Monthly Archives: April 2018

Dev Channel Update for Chrome OS

The Dev channel has been updated to 67.0.3396.26 (Platform version: 10575.22.0) for most Chrome OS devices. This build contains a number of bug fixes, security updates and feature enhancements. A list of changes can be found here.

If you find new issues, please let us know by visiting our forum or filing a bug. Interested in switching channels? Find out how. You can submit feedback using ‘Report an issue...’ in the Chrome menu (3 vertical dots in the upper right corner of the browser).

Cindy Bayless
Google Chrome

Join Us for a Small Business Week Workshop to Learn How to Connect with Local Customers Online

It’s National Small Business Week and our partners across the country are hosting in-person workshops where you, and fellow business owners, can learn how to connect with local customers online.

Find a free, local workshop near you.

Can’t find one that works for you? Register to watch our livestream online (Wednesday, May 2 at 9am PT/12pm ET). Ask your questions during our live Q&A session by posting your question on Twitter using the hashtag #PartnersConnect.

We hope you can join us!


Posted by Whitney Cox, Marketing Manager, Get Your Business Online

A #SmallThanks makes a big difference this National Small Business Week

Love a local spot? Make it known this National Small Business Week—post a review or photo to their Google listing, or thank them on social media with the hashtag #SmallThanks. A small shout-out can mean a lot for a local business.  

One of my latest favorites is ABLE, a hip boutique in Nashville, TN that sells bags, shoes and jewelry handcrafted by women who have often overcome extraordinary circumstances to become entrepreneurs. I just gave ABLE a Small Thanks review on their Google listing for all they do (and for the cute earrings I just bought from them!).

During National Small Business Week, YouTube creators across the country are also sharing the places they love—from skate shops to bookmobiles and everything in between.

#SmallThanks for National Small Business Week

If you own a small business, check out the #SmallThanks Hub for free, customized marketing materials to turn your reviews into ready-to-use social posts, stickers, posters, and more. Reviews from your fans are like “digital thank you notes” and are one of the first things people notice about your business online, so start sharing your customers’ love with #SmallThanks today.

NSBW_SmallThanks.jpg

Examples of marketing materials on the #SmallThanks Hub 


For more tips on how to connect with local customers online, tune into our National Small Business Week livestream workshop from 9:00-10:00 a.m. PT on Wednesday, May 2. Register or find a partner-hosted workshop near you at google.com/smallbusinessweek. You can also find additional resources in our Grow with Google hub.


Happy National Small Business Week! Don’t forget to show your favorite local spot some love this week with a #SmallThanks—a small way to give them a big thank you.


Announcing Open Images V4 and the ECCV 2018 Open Images Challenge

Posted by Vittorio Ferrari, Research Scientist, Machine Perception

In 2016, we introduced Open Images, a collaborative release of ~9 million images annotated with labels spanning thousands of object categories. Since its initial release, we've been hard at work updating and refining the dataset, in order to provide a useful resource for the computer vision community to develop new models

Today, we are happy to announce Open Images V4, containing 15.4M bounding-boxes for 600 categories on 1.9M images, making it the largest existing dataset with object location annotations. The boxes have been largely manually drawn by professional annotators to ensure accuracy and consistency. The images are very diverse and often contain complex scenes with several objects (8 per image on average; visualizer).
Annotated images from the Open Images dataset. Left: Mark Paul Gosselaar plays the guitar by Rhys A. Right: Civilization by Paul Downey. Both images used under CC BY 2.0 license.
In conjunction with this release, we are also introducing the Open Images Challenge, a new object detection challenge to be held at the 2018 European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV 2018). The Open Images Challenge follows in the tradition of PASCAL VOC, ImageNet and COCO, but at an unprecedented scale.

This challenge is unique in several ways:
  • 12.2M bounding-box annotations for 500 categories on 1.7M training images,
  • A broader range of categories than previous detection challenges, including new objects such as “fedora” and “snowman”.
  • In addition to the object detection main track, the challenge includes a Visual Relationship Detection track, on detecting pairs of objects in particular relations, e.g. “woman playing guitar”.
The training set is available now. A test set of 100k images will be released on July 1st 2018 by Kaggle. Deadline for submission of results is on September 1st 2018. We hope that the very large training set will stimulate research into more sophisticated detection models that will exceed current state-of-the-art performance, and that the 500 categories will enable a more precise assessment of where different detectors perform best. Furthermore, having a large set of images with many objects annotated enables to explore Visual Relationship Detection, which is a hot emerging topic with a growing sub-community.

