Tag Archives: Google+

We’re #AllForSmallBiz This National Small Business Week

We’ve all been there: It’s Taco Tuesday and you promised to bring that new smoky hot sauce everyone’s talking about, but you have no idea where to find it. Ten years ago, you would have had to drive home and search for a store on your desktop computer or call a friend for help. Today, you can solve the problem just by grabbing your phone and saying “OK Google…”

As a result, you shop differently now, and so do your customers. Most people research online before buying anything – and 93% of people who search on their phone go on to make a purchase.1 As a small business owner, you want your customers to be able to find you, so you need to be there during the moments when they’re looking for something you have to offer. And we’re here to help. During National Small Business Week (May 1-7), Google is excited to help every business get online and every community show they’re #AllForSmallBiz. We’re partnering with organizations all over the country – from Alaska to Iowa to Puerto Rico – to host hundreds of workshops to help you learn how to get your business online and you’re invited: google.com/smallbusinessweek.



In these local workshops, we’ll show you how you can reach your customers in those important moments. You’ll learn how to update your information on Google Search and Maps, build a no-charge mobile-optimized website and more, so that you can connect with people no matter where they are or on which device they’re searching.



Can’t make a workshop in person? Starting May 1, Google will offer a collection of online resources to help small business owners learn how to get on the web and in front of customers who are searching online and on the go.

The time is now. Consumer behavior is changing quickly, but more than half of all small businesses don’t have a website.2 Join us and learn how to get your business online so that you can be found when customers are searching and shopping – no matter what device they use. Sign up for a workshop at google.com/smallbusinessweek. From our team to yours, Happy Small Business Week!

Claire Mudd, Head of Americas SMB Marketing

1. Google/Nielsen, "Mobile Path to Purchase" study, November 2013
2. Google/Ipsos, "Survey of businesses with under 250 employees", October 2013

Experience virtual reality art in your browser

Posted by Jeff Nusz, Data Arts Team, Pixel Painter

Two weeks ago, we introduced Tilt Brush, a new app that enables artists to use virtual reality to paint the 3D space around them. Part virtual reality, part physical reality, it can be difficult to describe how it feels without trying it firsthand. Today, we bring you a little closer to the experience of painting with Tilt Brush using the powers of the web in a new Chrome Experiment titled Virtual Art Sessions.

Virtual Art Sessions lets you observe six world-renowned artists as they develop blank canvases into beautiful works of art using Tilt Brush. Each session can be explored from start to finish from any angle, including the artist’s perspective – all viewable right from the browser.

Participating artists include illustrator Christoph Niemann, fashion illustrator Katie Rodgers, sculptor Andrea Blasich, installation artist Seung Yul Oh, automotive concept designer Harald Belker, and street artist duo Sheryo & Yok. The artists’ unique approaches to this new medium become apparent when seeing them work inside their Tilt Brush creations. Watch this behind-the-scenes video to hear what the artists had to say about their experience:


Virtual Art Sessions makes use of Google Chrome’s V8 Javascript engine for high-performance processing power to render large volumes of data in real time. This includes point cloud data of the artist’s physical form, 3D geometry data of the artwork, and position data of the VR controllers. It also relies on Chrome’s support of WebM video and WebGL to produce the 360° representations of the artists and artwork – the artist portrayals alone require the browser to draw over 200,000 points at 30 times a second. For a deeper look, read the technical case study or browse the project code that is available open source from the site’s tech page.

We hope this experiment provides a window into the world of painting in virtual reality using Tilt Brush. We are excited by this new medium and hope the experience leaves you feeling the same. Visit g.co/VirtualArtSessions to start exploring.

An Expansion Update on Home Service Ads

The unexpected pipe leak, the key locked inside, the mess after a big housewarming, we've all been there. It's in these moments that people need quick and reliable help from someone they trust. If you’re a home services business owner, then people are turning to Google everyday to find professionals like you: plumbers, locksmiths, home cleaners and more.

Last year we introduced a new way for small businesses in the San Francisco Bay Area to offer home service solutions on Google. So far, thousands of people in the region have connected with qualified business owners through the format.

