You may have noticed that we’re very focused on speed around here. From our beginning with 1 Gig to being one of the first ISPs with a widely accessible multi-gig product with 2 Gig two years ago, Google Fiber has always been pushing what “fast” means when it comes to internet service.
And we’re ready to do it again, because, let’s face it, fast is relative to what you need and want to do online. There will always be more to do. More files to upload and download, more games to play, more transactions to make, more movies to stream, more media to create — just … more of everything.
That’s why Google Fiber will launch 5 Gig and 8 Gig beginning in early 2023. Both products will offer symmetrical upload and download speeds (up to 5 Gig or 8 Gig respectively*) with a Wi-Fi 6 router (or you can use your own), up to two mesh extenders and professional installation, all priced for everyday use — $125/month for 5 Gig and $150/month for 8 Gig.
We believe that customers should also have access to these fast speeds and increased bandwidth at accessible prices without contracts, data caps or installation fees, and we’re committed to making that happen.
Who needs 5 Gig and 8 Gig?
At Google Fiber, we want to make sure our customers are ready for whatever the internet throws their way. While 2 Gig answered the call for many gamers and power streamers, 5 Gig and 8 Gig are designed for even heavier internet users — creative professionals, people working in the cloud or with large data, households with large shared internet demands. People who create and utilize large files need the ability to transfer them efficiently. For those who work on the cloud or in real time, like with financial transactions, it’s helpful to know there’s less lag between pushing send and making something happen. 5 Gig and 8 Gig can help these customers take on whatever they need online and be ready for whatever is coming next.
Google Fiber’s new 5 Gig and 8 Gig plans will answer this call. 5 Gig will make it easier to upload and download simultaneously, no matter the file size. And 8 Gig will make sure that everything you are doing online is happening in near real time (without jitter and with low latency).
While we can’t predict the future, we believe that video quality never seen before, virtual experiences that seem real to the touch, gaming as fast as you can play, (and who knows what else?) are right around the corner. This vision starts with our commitment to delivering great internet. With the help of content partners and device manufacturers, we're excited to usher in the next generation internet experience for Google Fiber customers.
So...how can I get it?
If you are a current Google Fiber customer, especially in Utah, Kansas City or West Des Moines, you could be trying out these new products as early as next month. Sign up for an opportunity to be among the first to test 5 Gig and 8 Gig in your city. We’ll follow up with eligible customers to learn a little bit more about how you plan to put all that speed to use.
Google Fiber brought you 1 Gig in 2010, 2 Gig in 2020, and 5 and 8 Gig in 2022 (and we’re already testing 20,000 megabits in the field) … the future is fast, and it’s about to get faster.
Posted by Amalia O’Sullivan, Director of Product Management
*Upload/download speed and device streaming claims are based on maximum wired speeds. Actual internet and Wi-Fi speeds are not guaranteed and may vary based on factors such as hardware and software limitations, latency, packet loss, etc.
Posted by Allison Chang (Product Manager, Google Play), Weifang Sun (Product Manager, Chrome OS), Manuel Wang (Product Manager, Google Play Console), and Marcus Leal (Product Manager, Google Play)
Your Play Store listing is the best way to help prospective users understand the functionality and value of your app. The assets and information you provide - descriptions, images, and videos – are essential to users looking to make a decision on what to download.
Tailoring your app's assets to each form factor is more important than ever, as users are increasingly investing in connected devices beyond their phones, such as tablets, smart watches, and TVs. In fact, the number of active non-mobile Android devices has grown almost 30% in the last year.
Today, we’re announcing new features that put more of your store listing assets front and center in Google Play. We'll also walk through some best practices to help you optimize your listing and generate meaningful installs for your app.
Changes on Large Screens
New Content-Forward Formats on Play Homepages
On large screens like tablets, foldables, and Chromebooks, we’re continuing to make improvements that will enable users to discover the best apps for their devices. As we showcased at I/O earlier this year, we’re redesigning the Play Store for large screens and using your screenshots, videos, and descriptions directly in Apps and Games Home.
Play Store homepage for large screens (2023)
The goal of this content-forward approach is to better represent your app in the store and help users make install decisions.