In addition to the above, Open Images V4 also contains 30.1M human-verified image-level labels for 19,794 categories, which are not part of the Challenge. The dataset includes 5.5M image-level labels generated by tens of thousands of users from all over the world at crowdsource.google.com.

Source: Google AI Blog


Announcing Open Images V4 and the ECCV 2018 Open Images Challenge

Posted by Vittorio Ferrari, Research Scientist, Machine Perception

In 2016, we introduced Open Images, a collaborative release of ~9 million images annotated with labels spanning thousands of object categories. Since its initial release, we've been hard at work updating and refining the dataset, in order to provide a useful resource for the computer vision community to develop new models

Today, we are happy to announce Open Images V4, containing 15.4M bounding-boxes for 600 categories on 1.9M images, making it the largest existing dataset with object location annotations. The boxes have been largely manually drawn by professional annotators to ensure accuracy and consistency. The images are very diverse and often contain complex scenes with several objects (8 per image on average; visualizer).
Annotated images from the Open Images dataset. Left: Mark Paul Gosselaar plays the guitar by Rhys A. Right: Civilization by Paul Downey. Both images used under CC BY 2.0 license.
In conjunction with this release, we are also introducing the Open Images Challenge, a new object detection challenge to be held at the 2018 European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV 2018). The Open Images Challenge follows in the tradition of PASCAL VOC, ImageNet and COCO, but at an unprecedented scale.

This challenge is unique in several ways:
  • 12.2M bounding-box annotations for 500 categories on 1.7M training images,
  • A broader range of categories than previous detection challenges, including new objects such as “fedora” and “snowman”.
  • In addition to the object detection main track, the challenge includes a Visual Relationship Detection track, on detecting pairs of objects in particular relations, e.g. “woman playing guitar”.
The training set is available now. A test set of 100k images will be released on July 1st 2018 by Kaggle. Deadline for submission of results is on September 1st 2018. We hope that the very large training set will stimulate research into more sophisticated detection models that will exceed current state-of-the-art performance, and that the 500 categories will enable a more precise assessment of where different detectors perform best. Furthermore, having a large set of images with many objects annotated enables to explore Visual Relationship Detection, which is a hot emerging topic with a growing sub-community.

In addition to the above, Open Images V4 also contains 30.1M human-verified image-level labels for 19,794 categories, which are not part of the Challenge. The dataset includes 5.5M image-level labels generated by tens of thousands of users from all over the world at crowdsource.google.com.

New collaboration with Fitbit to drive positive health outcomes

As I’ve shared in the past, Google Cloud’s vision for the healthcare industry is very much a reflection of Google’s overall mission. We’re building healthcare-specific products and solutions as well as supporting a growing partner ecosystem to help companies organize healthcare data in a way that is accessible and interoperable, but also secure, enabling them to create a positive and lasting impact on human health.


Today we’re announcing a new collaboration with Fitbit across wearables and digital health that will help drive positive health outcomes at scale. Fitbit has chosen Google Cloud as their preferred cloud provider and will be using our Cloud Healthcare API to provide an interoperability solution that enables their users to collaborate on care with their own healthcare providers. For example, using Cloud Healthcare API with Fitbit’s newly acquired Twine Health platform. The two companies will also be exploring how Google Cloud’s machine learning APIs can help them uncover deeper insights to benefit their users. 


Although we’re just getting started in this collaboration, we’re excited by what’s possible. To date, Fitbit has sold more than 76 million devices, built a community of more than 25 million active users and has one of the world’s largest health and fitness databases. We hope that by helping them take advantage of our highly secure platform and support for open standards, we can bring better health to more people around the world.


Source: Google Cloud


Expanding our GPU portfolio with NVIDIA Tesla V100

By Chris Kleban and Ari Liberman, Product Managers

Cloud-based hardware accelerators like Graphic Processing Units, or GPUs, are a great choice for computationally demanding workloads such as machine learning and high-performance computing (HPC). We strive to provide the widest selection of popular accelerators on Google Cloud to meet your needs for flexibility and cost. To that end, we’re excited to announce that NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs are now publicly available in beta on Compute Engine and Kubernetes Engine, and that NVIDIA Tesla P100 GPUs are now generally available.

