YouTube NextUp: Are you the next big thing on YouTube?

Last year, creators on YouTube generated billions of views daily and earned millions of dollars via our revenue-sharing Partner Program. In addition to teaching individuals how to crochet flowers and apply the perfect lipstick, Africa's top creators also taught people how to have fun.


We believe that the next generation of successful singers, dancers, actors, producers, musicians, and make-up artists are already honing their skills on YouTube , and we want to see more of them take the next step in their YouTube careers and convert their video hobby into a profession or perhaps a small company.


YouTube NextUp was introduced in 2011 to help YouTube creators take their channel to the next level. Over 250 YouTube artists from 15 different countries have benefited from this initiative, which has helped them to enhance their channels and jumpstart a new stage of development on YouTube. From science enthusiasts like AsapSCIENCE, Marcus Butler, MegwinTV, to foodies like Laura Vitale, NextUp has continued to help selected creators become some of YouTube's brightest stars.
We’re thrilled to announce the expansion of the YouTube NextUp program to Sub Saharan Africa, beginning with Nigeria and South Africa. In 2021, 20 creators in Nigeria and South Africa will be selected for the development program, which offers:
  • A spot at a week-long YouTube creator Camp in which they’ll benefit from 1:1 mentoring and learn an array of production techniques from leading industry and YouTube experts
  • A $1,000 voucher for production equipment to help you make your video dreams a reality.
  • Personalized one-on-one support from the YouTube team until April 2022
  • Mentorship by YouTube NextUp grads, plus the opportunity to meet and work with other fast-rising creators. 
  • The opportunity to become better connected with a special community of aspiring and talented content creators from around the world

So who’s next up? We're looking for YouTube creators who are dedicated, passionate, and inspiring, and who fulfill our eligibility criteria, including having a channel with 10,000 to 100,000 subscribers and having posted at least 3 original and native videos in the past three months. .



Full eligibility details, application guidelines and contest rules available at https://events.withgoogle.com/nextup/


We’re excited to see what you’ll come up with next on YouTube!





Posted by Addy Awofisayo, YouTube Content Partnerships, Sub Saharan Africa


 ==== 

Driving success for Australian retail with digitalisation

In spite of the  significant disruption to the retail sector, we’ve seen firsthand how companies have accelerated their digital transformation journey to better differentiate themselves in a highly competitive market.

In fact, the Google Cloud Retail Digital Pulse looked at the digital maturity across Australian retail and found the segment to be steadily advancing towards becoming more digitally resilient. The business sentiment is however still mixed and the market shows a split between those who have embraced digital and are thriving, and those that have not and are struggling. 

Among Australian respondents, almost a quarter (23.3 percent) said investment in digitalisation was driven by the desire to reduce costs and improve profitability, with 17.5 percent wanting to improve customer experience to drive revenue and/or increase KPI scores. Building customer data platforms, enhancing capabilities around marketing optimisation and the ability to drive personalisation are some priority use cases for Australian retailers. While challenges remain around budgets, inability to harness customer/operational data and lack of digital transformation roadmaps, more than half (58.3 percent) of respondents are looking to Cloud Services providers for help with digitalisation. 

We’re proud of the role we play in supporting the retail sector in Australia (and beyond) to enhance digital offerings and embrace the future of retail, empowering businesses to harness their data to achieve tangible business results and enhance customer relationships. 

Here’s a look at how some of our Australian customers are leveraging Google Cloud to transform their offering for customers: 

Country Road Group & David Jones: Unearthing data for digital growth

When COVID-19 forced the closure of storefronts, the Country Road Group and David Jones marketing teams sought to demonstrate the value of digital for both engaging customers and sales. After experiencing a 50 percent increase in requests for data analytics, pulling reports from multiple dashboards and structuring them to be meaningful and relevant, became extremely time intensive. 

Looking to Cloud Services providers for help with digitalisation, Country Road Group & David Jones engaged MightyHive to transform marketing for the business. The provider leveraged BigQuery as the business’s data source, connecting with Looker to better explore, share, and visualise the company's supplier and campaign data. 

Consolidating multiple disparate data sources into just three dashboards has minimised the volume of manual reporting, saving the team a full day per week. Looker has also delivered more comprehensive insights to inform the future growth of the business. 

