Tag Archives: Events

Meet the 20 finalists of the Google Play Indie Games Contest

Posted by Matteo Vallone, Google Play Games Business Development

Back in November, we launched the Google Play Indie Games Contest for developers from 15 European countries, to celebrate the passion and innovation of the indie community in the region. The contest will reward the winners with exposure to industry experts and players worldwide, as well as other prizes that will showcase their art and help them grow their business on Android and Google Play.

Thank you to the nearly 1000 of you who submitted high quality games in all types of genres! Your creativity, enthusiasm and dedication have once again impressed us and inspired us. We had a very fun time testing and judging the games based on fun, innovation, design excellence and technical and production quality, and it was challenging to select only 20 finalists:

Meet the 20 finalists
(In alphabetical order)

Blind Drive
(coming soon)

Lo-Fi People
Israel
Causality
(coming soon)

Loju
United Kingdom
Crap! I'm Broke: Out of Pocket
Arcane Circus Netherlands
Egz

 Lonely Woof
France
Ellipsis

Salmi GmbH Germany
Gladiabots


GFX47
France
Happy Hop: Kawaii Jump

 Platonic Games
Spain
Hidden Folks (coming soon)

 Adriaan de Jongh Netherlands
Lichtspeer
(coming soon)

Lichthund
Poland
Lost in Harmony
Digixart

 Entertainment France
Mr Future Ninja (coming soon)

Huijaus Studios
Finland
Paper Wings


Fil Games
Turkey
PinOut


Mediocre
Sweden
Power Hover
Oddrok
Finland
Reigns

Nerial
United Kingdom
Rusty Lake: Roots
Rusty Lake Netherlands
Samorost 3


Amanita Design Czech Republic
The Battle of Polytopia

Midjiwan AB Sweden
twofold inc.


Grapefrukt games Sweden
Unworded (coming soon)

Bento Studio France

Check out the prizes

All the 20 finalists are getting:
  • The opportunity to exhibit and showcase their game at the final event held at the Saatchi Gallery in London, on 16th February 2017.
  • Promotion of their game on a London billboard for one month.
  • Two tickets to attend a 2017 Playtime event. This is an invitation-only event for top apps and games developers on Google Play.
  • One Pixel XL smartphone.
At the event at Saatchi, the finalists will also have a chance to make it to the next rounds and win additional prizes, including:
  • YouTube influencer campaigns worth up to 100,000 EUR.
  • Premium placements on Google Play.
  • Tickets to Google I/O 2017 and other top industry events.
  • Promotions on our channels.
  • Special prizes for the best Unity game.
  • And more!

 Come support them at the final event

At the final event attendees will have a say on which 10 of these finalists will get to pitch their games to the jury, who will decide on the final contest winners who will receive the top prizes.

Register now to join us in London, meet the developers, check out their great games, vote for your favourites, and have fun with various industry experts and indie developers.



A big thank you again to everyone who entered and congratulations to the finalists. We look forward to seeing you at the Saatchi Gallery in London on 16th February.

Open source down under: Linux.conf.au 2017

It’s a new year and open source enthusiasts from around the globe are preparing to gather at the edge of the world for Linux.conf.au 2017. Among those preparing are Googlers, including some of us from the Open Source Programs Office.

This year Linux.conf.au is returning to Hobart, the riverside capital of Tasmania, home of Australia’s famous Tasmanian devils, running five days between January 16 and 20. The theme is the “Future of Open Source.”
Circle_DevilTuz.png
Tuz, a Tasmanian devil sporting a penguin beak, is the Linux.conf.au mascot.
(Artwork by Tania Walker licensed under CC BY-SA.)
The conference, which began in 1999 and is community organized, is well equipped to explore that theme which is reflected in the program schedule and miniconfs.

You’ll find Googlers speaking throughout the week, as well as participating in the hallway track. Don’t miss our Birds of a Feather session if you’re a student, educator, project maintainer, or otherwise interested in talking about outreach and student programs like Google Summer of Code and Google Code-in.

Monday, January 16th
12:20pm The Sound of Silencing by Julien Goodwin
4:35pm   Year of the Linux Desktop? by Jessica Frazelle

Tuesday, January 17th
All day    Community Leadership Summit X at LCA

Wednesday, January 18th
2:15pm   Community Building Beyond the Black Stump by Josh Simmons
4:35pm   Contributing to and Maintaining Large Scale Open Source Projects by Jessica Frazelle

Thursday, January 19th
4:35pm   Using Python for creating hardware to record FOSS conferences! by Tim Ansell

Friday, January 20th
1:20pm   Linux meets Kubernetes by Vishnu Kannan

Not able to make it to the conference? Keynotes and sessions will be livestreamed, and you can always find the session recordings online after the event.