Today’s most demanding workloads and industries require the fastest hardware accelerators. You can now select as many as eight NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs, 96 vCPU and 624GB of system memory in a single VM, receiving up to 1 petaflop of mixed precision hardware acceleration performance. The next generation of NVLink interconnects deliver up to 300GB/s of GPU-to-GPU bandwidth, 9X over PCIe, boosting performance on deep learning and HPC workloads by up to 40%. NVIDIA V100s are available immediately in the following regions: us-west1, us-central1 and europe-west4. Each V100 GPU is priced as low as $2.48 per hour for on-demand VMs and $1.24 per hour for Preemptible VMs. Like our other GPUs, the V100 is also billed by the second and Sustained Use Discounts apply.

Our customers often ask which GPU is the best for their CUDA-enabled computational workload. If you’re seeking a balance between price and performance, the NVIDIA Tesla P100 GPU is a good fit. You can select up to four P100 GPUs, 96 vCPUs and 624GB of memory per virtual machine. Further, the P100 is also now available in europe-west4 (Netherlands) in addition to us-west1, us-central1, us-east1, europe-west1 and asia-east1.

Our GPU portfolio offers a wide selection of performance and price options to help meet your needs. Rather than selecting a one-size-fits-all VM, you can attach our GPUs to custom VM shapes and take advantage of a wide selection of storage options, paying for only the resources you need.


Google Cloud GPU Type
VM Configuration Options
NVIDIA GPU
GPU Mem
GPU Hourly Price**
GPUs
vCPUs*
System Memory*
16GB
$2.48 Standard
$1.24 Preemptible
1,8
(2,4) coming in beta
1-96
1-624 GB
16GB
$1.46 Standard
$0.73 Preemptible
1,2,4
1-96
1-624 GB
12GB
$0.45 Standard
$0.22 Preemptible
1,2,4,8
1-64
1-416 GB

* Maximum vCPU count and system memory limit on the instance might be smaller depending on the zone or the number of GPUs selected.
** GPU prices listed as hourly rate, per GPU attached to a VM that are billed by the second. Pricing for attaching GPUs to preemptible VMs is different from pricing for attaching GPUs to non-preemptible VMs. Prices listed are for US regions. Prices for other regions may be different. Additional Sustained Use Discounts of up to 30% apply to GPU on-demand usage only.


Google Cloud makes managing GPU workloads easy for both VMs and containers. On Google Compute Engine, customers can use instance templates and managed instance groups to easily create and scale GPU infrastructure. You can also use NVIDIA V100s and our other GPU offerings in Kubernetes Engine, where Cluster Autoscaler helps provide flexibility by automatically creating nodes with GPUs, and scaling them down to zero when they are no longer in use. Together with Preemptible GPUs, both Compute Engine managed instance groups and Kubernetes Engine’s Autoscaler let you optimize your costs while simplifying infrastructure operations.

LeadStage, a marketing automation provider, is impressed with the value and scale of GPUs on Google Cloud.

"NVIDIA GPUs work great for complex Optical Character Recognition tasks on poor quality data sets. We use V100 and P100 GPUs on Google Compute Engine to convert millions of handwritten documents, survey drawings, and engineering drawings into machine-readable data. The ability to deploy thousands of Preemptible GPU instances in seconds was vastly superior to the capacity and cost of our previous GPU cloud provider." 
— Adam Seabrook, Chief Executive Officer, LeadStage
Chaos Group provides rendering solutions for visual effects, film, architectural, automotive design and media and entertainment, and is impressed with the speed of NVIDIA V100s on Google Cloud.

"V100 GPUs are great for running V-Ray Cloud rendering services. Among all possible hardware configurations that we've tested, V100 ranked #1 on our benchmarking platform. Thanks to V100 GPUs we can use cloud GPUs on-demand on Compute Engine to render our clients' jobs extremely fast."
— Boris Simandoff, Director of Engineering, Chaos Group
 If you have computationally demanding workloads, GPUs can be a real game-changer. Check our GPU page to learn more about how you can benefit from P100, V100 and other Google Cloud GPUs!

Google Search now offers easy access to exam information

https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/hD6tLHCe-mVW3jNQPDJq3GZrL_6vft_KFkCS64nLk3Ws4wZjPsOVjaRLtaQ1j7uO7vd6X5pzHVcznP38V6Klrxjgcx6zfP08w_OY6Lxand0tbnZq2oG9y2OVsDS90BKQHS0wiEpw Shilpa Agrawal Product Manager Google Search
Look up your JEE Main exam results and find information for popular exams in India right within Google Search


Exams are an integral part of an Indian student's academic journey and have a profound impact on their lives. Over 260 million students in India spend countless hours preparing for exams and eagerly await the moment that results are announced. They turn to the internet for all their exam needs, but often this information is hard to locate, and slow to load. To improve the exam experience for students, Google today is announcing two new features to make finding exam information easier and more reliable.


