Category Archives: Google Developers Blog

News and insights on Google platforms, tools and events

#WeArePlay | Meet Ingrid from Sweden. More stories from around the world.

Posted by Leticia Lago, Developer Marketing

Another month, another reason to celebrate trailblazing creators behind some of the most innovative apps and games. From an equestrian training platform in Sweden to a chilled out fishing game in the Republic of Korea, let’s take a look at some of the exciting #WeArePlay stories of founders and their creations.


Ingrid is a big fan of horseback riding and has always loved the social aspect of the sport. But when she wanted to take her passion online, she was surprised to be unable to find sports platforms specifically tailored to equestrians. So, Ingrid and her co-founders, Totta and Erika, took matters into their own hands, pooling their collective experiences in marketing, programming and economics to create Ridely: a platform that aims to democratize the access to trainers and content about riding. Since then, they’ve partnered up with the US Equestrian Federation and are “constantly innovating and looking at ways to develop the app further and improve our members’ horse riding experience” – in fact, they’re currently working on creating expert programs, monthly riding challenges and adding a social feed to spark discussion and create community.


#WeArePlay Joahnes & Meiky Gaco Games Solo, Indonesia g.co/play/weareplay Google Play

Now to the other side of the world, Indonesia. Johanes always had a wild imagination and a head brimming with ideas, which is why he originally aspired to be an author. However, when he found himself captivated by role playing games, he decided to channel his storytelling into the gaming genre instead. Collaborating with graphic artist Meiky, the pair brainstormed their anime-inspired fantasy adventure RPG Epic Conquest. Even without conscious marketing efforts, the game proved to be a big hit, spawning the follow-up Epic Conquest 2 – with more sequels currently in the works.


#WeArePlay Young-Gon Nexelon Soengnam, Republic of Korea g.co/play/weareplay Google Play

Next up, Young-Gon from the Republic of Korea. An old hand in the industry, Young-Gon has been involved in gaming for over two decades. However, it was in 2017 that he decided to launch his own studio, Nexelon, with the goal of reaching audiences abroad. In his popular title, Fishing Life, he “wanted to create a fishing game that was soothing, uncomplicated to play and that really showcased the underwater world”, depicting the calming nature of angling as a hobby with gently whooshing waves and scenes of tranquil lakes and mountains. And he’s continuing this theme of serenity with his upcoming release – an eco-sci fi game where players explore other planets for resources to restore a polluted Earth.



#WeArePlay Sergej, Victoria & Michall Nordcurrent Vilnius, Lithuania g.co/play/weareplay Google Play

Last up, dream team Victoria, her husband Michail, and his brother Sergej from Lithuania. They had their sights set on making games since childhood. They were still at university when they released their very first title, swiftly using the revenue to form their own studio, Nordcurrent. In their popular game Cooking Fever, players are put to the test to rapidly prepare different dishes – inspired by cuisines from around the world. They recently added a pancake flipping restaurant option and also plan live culinary events around themed celebrations, such as Valentine’s Day.


Discover more of the amazing #WeArePlay stories around the world and share your favorites.



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Programmatically access working locations with the Calendar API

Posted by Chanel Greco, Developer Advocate

Giving Google Workspace users the ability to set their working location and working hours in Google Calendar was an important step in helping our customers’ employees adapt to a hybrid world. Sending a Chat message asking “Will you be in the office tomorrow?” soon became obsolete as anyone could share where and when they would be working within Calendar.

To improve the hybrid working experience, many organizations rely on third-party or company-internal tools to enable tasks like hot desk booking or scheduling days in the office. Until recently, there was no way to programmatically synchronize the working location set in Calendar with such tools.


Image showing working locations visible via Google Calendar in the Robin app
Robin displays the working location from Google Calendar in their application and updates the user's Google Calendar when they book a desk in Robin

Programmatically read and write working locations

We are pleased to announce that the Calendar API has been updated to make working locations available and this added functionality is generally available (feature is only available for eligible Workspace editions). This enables developers to programmatically read and write the working location of Google Workspace users. This can be especially useful in three use cases that have surfaced in discussions with customers which we are going to explore together.

1.     Synchronize with third-party tools

Enhancing the Calendar API enables developers to synchronize user’s working location with third-party tools like Robin and Comeen. For example, some companies provide their employees with desk booking tools so they can book their workplace in advance for the days they will be on-site. HR management tools are also common for employees to request and set “Work from home” days. In both situations the user had to set their working location in two separate tools: their desk booking tool and/or HR management system and Google Calendar.

Thanks to the working location being accessible through the Calendar API this duplicate work is no longer necessary since a user’s working location can be programmatically set. And if a user's calendar is the single source of truth? In that case, the API can be used to read the working location from the user’s calendar and write it to any permissioned third-party tool.