We’ll see you there!

By Josh Simmons, Open Source Programs Office

Welcoming the third class of Launchpad Accelerator with expansion into new countries!

Roy Glasberg, Global Lead, Launchpad Program & Accelerator

After two successful classes, we're excited to announce the next group of promising startups for the third class of Launchpad Accelerator. The startups from Brazil, India, Indonesia, and Mexico will be joined by developers from five additional countries: Argentina, Colombia, Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam.

The program includes intensive mentoring from Google engineers, product managers and other expert mentors from top technology companies and VCs in Silicon Valley. Participants receive equity-free support, credits for Google products, PR support and work closely with Google for six months in their home country.

Class 3 kicks off early next year (January 30) at Launchpad Space, our physical space in San Francisco where developers and startups can get free technical training, one-on-one mentoring and more education geared towards helping them successfully build their apps & startups.

Here's the full list of participating startups (by country):




If you're interested in applying for future Launchpad Accelerator cohorts, we encourage you to follow us on the Launchpad Accelerator site to receive updates. We also expect to add more countries to the program in the future. Stay tuned!

Dart Developer Summit 2016 Videos: Soundness, AngularDart 2.0, and the Fastest Growing Language at Google

Posted by Filip Hracek, Program Manager, Dart
Videos from last month’s Dart Developer Summit are up on YouTube and we thought we’d cherry-pick the highlights for you. The summit keynote is a summary of all the major news and of the direction the team is taking now. It’s where we announced that Dart is the fastest growing language at Google. Teams switching to Dart report up to twice the productivity and development speed of what they had previously.

Next, AngularDart 2.0 was launched in a presentation by Ferhat Buyukkokten and Matan Lurey. They showed how they made the framework’s output 40% smaller and 15% faster in the 4 months since AngularDart got its own dedicated team. They also showed our 60 fps table using setState(), and the new testing framework called NgTestBed.
Later in the day, Ted Sander launched AngularDart Components — the material design widgets Google is using in customer-facing apps like AdWords and AdSense. Hundreds of Google engineers work with these components every day. Watch the video to learn how they make our teams more productive, and our web apps more performant.
If you’re interested  in language design, watch Sound Dart, a talk by Leaf Petersen in which he explains Dart’s strong mode. With strong mode, Dart’s type system becomes sound, so that when you write types they are guaranteed to be correct (while still allowing you to write dynamically typed code where you want the flexibility). This differentiates strong-mode Dart from many popular compile-to-JavaScript languages, and improves both performance and developer productivity.

Another presentation that made waves was the Flutter keynote from Day 2 of the summit. Eric Seidel impressed the audience by showing just how fast mobile development can be with Flutter.

After Eric’s talk, John McCutchan and Todd Turnidge went into details about Flutter hot reloading. They also showed, for the first time, code rewind in Dart.

These are just 6 out of the 18 talks that are available on YouTube. For example, Will Ekiel’s talk titled Learnings from building a CRM app at Google gives a perspective on managing a product built with Dart and deploying it across both web and mobile. Another interesting practical presentation on using Dart in production is the one given by Faisal Abid and Kevin Birch about their large-scale JS-to-AngularDart rewrite. And the list goes on. We’re very happy how the event went, and we’re already looking forward for next year’s summit. In the meantime, follow our blog, our Twitter account, our G+ page, or join the conversation in any other way. We want to hear from you. Thanks for building in Dart.

Chrome Dev Summit. Now Live Streaming

Posted by Paul Kinlan, Chrome Developer Relations

Good morning! Only one minute to go until Darin Fisher, VP of Chrome kick's off this year's keynote at Chrome Dev Summit 2016. Join us as we take a look at the latest web advancements with over 20 sessions presented by Chrome engineers. We're live streaming all sessions and posting videos throughout the next two days.

Get Ready for the Chrome Dev Summit 2016

Posted by Paul Kinlan, Chrome Developer Relations

Chrome Dev Summit is almost here! We'll kick off live from San Francisco at the SFJAZZ Center, at 10:00 AM PT this coming Thursday, Nov 10th. This year's summit will focus on key themes that matter to you: Progressive, to build high quality web apps; Performance, to increase user engagement; and What's Next, a look at how the Chrome team is thinking about the future of the web.

While we're putting the finishing touches on the keynote, sessions, and code labs, we wanted to provide you with some tips to get ready to experience Chrome Dev Summit, either in-person or via the livestream.

Navigate the summit with notifications

To get the most out of Chrome Dev Summit, make sure to check out the schedule and set up notificationsfor the sessions you don't want to miss. These will help you plan your schedule whether you're in person or tuning in via the livestream.

