Author Archives: Lynette

Google for Entrepreneurs Tech Hub Network arrives in Ireland

When Google first started in Ireland, we opened an office with just five people. Today we have more than 5000 people in our Dublin office and as we have grown, so has Dublin’s tech community. The city is now home to some of the biggest global tech firms as well as some of the most promising startups in Europe. This community is creating jobs and opportunity with two thirds of all new jobs in the Irish economy being created by startups.

We have always been committed to supporting the startup community in Dublin to help the next generation of companies succeed. So we are especially pleased that today the Google for Entrepreneurs Tech Hub Network announced a partnership with Dogpatch Labs, one of Ireland’s leading startup organisations. The announcement was made by Minister for Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation Richard Bruton T.D at an event at Dogpatch Labs today.

The partnership will provide co-working space along with new resources including funding, training and mentorship opportunities. Members will also get access to Google programs and products throughout the network including:
  • Mentorship from Dublin Googlers (in 2014, over 200 Googlers mentored Irish startups)
  • Eligibility for Google product offers relevant to startups; and
  • The Google for Entrepreneurs Global Passport, where entrepreneurs from each hub can work for free at spaces designated at any other hub in the network including London, San Francisco and Tel Aviv  
With Dogpatch Labs and our Google for Entrepreneurs program, we hope Dublin’s world-class startup community will grow that much faster, building transformative products and companies that will take the world by storm. We can’t wait to see what new ideas come out

Posted by Paddy Flynn, Startup engagement at Google Ireland

See through the clouds with Earth Engine and Sentinel-1 Data

This year the Google Earth Engine team and I attended the European Geosciences Union General Assembly meeting in Vienna, Austria to engage with a number of European geoscientific partners. This was just the first of a series of European summits the team has attended over the past few months, including, most recently, the IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society meeting held last week in Milan, Italy.

 Noel Gorelick presenting Google Earth Engine at EGU 2015

We are very excited to be collaborating with many European scientists from esteemed institutions such as the European Commission Joint Research Centre, Wageningen University, and University of Pavia. These researchers are utilizing the Earth Engine geospatial analysis platform to address issues of global importance in areas such as food security, deforestation detection, urban settlement detection, and freshwater availability.

Thanks to the enlightened free and open data policy of the European Commission and European Space Agency, we are pleased to announce the availability of Copernicus Sentinel-1 data through Earth Engine for visualization and analysis. Sentinel-1, a radar imaging satellite with the ability to see through clouds, is the first of at least 6 Copernicus satellites going up in the next 6 years.

 Sentinel-1 data visualized using Earth Engine, showing Vienna (left) and Milan (right).

windfarms.png
 Wind farms seen off the Eastern coast of England

This radar data offers a powerful complement to other optical and thermal data from satellites like Landsat, that are already available in the Earth Engine public data catalog. If you are a geoscientist interested in accessing and analyzing the newly available EC/ESA Sentinel-1 data, or anything else in our multi-petabyte data catalog, please sign up for Google Earth Engine.

We look forward to further engagements with the European research community and are excited to see what the world will do with the data from the European Space Agency's Copernicus program satellites.

Posted by Luc Vincent, Engineering Director, Geo Imagery