Image showing Google Workspace Add-on synchronizing users' working locations in the Comeen app.
Comeen’s Google Workspace Add-on synchronizes the user’s’ working locations whenever the user updates their working location, either in Google Calendar or in Comeen's add-on

2.     Display working location on other surfaces

The API enables the surfacing of the user's working location in other tools, creating interesting opportunities. For instance, some of our customers have asked for ways to better coordinate in-office days. Imagine you are planning to be at the office tomorrow. Who else from your team will be there? Who from a neighboring team might be on-site for a coffee chat?

With the Calendar API, a user's working location can be displayed in tools like directories, or a hybrid-work scheduling tool. The goal is to make a user’s working location available in the systems that are relevant to our customers.

3.     Analyze patterns

The third use case that surfaced from discussions with our customers is analyzing working location patterns. With many of our customers having a hybrid work approach it’s vital to have a good understanding of the working patterns. For example, which days do locations reach maximal legal capacity? Or, when does the on-campus restaurant have to prepare more meals for employees working on-site?

The API answers these and other questions so that facility management can adapt their resources to the needs of their employees.


How to get started

Now that you have an idea of the possibilities the updated Calendar API creates, we want to guide you on how you can get started using it.

  • Check out the developer documentation for reading and writing a user's working locations.
  • Watch the announcement video on the Google Workspace Developers YouTube channel.
  • Check the original post about the launch of the working location feature for a list of all Google Workspace plans that have access to the feature.

Meet the student leaders building apps using Google technology

Posted by Kübra Zengin, North America GDSC Regional Lead

Serving as a Google Developer Student Clubs (GDSC) Lead at the university level builds technical skills and leadership skills that serve alumni well in their post-graduate careers. Four GDSC Alumni Leads from universities in Canada and the U.S. have gone on to meaningful careers in the tech industry, and share their experiences.

Image of Daniel Shirvani (right) with Ayman Bolad (left)at a Google Developer Students event

Daniel Shirvani: The Next Frontier in Patient Data

Daniel Shirvani graduated from the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Vancouver, Canada, in 2023, with a Bachelor’s of Science in Pharmacology, and will soon return to UBC for medical school. He served as Google Developer Student Clubs (GDSC) Lead and founding team member. He also launched his own software company, Leftindust Systems, in 2019, to experiment with creating small-scale electronic medical record software (EMR) for the open source community. This project is now closed.

“I built a startup to rethink the use of medical software,” he says.

As a summer student volunteer at a Vancouver-area heart clinic, Shirvani was tasked with indexing hundreds of medical records, who had specific blood glucose HBA1C levels and factors related to kidney disease, to see who would be eligible for the new cardiac drug. However, the clinic’s medical records software didn’t have the capability to flag patients in the system, so the only way to register the hundreds of files on Shirvani’s final list would be to do so manually–and that was impossible, given the size of the list and the time remaining in his work term. He believed that the software should have been able to not only flag these patients, but also to automatically filter which patients met the criteria.

“Two to three hundred patients will not receive this life-saving drug because of this software,” Shirvani says. “My father is a patient who would have been eligible for this type of drug. His heart attack put things into perspective. There are families just like mine who will have the same experience that my father did, only because the software couldn’t keep up.”

Shirvani decided to combine his medical knowledge and programming skills to develop an electronic medical software, or EMR, that could store patient data numerically, instead of within paragraphs. This allows doctors to instantly analyze the data of patients, both at the individual and group-level. Doctors across North America took notice, including those from UBC, Stanford, UCLA, and elsewhere.

“During the North America Connect conference, a 2-day in-person event bringing together organizers and members across North America from the Google for Developers community programs including Google Developer Group, Women Techmakers, Google Developer Experts, and Google Developer Student Clubs, I met with many GDEs and Googlers, such as Kevin A. McGrail, who is now a personal mentor,” says Shirvani, who continues to look for other ways to make change in the healthcare community.

"When systems disappoint, we see not an end, but a new beginning. It’s in that space that we shape the future.


Image of Alexandra Cusell presenting at Carnegie Mellon University Swartz Center for Entrepreneurship

Alex Cussell: Becoming a tech entrepreneur

Alex Cussell graduated from the University of Central Florida in 2020, where she was a GDSC Lead her senior year. She says the experience inspired her to pursue her passion of becoming a tech entrepreneur.