We’ve published a set of content quality guidelines as best practices to showcase your app on large screens. Beginning early next year, apps with assets that follow these criteria will be able to take advantage of richer formats in Play. This won’t impact your app’s promotability, just the way your app is displayed in the Play Store.
Screenshot Support for ChromeOS
When users browse the Play Store on Chromebooks today, they see tablet or phone screenshots in the app’s store listing page. Since this does not always accurately portray the Chromebook experience, we’re now launching the ability to upload Chromebook-specific screenshots in Play Console.
Chromebook screenshots in Play Developer Console
This will allow up to 8 screenshots and will be shown primarily on the Play Store for Chromebooks. These screenshots will appear on both your app listing page and Play homepages.
We recommend using 16:9 screenshots for landscape with dimensions of 1080-7690px.
To get started, visit the Main Store Listing section in Play Console.
Updates to Tablet Screenshot Guidelines
With the new launch of ChromeOS screenshot support, we’re also updating our quality guidelines for tablets for consistency across large screens. While previously uploaded tablet screenshots will not be affected, this should help simplify the process of generating new screenshots when you make updates to your app.
Changes on Phones
Homepages for Other Devices
Last month, we introduced form-factor-specific homepages. This is a dedicated surface on phones for users that have additional non-mobile devices. These homepages improve the visibility of your app and store listing details by allowing users to browse for titles best suited for their smart watches, TVs or cars - all from their phones.
Homepages for other devices
Search Device Filters and Remote Install
Users can also filter results in search with a new device filter in Play. With the filter enabled, search results will only include titles that are compatible with the selected device.
Device search filters
Remote install to other devices
Store Listing Best Practices
Since these changes will make your store listing details much more prominent in Play, here are some ways to help you optimize your app assets:
Use device-specific screenshots that demonstrate the core app or game experience.
In Play Console, you can upload screenshots to show users how your app or game will look on different device types and highlight unique form factor features. When choosing screenshots, use imagery that conveys the primary user flows within your app. This will help users on all devices anticipate what the true app or game experience will be like for them.
Use device imagery with caution
Showing a physical device in your store listing may cause your screenshots and videos to become obsolete quickly or alienate some users. To save time maintaining your assets, use screenshots and videos of just the app or game experience.
Use high-quality images with the proper aspect ratio and resolution
Using high quality images is essential to ensuring your screenshots look great on all screen sizes. Don’t include screenshots that are pixelated, stretched or compressed, or improperly rotated.
Avoid overloading assets with text
To make sure your screenshots and videos look great when featured on Play homepages, avoid using too much text. Since we may resize your assets to fit certain screen sizes, this will prevent any text from being cut off unintentionally.
If you need to use text, avoid any time-sensitive copy that needs to be updated frequently.
As we continue to test ways to feature your store listing information more prominently in Play, the quality of your assets remain as important as ever. We hope these features and tips empower you to showcase the best of your app on all device types. For more tips like these to help you get started, visit our content quality guidelines.
Posted by Ashish Thapliyal, Software Engineer, and Jordi Pont-Tuset, Research Scientist, Google Research
Image captioning is the machine learning task of automatically generating a fluent natural language description for a given image. This task is important for improving accessibility for visually impaired users and is a core task in multimodal research encompassing both vision and language modeling.
However, datasets for image captioning are primarily available in English. Beyond that, there are only a few datasets covering a limited number of languages that represent just a small fraction of the world’s population. Further, these datasets feature images that severely under-represent the richness and diversity of cultures from across the globe. These aspects have hindered research on image captioning for a wide variety of languages, and directly hamper the deployment of accessibility solutions for a large potential audience around the world.
Today we present and make publicly available the Crossmodal 3600 (XM3600) image captioning evaluation dataset as a robust benchmark for multilingual image captioning that enables researchers to reliably compare research contributions in this emerging field. XM3600 provides 261,375 human-generated reference captions in 36 languages for a geographically diverse set of 3600 images. We show that the captions are of high quality and the style is consistent across languages.
The Crossmodal 3600 dataset includes reference captions in 36 languages for each of a geographically diverse set of 3600 images. All images used with permission under the CC-BY 2.0 license.