JEE Main exam results, right on Google Search
Starting today with the JEE Main exam results, we are launching a feature on Google Search to help students  quickly, securely, and seamlessly locate their exam score on their smartphone or desktop. The Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) has worked directly with Google to make the JEE Main exam results available on the Google Search results page as soon as they are announced.


“At CBSE, we are always looking for ways to enhance facilities to millions of our students across the globe. We are collaborating with Google for smooth dissemination of results through an easy and secure platform,” said Rama Sharma, Senior Public Relations Officer, CBSE.


When a student searches for "JEE Main results" they will be able to directly look up their scores within Google Search. They simply have to enter their roll number and date of birth, and their individual results will be displayed. Google has worked closely with CBSE to ensure that the data is handled securely and used solely for the purpose of showing the results on Google, and only for the duration that this feature is live.




Easy access to information about other key exams in India
We’re also making it easier for students to get ready for tests with an improved Search experience for popular Indian exams. Now when you search for an exam like GATE, SSC CGL, CAT, and many more, you will see important information such as test dates right within Search. You’ll also be able to easily find links to register, view other important links, and visit the official test site.


Our vision has always been to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful to everyone. With over 260 million students enrolled in more than 1.5 million schools across India, we believe having reliable, seamless, and secure access to education-related information is crucial. That’s why today’s updates are just the first step of many to improve access to information about important exams and other exam-related content in Google Search in India, and to work with government-approved educational institutions to provide reliable and secure access to exam information for the benefit of even more students.

Posted by Shilpa Agrawal, Product Manager, Google Search

Video is everywhere – helping brands find their audience in the era of convergence

With cord-cutting on the rise, brands have been looking for new ways to connect with an important part of their audience that are harder than ever to reach. According to fresh Nielsen data, more than half of 18- to 49-year-olds in the U.S. are either light viewers of TV or do not subscribe to TV; but over 90 percent of these people watch YouTube.1 Today we’re introducing a new set of opportunities on YouTube to help brands reach these viewers across content and devices.

YouTube audiences on TV screens
We’re amidst the second major shift in how people watch video on YouTube. In the past few years, we witnessed mobile viewership exceed desktop, marking the first major shift in how people interacted with YouTube. Now, in 2018, viewers are returning to that original, purpose-built device for video viewing – the television set.

At YouTube we’ve brought people back to the big screen by building a rich YouTube experience for set-top boxes, gaming consoles, streaming devices and smart TVs of all stripes. And now TV screens are our fastest growing screen counting over 150 million hours of watch time per day.2

We heard from advertisers that they want in so we have been working to make it easy for you to find your most engaged, valuable audience while they are watching YouTube on a TV set, with the new TV screens device type. In the coming months, we’ll add TV screens – joining computers, mobile phones and tablets – to AdWords and DoubleClick Bid Manager, so advertisers globally can tailor their campaigns for this environment – for example, by using a different creative.

We’ve already seen that people react positively to ads on the TV screen – based on Ipsos Lab Experiments, YouTube ads shown on TV drove a significant lift in ad recall and purchase intent, with an average lift of 47 percent and 35 percent respectively.3

YouTube audiences on every screen
And for brands who want help reaching cord cutters, we now offer a new segment in AdWords called “light TV viewers.” Advertisers will be able to reach people who consume most of their television and video content online and might be harder to reach via traditional media. This audience is reachable on YouTube across computers, mobile, tablets, and TV screens.

Welcoming YouTube TV to Google Preferred
Last year we launched YouTube TV, a new way to enjoy cable-free live TV. Now a year in, YouTube TV continues to gain momentum – we’ve recently added new networks to our service, expanded availability to over 85 percent of U.S. households in nearly 100 TV markets, and announced partnerships with major sports leagues. For the first time, this upcoming broadcast season advertisers will be able to access full length TV inventory in Google Preferred.

Content from some cable networks in the U.S. will be part of Google Preferred lineups so that brands can continue to engage their audience across all platforms. This means advertisers will be able to get both the most popular YouTube content and traditional TV content in a single campaign – plus, we’ll dynamically insert these ads, giving advertisers the ability to show relevant ads to the right audiences, rather than just showing everyone the same ad as they might on traditional TV.