“Leading a group of students with such differing backgrounds, addressing the world’s most pervasive problems, and loving every second of it taught me that I was meant to be a tech entrepreneur,” she says. “We were on a mission to save the lives of those involved in traffic accidents, when the world as we knew it came to a screeching halt due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

After her virtual graduation, Cussell moved to Silicon Valley and earned a Master’s in Technology Ventures from Carnegie Mellon University. She studied product management, venture capital, and startup law, with a vision of building a meaningful company. After getting engaged and receiving multiple gift cards as bridal shower gifts, Cussell found herself confused about each card’s amount and challenged trying to keep them organized.

She created the Jisell app, which features a universal gift card e-wallet, allowing users to digitize their gift cards. The app has had over five thousand dollars in gift cards uploaded to date and a partnership with the largest gift card distributor in the U.S. Jisell product manager Emily Robertson was Cussell’s roommate at the GDSC summit.

“Without Google Developer Student Clubs, I might never have realized how much I love problem-solving or technical leadership or known so much about the great tools offered by Google,” Cussell says. "Thank you to everyone who contributes to the GDSC experience; you have truly changed the lives of so many.”


Headshot of Angela Busheska, smiling

Angela Busheska: Founding a nonprofit to fight climate change

Angela Busheska is double majoring in electrical engineering and computer science, with a minor in mathematics, at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania, and anticipates graduating in 2025. A Google intern this summer and last summer, Busheska participated in Google’s Computer Science Research Mentorship Program from September 2021-January 2022, which supports the pursuit of computing research for students from historically marginalized groups through career mentorship, peer-to-peer networking, and building awareness about pathways within the field. Busheska investigated the computing processes across four different projects in the field of AI for Social Good.

During the pandemic, in 2020, Busheska founded EnRoute, a nonprofit to harness the power of everyday actions to fight climate change and break down the stigma that living sustainably is an expensive and challenging commitment. She also built a mobile app using Android and Flutter that helps users make simple daily transportation and shopping choices to reduce their carbon footprints. Since 2020, the app has guided thousands of users to reduce more than 100,000kg of CO2 emissions.

EnRoute honors Busheska’s aunt, who passed away when Busheska was 17. Busheska grew up in Skopje, in North Macedonia, one of the world’s most polluted cities.

“When I was 17 years old, Skopje’s dense air pollution led my aunt, who suffered from cardiovascular difficulties, to complete blood vessel damage, resulting in her swift passing,” says Busheska. “Inspired by my personal loss, I started researching the causes of the pollution.”

EnRoute has been featured on the Forbes 30 Under 30 Social Impact List and has been publicly recognized by Shawn Mendes, Prince William, One Young World, and the United Nations.


Headshot of Sapphira Ching, smiling

Sapphira Ching: Advancing Environmental, Social, and Government standards (ESG)

Sapphira Ching, a senior at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, spent her junior year as UPenn’s GDSC Lead, after joining GDSC her first year, leading social media for the club that spring and heading marketing and strategy her sophomore year. As a GDSC Lead, Sapphira expanded GDSC's campus membership and partnerships to reach an audience of over 2,000 students. In line with her passion for Environmental, Social, and Government standards (ESG) and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), Sapphira built a leadership team from different areas of study, including engineering, business, law, medicine, and music.

Ching’s passions for ESG, technology, and business drive her choices, and she says, “I am eager to incorporate ESG into tech to bring people together using business acumen.”

The Wharton School appointed her as an inaugural undergraduate fellow at the Turner ESG Initiative, and she founded the Penn Innovation Network, an ESG innovation club. Her summer internships have focused on ESG; her 2021 summer internship at MSCI (formerly known as Morgan Stanley Capital International) centered on on ESG, and her 2022 summer internship was at Soros Fund Management, an ESG juggernaut in finance. She is also a NCAA Division I student-athlete and Olympic hopeful in sabre fencing.

“I attribute my growth in ESG, tech, and business to how GDSC has helped me since my first year of college,” Ching says.
Are you an Alumni or current GDSC Lead? You can join the Google Developer Student Clubs (GDSC) LinkedIn Group here. The group is a great place to share ideas and connect with current and former GDSC Leads.

Interested in joining a GDSC near you? Google Developer Student Clubs (GDSC) are university based community groups for students interested in Google developer technologies. Students from all undergraduate or graduate programs with an interest in growing as a developer are welcome. Learn more here.

Interested in becoming a GDSC Lead? GDSC Leads are responsible for starting and growing a Google Developer Student Club (GDSC) chapter at their university. GDSC Leads work with students to organize events, workshops, and projects. Learn more here.