Overview of the Crossmodal 3600 Dataset Creating large training and evaluation datasets in multiple languages is a resource-intensive endeavor. Recent work has shown that it is feasible to build multilingual image captioning models trained on machine-translated data with English captions as the starting point. However, some of the most reliable automatic metrics for image captioning are much less effective when applied to evaluation sets with translated image captions, resulting in poorer agreement with human evaluations compared to the English case. As such, trustworthy model evaluation at present can only be based on extensive human evaluation. Unfortunately, such evaluations usually cannot be replicated across different research efforts, and therefore do not offer a fast and reliable mechanism to automatically evaluate multiple model parameters and configurations (e.g., model hill climbing) or to compare multiple lines of research.
XM3600 provides 261,375 human-generated reference captions in 36 languages for a geographically diverse set of 3600 images from the Open Images dataset. We measure the quality of generated captions by comparing them to the manually provided captions using the CIDEr metric, which ranges from 0 (unrelated to the reference captions) to 10 (perfectly matching the reference captions). When comparing pairs of models, we observed strong correlations between the differences in the CIDEr scores of the model outputs, and side-by-side human evaluations comparing the model outputs. , making XM3600 is a reliable tool for high-quality automatic comparisons between image captioning models on a wide variety of languages beyond English.
Language Selection We chose 30 languages beyond English, roughly based on their percentage of web content. In addition, we chose an additional five languages that include under-resourced languages that have many native speakers or major native languages from continents that would not be covered otherwise. Finally, we also included English as a baseline, thus resulting in a total of 36 languages, as listed in the table below.
Arabic
Bengali*
Chinese
Croatian
Cusco Quechua*
Czech
Danish
Dutch
English
Filipino
Finnish
French
German
Greek
Hebrew
Hindi
Hungarian
Indonesian
Italian
Japanese
Korean
Maori*
Norwegian
Persian
Polish
Portuguese
Romanian
Russian
Spanish
Swahili*
Swedish
Telugu*
Thai
Turkish
Ukrainian
Vietnamese
List of languages used in XM3600. *Low-resource languages with many native speakers, or major native languages from continents that would not be covered otherwise.
Image Selection The images were selected from among those in the Open Images dataset that have location metadata. Since there are many regions where more than one language is spoken, and some areas are not well covered by these images, we designed an algorithm to maximize the correspondence between selected images and the regions where the targeted languages are spoken. The algorithm starts with the selection of images with geo-data corresponding to the languages for which we have the smallest pool (e.g., Persian) and processes them in increasing order of their candidate image pool size. If there aren't enough images in an area where a language is spoken, then we gradually expand the geographic selection radius to: (i) a country where the language is spoken; (ii) a continent where the language is spoken; and, as last resort, (iii) from anywhere in the world. This strategy succeeded in providing our target number of 100 images from an appropriate region for most of the 36 languages, except for Persian (where 14 continent-level images are used) and Hindi (where all 100 images are at the global level, because the in-region images were assigned to Bengali and Telugu).
Sample images showcasing the geographical diversity of the annotated images. Images used under CC BY 2.0 license.
Caption Generation In total, all 3600 images (100 images per language) are annotated in all 36 languages, each with an average of two annotations per language, yielding a total of 261,375 captions.
Annotators work in batches of 15 images. The first screen shows all 15 images with their captions in English as generated by a captioning model trained to output a consistent style of the form "<main salient objects> doing <activities> in the <environment>", often with object attributes, such as a "smiling" person, "red" car, etc. The annotators are asked to rate the caption quality given guidelines for a 4-point scale from "excellent" to "bad", plus an option for "not_enough_information". This step forces the annotators to carefully assess caption quality and it primes them to internalize the style of the captions. The following screens show the images again but individually and without the English captions, and the annotators are asked to produce descriptive captions in the target language for each image.
The image batch size of 15 was chosen so that the annotators would internalize the style without remembering the exact captions. Thus, we expect the raters to generate captions based on the image content only and lacking translation artifacts. For example in the example shown below, the Spanish caption mentions “number 42” and the Thai caption mentions “convertibles”, none of which are mentioned in the English captions. The annotators were also provided with a protocol to use when creating the captions, thus achieving style consistency across languages.