Hanes: Data drives enhanced consumer experience

Hanes Australasia is home to some of Australia’s best-known apparel and lifestyle brands, including Bonds, Bras N Things, and Sheridan. It’s among the 40.8 percent of retailers who adopted technology for marketing optimisation. 

Hanes recognised that data was key to understanding consumer behaviour, preferences, and to driving revenue from its ecommerce investments. The company implemented Google Cloud services—including scalable and serverless BigQuery data warehousing, the Firebase mobile development platform, Cloud Functions to build and connect cloud services, and Pub/Sub event ingestion and delivery—to deliver on these opportunities. 

The business can now collect detailed in-store transaction data along with on-site transaction and customer event data, that is streamed in near-real time into Google Cloud. This data provides a wealth of information that can be transformed into actionable insights for marketing optimisation, and to help support wholesale partners.

JB HiFi: Personalisation drives transaction value

With 39.8 percent of Australian respondents leveraging technology for product discovery and search, JB HiFi is one example of how personalisation can be a powerful driver of success.  

Previously, JB Hi-Fi’s buying team would manually recommend products to visitors — a time-consuming process that meant recommendations of three or four associated products represented only a fraction of the more than  50,000 products available on its website. 

After deploying Recommendations AI, JB Hi-Fi found the average transaction value (ATV) for products recommended increased, when compared to manual processes. Furthermore, monthly average revenue from recommended products increased when compared to manually curated products, and the conversion rate for products offered on the JB Hi-Fi home page also improved. 

The adoption of Recommendations AI has also given JB Hi-Fi the ability to give its customers a more personalised online experience matching it to the personalised, expert experience delivered to customers in-store.

Continuing momentum in a 'post-COVID' world

Beyond the noise and challenges of COVID-19,  retailers are still navigating  what the ‘new normal’ looks like for them and how to manage the blurring of online and in-store interactions with customers. As ecommerce continues as the driving engine for growth, digital transformation remains central to retailers’ long term success.  Commitment to a digital strategy and investing to accelerate the journey to digital resilience is going to be the key. At the same time, it is a great opportunity for retailers to further build on their digital foundations to enable differentiation in the market.

Google Cloud is committed to leading the digital transformation of Australia’s retail sector. We’re continuing to expand our capabilities for merchants, offering tools and solutions designed specifically for the retail industry. Our aim is to empower partners with a scalable platform of innovation, digitisation and efficiency to ultimately give our retail customers the tools they need to thrive.


Taste Mexico: Sampling centuries of Mexican heritage

“From yellow corn and white corn their flesh was made; from corn dough the arms and legs of man were made,” reads the ancient pre-Hispanic legend written in the sacred Mayan book, the Popol Vuh.


The connection between food and cultural heritage couldn’t be stronger. And according to Mexican chef Martha Ortiz, Mexican food is identity. “It’s such a strong gastronomy that it makes us believe why the Popol Vuh said that we’re made of corn,” she says. “And even Mexico’s flag is quite gastronomic, with the eagle devouring a snake while standing on prickly pears and nopales (prickly pear cacti).”


Martha is one of the chefs who participated in Google Arts & Culture’s latest program, Taste Mexico. It showcases the deep connection between food, culture, legacy and art represented in Mexican food with more than 220 stories, 6000 images and 200 videos from 31 partner institutions. Subjects range from the traditional Mexican female cooks, called mayoras, to internationally known chefs like Martha and Enrique Olvera.

A spoonful of Hispanic legacy

Martha says Mexican food represents Hispanic heritage in its inclusivity, capturing the fusion of beliefs and traditions that created the mestizo culture. “Nowadays there’s a big discussion on the past, the indigenous peoples and colonization. The way I see it, is that in gastronomy there wasn’t violence,” she says. “The earth was fertile, and in the clay pots and wooden spoons were mixed local ingredients like chili peppers with new ones, like the sesame seeds brought by the Spaniards, who were introduced to it by the Moors.” The Taste Mexico virtual exhibit includes topics like the fusion of Mexican cuisine and the blend of cultures in new creations, like chocolate.