As marketers continue to break the silos and think of holistic media plans, we’re excited to enable the opportunity. Because while TV screen viewing is big and growing fast, video is everywhere and the key is connecting with viewers wherever they watch.

Posted by Debbie Weinstein, Managing Director, YouTube/Video Global Solutions

1Google commissioned Nielsen custom fusion study. Desktop, mobile and TV fusion. TV measurement of television distribution sources and total minutes watched. Reach among persons 18-49. Light TV viewers represent the bottom tercile of total TV watchers based on total minutes viewed. October 2017.

2YouTube Internal Data. Global, accurate as of Jan 2018. Based on seven day average of watch time for TV screen devices, which include smart TVs, Roku/Apple TV and game consoles.

3Google/Ipsos Lab Experiment, U.S., March 2018 (32 ads, 800 U.S. residents, 18-64 y/o)

Source: YouTube Blog


Video is everywhere – helping brands find their audience in the era of convergence

With cord-cutting on the rise, brands have been looking for new ways to connect with an important part of their audience that are harder than ever to reach. According to fresh Nielsen data, more than half of 18 to 49 year-olds in the US are either light viewers of TV or do not subscribe to TV; but over 90 percent of these people watch YouTube.1 Today we’re introducing a new set of opportunities on YouTube to help brands reach these viewers across content and devices.


YouTube audiences on TV screens
We’re amidst the second major shift in how people watch video on YouTube. In the past few years, we witnessed mobile viewership exceed desktop, marking the first major shift in how people interacted with YouTube. Now, in 2018, viewers are returning to that original, purpose-built device for video viewing – the television set.

At YouTube we’ve brought people back to the big screen by building a rich YouTube experience for set-top boxes, gaming consoles, streaming devices and smart TVs of all stripes. And now TV screens are our fastest growing screen, counting over 150 million hours of watch time per day.2

We heard from advertisers that they want in, so we have been working to make it easy for you to find your most engaged, valuable audience while they are watching YouTube on a TV set, with the new TV screens device type. In the coming months, we’ll add TV screens – joining computers, mobile phones and tablets – to AdWords and DoubleClick Bid Manager, so advertisers globally can tailor their campaigns for this environment – for example, by using a different creative.

We’ve already seen that people react positively to ads on the TV screen – based on Ipsos Lab Experiments, YouTube ads shown on TV drove a significant lift in ad recall and purchase intent, with an average lift of 47 percent and 35 percent respectively.3


YouTube audiences on every screen

And for brands who want help reaching cord cutters, we now offer a new segment in AdWords called “light TV viewers.” Advertisers will be able to reach people who consume most of their television and video content online and might be harder to reach via traditional media. This audience is reachable on YouTube across computers, mobile, tablets, and TV screens.


Welcoming YouTube TV to Google Preferred

Last year we launched YouTube TV, a new way to enjoy cable-free live TV. Now a year in, YouTube TV continues to gain momentum – we’ve recently added new networks to our service, expanded availability to over 85 percent of US households in nearly 100 TV markets, and announced partnerships with major sports leagues. For the first time, this upcoming broadcast season advertisers will be able to access full length TV inventory in Google Preferred.

Content from some cable networks in the US will be part of Google Preferred lineups so that brands can continue to engage their audience across all platforms. This means advertisers will be able to get both the most popular YouTube content and traditional TV content in a single campaign – plus, we’ll dynamically insert these ads, giving advertisers the ability to show relevant ads to the right audiences, rather than just showing everyone the same ad as they might on traditional TV.

As marketers continue to break the silos and think of holistic media plans, we’re excited to enable the opportunity. Because while TV screen viewing is big and growing fast, video is everywhere and the key is connecting with viewers wherever they watch.

Posted by Debbie Weinstein, Managing Director, YouTube/Video Global Solutions 





1. Google commissioned Nielsen custom fusion study. Desktop, mobile and TV fusion. TV measurement of television distribution sources and total minutes viewed. Reach among persons 18-49. Light TV viewers represent the bottom tercile of total TV watchers based on total minutes viewed. October 2017.
2. YouTube Internal Data, Global, Accurate as of Jan 2018. Based on seven day average of watch time for TV screen devices, which include smart TVs, Roku/Apple TV and game consoles.
3. Google/Ipsos Lab Experiment, US, March 2018 (32 ads, 800 US residents 18-64 y/o).

Source: Inside AdWords