Can't join us in person?

Don't worry, we've got you covered! Here are some ways you can connect with Chrome Dev Summit in real-time:

  • Tune in to the livestream at any time throughout the 2 day summit on developer.chrome.com/devsummit. We will stream the keynote and all sessions over the course of the event. If you want us to send you a reminder to tune into the livestream, sign up here.
  • Subscribeto the Chrome Developers YouTube Channel to stay up to date as we'll be publishing all of the talks from the event.
  • Join the conversation and send us your web questions on Twitter that include the #ChromeDevSummit hashtag or join our Slack by signing up here and a team of onsite Googlers will do their best to track down an answer in real time for you.

We're looking forward to having you with us you for 2 days of web fun, soon!

Don't forget to join the social conversation at #ChromeDevSummit.

Dart in 2017 and beyond

We’re here at the Dart Developer Summit in Munich, Germany. Over 250 developers from more than 50 companies from all over the world just finished watching the keynote.

This is a summary of the topics we covered:

Dart is the fastest growing programming language at Google, with a 3.5x increase in lines of code since last year. We like to think that this is because of our focus on developer productivity: teams report 25% to 100% increase in speed of development. Google has bet its biggest business on Dart — the web apps built on Dart bring over $70B per year.

Google AdSense recently launched a ground-up redesign of their web app, built with Dart. Earlier this year, we announced that the next generation of AdWords is built with Dart. There are more exciting Dart products at Google that we’re looking forward to reveal. Outside Google, companies such as Wrike, Workiva, Soundtrap, Blossom, DG Logic, Sonar Design have all been using and enjoying Dart for years.

Our five year investment in this language is reaping fruit. But we’re not finished.

We learned that people who use Dart love its terse and readable syntax. So we’re keeping that.

We have also learned that Dart developers really enjoy the language’s powerful static analysis. So we’re making it better. With strong mode, Dart’s type system becomes sound (meaning that it rejects all incorrect programs). We’re also introducing support for generic methods.

We have validated that the programming language itself is just a part of the puzzle. Dart comes with ‘batteries included.’ Developers really like Dart’s core libraries — we will keep them tight, efficient and comprehensive. We will also continue to invest in tooling such as pub (our integrated packaging system), dartfmt (our automatic formatter) and, of course, the analyzer.

On the web, we have arrived at a framework that is an excellent fit for Dart: AngularDart. All the Google web apps mentioned above use it. It has been in production at Google since February. AngularDart is designed for Dart, and it’s getting better every week. In the past 4 months, AngularDart’s output has gotten 40% smaller, and our AngularDart web apps got 15% faster.

Today, we’re launching AngularDart 2.0 final. Tune in to the next session.

With that, we’re also releasing — as a developer preview — the AngularDart components that Google uses for its major web apps. These Material Design widgets are being developed by hundreds of Google engineers and are thoroughly tested. They are written purely in Dart.

We’re also making Dart easier to use with existing JavaScript libraries. For example, you will be able to use our tool to convert TypeScript .d.ts declarations into Dart libraries.

We’re making the development cycle much faster. Thanks to Dart Dev Compiler, compilation to JavaScript will take less than a second across all modern browsers.

We believe all this makes Dart an even better choice for web development than before. Dart has been here for a long time and it’s not going anywhere. It’s cohesive and dependable, which is what a lot of web developers want.

We’re also very excited about Flutter — a project to help developers build high-performance, high-fidelity, mobile apps for iOS and Android from a single codebase in Dart. More on that tomorrow.

We hope you’ll enjoy these coming two days. Tune in on the live stream or follow #dartsummit on Twitter.

By Filip Hracek, Developer Relations Program Manager

Another year of Haskell Hacking in the Google Zurich Office

For the fourth time, the Google Open Source Programs Office have co-sponsored a three-day hackathon for Haskell, an open source functional programming language. Gleb Peregud from Google’s Zurich office talks more about the event below.

On the weekend of July 22nd, 126 Haskell enthusiasts got together for another installment of ZuriHac, a yearly open source Haskell hackathon held in Zurich, Switzerland, and like the last two years it took place at Google Zurich.

Participants could either hack uninterrupted in the main room or listen to a number of presentations in the tech talk room. Each day was kicked off with a keynote — Bas van Dijk talked about the use of functional programming at LumiGuide (slides), Edward Kmett about monad homomorphisms, and Andres Löh about generic-sop, a new approach to generic programming. All three talks drew a full room of interested listeners.

We also prepared two codelabs for Haskell beginners, and rallied 28 dedicated volunteers to serve as mentors (thank you all!) so that there was always someone to ask for help.