• A vintage sports car in a showroom with many other vintage sports cars
• The branded classic cars in a row at display
Spanish
• Automóvil clásico deportivo en exhibición de automóviles de galería — (Classic sports car in gallery car show)
• Coche pequeño de carreras color plateado con el número 42 en una exhibición de coches — (Small silver racing car with the number 42 at a car show)
Thai
• รถเปิดประทุนหลายสีจอดเรียงกันในที่จัดแสดง — (Multicolored convertibles line up in the exhibit)
• รถแข่งวินเทจจอดเรียงกันหลายคันในงานจัดแสดง — (Several vintage racing cars line up at the show.)
Sample captions in three different languages (out of 36 — see full list of captions in Appendix A of the Crossmodal-3600 paper), showcasing the creation of annotations that are consistent in style across languages, while being free of direct-translation artifacts (e.g., the Spanish “number 42” or the Thai “convertibles” would not be possible when directly translating from the English versions). Image used under CC BY 2.0 license.
Caption Quality and Statistics We ran two to five pilot studies per language to troubleshoot the caption generation process and to ensure high quality captions. We then manually evaluated a random subset of captions. First we randomly selected a sample of 600 images. Then, to measure the quality of captions in a particular language, for each image, we selected for evaluation one of the manually generated captions. We found that:
For 25 out of 36 languages, the percentage of captions rated as “Good” or “Excellent” is above 90%, and the rest are all above 70%.
For 26 out of 36 languages, the percentage of captions rated as “Bad” is below 2%, and the rest are all below 5%.
For languages that use spaces to separate words, the number of words per caption can be as low as 5 or 6 for some agglutinative languages like Cusco Quechua and Czech, and as high as 18 for an analytic language like Vietnamese. The number of characters per caption also varies drastically — from mid-20s for Korean to mid-90s for Indonesian — depending on the alphabet and the script of the language.
Empirical Evaluation and Results We empirically measured the ability of the XM3600 annotations to rank image captioning model variations by training four variations of a multilingual image captioning model and comparing the CIDEr differences of the models’ outputs over the XM3600 dataset for 30+ languages, to side-by-side human evaluations. We observed strong correlations between the CIDEr differences and the human evaluations. These results support the use of the XM3600 references as a means to achieve high-quality automatic comparisons between image captioning models on a wide variety of languages beyond English.
Recent Uses Recently PaLI used XM3600 to evaluate model performance beyond English for image captioning, image-to-text retrieval and text-to-image retrieval. The key takeaways they found when evaluating on XM3600 were that multilingual captioning greatly benefits from scaling the PaLI models, especially for low-resource languages.
Acknowledgements We would like to acknowledge the coauthors of this work: Xi Chen and Radu Soricut.
Ensuring today’s workforce has the skills required for an evolving labor market requires creative approaches. That’s why we’ve been working with higher education to help students and people already in the job market reach their earning potential. Educational institutions in all 50 states, including over 300 universities, community colleges and career and technical education high schools, have incorporated Google Career Certificates to help people begin promising careers in growing fields.
Today, we’re announcing Industry Specializations, a new addition to the Google Career Certificates program. We’ve joined forces with leading universities so people can learn from top experts at Google and world-class faculty in an affordable and accessible way — no experience or application required. The university-built Specializations will provide Google Career Certificate graduates and new learners with additional expertise and skills for jobs in some of the fastest-growing industries.
Learners can build on their skills and access new career opportunities by enrolling in a Specialization to prepare for entry-level jobs like:
Healthcare IT specialist and healthcare customer support, with Healthcare IT Support by Johns Hopkins University
Construction manager and project engineer, with Construction Management by Columbia Engineering
Plus, top institutions are working with us to reach even more people with the Google Career Certificates. UCLA Extension, one of the first and largest continuing education providers in the country, is offering the Google Career Certificates to any learner, at no cost, through UCLAxOpen. Stanford Digital Education is partnering with the Bay Area Community College Consortium to provide in-person and virtual instruction programs to deliver the Google Career Certificates across the Bay Area. And the SkillUp Google Career Certificate program at Rutgers University provides alumni with free access to the Google Career Certificates through their career services office.
