Monthly Archives: September 2014

Google Sheets add-on for linear optimization

Your work depends on the best solutions to some tough problems. Whether you're working to optimize distribution networks or delivery routes, or simply getting the best staff schedules and optimizing your finances, the Google Sheets add-on for linear optimization can now help you do the math.

This add-on is one of many available. Remember to check out the complete store for Docs and Sheets often--more useful tools are being added each week.

Release track:
Rapid release and Scheduled release

For more information:
Get the linear optimization add-on

Note: all launches are applicable to all Google Apps editions unless otherwise noted

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10 ideas for a better world | Vote in Australia’s Google Impact Challenge

Every year, millions of Australians volunteer their time and money to make Australia and the world a better place - but there are many great ideas out there that go undeveloped because of a lack of funding or resources. Which is why in July, we launched the first Google Impact Challenge in Australia, inviting Aussie non-profits to tell us how they would change the world using technology. 

Today, we’re sharing the 10 Google Impact Challenge finalists and asking for you to vote at g.co/australiachallenge for which non-profit should receive a $500,000 grant to help bring their project to life.

Drum roll, please!

The ten finalists are:

Finalist
Project
Australian Indigenous Mentoring Association (AIME)
Online game to inspire young Indigenous students to learn maths and science
Asthma Foundation NSW
Sensors and a mobile app to access and report real-time air quality data
Alternative Technology Association
Solar lighting for remote households in East Timor
Engineers Without Borders Australia
Biodigester toilets to provide sanitation and energy in Cambodian communities
The Fred Hollows Foundation
Low-cost mobile camera to detect and prevent blindness caused by diabetes
Infoxchange
App to connect homeless people with social services
Penguin Foundation
Magnetic particle technology to remove oil from contaminated wildlife
University of New South Wales (ASPIRE)
Online educational and career development platform for disadvantaged students
University of Technology Sydney
Sensors to detect and report excessive groundwater depletion in arid regions
Zoo and Aquarium Association, Australasia
App to crowdsource data from travelers about the illegal wildlife trade

These 10 finalists stood out to us with innovative projects that use technology to make a big impact on important causes - ranging from tackling environmental crises to making education more accessible to helping Australians better manage their own health and assisting people in need. You can find out more about each of the finalists’ projects here.

We’re now asking Australians to vote for the finalists that inspire you the most. On October 14, we’ll announce the winner of the public vote and three additional winners selected by a judging panel made up of Australian sporting legend Glenn McGrath, community and arts leader Kim Williams, Australian businesswoman and philanthropist Anne Geddes, Google Australia Managing Director Maile Carnegie and Google.org Director Jacquelline Fuller. All four winners will each receive a $500,000 grant as well as mentoring and support from Google employees to help make their project a reality.

You’ve got until Monday 13th October 11:59pm AEDT to cast your vote and support Australian non-profits using technology to tackle some of the world’s biggest social challenges.

Posted by Maile Carnegie, Managing Director, Google Australia

Announcing Drive for Education

Today we announced that we’ll bring Drive for Education, with unlimited storage and enhanced administrative controls, to the Google Apps for Education platform. In the coming months, the features below will be added to all Google Apps for Education accounts at no charge:  

  • Unlimited storage: Store as many Google Drive files, Gmail messages, and Google+ photos as you need. Individual file sizes up to 5TB will be supported.
  • Vault: Use Google Apps Vault to archive emails and chats, to search Drive files, and to preserve important information for your organization.
  • Enhanced auditing and controls: Gain insights from new activity and audit reports for Google Drive.