Aside from keynotes, there were five other talks: an experience report on parallelizing and distributing scientific computations (slides), an overview of a language to program FPGAs called CλaSH, an interactive tour through low-level pieces of the GHC Haskell compiler, an introduction to web programming using Spock (slides) and a talk on revamping the build system of GHC (slides).

Spontaneous mini-lectures attract smaller crowds.
As is traditional, after a full Saturday of hacking, we went out to barbecue down by the Zurich lake.

We were lucky that weather forecast was mistaken about a looming thunderstorm!
We managed to beat last year's record, and welcomed 126 attendees. We hope to have even more participants next year - our goal is to host 150 hackers in 2017. See you in a year!

By Gleb Peregud, Site Reliability Engineer

Mobile web and machine learning solutions: Case studies from Launchpad Accelerator

Roy Glasberg, Global Lead, Launchpad and Launchpad Accelerator

Last month, the second cohort of Launchpad Accelerator, Google’s high-touch global program for late-stage startups, came and conquered their app challenges with the help of mentors at Google HQ.

What did they learn that they’d like to share with developers across the world? Check out the video below for solutions from 3 different startups, and an in-depth review of MagicPin’s mobile web challenge and solution.


Startup:

MagicPinfrom India is a social network app that curates a local user base around locations, allowing merchants to connect with these specific audiences.

Mobile web challenge:

In India, downloading an app requires a high commitment. On average a user would keep 5 or 6 apps on their phone. According to Anshoo Sharma, Co-Founder and CEO, MagicPin, “If you want to be the next app that they download, there is a high barrier.”

Jordan Adler, Google Developer Advocate: “Devices in markets like India have limited space--on average 128 MB of memory--and when you add in system features only 40 bytes of user space is left. And if a typical APK is a few megabytes, you can only have a few apps before you have to stop downloading.”

Solution:

Jordan Adler: “One of the great things about Progressive Web Apps is you don’t have to request the commitment (to download an app) upfront. You can start to build a relationship with the user through the web interface, and over time the web app can become more like a native app, it can be housed on a device, cache content and work offline.”

Anshoo Sharma: “In the last 1.5 weeks we have been here we have already launched a micro version of our platform on Progressive Web Apps. And the experience is great! Without using the (mobile) app people can get as good an experience.”

About Launchpad Accelerator

Launchpad Accelerator is a six-month accelerator that enables late-stage app startups from emerging markets to successfully scale. Here's a two-minute video about the Accelerator.

Supercharge your Game with AdMob at Casual Connect USA 2016

Are you attending Casual Connect USA 2016 in San Francisco from July 18th to 20th? If the answer is yes, come meet the AdMob team at the Google booth (#106), where you’ll learn how to grow your gaming revenue! AdMob specialists will be in attendance to help answer any questions you might have and optimize your account on the spot.


On Monday, July 18th at 11:30am, don’t miss our talk: Find and Engage High Value Users From the Start; Google’s Mobile Ad Platform from Soft-launch through Growth with Google’s mobile ad product management leader, Sissie Hsiao. After this session, you’ll be fully up to speed on how to harness Google’s powerful automation to find high value players and build a thriving gaming business.

After the talk, come check out our workshops from 1:00pm to 4:00pm where you’ll meet with our product leaders and get a deep dive on a range of topics. These workshops are 20 minutes long and open to everyone. Seating is limited so be sure to come 5 minutes early to the workshop you want to attend.

1:00pm - 1:25pmBest practices for finding and engaging high quality players

Find out how Google’s insights and automated ads tools can help you understand what your players value the most and how to find them.
1:25pm - 1:50pmBuild the buzz and get the install – the one-two punch of awareness and intent

Samantha and Connie from the the App Dev team will discuss ways you can improve your keywords to get the best performing Search campaigns.
1:50pm - 2:15pmAligning monetization with player happiness

Gaming BD Lead Alejandro Manchado will discuss how to maximize your revenue across ads and IAP and tailor your monetization by user segment with AdMob and Firebase.
2:15pm - 2:40pmMore than a glimpse – storytelling using engaging formats

As the team lead for Google’s App Developer Sales, Beth will share insights and best practices on how you can use Google’s app promotion solutions to take your app to the next level.
2:40pm - 3:05pmTips for taking your game global – efficiently

Google has made it really easy for you to launch your app globally. Find out how Google helps you identify which market to enter and localize your app content for users.


Even if you can’t attend this year, you’ll be able to stay in the loop. We’ll be live tweeting and sharing the event on our Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+ channels, using the hashtags #Google #CasualConnect .

Posted by Henry Wang, Product Marketing, AdMob

Source: Inside AdMob