In San Jose, Ishmael Chandler's local plumbing service is growing quickly after using Home Service Ads for less than one year. "Home Service Ads have really helped us grow our business - since starting, we've seen a 20-30% increase in our overall business. As the program has grown throughout the year, we've seen better and better returns," he said.

We want to offer business owners like Ishmael the chance to connect with potential customers on Google, and that’s why we’re actively preparing to expand the availability of the experience to residents and business owners in Sacramento, California. In addition to the four types of services we’ve added in the past year -- plumbers, locksmiths, home cleaners and plumbers -- we’re also introducing two more highly requested categories of providers: HVAC services and electricians.

If you serve residents of Sacramento, visit google.com/homeserviceads to learn more about how we can help you reach more customers. We'll see you there!

Grow your games business on Google Play: Game parameters management, video recording, streaming ads, and more

Originally posted on Android Developers blog

Posted by Morgan Dollard, Product Manager of Google Play Games

With mobile gamers across 190 countries, Google Play Games is made up of a vibrant and diverse gaming community. And these players are more engaged than ever. Over the past year, the number of games reaching over 1 million installs grew by 50 percent.

Today, at our annual Developer Day at the Game Developers Conference, we announced new platform and ads tools for developers, of all sizes reach, to reach this global audience and accelerate the growth of their games business. Check out below the full range of features that will help game developers build their apps, grow their users base, and earn more revenue.

Making Google Play Games better for players

In February, we introduced Gamer IDs so that anyone could create a gaming persona. We also simplified the sign-in process for Google Play Games so players could pick up playing their game more quickly. We’re also working on product enhancements to make Play Games a little more social and fun, which will mean more engaged players who’re playing your game for longer. One example is the launch of Gamer friends (coming soon!), where your players can add and interact with their friends from within the Google Play Games app (without needing a Google+ account).

We’re also launching the Indie Corner, a new collection on Google Play, that will highlight amazing games built by indie developers. You can nominate your awesome indie game for inclusion at g.co/indiecornersubmission. We’ll pick the best games to showcase based on the quality of the experience and exemplary use of Google Play game services.

Grow your game with powerful new features from Google Play game services

In January, we added features to Player Analytics, the free reporting tool of Google Play game services, which helps you understand how players are progressing, spending and churning. Today, we previewed some upcoming new tools that would be available in the coming months, including:

  • Game parameters management: With game parameters management, you will be able to update gameplay and game economy parameters without the need for APK changes or resubmitting your app. You’ll be able to optimize virtual goods and currencies from the Developer Console or the Google Play Developer API.

Game parameters management in the Google Play Developer Console
  • Video Recording API: You will be able to easily add video recording to your app and let users share their videos with their friends and on YouTube in a few simple steps. We are also adding live streaming functionality to allow your fans to broadcast their gameplay experiences in real time on YouTube.
  • Predictive Analytics: The Player Stats API now has Predictive Analytics to help you identify which groups of players are likely to spend or churn, and we are adding new predictions for how much a player is likely to spend within 30 days and the probability that a player is a high spender. This allows you to tailor experiences for these players to try to increase their spend or engagement. Learn more about the
    Player Stats API.

“Not showing ads to users that were probable to spend increased number of IAP transactions by 15%.” – Avetis Zakharyan, CEO Underwater Apps

New ad formats and targeting to find, keep and monetize high-quality gamers

Promoting your game and growing your audience is important, but it’s just as important to reach the right audience for your game, the players who want to open the game again and again. That’s why today we’ve unveiled new features that make it simpler to reach the right audience at scale.

  • Search Trial Run Ads: In the next few weeks, we’ll launch a new way for users to try your game out when they do a search for games on Google through a new ad format, Search Trial Run Ads. After tapping “Try now”, an individual can play your game for up to 10 minutes, and then download the game in full if they choose. These ads will appear to smartphone users on WiFi. Using this format, you can drive qualified users who are likely to stay engaged with your game after install.