For Martha, Mexican gastronomy is more than just food — it’s art. It’s a mix of narratives, sounds, images and senses. She thinks about the sound and the feel of the chilli peppers breaking against the stone when preparing a traditional mole, or the clapping sounds of the women making tortillas in a market, which she refers to as a tortilla symphony. “It’s a mise-en-scène. There’s theatricality, a plot, a lyric, beauty and taste.” Through Taste of Mexico, experience that theatricality through iconic markets like Melchor Ocampo or the ones in Puebla


Martha remembers the colorful paintings of the Oaxacan artist Rufino Tamayo, and it makes her think about the colors of that state where you can have a black mole with red rice served on a blue plate at a deep green “fonda.” That’s why she doesn't refer to the people who visit her restaurants as dinner guests, but as dish collectors.

A flavorful concert

With this in mind, Martha organized an art and food physical exhibition and event in collaboration with the Museum of Contemporary Art Querétaro, “We Eat Color” — which is now part of Taste Mexico — that offered a fusion of art, gastronomy and music. Martha prepared surprising dishes in six colors — white, yellow, green, red, black and psychedelia, which represents the combination of all the colors. — that merged with the music from the State of Querétaro Philharmonic and with the plastic work of five local artists. 


Creating narratives is the base of Martha’s cooking style. It’s not just about preparing a dish, but about telling a story based on Mexican history and culture. From the way pink mole connects a wedding tradition in Taxco and the local religious beliefs of Santa Prisca, to the way the national dish, Chile en Nogada, represents hope and freedom, or how eating a black mole with a tortilla is like having a dish of night and day, since pre-hispanic tradition dictates that tortillas are the communion with the sun. “Mexican cuisine is a cultural manifestation that has a powerful legacy, and thus a powerful future,” she says.“Life is meant to offer beauty, and Mexican gastronomy is beautiful.”

5 things I learned from Google’s productivity expert

I’ve primarily worked remotely for the better part of the last decade, but when the pandemic sent everyone else home from the office, I struggled. Even though I was extremely familiar with working from home, I wasn’t used to spending all my free time at home, too. Like people everywhere, staying productive when the home became the office, and the gym, and the dog daycare, and the everything else was challenging. 

Headshot of Laura Mae Martin looking into the camera and smiling.

Google’s Executive Productivity Advisor Laura Mae Martin

Fortunately, I knew there was someone who could help me. Laura Mae Martin is Google’s Executive Productivity Advisor, and over the years, she’s been offering Googlers advice on how to stay productive, even when our surroundings make it difficult. Her guidance has been an incredible resource — and now it’s available for everyone. “The Google Workspace guide to productivity and wellbeing” is a downloadable, free ebook that shares tons of Laura’s best tips and ideas for making the most of your time. As a bit of a preview, here are five things I learned from the guide that I’ve found most helpful: 

  1. Pinpointing my peak times:One tip from Laura is to figure out when you work best. “Make a list of the times throughout the day and week when you feel most energized and focused,” she writes. These are “peak times,” and likely when you’re going to be the most productive. 

  2. Don’t fight that Friday feeling:There’s a reason Friday afternoons can feel like they’re dragging on. In her guide, Laura advises that you don’t try to overplan the end of the week. “Fridays can be a great window for returning emails or planning the next week,” she says.

  3. Check in even if you can’t respond: Getting through email is one of the most daunting tasks of any job, and everyone’s experienced the pile-up problem. One tip from Laura  is to respond to emails that require your input within 24 hours — even if it’s just to say “I can’t get to this right now, but I will by the end of the week.”

  4. Sometimes, less time is more: According to Parkinson’s Law, “work expands to the allotted time,” meaning if you put 30 minutes on the calendar for a meeting, you and your colleagues will feel like you have to use all of that time even if you’re done within 20 minutes. Laura’s advice: Put shorter amounts of time on the calendar. 

  5. Welcome the “whitespace”:We spend a lot of our time at work getting things done, or “closing loops” as Laura puts it. But it’s important to make time to just think and brainstorm, to come up with new ideas. One way you can make that happen is by putting blocks on your calendar for dedicated time to do exactly that. 

That’s just a tiny sample of everything I learned from Laura. The guide has so many ways you can maximize your time at work (so you can maximize your time not at work) plus how you can use Google Workspace to put these ideas into practice.  You can download it now.  

