Last year, I was on the New York City subway conducting user research for Touring Bird, a project I was working on with Area 120, Google’s in-house lab for experimental projects. One of the young commuters standing next to me was silently scrolling on her device, switching between a social media app, YouTube and an online shop. 

Curious, I asked her what she was doing. It turns out she'd seen somebody promote a makeup product on social media, and wanted to check it out—so she watched reviews on YouTube to see how it would look in real life and whether other people liked it. Then she looked it up on an e-commerce site to buy it. This took three different apps or websites, at minimum, to find what she was looking for.

This was the original insight for a new experiment Area 120 is launching today: Shoploop, a video shopping platform for discovering, evaluating and buying products, all in one place.

Discover new products in a short, entertaining video format

The experience on Shoploop is more interactive than just scrolling through images, titles and descriptions on a traditional e-commerce site. All Shoploop videos are shorter than 90 seconds and help you discover new products in an entertaining way, whether you want to try at-home nail stickers, revive your second-day hair or get a concealer that gives full coverage. 

Information from real, relatable people

We want to help people experience the look and feel of products they’re shopping for in real life without going to a physical store. Shoploop helps you get product reviews from real people who are knowledgeable about the products in a particular area. For example, Alex shows live product usage in her video to get rid of pimples, and Kim includes practical tips and advice on how to use a face roller in her video.

A simple purchasing experience

Once you find a product that interests you, you can either save the product to buy it later or click straight to the merchant’s website to complete the purchase. You can also follow your favorite Shoploop creators and share videos you like with your friends and family. 

Currently, we’re focused on content creators, publishers and online store owners in the beauty industry in categories such as makeup, skincare, hair and nails. Our goal is to provide them a platform where they can review and recommend products and help others shop directly from their videos. For example, Jessica, contributing editor at Allure, shows the benefits of using a Mihakka (a face exfoliating tool made with clay from the Atlas mountains in Morocco), and Adeline Koh, owner of handmade skincare company Sabbatical Beauty, highlights the craftsmanship and story behind her products. If you are a content creator or a store owner in any of these product areas, you can apply through our website to be an exclusive Shoploop creator.

Check out our Shoploop experiment by visiting shoploop.app on your mobile device. The current site is optimized for mobile and we are working hard to bring it to desktop users soon. 

“What are we doing?” my wife asked as we both looked up from our phones one evening. We’d been browsing feeds of posts, images and news for hours on end, mindlessly filling the gaps between work and sleep. “This is our one precious life,” she told me. That line, paraphrased from a Mary Oliver poem, became shorthand for us to spend more time on what we loved.

That week, we started collecting some of the things that brought us joy and shared them with each other. She grew up birding and knew I was interested, so she sent me links to resources on bird identification, migration patterns and good binoculars. Since we met, we had also dreamed about someday starting a flower farm, so  we began collecting notes on farming plans, seed catalogs and other ideas to chase that dream together.

It was powerful to tell each other what we wanted to spend more time on. And once we did, we found that collecting related ideas, links and resources together gave us a way to spend more time on our shared passions in real life.

To explore this idea further, four colleagues and I created a new experiment called Keen as part of Area 120, Google’s workshop for experimental projects. We worked in close collaboration with a team at Google called People and AI Research (PAIR), dedicated to human-centered machine learning systems, to develop this experiment.

A home for long-term interests 

On Keen, which is a web and Android app, you say what you want to spend more time on, and then curate content from the web and people you trust to help make that happen. You make a “keen,” which can be about any topic, whether it’s baking delicious bread at home, getting into birding or researching typography. Keen lets you curate the content you love, share your collection with others and find new content based on what you have saved.

Curate and share 

You can curate for yourself or for other people. Just as my wife found resources to help me learn about birding, you can use Keen to build a collection of your best resources on a topic you know well and share it with people who would enjoy your curation. The keens can be private or public, so you control what is shared and who can contribute.