MediaPipe for Raspberry Pi and iOS

Posted by Paul Ruiz, Developer Relations Engineer

Back in May we released MediaPipe Solutions, a set of tools for no-code and low-code solutions to common on-device machine learning tasks, for Android, web, and Python. Today we’re happy to announce that the initial version of the iOS SDK, plus an update for the Python SDK to support the Raspberry Pi, are available. These include support for audio classification, face landmark detection, and various natural language processing tasks. Let’s take a look at how you can use these tools for the new platforms.

Object Detection for Raspberry Pi

Aside from setting up your Raspberry Pi hardware with a camera, you can start by installing the MediaPipe dependency, along with OpenCV and NumPy if you don’t have them already.

python -m pip install mediapipe

From there you can create a new Python file and add your imports to the top.

import mediapipe as mp from mediapipe.tasks import python from mediapipe.tasks.python import vision import cv2 import numpy as np

You will also want to make sure you have an object detection model stored locally on your Raspberry Pi. For your convenience, we’ve provided a default model, EfficientDet-Lite0, that you can retrieve with the following command.

wget -q -O efficientdet.tflite -q https://storage.googleapis.com/mediapipe-models/object_detector/efficientdet_lite0/int8/1/efficientdet_lite0.tflite

Once you have your model downloaded, you can start creating your new ObjectDetector, including some customizations, like the max results that you want to receive, or the confidence threshold that must be exceeded before a result can be returned.

# Initialize the object detection model base_options = python.BaseOptions(model_asset_path=model)options = vision.ObjectDetectorOptions(                                   base_options=base_options,                                   running_mode=vision.RunningMode.LIVE_STREAM,                                   max_results=max_results,                                                       score_threshold=score_threshold,                                    result_callback=save_result) detector = vision.ObjectDetector.create_from_options(options)

After creating the ObjectDetector, you will need to open the Raspberry Pi camera to read the continuous frames. There are a few preprocessing steps that will be omitted here, but are available in our sample on GitHub.

Within that loop you can convert the processed camera image into a new MediaPipe.Image, then run detection on that new MediaPipe.Image before displaying the results that are received in an associated listener.

mp_image = mp.Image(image_format=mp.ImageFormat.SRGB, data=rgb_image) detector.detect_async(mp_image, time.time_ns())

Once you draw out those results and detected bounding boxes, you should be able to see something like this:

Moving image of a person holidng up a cup and a phone, and detected bounded boxes identifying these items in real time

You can find the complete Raspberry Pi example shown above on GitHub, or see the official documentation here.

Text Classification on iOS

While text classification is one of the more direct examples, the core ideas will still apply to the rest of the available iOS Tasks. Similar to the Raspberry Pi, you’ll start by creating a new MediaPipe Tasks object, which in this case is a TextClassifier.

var textClassifier: TextClassifier? textClassifier = TextClassifier(modelPath: model.modelPath)

Now that you have your TextClassifier, you just need to pass a String to it to get a TextClassifierResult.

func classify(text: String) -> TextClassifierResult? { guard let textClassifier = textClassifier else { return nil } return try? textClassifier.classify(text: text) }

You can do this from elsewhere in your app, such as a ViewController DispatchQueue, before displaying the results.

let result = self?.textClassifier.classify(text: inputText) let categories = result?.classificationResult.classifications.first?.categories?? []

You can find the rest of the code for this project on GitHub, as well as see the full documentation on developers.google.com/mediapipe.

Moving image of TextClasifier on an iPhone

Getting started

To learn more, watch our I/O 2023 sessions: Easy on-device ML with MediaPipe, Supercharge your web app with machine learning and MediaPipe, and What's new in machine learning, and check out the official documentation over on developers.google.com/mediapipe.

We look forward to all the exciting things you make, so be sure to share them with @googledevs and your developer communities!

Meet the Google for Startups Accelerator: Women Founders Class of 2023

Posted by Iran Karimian, Startup Developer Ecosystem Lead, Canada

It’s an unfortunate truth that women founders are massively underrepresented among venture-backed entrepreneurs and VC investors, with companies founded solely by women receiving less than 3% of all venture capital investments. In response to this, it has become more apparent of the need to invest in women entrepreneurs in alternate ways - such as mentorship guidance and technical support to help grow and scale their business.

Back in 2020, we launched the Google for Startups Accelerator: Women Founders program to bridge the gender gap in the North American startup ecosystem, and provide high-quality mentorship opportunities, technical guidance, support and community for women founders in the region. Since then, the program has supported 36 women-led startups across North America, who have collectively raised $73.46M USD since graduating from their cohort. Now in its fourth year, the equity-free, 10-week intensive virtual accelerator program provides women-led startups the tools they need to prepare for the next phase of their growth journey.