SGN’s Search Trial Run Ad for Panda Pop
  • Portrait Video Ads: More than 80% of video ad views in mobile apps on the Google Display Network are from devices held vertically, but often these videos are created for landscape viewing. Over the next few weeks, we’re launching Portrait Video Ads for a full-screen, immersive portrait video experience. Developers have seen significant improvement in both click-through and conversion rates, resulting in lower cost per install and more installs.
  • Active User Targeting for Games: In the coming weeks, we’re rolling out a new type of targeting for Android apps that allows you to show ads to users who have spent more than 30 minutes playing games, or who have played a Google Play Games integrated game, in the last 30 days.

Earn more revenue in your game with AdMob

AdMob helps game developers around the world maximize revenue through in-app advertising. At GDC, we also announced a new way to help you earn more through AdMob Mediation. Rewarded advertising is a popular form of game monetization -- users are given the choice to engage with ads in exchange for an in-app reward. AdMob Mediation will enable you to easily monetize your apps with rewarded video ads from a number of ad providers. Supported networks and platforms include AdColony, AppLovin, Chartboost, Fyber, Upsight and Vungle, with more being added all the time.

You can learn more about this, and all our ads announcements on the Inside AdWords blog.

This is just the start of what we’ve got planned for 2016. We hope you can make use of these tools to improve your game, engage your audience, and grow your business and revenue.

Grow your games business on Google Play: Game parameters management, video recording, streaming ads, and more

Posted by Morgan Dollard, Product Manager of Google Play Games

With mobile gamers across 190 countries, Google Play Games is made up of a vibrant and diverse gaming community. And these players are more engaged than ever. Over the past year, the number of games reaching over 1 million installs grew by 50 percent.

Today, at our annual Developer Day at the Game Developers Conference, we announced new platform and ads tools for developers, of all sizes reach, to reach this global audience and accelerate the growth of their games business. Check out below the full range of features that will help game developers build their apps, grow their user base, and earn more revenue.

Making Google Play Games better for players

In February, we introduced Gamer IDs so that anyone could create a gaming persona. We also simplified the sign-in process for Google Play Games so players could pick up playing their game more quickly. We’re also working on product enhancements to make Play Games a little more social and fun, which will mean more engaged players who’re playing your game for longer. One example is the launch of Gamer friends (coming soon!), where your players can add and interact with their friends from within the Google Play Games app (without needing a Google+ account).

We’re also launching the Indie Corner, a new collection on Google Play, that will highlight amazing games built by indie developers. You can nominate your awesome indie game for inclusion at g.co/indiecornersubmission. We’ll pick the best games to showcase based on the quality of the experience and exemplary use of Google Play game services.

Grow your game with powerful new features from Google Play game services

In January, we added features to Player Analytics, the free reporting tool of Google Play game services, which helps you understand how players are progressing, spending and churning. Today, we previewed some upcoming new tools that would be available in the coming months, including:

  • Game parameters management: With game parameters management, you will be able to update gameplay and game economy parameters without the need for APK changes or resubmitting your app. You’ll be able to optimize virtual goods and currencies from the Developer Console or the Google Play Developer API.

Game parameters management in the Google Play Developer Console
  • Video Recording API: You will be able to easily add video recording to your app and let users share their videos with their friends and on YouTube in a few simple steps. We are also adding live streaming functionality to allow your fans to broadcast their gameplay experiences in real time on YouTube.
  • Predictive Analytics: The Player Stats API now has Predictive Analytics to help you identify which groups of players are likely to spend or churn, and we are adding new predictions for how much a player is likely to spend within 30 days and the probability that a player is a high spender. This allows you to tailor experiences for these players to try to increase their spend or engagement. Learn more about the
    Player Stats API.

“Not showing ads to users that were probable to spend increased number of IAP transactions by 15%.” – Avetis Zakharyan, CEO Underwater Apps

New ad formats and targeting to find, keep and monetize high-quality gamers

Promoting your game and growing your audience is important, but it’s just as important to reach the right audience for your game, the players who want to open the game again and again. That’s why today we’ve unveiled new features that make it simpler to reach the right audience at scale.