Expand and explore

For every keen you create, we use Google Search and the latest in machine learning to remain on the lookout for helpful content related to your interests. The more you save to a keen and organize it, the better the recommendations become. Even if you’re not an expert on a topic, you can start curating a keen and save a few interesting “gems” or links that you find helpful. These bits of content act like seeds and help keen discover more and more related content over time. You can also follow keens that others have created, discovering thousands of hand-curated lists from the community and getting alerts when new things are added.

Spend time on what you love

Keen isn’t intended to be a place to spend endless hours browsing. Instead, it’s a home for your interests: a place to grow them, share them with loved ones and find things that will help in making this precious life count.

We'd love your feedback on the idea and how to make it better, and if you’ve made a keen that you think others would love, let us know.

“What are we doing?” my wife asked as we both looked up from our phones one evening. We’d been browsing feeds of posts, images and news for hours on end, mindlessly filling the gaps between work and sleep. “This is our one precious life,” she told me. That line, paraphrased from a Mary Oliver poem, became shorthand for us to spend more time on what we loved.

That week, we started collecting some of the things that brought us joy and shared them with each other. She grew up birding and knew I was interested, so she sent me links to resources on bird identification, migration patterns and good binoculars. Since we met, we had also dreamed about someday starting a flower farm, so  we began collecting notes on farming plans, seed catalogs and other ideas to chase that dream together.

It was powerful to tell each other what we wanted to spend more time on. And once we did, we found that collecting related ideas, links and resources together gave us a way to spend more time on our shared passions in real life.

To explore this idea further, four colleagues and I created a new experiment called Keen as part of Area 120, Google’s workshop for experimental projects. We worked in close collaboration with a team at Google called People and AI Research (PAIR), dedicated to human-centered machine learning systems, to develop this experiment.

A home for long-term interests 

On Keen, which is a web and Android app, you say what you want to spend more time on, and then curate content from the web and people you trust to help make that happen. You make a “keen,” which can be about any topic, whether it’s baking delicious bread at home, getting into birding or researching typography. Keen lets you curate the content you love, share your collection with others and find new content based on what you have saved.

Curate and share 

You can curate for yourself or for other people. Just as my wife found resources to help me learn about birding, you can use Keen to build a collection of your best resources on a topic you know well and share it with people who would enjoy your curation. The keens can be private or public, so you control what is shared and who can contribute.

Expand and explore

For every keen you create, we use Google Search and the latest in machine learning to remain on the lookout for helpful content related to your interests. The more you save to a keen and organize it, the better the recommendations become. Even if you’re not an expert on a topic, you can start curating a keen and save a few interesting “gems” or links that you find helpful. These bits of content act like seeds and help keen discover more and more related content over time. You can also follow keens that others have created, discovering thousands of hand-curated lists from the community and getting alerts when new things are added.

Spend time on what you love

Keen isn’t intended to be a place to spend endless hours browsing. Instead, it’s a home for your interests: a place to grow them, share them with loved ones and find things that will help in making this precious life count.

We'd love your feedback on the idea and how to make it better, and if you’ve made a keen that you think others would love, let us know.

“What are we doing?” my wife asked as we both looked up from our phones one evening. We’d been browsing feeds of posts, images and news for hours on end, mindlessly filling the gaps between work and sleep. “This is our one precious life,” she told me. That line, paraphrased from a Mary Oliver poem, became shorthand for us to spend more time on what we loved.

That week, we started collecting some of the things that brought us joy and shared them with each other. She grew up birding and knew I was interested, so she sent me links to resources on bird identification, migration patterns and good binoculars. Since we met, we had also dreamed about someday starting a flower farm, so  we began collecting notes on farming plans, seed catalogs and other ideas to chase that dream together.

It was powerful to tell each other what we wanted to spend more time on. And once we did, we found that collecting related ideas, links and resources together gave us a way to spend more time on our shared passions in real life.

To explore this idea further, four colleagues and I created a new experiment called Keen as part of Area 120, Google’s workshop for experimental projects. We worked in close collaboration with a team at Google called People and AI Research (PAIR), dedicated to human-centered machine learning systems, to develop this experiment.