Today, we are excited to introduce the 11 impressive women-led startups selected to participate in the 2023 cohort:

  • Aravenda (Fairfax, VA) is a comprehensive consignment shop software that is leading innovation in the fastest growing segment of retail through resales.
  • BorderlessHR (Ottawa, ON) offers global talent solutions for small businesses, providing instant matches to pre-vetted talent and AI-powered interviewers, saving SMBs the cost and time spent hiring the right talent on time and within budget. Borderless HR also offers a free suite of HR products to help manage talent.
  • Cobble (New York City, NY) is a platform that helps people reach collaborative agreement with others on ideas. Cobble offers a combination of decision-making tools, curated content and AI-driven social connections.
  • Craftmerce (Delaware City, DE) is a B2B technology platform that links African artisans to mainstream retail partners by providing tools for distributed production, enterprise management, and financing.
  • Dreami (Redwood City, Calif.) powers data-driven career development programs for the 36 million people in the US who face barriers to employment.
  • Medijobs (New York City, NY) offers virtual recruiting for the healthcare industry.
  • Monark (Calgary, AB) is a digital leadership development platform, preparing the next generation of leaders through on-demand personalized learning.
  • NLPatent (Toronto, ON) is an AI-patent search and analytics platform that uses a fine-tuned large language model, built from the ground up, to understand the language of innovation.
  • Rejoy Health (Mountain View, Calif.) is an AI-powered mobile application that uses computer vision technology to deliver at-home physical therapy, enabling individuals to effectively manage and alleviate chronic musculoskeletal conditions like back and joint pain.
  • Shimmer (San Francisco, Calif.) is an ADHD coaching platform that connects adults with ADHD and expert ADHD coaches for behavioral coaching.
  • Total Life (Jupiter, FL) reimagines aging for older adults through an easy, one-click platform that connects users with a Medicare covered healthcare provider.

Through data-driven insights, and leveraging the power of AI and ML, these women-led startups are leading innovation in the North American tech scene. We are thrilled to have them join the 10-week intensive virtual program, connecting them to the best of Google's programs, products, people and technology to help them reach their goals and unlock their next phase of growth. The 2023 Google for Startups Accelerator: Women Founders program kicks off this September.

Developers Share How They Build with Google Tools and Bard

Posted by Lyanne Alfaro, DevRel Program Manager, Google Developer Studio

Developer Journey is a monthly series highlighting diverse and global developers sharing relatable challenges, opportunities, and wins in their journey. Every month, we will spotlight developers around the world, the Google tools they leverage, and the kind of products they are building.

This month, we spoke with several Google Developer Experts to learn more about their path.

Eslam Medhat Fathy

Headshot of Eslam Medhat Fathy smiling
Giza, Egypt
Google Developer Expert, Firebase
Technical and Design Mentor at Google for Startups Accelerator Program
Google Developer Group Organizer
Senior Flutter Developer at Sarmad

What Google tools have you used to build?

I have used many tools like Firebase, Flutter, Android, Kotlin, Dart, Assistant, and Bard, of course.

Which tool has been your favorite to use? Why?

My favorite tool is Firebase, because of how easy it is to set up and use. It also provides a serverless architecture, easy-to-use services, real-time synchronization, and cross-platform support, among other features. These benefits can help you build robust and scalable applications quickly and easily.

Tell us about something you've built in the past using Google tools.

I have more than 10 apps in the store created in Android native with Kotlin, Flutter and Dart. A few examples are Rehlatech and AzkarApp.

What will you create with Google Bard?

I use Bard every day for generating, debugging, explaining, learning code, and more.

What advice would you give someone starting in their developer journey?

I advise everyone about to start their developer journey to:

  • Start with the basics: It's important to have a solid foundation in programming fundamentals. Learn the basics of a programming language, such as syntax, data types, control structures, and functions.
  • Practice coding: Practice makes perfect. The more you practice coding, the better you'll become. Start with small projects and gradually move on to more complex projects.
  • Learn from others: Join online communities, attend meetups, and participate in forums. Learning from others can help you improve your skills.
  • Read the documentation: Documentation is your friend. Read the documentation of the programming language or tools you're using. It can help you understand how to use them properly and solve problems.
  • Be patient: Learning to code takes time and patience. Don't get discouraged if you don't understand something right away. Keep practicing and asking questions.
  • Build projects: Building projects is a great way to learn new skills and apply what you've learned. Start small and gradually build more complex projects.
  • Stay up-to-date: Technology is constantly evolving. Stay up-to-date on the latest trends and updates in the programming world. Attend conferences, read blogs, and follow experts on social media.
  • Have fun: Coding should be fun. Don't take it too seriously and enjoy the process of learning and building new things.

