloud Platform team, but I’ve never really explained why I was attracted to Google in the first place. Before joining Google I’d been a strong advocate of two key technologies: the Go programing language and Kubernetes. Both just so happen to originate from Google and I’m sure my investment in both technologies helped me land a job here. Like many, I was attracted to Google because of all the inspiring innovations that have helped shape the last decade of computing and have influenced a countless number of open source projects.

I’ve spent several years pouring over Google white papers and stitching together information from across the web trying to stay up to speed, and I’ll tell you it’s pretty time consuming. This year I’ve got a better idea. I’ll be attending GCP NEXT 2016. Why? Because it’s the only conference where you can find complete coverage of Google Cloud Platform technologies and more importantly the people behind them.

Today we’re announcing the GCP NEXT conference program, featuring in-depth technical sessions led by Google and the Google Cloud Platform community— developers, customers and partners. Dive into compute with us for two-full days and come away with a practical expertise in Google Cloud Platform. Sample sessions include:

  • "From idea to market in less than 6 months: Creating a new product with GCP," presented by CI&T — App Developer Track
  • "Painless container management with Google Container Engine & Kubernetes," presented by Brendan Burns & Tim Hockin, Google — Infrastructure & Operations Track
  • "Cloud data warehousing with BigQuery featuring Dropbox Nighthawk," presented by Jordan Tigani, Google & Dropbox — Data & Analytics Track
  • "Security analytics for today's cloud-ready enterprise," presented by Matt O’Connor, Google & PwC — Solutions Showcase

Curated from our Call for Speakers, an internal and external search for the very best content, demos and presenters, NEXT technical tracks cover the most relevant topics in cloud, from machine learning to networking and IOT. They’ll also teach you best practices and how-tos directly from product leaders and developers who have implemented our platform, including speakers from Netflix, Atomic Fiction, FIS Global (Sungard), and many more to be announced.

If you want to know more about Google Cloud Platform, are thinking about moving to the cloud or want to sharpen your skills in compute, don’t miss GCP NEXT. Register today and get our early bird rate (available until February 5th).

To keep up to date on GCP NEXT 2016, follow us on Google+, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

- Posted by Kelsey Hightower, Developer Advocate, Google Cloud Platform