Release track:
Specific launch timeline information will be added to the Google Apps Release calendar once available

For more information:
Google for Work Blog Post

Note: all launches are applicable to all Google Apps editions unless otherwise noted

whatsnew.googleapps.com
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41.6% of surveyed advertisers say programmatic is top of mind when designing a media plan


There’s no question that yesterday’s ad tech trend, programmatic buying, is here to stay. Programmatic spending is expected to reach $21B worldwide in 2014, according to Magna Global. To understand how the move toward programmatic buying is impacting the advertising industry, DoubleClick recently commissioned a study on the topic with Advertising Age. Here’s what we found.
  • More advertisers are demanding it:
    • 41.6% of surveyed advertisers (including marketers and agencies) indicated that programmatic is top of mind when designing a media plan. This is a marked shift from previous strategies, where it was primarily considered at the end of the media buying process.
    • 2 years from now, marketing departments will be the primary advocates for programmatic buying; currently, the media buying arms of agencies and marketers are responsible for it. 
    • Cross-platform reach is believed to be the primary benefit of programmatic buying for advertisers, followed by increased operational efficiency, and better relevance in messaging
  • Publishers are adapting for a programmatic world:
    • For nearly 25% of the publisher respondents in the survey, programmatic selling is top of mind when responding to RFPs
    • 72% of publishers surveyed would sell more inventory programmatically with stronger cross-platform support
    • Publishers expect an 11.17% rise in CPM growth rates in the next 2 years
  • The growth of programmatic is contingent upon the evolution of the advertising ecosystem:
    • Transparency is key to adoption by buyers and sellers
    • Inventory quality, ad fraud management and the move to programmatic premium will drive higher-value advertising
    • Cross-platform support will help marketers and sellers realize the true potential of one-to-one engagement
Want more information on the study? Here are three things you can do:
  • Read the full report, along with perspectives from industry leaders from Vivaki, UM, Fox News, New York Times. 
  • Get the high-level picture in the infographic supporting key findings
  • Stay tuned for details on a webinar featuring Kellogg’s Aaron Fetters, Director of Analytics and Insights to hear why and how they’re increasing their investment in programmatic technologies.
You can stay on top of new updates by subscribing to our newsletter and following us on Google+ and Twitter.


Posted by Yamini Gupta, Product Marketing Team

41.6% of surveyed advertisers say programmatic is top of mind when designing a media plan


There’s no question that yesterday’s ad tech trend, programmatic buying, is here to stay. Programmatic spending is expected to reach $21B worldwide in 2014, according to Magna Global. To understand how the move toward programmatic buying is impacting the advertising industry, DoubleClick recently commissioned a study on the topic with Advertising Age. Here’s what we found.
  • More advertisers are demanding it:
    • 41.6% of surveyed advertisers (including marketers and agencies) indicated that programmatic is top of mind when designing a media plan. This is a marked shift from previous strategies, where it was primarily considered at the end of the media buying process.
    • 2 years from now, marketing departments will be the primary advocates for programmatic buying; currently, the media buying arms of agencies and marketers are responsible for it. 
    • Cross-platform reach is believed to be the primary benefit of programmatic buying for advertisers, followed by increased operational efficiency, and better relevance in messaging
  • Publishers are adapting for a programmatic world:
    • For nearly 25% of the publisher respondents in the survey, programmatic selling is top of mind when responding to RFPs
    • 72% of publishers surveyed would sell more inventory programmatically with stronger cross-platform support
    • Publishers expect an 11.17% rise in CPM growth rates in the next 2 years
  • The growth of programmatic is contingent upon the evolution of the advertising ecosystem:
    • Transparency is key to adoption by buyers and sellers
    • Inventory quality, ad fraud management and the move to programmatic premium will drive higher-value advertising
    • Cross-platform support will help marketers and sellers realize the true potential of one-to-one engagement
Want more information on the study? Here are three things you can do:
  • Read the full report, along with perspectives from industry leaders from Vivaki, UM, Fox News, New York Times. 
  • Get the high-level picture in the infographic supporting key findings
  • Stay tuned for details on a webinar featuring Kellogg’s Aaron Fetters, Director of Analytics and Insights to hear why and how they’re increasing their investment in programmatic technologies.
Posted by Yamini Gupta, Product Marketing Team

Reminder: Making Google Apps Marketplace available to non-admins

As announced on Sept 17, the Google Apps Marketplace (GAM) will open to non-admins in Scheduled release domains by default early next week.