Carmen Ansio

Headshot of Carmen Ansio smiling
Barcelona, Spain
Google Developer Expert, Firebase
Google Developer Expert, Web Technologies
UX Engineer

What Google tools have you used to build?

I have used various Google tools to build projects including Angular, Dart, and Firebase.

Which tool has been your favorite to use? Why?

My favorite tool has been Chrome DevTools because of its versatile suite of debugging tools and its network panel, which I often use to optimize web performance. DevTools is an essential part of my daily development process as it allows me to test, experiment, and debug code directly in the browser.

What will you create with Google Bard?

With Google Bard, I plan to develop a Figma plugin for creating dynamic design prototypes. Leveraging the natural language processing and understanding capabilities of Google Bard, the plugin will allow designers to quickly convert textual descriptions into visual design elements. This can significantly streamline the design process, bridging the gap between ideation and visual representation, while enabling non-designers to contribute effectively to the design process.

What advice would you give someone starting in their developer journey?

For those beginning their developer journey, my advice would be: Always stay curious and never stop learning. Technology evolves quickly, and it's important to be adaptable. Also, never undervalue the importance of good UI/UX design. It's not only about writing code, but also about creating a great user experience.

Stéphanie Walter

Headshot of Stéphanie Walter smiling
Luxembourg, Luxembourg
Google Developer Expert, Web Technologies
Women Techmakers
UX Researcher & Designer

What Google tools have you used to build?

The main tools I use are the Chrome inspect tool and Lighthouse. I’m using Material UI a lot and the M3 design kit for Figma is a great time saver.

Which tool has been your favorite to use? Why?

Performance is important where I work, so Lighthouse is definitely in my favorite list. The function to get a quick report, which also shows main accessibility issues, is very nice. Of course it won’t show all accessibility issues, but it’s a good place to start improving a website.

Please share with us about something you’ve built in the past using Google tools.

Both Lighthouse and the Chrome inspect tool are lifesavers when building websites like my blog. There’s still improvement to be made on some pages on performance, but it’s getting there.

What will you create with Google Bard?

To be honest, it only has been recently made available for my country, so I haven’t had time to really play with it. For now, I use AI chatbots as glorified assistants. English isn’t my native language, so asking such tools to help translate some things and improve grammar in some sentences is very helpful. I might use it to help me with sharing knowledge: to improve my articles, conference slides, and training material.

What advice would you give someone starting in their developer journey?

Start with a project you are passionate about, something that would help you, or something you wish existed. It doesn’t have to be perfect. It also doesn’t have to be something that will bring money. And remember, you also don’t have to finish it. It’s nice if you can share it with peers to get feedback but you can also share unfinished projects. It’s all about learning while working on something that you like.But remember to also step away from the computer. Developing should not be your whole life - otherwise, you will burn out really fast.

Google Developer Groups & ecosystem partners bring Startup Success Days to 15 Indian cities

Posted by Harsh Dattani - Program Manager, Developer Ecosystem

The Indian startup ecosystem is thriving, with new startups being founded every day. The country has a large pool of talented engineers and entrepreneurs, and a growing number of investors, policy makers and new age enterprises are looking to back Indian startups.

Google Developer Groups (GDGs) in 50 key Indian cities with varying tech ecosystems across India have seen a healthy mix of developers from the startup ecosystem participating in local meetups. As a result, GDGs have created a platform in collaboration with Google to help early-stage startups accelerate their growth. GDGs across India are increasingly playing a vital role in assisting startup founders and their teams with content, networking opportunities, hackathons, bootcamps, demo days, and more.

We are pleased to announce Startup Success Days with the goal of strengthening how developer communities interact with startup founders, VCs, and Googlers to discuss, share, and learn about the latest trends like Generative AI, Google Cloud, Google Maps, and Keras.

Google Developer Groups Success Days August to October 2023

Startup Success Days will be held in 15 cities across India, starting with 8 cities in August and September: Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Indore, Chennai, New Delhi, Mumbai, and Pune.

The next event will be hosted at Bangalore on August 12, 2023 at Google Office. The events will be free to attend and will be open to all startups, regardless of stage or industry. The events will cover technical topics, focused on Google technologies, and will provide opportunities for startups to receive mentorship from industry experts, network with other startups, and meet VCs to receive feedback on their business models.

Learn more and register for Startup Success Days on our website.

We look forward to seeing you there!

Harsh Dattani
Program Manager, Developer Ecosystem at Google

Expanding our Fully Homomorphic Encryption offering

Posted by Miguel Guevara, Product Manager, Privacy and Data Protection Office

At Google, it’s our responsibility to keep users safe online and ensure they’re able to enjoy the products and services they love while knowing their personal information is private and secure. We’re able to do more with less data through the development of our privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) like differential privacy and federated learning.