A home for long-term interests 

On Keen, which is a web and Android app, you say what you want to spend more time on, and then curate content from the web and people you trust to help make that happen. You make a “keen,” which can be about any topic, whether it’s baking delicious bread at home, getting into birding or researching typography. Keen lets you curate the content you love, share your collection with others and find new content based on what you have saved.

Curate and share 

You can curate for yourself or for other people. Just as my wife found resources to help me learn about birding, you can use Keen to build a collection of your best resources on a topic you know well and share it with people who would enjoy your curation. The keens can be private or public, so you control what is shared and who can contribute.

Expand and explore

For every keen you create, we use Google Search and the latest in machine learning to remain on the lookout for helpful content related to your interests. The more you save to a keen and organize it, the better the recommendations become. Even if you’re not an expert on a topic, you can start curating a keen and save a few interesting “gems” or links that you find helpful. These bits of content act like seeds and help keen discover more and more related content over time. You can also follow keens that others have created, discovering thousands of hand-curated lists from the community and getting alerts when new things are added.

Spend time on what you love

Keen isn’t intended to be a place to spend endless hours browsing. Instead, it’s a home for your interests: a place to grow them, share them with loved ones and find things that will help in making this precious life count.

We'd love your feedback on the idea and how to make it better, and if you’ve made a keen that you think others would love, let us know.

Look around on the bus, in line at a coffee shop, or even at the doctor’s office. You’ll likely see people playing games on their phones—and they’re a few of the two billion people around the world who are doing it. Unfortunately, many games (especially web games) don’t load well on low memory devices and 2G or 3G networks that hundreds of millions of people rely on.

Today, we’re announcing GameSnacks to help address this problem. Part of Area 120,Google’s lab for experimental projects, our goal is to make HTML5 games more accessible for phones on any network in the world. GameSnacks games are fast, easy to play, and available on any device that lets you connect to the internet. 

Additionally, people in Indonesia can soon access GameSnacks games though Gojek, a leading super app in southeast Asia. Let’s explore how GameSnacks works for users and developers.

Web games are slow for many people

Take a look at how a typical web game loads on a 1 GB RAM phone on a 3G network, which is what hundreds of millions of people around the world use: 

Over half of mobile site visitors leave a page if it takes more than 3 seconds to load, but this game took 12 seconds. 

GameSnacks games are easy to play and fast loading

Fortunately for many users, GameSnacks games can load within a few seconds in network conditions slower than 1 Mbps, which tens of millions of people worldwide experience. For instance, Tower, a popular GameSnacks game, is quickly ready to play on the same 1 GB RAM device connected to 3G from earlier:

Our Area 120 team works with developers to achieve fast performance by reducing the size of the initially-loaded HTML page, compressing additional assets such as scripts, images, and sounds, and waiting to load them until necessary.

Next, let’s look at the design of the games. GameSnacks games are simple, fun and ideal for casual gamers. Games only last for a few minutes, and have straightforward rules that can be learned without instructions. GameSnacks games are accessible on any web-capable device. Each game supports touch, keyboard, and mouse controls and can be played on Android, iOS, and desktop devices.

GameSnacks games will be in Gojek

We’ve also partnered with Gojek to bring GameSnacks games into the Gojek ecosystem through GoGames. Gojek is a leading technology platform in Southeast Asia focused on removing life’s daily frictions. Through this partnership, we’ll deliver more accessible gaming experiences to Southeast Asian users, starting in Indonesia.

Our team is always looking to add more high quality games to the GameSnacks game catalog. If you’re an HTML5 game developer interested in building fast-loading games for people around the world, please contact us. 

Additionally, if you develop an app that could embed GameSnacks games, please reach out. GameSnacks games can help entertain your users and increase the likelihood that they come back to your app. The presentation of the games can also be customized to feel native to your app.