The new Google Cloud region in Toronto is now open

For over a decade, we’ve been investing in Canada to become a go-to cloud partner for organizations across the country. Whether they’re in financial services, media and entertainment, retail, telecommunications or the public sector, a rapidly growing number of organizations located or operating in Canada are choosing Google Cloud to help them build applications better and faster, store data, and deliver awesome experiences to their users, all on the cleanest cloud in the industry. To support this growing customer base, we’re excited to announce that the new Google Cloud region in Toronto is now open.


As you’d expect, we’re thrilled about this news, but we aren’t the only ones that have been looking forward to this launch. We asked some of our customers operating in Canada for their take on the upcoming cloud region. Here’s what they had to say:


"Our alliance with Google is truly distinctive in the Canadian market as we are working together to co-innovate and create new services for key industries, including communications technology, healthcare, agriculture, security, and the connected home. The new cloud region in Toronto marks another key milestone that will propel TELUS’ digital leadership by further leveraging the scalability, reliability and cost effectiveness of Google Cloud to support improved customer experience and build stronger, healthier and more sustainable communities."
- Hesham Fahmy, Chief Development Officer, TELUS 


“We’re simplifying, modernizing and digitizing Scotiabank to enhance the customer experience for our 25 million customers across the globe. By leveraging powerful cloud-based services including Google Cloud, we’re able to put the most advanced software engineering, data analytics and machine learning tools in the hands of our talented employees. We welcome Google Cloud's investment in Toronto and look forward to the opportunities the Toronto Cloud Region will present to our Technology team.”
- Michael Zerbs, Group Head Technology & Operations, Scotiabank


“Cloud technologies—and the access to scalable compute, rich geospatial datasets and smart analytics tools—will be critical contributors to support climate action and sustainable policy decisions. At Natural Resources Canada, scientists and researchers are applying innovative digital solutions to support Canada’s natural resource sector. The new Google Cloud region in Toronto will provide our scientists, technologists and researchers with the products and services necessary to turn Earth data into actionable insights.” 
- Vik Pant, PhD, Chief Scientist and Chief Science Advisor, Natural Resources Canada


“At Accenture, we bring together technology and human ingenuity to create and respond to change. We’re thrilled to join forces with Google Cloud and their newest region in Toronto with an important mutual goal: to accelerate cloud innovation in Canada. Our clients already know us for our deep industry intelligence, cloud-first expertise and market-renowned delivery. We’re now combining that with Google’s human-centric design to bring even more opportunities to our clients across all industries.” 
- Jeffrey Russell, President of Accenture in Canada


“We are thrilled to see Google’s commitment to Canada. We look forward to helping our joint customers transform their operations, leveraging Google Cloud’s latest data center in Toronto. At Deloitte, we believe cloud is THE opportunity to reimagine everything.”
- Terry Stuart, Deloitte Chief Digital Officer, Canada


“As Canadian organizations increasingly leverage cloud to transform their businesses, we are excited about the new opportunities that the Toronto Google Cloud region brings to the market. We look forward to continuing our strong partnership with Google Cloud to bring customized and innovative solutions that help Canadian companies fully realize the value of cloud technology, so that they can compete and win on the global stage.”
- Andrew Caprara, Chief Operating Officer, Softchoice


Toronto joins 27 existing Google Cloud regions connected via our high-performance network, helping customers better serve their users and customers throughout the globe. In combination with our Montreal region, customers now benefit from improved business continuity planning with distributed, secure infrastructure needed to meet IT and business requirements for disaster recovery, while maintaining data sovereignty.


The new region launches with three zones, allowing organizations of all sizes and industries to distribute apps and storage to protect against service disruptions, and with our core portfolio of Google Cloud Platform products, including Compute Engine, App Engine, Google Kubernetes Engine, Bigtable, Spanner, and BigQuery.


We’re working to bring you new cloud products and capabilities in Canada, and our goal is to allow you to access those services quickly and easily—wherever you might be in the country. The past year has proved how important easy access to digital infrastructure, technical education, training and support are to helping businesses respond to the pandemic. We’re particularly proud of the teams who faced the unique challenges of building a cloud region during this time to help our customers and community accelerate their digital transformation.