And throughout the global tech industry, we’re excited to see that adoption of PETs is on the rise. The UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) recently published guidance for how organizations including local governments can start using PETs to aid with data minimization and compliance with data protection laws. Consulting firm Gartner predicts that within the next two years, 60% of all large organizations will be deploying PETs in some capacity.

We’re on the cusp of mainstream adoption of PETs, which is why we also believe it’s our responsibility to share new breakthroughs and applications from our longstanding development and investment in this space. By open sourcing dozens of our PETs over the past few years, we’ve made them freely available for anyone – developers, researchers, governments, business and more – to use in their own work, helping unlock the power of data sets without revealing personal information about users.

As part of this commitment, we open-sourced a first-of-its-kind Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) transpiler two years ago, and have continued to remove barriers to entry along the way. FHE is a powerful technology that allows you to perform computations on encrypted data without being able to access sensitive or personal information and we’re excited to share our latest developments that were born out of collaboration with our developer and research community to expand what can be done with FHE.

Furthering the adoption of Fully Homomorphic Encryption

Today, we are introducing additional tools to help the community apply FHE technologies to video files. This advancement is important because video adoption can often be expensive and incur long run times, limiting the ability to scale FHE use to larger files and new formats.

This will encourage developers to try out more complex applications with FHE. Historically, FHE has been thought of as an intractable technology for large-scale applications. Our results processing large video files show it is possible to do FHE in previously unimaginable domains.Say you’re a developer at a company and are thinking of processing a large file (in the TBs order of magnitude, can be a video, or a sequence of characters) for a given task (e.g., convolution around specific data points to do a blurry filter on a video or detect object movement), you can now try this task using FHE.

To do so, we are expanding our FHE toolkit in three new ways to make it easier for developers to use FHE for a wider range of applications, such as private machine learning, text analysis, and video processing. As part of our toolkit, we will release new hardware, a software crypto library and an open source compiler toolchain. Our goal is to provide these new tools to researchers and developers to help advance how FHE is used to protect privacy while simultaneously lowering costs.


Expanding our toolkit

We believe—with more optimization and specialty hardware — there will be a wider amount of use cases for a myriad of similar private machine learning tasks, like privately analyzing more complex files, such as long videos, or processing text documents. Which is why we are releasing a TensorFlow-to-FHE compiler that will allow any developer to compile their trained TensorFlow Machine Learning models into a FHE version of those models.

Once a model has been compiled to FHE, developers can use it to run inference on encrypted user data without having access to the content of the user inputs or the inference results. For instance, our toolchain can be used to compile a TensorFlow Lite model to FHE, producing a private inference in 16 seconds for a 3-layer neural network. This is just one way we are helping researchers analyze large datasets without revealing personal information.

In addition, we are releasing Jaxite, a software library for cryptography that allows developers to run FHE on a variety of hardware accelerators. Jaxite is built on top of JAX, a high-performance cross-platform machine learning library, which allows Jaxite to run FHE programs on graphics processing units (GPUs) and Tensor Processing Units (TPUs). Google originally developed JAX for accelerating neural network computations, and we have discovered that it can also be used to speed up FHE computations.

Finally, we are announcing Homomorphic Encryption Intermediate Representation (HEIR), an open-source compiler toolchain for homomorphic encryption. HEIR is designed to enable interoperability of FHE programs across FHE schemes, compilers, and hardware accelerators. Built on top of MLIR, HEIR aims to lower the barriers to privacy engineering and research. We will be working on HEIR with a variety of industry and academic partners, and we hope it will be a hub for researchers and engineers to try new optimizations, compare benchmarks, and avoid rebuilding boilerplate. We encourage anyone interested in FHE compiler development to come to our regular meetings, which can be found on the HEIR website.

Launch diagram

Building advanced privacy technologies and sharing them with others

Organizations and governments around the world continue to explore how to use PETs to tackle societal challenges and help developers and researchers securely process and protect user data and privacy. At Google, we’re continuing to improve and apply these novel data processing techniques across many of our products, and investing in democratizing access to the PETs we’ve developed. We believe that every internet user deserves world-class privacy, and we continue to partner with others to further that goal. We’re excited for new testing and partnerships on our open source PETs and will continue investing in innovations, aiming at releasing more updates in the future.

These principles are the foundation for everything we make at Google and we’re proud to be an industry leader in developing and scaling new privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) that make it possible to create helpful experiences while protecting our users’ privacy.

PETs are a key part of our Protected Computing effort at Google, which is a growing toolkit of technologies that transforms how, when and where data is processed to technically ensure its privacy and safety. And keeping users safe online shouldn’t stop with Google - it should extend to the whole of the internet. That’s why we continue to innovate privacy technologies and make them widely available to all.