Admins can now choose to allow people from their organization to install any GAM apps via the GAM interface (vs having to visit a GAM app vendor website directly), or they can choose to customize which apps are made available to them in GAM for installation. They can also turn the feature off altogether if they so choose.

Please take the appropriate action for your organization in advance of this launch (see Help Center instructions linked below), planned for Tues, Oct 7th.

Note: This feature is automatically defaulted off for K-12 EDU domains.

Release track:
Scheduled release coming on Oct 7, 2104

For more information:
Help Center

Note: all launches are applicable to all Google Apps editions unless otherwise noted

whatsnew.googleapps.com
Get these product update alerts by email
Subscribe to the RSS feed of these updates

New version of the Google Admin app on iOS

A new version of the Google Admin app for iOS is now available in the App Store. The app lets admins manage their Google for Work products on the go with their iPads and iPhones. This latest release (v1.1.0) contains the following features:

  • Instant search for finding users
  • Unifying the search fields for first name and last name for ease of use
  • Ability to switch between multiple accounts quickly
  • Conforming the UX to iOS 7 guidelines
  • Adding a settings page with settings like remember password, etc
  • Accessibility fixes

Release track:
Rapid release and Scheduled release

For more information:
Get the Google Apps Admin app on the App Store

Note: all launches are applicable to all Google Apps editions unless otherwise noted

whatsnew.googleapps.com
Get these product update alerts by email
Subscribe to the RSS feed of these updates

Sudoku, Linear Optimization, and the Ten Cent Diet

Originally posted on the Google Research blog. Cross posted on the Google Developers blog

In 1945, future Nobel laureate George Stigler wrote an essay in the Journal of Farm Economics titled The Cost of Subsistence about a seemingly simple problem: how could a soldier be fed for as little money as possible?

The “Stigler Diet” became a classic problem in the then-new field of linear optimization, which is used today in many areas of science and engineering. Any time you have a set of linear constraints such as “at least 50 square meters of solar panels” or “the amount of paint should equal the amount of primer” along with a linear goal (e.g., “minimize cost” or “maximize customers served”), that’s a linear optimization problem.

At Google, our engineers work on plenty of optimization problems. One example is our YouTube video stabilization system, which uses linear optimization to eliminate the shakiness of handheld cameras. A more lighthearted example is in the Google Docs Sudoku add-on, which instantaneously generates and solves Sudoku puzzles inside a Google Sheet, using the SCIP mixed integer programming solver to compute the solution.



Today we’re proud to announce two new ways for everyone to solve linear optimization problems. First, you can now solve linear optimization problems in Google Sheets with the Linear Optimization add-on written by Google Software Engineer Mihai Amarandei-Stavila. The add-on uses Google Apps Script to send optimization problems to Google servers. The solutions are displayed inside the spreadsheet. For developers who want to create their own applications on top of Google Apps, we also provide an API to let you call our linear solver directly.


Second, we’re open-sourcing the linear solver underlying the add-on: Glop (the Google Linear Optimization Package), created by Bruno de Backer with other members of the Google Optimization team. It’s available as part of the or-tools suite and we provide a few examples to get you started. On that page, you’ll find the Glop solution to the Stigler diet problem. (A Google Sheets file that uses Glop and the Linear Optimization add-on to solve the Stigler diet problem is available here. You’ll need to install the add-on first.)

Stigler posed his problem as follows: given nine nutrients (calories, protein, Vitamin C, and so on) and 77 candidate foods, find the foods that could sustain soldiers at minimum cost.

The Simplex algorithm for linear optimization was two years away from being invented, so Stigler had to do his best, arriving at a diet that cost $39.93 per year (in 1939 dollars), or just over ten cents per day. Even that wasn’t the cheapest diet. In 1947, Jack Laderman used Simplex, nine calculator-wielding clerks, and 120 person-days to arrive at the optimal solution.