To support all of our users, customers and government organizations in Canada, we’ll continue to invest in new infrastructure, engineering support and solutions. We’re currently hosting our first ever Google Cloud Accelerator Canada to bring the best of Google's programs, products, people and technology to startups doing interesting work in the cloud. We’ve recently received Protected B accreditation with Canadian Centre for Cyber Security, which is crucial for healthcare, education, and regulated industries adopting cloud services. We’re also pleased to announce the preview of Assured Workloads for Canada—a capability which allows you to secure and configure sensitive workloads in accordance with your specific regulatory or policy requirements.


For help migrating to Google Cloud, please contact our local partners. For additional details on Google Cloud regions, please visit our locations page, where you’ll find updates on the availability of additional services and regions. You can always contact us to help you get started or access our many educational resources. We’re excited to see what you build next with Google Cloud.

September 2021 update to Display & Video 360 API v1


Today we’re releasing an update to the Display & Video 360 API that includes the following features:
More detailed information about this update can be found in the Display & Video 360 API release notes. Before using these new features, make sure to update your client library to the latest version.


If you run into issues or need help with these new features or samples, please contact us using our support contact form.

September 2021 update to Display & Video 360 API v1


Today we’re releasing an update to the Display & Video 360 API that includes the following features:
More detailed information about this update can be found in the Display & Video 360 API release notes. Before using these new features, make sure to update your client library to the latest version.


If you run into issues or need help with these new features or samples, please contact us using our support contact form.

Our Grace Hopper subsea cable has landed in the UK

Last year, we announced a new subsea cable — named Grace Hopper after the computer science pioneer — that will run between the United States, the United Kingdom and Spain. The cable will improve the resilience of the Google network that underpins our consumer and enterprise products. The 16-fibre pair Google-funded cable will connect New York (United States) to Bude (United Kingdom) and Bilbao (Spain).

Today, the Grace Hopper cable has landed in Bude, Cornwall. 

Many people around the world use Google products every day to stay in touch with friends and family, travel from point A to point B, find new customers or export products to new markets. As our first Google-funded cable to the U.K., Grace Hopper is part of our ongoing investment in the country, supporting users who rely on our products and customers using our tools to grow their business.

We know that technology is only becoming more important for the U.K. economy. The amount technology contributes to the U.K. economy has grown on average by 7% year on year since 2016. And U.K.-based venture capital investment is ranked third in the world, reaching a record high of $15 billion in 2020, despite the challenging conditions from the COVID-19 pandemic. What’s more, 10% of all current U.K. job vacancies are in tech roles, and the number of people employed in the tech sector has grown 40% in two years. With this in mind, improving the diversity and resilience of Google’s network is crucial to our ability to continue supporting one of the U.K.’s most vital sectors, as well as its long-term economic success.  

Grace Hopper represents a new generation of trans-Atlantic cable coming to the U.K. shores and is one of the first new cables to connect the U.S. and the U.K. since 2003. Moreover, with the ongoing pandemic fostering a new digital normal, Google-funded subsea cables allow us to plan and prepare for the future capacity needs of our customers, no matter where they are in the world. Grace Hopper will connect the U.K. to help meet the rapidly growing demand for high-bandwidth connectivity and services.

An image of the Google buoy landing on the sandy beach of Bude, Cornwall

Grace Hopper buoy landing on the beach in Bude, Cornwall

Alongside CurieDunantEquiano and Firmina, Grace Hopper is the latest cable to connect continents along the ocean floor with an additional layer of security beyond what’s available over the public internet. We’ve worked with established channels and experts for years to ensure that Grace Hopper will be able to achieve better reliability in global communications, and free flows of data.

Following a successful Bilbao landing earlier in September, Grace Hopper also marks our first ever Google-funded route to Spain, taking a unique path from our existing cables, such as Dunant, which connects the U.S. and France, and Havfrue, which links the U.S. and Denmark. The cable will use novel “fibre switching,” which allows us to better move traffic around outages for increased reliability. Once it is complete, Grace Hopper will carry traffic quickly and securely between the continents, increasing capacity and powering Google services like Meet, Gmail and Google Cloud.

Grace Hopper will use this new switching architecture to provide optimum levels of network flexibility and resilience to adjust to unforeseen failures or traffic patterns. The multi-directional switching architecture is a significant breakthrough for uncertain times, and will more tightly integrate the upcoming Google Cloud region in Madrid into our global infrastructure. 