Back in 2006—before I started working at Google—I had a hypothesis that I could use Google Trends to predict the stock market. In most instances I was wrong, but it piqued my interest and led me to a new career path experimenting with supply-demand trends: from ticketing to the car manufacturing industry. Last year I joined Area 120, Google’s lab for experimental projects, and along with drummer-turned-entrepreneur Nick Turner, we decided to test my original hypothesis in the entertainment industry.

Together, alongside a talented team within Area 120, we zeroed in on live music since we knew the industry still relied heavily on gut instincts, rather than actionable insights. Surely we thought, if data could transform other industries like sports, couldn’t we do the same in live music? DEMAND is our new data analytics platform for live music industry professionals, from artists to venue managers to promoters.   

Helping artists make informed decisions

When fans decide they want to attend a concert, many start looking for tickets with Google Search. So we knew we could use publicly available Google Trends data to understand what people are searching for. From there, we layered in data from YouTube and Google Play to offer a barometer for sustained interest in an artist over time. Finally, we partnered with third-party data sources, like Oak View Group, to provide historical and current pricing, all with geographic specificity in more than 200 markets. With this data, DEMAND now provides a deeper look into the live music market for more than 19,000 artists.

During months of testing, we found that the data was valuable for live music professionals and fans alike. In one example, when evaluating the tour schedule for a Top 40 artist, DEMAND's data revealed that the artist did not price their tickets at market rate, which was leading to higher prices for fans in the ticket resale market. In another case, DEMAND’s analytics identified that an artist was choosing tour stops that didn’t reflect the strongest fan interest. In both examples, artists could have made better informed decisions with DEMAND that would have allowed them to identify and reach their fans more easily. 

DEMAND’s insights also lets people see how consumer brands align with specific artists based on search volume from the last 30 days. This data can impact brand marketers, advertising agencies and media bookers who want to identify cross-promotion opportunities.

DEMAND is available for everyone in the music industry

Based on our testing and insights derived from working with partners like Nederlander Concerts, we know DEMAND’s analytics can enhance the planning, pricing, marketing and sponsorship of live events. Meanwhile, music fans benefit as the most passionate fans can gain access to the artists they love in concert. Plus, venues and cities get to book the artists that locals want to see.

Additionally, we believe that DEMAND will serve as an equalizer. Even rising artists booking their own club stops and unknown venues can benefit by seeing where similar styles of artists performed well—or not so well—and at what prices. It’s our hope that DEMAND’s data will nurture the rise of these new artists while creating opportunities across the live music spectrum.

But the reality is that we don’t know all of the ways in which this data can be helpful, so we’re making DEMAND’s data—currently available at no cost—to anyone in the U.S. music industry. Interested users can sign-up to get whitelisted via https://demand.area120.com. 

Last time I went home to see my parents in Shanghai, I found them watching lots of how-to videos on painting and photography on their phone—even though I had considered them to be “smartphone challenged.” My mom has always had a creative side, and I was surprised to learn that she’s now an amateur oil painter thanks to these niche communities with quick how-to videos.

I too joined some of these vibrant creative communities that make videos about cooking and fashion. I noticed something magical in these videos: They could quickly get a point across—something that used to take a long time to learn with just text and images. 

We’ve been working with creators who already make these kinds of videos, so that Tangi can become a place where they have a voice to inspire other makers. Tangi’s focus on creativity and community is the biggest draw for them. They’ve been able to experiment with new ways to take their creativity to the next level. For example, Holly shows easy DIY projects and Rachel tells amazing stories through her portrait drawings.

Whether you love crafting, cooking, cosmetics or clothing, Tangi has 60 second videos to help you try something new—and a place to share it back too. You can also share a re-creation of things you tried out with Tangi's "Try It” feature, which helps build a community between creators and their fans. One of our most recreated videos is making guacamole in the avocado shell.

If you’re still working on your new year’s resolution list or for thinking about Valentine’s Day, Tangi has videos about whether it’s crafting, cooking, cosmetics, or clothing! Check some of these out:

1. Bring Boring White Candles to Life

2. DIY Spoon Flower

3. Pink Velvet Cake with Marbled Hearts

4. Snowflake Craft DIY

5. Quick style in 60 seconds or less!