Glop’s Simplex implementation solves the problem in 300 milliseconds. Unfortunately, Stigler didn’t include taste as a constraint, and so the poor hypothetical soldiers will eat nothing but the following, ever:
  • Enriched wheat flour
  • Liver
  • Cabbage
  • Spinach
  • Navy beans
Is it possible to create an appealing dish out of these five ingredients? Google Chef Anthony Marco took it as a challenge, and we’re calling the result Foie Linéaire à la Stigler:


This optimal meal consists of seared calf liver dredged in flour, atop a navy bean purée with marinated cabbage and a spinach pesto.

Chef Marco reported that the most difficult constraint was making the dish tasty without butter or cream. That said, I had the opportunity to taste our linear optimization solution, and it was delicious.

Posted by Jon Orwant, Engineering Manager

Maps Engine API now at v1: Make Maps in Google’s Cloud

Maps are a wonderful tools for visualizing data. With Google Maps Engine, you can create, share, and host maps like these in the Cloud:


National Geographic Society’s
Ocean Atlas: Indian Ocean Floor
David Rumsey Map Collection’s
Japan 1891

City of Edmonton's
Traffic Incidents Bubbles


Last year we started rolling out features to enable full data management in Maps Engine via a REST API and a set of native client libraries (including Java, Python and Node.js), making the API easy to use from any application or platform (Android, web, iOS, and server environments). The API can be used to automate data updates, build custom apps on the Maps Engine platform, or use 3rd party tools to connect existing software with your data stored in Maps Engine.

Today we’re launching the Maps Engine API v1.0: you can now do any CRUD operation on Maps Engine data via the API. The API is fully covered by our service level agreement (SLA) and deprecation policy. There is also a great set of new tutorials and documentation to help get you started.

Take advantage of Maps Engine and its API to:
  1. Bring Maps Engine to your own application by connecting with Maps Engine via the API. Great examples of this are Safe Software’s FME tool which allows you to load data from Socrata to Maps Engine and the Open Data Kit Collect app which helps folks collecting data out in the field update straight into Maps Engine,
  1. Make your maps discoverable to the world by joining the Maps Engine public data program and publishing your maps to the public Google Maps Gallery, or
  2. Host and craft your own maps in Maps Engine by signing up for a free account or becoming a Maps for Work customer (for higher data limits and query capacity)

Keen to get started using the API? Then check out the video below for a crash course in Maps Engine and the API and these tutorials.



Posted by Jen Kovnats, Product Manager

Seizing the digital opportunity in France

All too often, fast-moving, disruptive digital innovation is presented as the enemy of Europe’s enviable social system. The reality, according to a new study published this week in Paris by consultants Roland Berger, is that digital companies not only boost economic growth - they also increase worker satisfaction.

Launching the new Roland Berger Internet report
Berger studied 505 companies, all with more than 50 employees, classifying them in four categories by how much they use the Internet. Its study focused not on sexy Internet startups, but on traditional industries such as chemistry, energy or manufacturing. The conclusion was striking: new digital technologies are just as important in these traditional sectors as for high tech startups. The most “digital” grow six times faster than the “least digital”.



Given this finding, it is unsurprising that French companies sense the opportunity: some 57% interviewed put digital transformation as one of their medium term strategic priorities. Unfortunately, actions do not follow these intentions. Only 36% of French companies have a formal digital strategy and French corporate Internet engagement lags far behind French consumer use. While nearly six in 10 French people shopped online in 2013, only one French company in 10 sold online.

If more French companies embarked on the digital journey, Berger argues they would not only improve their performance - they also would please workers. Employees of the most digitally mature companies feel at least 50 percent more involved and happier in their professional life than those of the least matures ones. In a country famed for its quality of life, this is indeed an impressive finding!

Posted by Elisabeth Bargès, Senior Manager, Public Policy and Government Affairs, France