With the landing of the Grace Hopper cable in Cornwall, we look forward to supporting the next great U.K. tech innovations.


Our new animated series brings data centers to life

If you rely on the internet to search for the answer to a burning question, access work documents or stream your favorite TV show, you may have wondered how you can get the content you want so easily and quickly. You can thank a data center for that. 

Which may make you wonder: What exactly is a data center, and what is its purpose?

Google’s Discovering Data Centers series of short animated videos has the answers. As host of this series, I invite you to join us and learn about these expansive, supercomputer-filled warehouses that we all rely on, yet may know little about.

A loop of an animated video showing a data center campus surrounded by trees, blue sky, power lines, and wind turbines. Three small bubbles appear over the data center with images in each: a computer server to represent storage, wires to represent the power supply, and a fan to represent the cooling infrastructure.

Each video in this series helps peel back the layers on what makes data centers so fascinating: design, technology, operations and sustainability. There are times you click Start on Google Maps, edit a Google Doc or watch a YouTube video on how to fix something. By watching this series, you’ll better understand how Google’s data centers get you and billions of other users like you to that content quickly, securely and sustainably. 

Discovering Data Centers will help you understand: 

  • How data centers play a critical role in organizing your and the world’s information.
  • Data center design and how data centers are built to be sustainable. 
  • Our core principles, which show you can depend on us to be available 24/7. 

As the second season of our series gets underway, upcoming topics include: 

  • How hundreds of machines at a data center store data.
  • How our network allows data to travel through and between data centers within seconds. 
  • How encryption of data works to help secure every packet of data stored in our data centers.

To watch this series and see how data centers benefit you, visit our website. Check back monthly for new episodes where I’ll continue to reveal all the layers that make a data center hum. 

Click through the images below to read episode descriptions and take a peek at the engineering marvels that are today’s data centers.


Stable Channel Update for Desktop

The Stable channel has been updated to 93.0.4577.82 for Windows, Mac and Linux which will roll out over the coming days/weeks


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 issue, 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.

Security Fixes and Rewards

Note: Access to bug details and links may be kept restricted until a majority of users are updated with a fix. We will also retain restrictions if the bug exists in a third party library that other projects similarly depend on, but haven’t yet fixed.


This update includes 11 security fixes. Below, we highlight fixes that were contributed by external researchers. Please see the Chrome Security Page for more information.


[$7500][1237533] High CVE-2021-30625: Use after free in Selection API. Reported by Marcin Towalski of Cisco Talos on 2021-08-06

[$7500][1241036] High CVE-2021-30626: Out of bounds memory access in ANGLE. Reported by Jeonghoon Shin of Theori on 2021-08-18

[$5000][1245786] High CVE-2021-30627: Type Confusion in Blink layout. Reported by Aki Helin of OUSPG on 2021-09-01

[$TBD][1241123] High CVE-2021-30628: Stack buffer overflow in ANGLE. Reported by Jaehun Jeong(@n3sk) of Theori on 2021-08-18

[$TBD][1243646] High CVE-2021-30629: Use after free in Permissions. Reported by Weipeng Jiang (@Krace) from Codesafe Team of Legendsec at Qi'anxin Group on 2021-08-26

[$TBD][1244568] High CVE-2021-30630: Inappropriate implementation in Blink . Reported by SorryMybad (@S0rryMybad) of Kunlun Lab on 2021-08-30

[$TBD][1246932] High CVE-2021-30631: Type Confusion in Blink layout. Reported by Atte Kettunen of OUSPG on 2021-09-06

[$TBD][1247763] High CVE-2021-30632: Out of bounds write in V8. Reported by Anonymous on 2021-09-08

[$TBD][1247766] High CVE-2021-30633: Use after free in Indexed DB API. Reported by Anonymous on 2021-09-08


We would also like to thank all security researchers that worked with us during the development cycle to prevent security bugs from ever reaching the stable channel.


Google is aware that exploits for CVE-2021-30632 and CVE-2021-30633 exist in the wild.


As usual, our ongoing internal security work was responsible for a wide range of fixes:

[1249027] Various fixes from internal audits, fuzzing and other initiatives




Prudhvikumar Bommana
Google Chrome