Many of these partnerships are happening state-wide:
The Technical College System of Georgia launched the Google Career Certificates as a non-credit option to all 22 of their colleges.
The Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education is working with member universities across the state to implement the certificates as a non-credit offering to undergraduates, and will extend access to the community by offering them through university workforce and continuing education offices.
The North Carolina Community College System has developed credit-bearing courses around the Google Project Management and Data Analytics Certificates and has made them available in their central course catalog for all 58 colleges.
In addition to these states, community college systems in Connecticut, Michigan, Missouri, New Jersey, Ohio and Virginia are offering Google Career Certificates to help support learners’ employability.
By completing a Google Career Certificate and an Industry Specialization, learners will earn a credential from Google and from the participating university. They will also gain access to jobs through our employer consortium, which includes more than 150 companies — such as Adobe, Deloitte, Lowe’s, Verizon and Google — that are eager to hire talent in these fields.
We’re proud to work with higher education institutions to create additional accessible and flexible pathways for economic mobility. To learn more about these opportunities, visit grow.google/certificates. And if you are an academic institution interested in partnering with us, more information can be found on our website.
Image:Hacienda Auroraby Francisco Oller, collection of the Museo de Arte de Ponce on Google Arts & Culture
My family is of Salvadoran and Mexican descent — with the Indigenous, Afro-Latino and European roots that come with that lineage. One thing that they ingrained in me all my life was the importance of our culture and values. As I got older, these lessons helped me as I came into my truth, including when I came out as queer. I can’t disentangle all these parts of my identity — nor would I want to — and I’ve been lucky enough to have a supportive queer Latinx community around me along the way.
Everyone should have access to these supportive spaces, where they can see themselves and find a sense of self-acceptance and belonging. That’s why Google’s continued commitment to creating these spaces for diverse communities matters so much. I’m glad to see my team at Google.org supporting the culture, history and diversity of Latinos across the U.S., and using our platforms to make sure people can get connected to more resources. Here are a few ways we’re doing so this Hispanic Heritage Month.
Strengthening Latino LGBTQ+ and Indigeneous communities
Hispanic Heritage Month is a time to shine a light on our cultural contributions and histories, but it’s also a time to reflect on the challenges we still face. For some within our community, intersecting marginalized identities mean that they are disproportionately affected by discrimination and barriers compared to the broader community as a whole. For Indigenous communities, that can mean the erasure of first languages, lack of access to healthcare or inequities in education. For LGBTQ+ people it can result in lower levels of business support and discrimination for queer business owners.
Google.org is proud to support organizations that are tackling these issues head on. We’re providing a total of $500,000 in Google.org grants to three organizations who are focused on intersectionality in the Latino community:
Comunidades Indígenas en Liderazgo (CIELO), an Indigenous woman-led organization that works with Indigenous-migrant communities in Los Angeles, CA
Centro Binacional para el Desarrollo Indígena Oaxaqueño (CBDIO), an Indigenous-led organization supporting the Indigenous immigrant communities from Mexico in California’s Central Valley and Central Coast for almost 30 years
Continuing our support for Latino culture and cultural institutions
Inclusive spaces can be virtual, too, like the Latino Cultures in the U.S. project on Google Arts & Culture, which we first launched in 2017. The project has grown every year since, and now features more than 60 institutions and over 150 stories. This Hispanic Heritage Month, we added the largest online collection of Puerto Rican arts, with over 900 artworks digitized in high-resolution, thanks to a partnership with Lin-Manuel and Luis Miranda. And to further celebrate Latino culture in the U.S., Google.org has made a $1 million grant to the National Museum of the American Latino, a new museum joining the Smithsonian Institution network in Washington D.C. Latino communities are an integral part of America, and this museum will showcase our contributions for generations to come.
Escena del Rio by Manuel E. Jordán, collection of the Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña on Google Arts & Culture. A painting of a river surrounded by palm trees and puffy white clouds. Two people wade in the water and a sailboat floats in the middle of the scene.