  • Search Trial Run Ads: In the next few weeks, we’ll launch a new way for users to try your game out when they do a search for games on Google through a new ad format, Search Trial Run Ads. After tapping “Try now”, an individual can play your game for up to 10 minutes, and then download the game in full if they choose. These ads will appear to smartphone users on WiFi. Using this format, you can drive qualified users who are likely to stay engaged with your game after install.

SGN’s Search Trial Run Ad for Panda Pop
  • Portrait Video Ads: More than 80% of video ad views in mobile apps on the Google Display Network are from devices held vertically, but often these videos are created for landscape viewing. Over the next few weeks, we’re launching Portrait Video Ads for a full-screen, immersive portrait video experience. Developers have seen significant improvement in both click-through and conversion rates, resulting in lower cost per install and more installs.
  • Active User Targeting for Games: In the coming weeks, we’re rolling out a new type of targeting for Android apps that allows you to show ads to users who have spent more than 30 minutes playing games, or who have played a Google Play Games integrated game, in the last 30 days.

Earn more revenue in your game with AdMob

AdMob helps game developers around the world maximize revenue through in-app advertising. At GDC, we also announced a new way to help you earn more through AdMob Mediation. Rewarded advertising is a popular form of game monetization -- users are given the choice to engage with ads in exchange for an in-app reward. AdMob Mediation will enable you to easily monetize your apps with rewarded video ads from a number of ad providers. Supported networks and platforms include AdColony, AppLovin, Chartboost, Fyber, Upsight and Vungle, with more being added all the time.

You can learn more about this, and all our ads announcements on the Inside AdWords blog.

This is just the start of what we’ve got planned for 2016. We hope you can make use of these tools to improve your game, engage your audience, and grow your business and revenue.

Google Cloud Messaging: State of the Union

Posted by Laurence Moroney, Developer Advocate

Google Cloud Messaging (GCM) is an infrastructure that allows you to do simple and reliable messaging to distribute your messages to and across many devices.

Every day, GCM delivers over 150 Billion messages to devices on various platforms including Android Devices, iOS Devices and Web Browsers. It has a number of different techniques for sending messages:

Single devices. Each device has a unique registration token. If you want to reach that device -- for example using GCM to build a 1:1 chat application, you can do so, addressing it via that token.

Device Groups allow you to bundle devices together into a group. For example, one of your users might have multiple devices -- including the very common scenario of having both a phone and a tablet. Using Device Groups in GCM, you can send a message to all of her devices, and if you desire, you can implement your app so that dismissing on one dismisses on all.

Topics allow you to create interest groups for your users. Once they subscribe to a topic, you can send messages to that topic, and your users will receive them. There’s no subscription limit to these, so you don’t have to worry about how many users subscribe to your topics! Some great scenarios of topics being used to improve user experience can be found in this blog post.

When it comes to reliability of messages, an internal study at Google found that the majority of notification messages (95th percentile) are delivered within 250ms to connected devices. Connectivity is impacted by many factors -- including carriers, routers and local connectivity. Indeed, in some locales it is common for people to disable mobile data for large parts of the day in order to save on bandwidth costs. In this scenario, users will still receive their notifications once they re-activate their data connection.

We’ve provided a number of resources to help you to build apps using GCM. Check out this talk where you are taken step by step through building an Android app and an associated server in PHP. There’s also an open source ‘GCM Playground’ on GitHub here, which provides a sample server implementation that runs on the Google Cloud Platform!

If you want to reach iOS users, today we’re adding an API that will help you to migrate your existing infrastructure to send notifications to iOS device, with no client code changes required. With the new batch Import API you can import the APNs device tokens that you collected from your iOS audience into GCM, and immediately start sending notifications through GCM. After you import the APNs device tokens, you can also use the InstanceID API to transparently subscribe users to GCM topics, achieving efficient fan-out of notifications based on interest groups, once again with no changes required on client code.

We’re continuing to build and innovate on this platform -- stay tuned for lots of cool new features coming soon!

You can learn more about Google Cloud Messaging on the Developers site here, including quickstarts for Android and iOS!