Introducing Project IDX, An Experiment to Improve Full-stack, Multiplatform App Development

Posted by Bre Arder, UX Research Lead, Kirupa Chinnathambi, Product Lead, Ashwin Raghav Mohan Ganesh, Engineering Lead, Erin Kidwell, Director of Engineering, and Roman Nurik, Design Lead


These days, getting an app from zero to production – especially one that works well across mobile, web, and desktop platforms – can feel like building a Rube Goldberg machine. You’ve got to navigate an endless sea of complexity, duct-taping together a tech stack that'll help you bootstrap, compile, test, deploy, and monitor your apps.

While Google’s been working on making multiplatform app development easier for years – from Angular and Flutter to Google Cloud and Firebase – it feels like there’s even more we can do to make the entire multiplatform app development workflow faster and more frictionless. So several months ago, a few of us got together and started experimenting. And today, we’re excited to share a very early look at our experiment, which we’re calling Project IDX.

Moving illustration of Project IDX Logo

Project IDX is a browser-based development experience built on Google Cloud and powered by Codey, a foundational AI model trained on code and built on PaLM 2. It’s designed to make it easier to build, manage and deploy full-stack web and multiplatform applications, with popular frameworks and languages. Project IDX is also built on Code OSS, so it should feel familiar no matter what you’re building.

A big part of why we’re sharing Project IDX today is we’d love to hear from the broader developer community on what could help you work even faster. In the meantime, here’s a preview of what’s possible today with Project IDX.


Get to work quickly, from anywhere

At the heart of Project IDX is our conviction that you should be able to develop from anywhere, on any device, with the full fidelity of local development. Every Project IDX workspace has the full capabilities of a Linux-based VM, paired with the universal access that comes with being hosted in the cloud, in a datacenter near you.

Moving illustration of Project IDX workspace operating on a browser and generating a preview on a mobile devivce

Import your existing app, or start something new

Project IDX lets you import your existing projects from GitHub so you can pick up right where you left off. You can also create new projects, with pre-baked templates for popular frameworks, including Angular, Flutter, Next.js, React, Svelte, Vue, and languages such as JavaScript, Dart, and (coming soon) Python, Go, and more. We’re also actively working to add first-class support for more project types and frameworks. If you have any suggestions, we’d love your feedback on which stacks to support.

Image of logos of Project IDX supported frameworks – React, Angular, Next, Flutter, Vue, Svelte, Go, Python, GitHub

Preview your app across platforms

Creating successful apps today means optimizing your app design and behavior across platforms, and previewing your apps just as your users would see them. To make this easier, Project IDX includes a built-in web preview and, coming soon, a fully-configured Android emulator and an embedded iOS simulator, all available directly in the browser.

Moving illustration of app design and behavior optimized across multiple devices - iOS simulator, Web browser, and Android emulator – with Project IDX

Help from AI

We spend a lot of time writing code, and recent advances in AI have created big opportunities to make that time more productive. With Project IDX, we’re exploring how Google’s innovations in AI — including the Codey and PaLM 2 models powering Studio Bot in Android Studio, Duet in Google Cloud and more – can help you not only write code faster, but also write higher-quality code. Currently, Project IDX has smart code completion, an assistive chatbot, and contextual code actions like “add comments” and “explain this code”. Our AI capabilities are in their very early days, and we’re working on making IDX AI even better at helping you as you work.

Moving illustration of IDX AI assisting you with smart code completion, assistive chatbot, and contenxtual code actions

Publish to the web with Firebase Hosting

Finally, a common pain point in getting your app into production is deploying it. We’ve made this easier by integrating Firebase Hosting, making it possible to deploy a shareable preview of your web app, or deploy to production with a fast, secure, and global hosting platform, with just a few clicks. And because Firebase Hosting supports dynamic backends, powered by Cloud Functions, this works great for full-stack frameworks like Next.js.


Let’s build Project IDX together

We shared how we think Project IDX can start to make multiplatform app development better, along with some strides we’ve started making in these areas. But we are just at the beginning of this journey to improve the end-to-end development workflow, and we can only make good on this vision with your help. So with that, we’d like to share an early version of Project IDX with you — rough edges and all — to iterate on what’s working well and what could be even better for your app team’s workflow. To join us on our journey, visit our website to sign up and be one of the first to try Project IDX.

As for what’s next, we’re continuously working on adding new capabilities and addressing your feedback. We’re already working on new collaboration features, as we know how important those are in this hybrid work world, as well as deeper framework integrations and more personalized/contextual AI. Please share your feature requests with us as well!