Escena del Rio by Manuel E. Jordán, collection of the Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña on Google Arts & Culture
Goyita by Rafael Tufiño, collection of the Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña on Google Arts & Culture. A portrait of a person wearing a head wrap.
Goyita by Rafael Tufiño, collection of the Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña on Google Arts & Culture
House Interior II by Analida Burgos, collection of the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico on Google Arts & Culture. A painting of a stylized house surrounded by an orange border.
House Interior II by Analida Burgos, collection of the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico on Google Arts & Culture
Using our platform to connect Latinos to critical resources
Over the past year, Google.org has also supported a number of Hispanic and Latino nonprofits with more than $500,000 in donated Google Search advertising — helping them reach a broader audience and share vital resources. This includes:
UnidosUS, the largest Latino advocacy organization in the U.S., which has used Search Ads to amplify culturally-relevant COVID-19 information since the start of the pandemic
Hispanic Access Foundation, which is using donated advertising to recruit young leaders of color for internship opportunities with organizations like the U.S. National Park Service
When we support those in the margins, we elevate our entire society. I’m proud of the work Google is doing to support Hispanic and Latino communities, especially for those at the intersections. Happy Hispanic Heritage Month to all of the people who make our communities vibrant and beautiful simply by existing.
Hi everyone! We've just released Chrome Beta 107 (107.0.5304.36) for Android. It's now available on Google Play.
You can see a partial list of the changes in the Git log. For details on new features, check out the Chromium blog, and for details on web platform updates, check here.
If you find a new issue, please let us know by filing a bug.
The World Trade Organization recently predicted global trade growth will slow sharply next year, and the World Bank believes that declining growth rates will undermine efforts to reduce poverty. Meanwhile, inflation, high energy prices and fiscal pressures are in focus for policymakers everywhere.
Against this gloomy backdrop, one area that remains a source of optimism is the potential for digital transformation to jumpstart economic growth and create new opportunities — particularly for micro-, small- and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) who often are most vulnerable to economic downturns. As more people and businesses come online, particularly in emerging markets, the internet continues to create new opportunities for businesses to export and grow.
A report that we’re launching today gives us a sense of the scale of the opportunity, estimating that the right investments in digital transformation can boost the exports of six Latin American countries up to $140 billion annually, by 2030 – a four-fold increase over current levels.
“The Digital Sprinters”
Today’s report builds on our 2020 Digital Sprinters framework, which offered a blueprint for how emerging economies can accelerate their digital transformation with investments in four key areas:
Infrastructure: Investing in digital connectivity and secure and environmentally sustainable infrastructure, including smart management.
People: Preparing people across all communities for the jobs of the future by helping to skill and train them for the digital economy.
Technological innovation: Deploying technological innovation that can unlock new opportunities. Increasing the use of data, artificial intelligence, and cloud computing, to create efficiencies and enable economic growth.
Public policies: Creating a predictable regulatory ecosystem that promotes competitiveness, open markets, interoperable regulatory standards, and tax regimes based on international standards.
Digital Exports in Latin America
To assess the potential for Latin America, we commissioned new research to better understand digital exports and their potential to impact six economies in the region. The results are noteworthy. Overall, researchers projected digital exports to contribute more than 2% of GDP for Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Uruguay by 2030, or approximately $140 billion per year – an increase from the current $34 billion, or 0.8% of GDP.
The research identifies three ways in which the digitization is changing trade in Latin America:
Easier access to new markets. The lion’s share of current and potential economic gains come from digital tools that facilitate access to overseas markets, making it easier to sell abroad. What previously required heavy upfront investment and navigating complex bureaucratic processes can today be handled online, often on a smartphone or tablet. Over 60% of economic growth is fuelled by tools like online ads, which are regularly served to consumers abroad. Cloud services are another driver of digital exports, enabled by new infrastructure investments in the region, like Google’s “Cloud Regions” in Santiago, Chile, and São Paulo, Brazil.