Explore the new Google Play Developer Policy Center

Posted by Atul Kumar, Google Play Policy

More than 1 billion Android users come to Google Play every month to discover their favorite apps and games, enabling developers to reach a vast global audience and build successful businesses on the platform. To maintain a positive experience for both users and developers, the Google Play Developer Program Policies play a central role in helping make Google Play an open, safe and enjoyable ecosystem by educating the community and defining appropriate content and activities in the store.

We constantly listen to our developers and users to maintain fair and defined policies and look for ways to improve how we communicate those policies to help developers avoid accidental pitfalls. As part of that effort, we’ve redesigned our Developer Program Policy Center to communicate our policies with greater transparency and clarity. This redesign includes:

  • Thematic organization of policies, so it is easier for developers to find relevant policies and understand the broad principles behind them
  • Visual examples and detailed guidelines for the most common violations based on developer feedback
  • Expanded information on our policy enforcement to help resolve violations
  • A visual refresh embracing Material Design to help developers more intuitively find the information they are looking for on mobile or desktop

From making it easier to self-correct minor violations in minutes using the app publishing status feature to improving our policy communication, the new policy center is part of our ongoing effort to improve the developer experience. We invite you to explore the new policy center and and share your feedback.

Google’s Launchpad Accelerator successfully takes off. Apply to join the June class.

Originally posted on Android Developers Blog

Posted by Roy Glasberg Global Lead, Launchpad Program & Accelerator

Last month, 24 promising startups from India, Indonesia, and Brazil came to Silicon Valley to participate in Google’s Launchpad Accelerator, a new program that provides late-stage startups (mobile apps) with mentoring and resources to successfully scale in their local economies.

During the intensive two-week Accelerator kickoff in our Mountain View headquarters, Google engineers from 11 product areas, as well as experts from other companies, were on hand to provide startups with mentorship on how to scale and monetize their apps, and ultimately, build successful businesses. Now back in their home countries, the teams will continue developing their products with the support of up to $50,000 in equity-free funding, six more months of ongoing mentorship, and a breadth of developer tools from the Launchpad Accelerator program.

So far, many startup participants have already seen an immediate impact. Two weeks after attending the kickoff event, Brazilian mobile game developer UpBeat Games was featured on Google Play and saw a 1,000% increase in app installations in Asia, as well as a 200% overall increase in active users, by leveraging analytics to better understand their users.

According to UpBeat Games founder Vinicius Heimbeck, “By working one-on-one with the mentors, we learned that we needed to be a data-driven company. We now have the right analytics tools to measure the results of our efforts and to learn from them to optimize the user experience. This all directly impacted our huge success once we were featured on Google Play.”

eFishery, an Indonesian startup that produces smart automated fish feeders, turned its focus on scaling since attending Launchpad Accelerator. “The mentors gave us great insight about how to build a scalable product and how to engage billions of users,” said co-founder and CEO Gibran Chuzaefah Amsi El Farizy. “We received both technical and practical advice on our business, from building back-end technology to embracing failure with the right mindset.”

Apply now for Launchpad AcceleratorWe are also excited to announce the second class for Launchpad Accelerator which will begin in June 2016.

If you are a startup from India, Indonesia, Brazil, or Mexico (a new addition!) and are interested in participating in the next wave, we encourage you to apply here by March 31. We expect to continue adding more countries to the program in the future, so be on the lookout!

EarlGrey – iOS Functional UI Testing Framework

Posted by Siddartha Janga, Google iOS Developers

Brewing for quite some time, we are excited to announce EarlGrey, a functional UI testing framework for iOS. Several Google apps like YouTube, Google Calendar, Google Photos, Google Translate, Google Play Music and many more have successfully adopted the framework for their functional testing needs.

The key features offered by EarlGrey include:

  • Powerful built-in synchronization : Tests will automatically wait for events such as animations, network requests, etc. before interacting with the UI. This will result in tests that are easier to write (no sleeps or waits) and simple to maintain (straight up procedural description of test steps).
  • Visibility checking : All interactions occur on elements that users can see. For example, attempting to tap a button that is behind an image will lead to test failure immediately.
  • Flexible design : The components that determine element selection, interaction, assertion and synchronization have been designed to be extensible.

Are you in need for a cup of refreshing EarlGrey? EarlGrey has been open sourced under the Apache license. Check out the getting started guide and add EarlGrey to your project using CocoaPods or manually add it to your Xcode project file.

Google Apps for Work helps deliver projected savings of £500,000 for The Cordant Group

Posted by Craig Bell, IT Service Delivery Director at The Cordant Group

Editor's note: Today we hear from Craig Bell, IT Service Delivery Director at The Cordant Group, a specialist recruitment and integrated services company employing up to 50,000 staff during peak times, and turning over £750 million a year. Here, Craig tells us how Google Apps for Work has not only helped them work smarter and more flexibly thanks to a business-wide rollout, but has also helped deliver a projected savings of £500,000 to the company’s bottom line in just a year.

It may have grown since it was founded in 1957, but ours is still a family business, and one that values the input of every individual, whether they’re one of our 2,500 permanent employees, or one of our tens of thousands of seasonal workers. But with so many staff, we realised we needed an IT solution that would answer the needs of each person, rather than asking each of them to answer to our inflexible IT system. Our solution is Google Apps for Work, which has transformed the way we operate our business at every level.

With 200 locations nationwide, as well as offices in Germany and Australia, we launched our rollout of Google Apps for Work so our staff can work as a team, wherever they are. Gmail gives access to our accounts whether in the office, at home or on the road — and the fact that it’s multi-device compatible means no more lugging laptops around just to check our inboxes. The flexibility and immediacy it provides ensures that important messages don’t fall through the cracks, and now we’re so speedy and effective with email communications that we send and receive up to 16 million emails each month.

Hangouts also allows us to communicate (face-to-face in this case) at any time, no matter where any of us are based. With over a thousand Hangouts happening across the Group every month, Hangouts have become so crucial to the way we run our business and communicate with each other that we now often use it to conduct interviews for IT recruits. It’s a great way to asses how intuitively candidates use technology tools, in particular Google Apps. Using Hangouts for interviews also benefits our bottom line: we now spend an average of 25% less time on interviews for IT team members, simply because we don’t have to spend time on things like collecting interviewees from reception and making them cups of tea.

As a recruitment company, we have a frequent turnover of staff. Having forward-looking and familiar tools helps us appeal to the very best new recruits. Web-based mail, instant messaging and online communities like Google+, are cloud-based tools that younger generations have grown up with — and are now ready to work with. This familiarity allows new starters to work efficiently from the moment they log on and saves us time and money on training. Plus Google Apps tools are also incredibly easy to scale up or down.

Knowledge is also easy for us to scale now. We share documents hosted on Google Drive almost half a million times every month and add 125,000 new files each month. And everything we do is reusable rather than disposable. Our own internal teams can manage and roll out successful solutions to every one of our 200 locations without needing armies of external IT service providers to support us, a change that along with keeping specialist knowledge in-house and doing things more efficiently has played a significant part in reducing our operational expenditure by hundreds of thousands of pounds each year.

With the virtual nature of Google for Work products, we can also keep costs and downtime at a minimum when relocating to new offices as we grow. Google’s ability to integrate data and systems to the cloud so seamlessly means shifting office spaces and acquiring new companies is now more economically viable. When considering the total cost of acquisition for a subsidiary business, we look at how easily a business can be “Googlised.” Using Chrome OS allows us to almost instantly integrate existing businesses with often outdated legacy apps into our Group. This has opened up a host of opportunities that we otherwise would not have taken because of prohibitive IT costs.

In just one year, Google Apps for Work has completely changed the way we operate, which says a lot coming from a large and established business. As part of our company-wide “New World” IT rollout, we estimate that the new tools will enable us to save about £500,000, thanks to a combination of lower licensing costs, reducing capital expenditure by purchasing 2,000 compatible devices at more than half the previous cost of replacement, minimising use of external suppliers and relying more heavily on in-house skills and efficiencies. And there’s no doubt that we’ve also saved and earned a whole lot more thanks to working smarter with IT-led solutions.