New products. The second area, making up over a third of expected gains, are exports of a growing array of new digital products and services. Think of mobile apps that find a global audience through the Play Store or other platforms. More than 2.5 billion people in over 190 countries use Google Play every month. And more than 2 million developers work with us to build their businesses and reach people around the globe. Video streaming is another example where content produced in one country can easily be exported. Paying out over $6 billion to content creators between 2021 and 2022, YouTube is enabling content and culture to transcend borders.
Digitization of trade procedures. A third area that is contributing to export growth is the overall digitalization of trade processes. Think paperless procedures at the border or in ports, email or online forms instead of phone calls, or Cloud computing or artificial intelligence technologies to simplify formerly complex trade machinery while shrinking the cost. Google Translate supports more than 100 languages, it can translate entire websites, scanned documents or pictures, enabling seamless communication across borders. While not counted in overall estimates, digitalization of trade would bring additional efficiencies to trade balances.
A big opportunity for small businesses
Leveraging digitization for exports is already taking place today. For example, Doris Canseco opened a traditional flower shop in Mexico, but the limited local market led her to move online. Using Google Ads to get the word out about her business, Flores de Oaxaca's customers in Europe, the United States and Canada, among other places. The business doubled in size and today online sales account for between 60 and 85 percent of its total revenue.
Similarly, Germán Garmendia was born in the small town of Copiapó, in the Atacama desert in Chile. A shy and quiet child, his mother signed him up for drama classes. A few years later, Germán started posting videos online. Today, he is one of the world’s most popular YouTubers, with more than 43 million subscribers on HolaSoyGerman and 46 million on JuegaGerman, and has used the platform to break into other fields.
Doris’ and Germán’s stories reflect a broader trend in Latin America and beyond, where digital tools are democratizing access to the global economy and creating new opportunities that didn’t exist a generation ago. The new report suggests that governments, together with the private sector and civil society, should adopt policies and invest to reinforce this trend.
Compelling data for governments and policymakers
The report looked at how policymakers can unlock export opportunities in a way that is inclusive and sustainable. Based on prior experience across Latin America, they identified 11 recommendations across five areas, which are aligned with the Digital Sprinters framework: — (1) lead from the top, (2) build physical capital, (3) develop human capital, (4) enhance competitiveness, and (5) enable technology usage. While progress and priorities vary among countries, the most common recommendations involve boosting digital infrastructure, digital skilling, digital security and policies that promote trade.
How Google is supporting economic inclusivity through exports
The report estimates that Google's digital products enabled 13% of the export growth across these economies in 2021. We are proud of this contribution and look forward to supporting future growth. We’re also committed to supporting entrepreneurship and skills development across the region.
When we opened our Google for Startups campus in Brazil in 2016, there were no “unicorns” — startups valued at $1 billion or more – in the region. Today, there are 35, including 13 that have been part of our Google for Startups programs. Many of these startups develop digital exports, provide their services across borders, and help traditional small businesses to grow. With investment, resources and training from Google, we have supported more than 450 startups in the region. These startups have gone on to raise more than $9 billion in investments while creating 25,000 jobs.
We’re also supporting digital skills—like cross-border marketing online — which are key to unlocking opportunities for entrepreneurs. Through our Grow with Google program and Google.org grantees, we’ve trained nearly eight million people across Latin America in digital skills since 2017. To build on this momentum, we’ve recently announced that we’ll provide Google Career Certificate scholarships to train one million more people in Latin America — opening paths to well-paying jobs in high-growth fields.
Next Steps
At a time of global macroeconomic uncertainty, it is more important than ever to double down on digitally-led trade growth . We hope this research we are releasing today sheds further light on the opportunities and policies needed to achieve them —and helps communities and policymakers in Latin America as they seek to harness digital transformation to become Digital Sprinters.
The Beta channel is being updated to 107.0.5304.32 (Platform version: 15117.41.0 / 15117.42.0) for most ChromeOS devices. This build contains a number of bug fixes and security updates and will be rolled out over the next couple days.
If you find new issues, please let us know one of the following ways
The Beta channel has been updated to 107.0.5304.36 for Windows,Mac and Linux.
A full list of changes in this build is available in the log. Interested in switching release channels? Find out how here. If you find a new issues, please let us know by filing a bug. The community help forum is also a great place to reach out for help or learn about common issues.
