Celebrating Martin Luther King Day by giving back

Today, Martin Luther King Day of Service in the U.S., Googlers around the country worked with community service organizations to lend a helping hand in their area and commemorate the holiday.

The Black Googler Network (BGN), an employee resource group made up of volunteers, spearheaded this effort to set up service projects in multiple offices. In the California Bay Area today, we joined The Center for Music National Service in the MLK Day of Service & Song in various projects to beautify John O’Connell High School in San Francisco’s Mission district. Projects included mural painting, landscaping and organizing books and materials, and the celebration included time for students and volunteers to share their art and voice their feelings about the importance of the day.



In New York last week, we teamed up with the Harlem Children’s Zone for a full-day workshop with college students to review their resumes and conduct mock interviews, aimed at supporting the organization’s goal of ending the cycle of generational poverty. And in Ann Arbor, Mich., we joined the Ann Arbor Community Center and University of Michigan students to serve hot meals and give out winter garments to homeless families in need.

We’re proud of the ways Googlers came together to celebrate today and we’re committed to diversity and cultural inclusion year-round, with a focus on closing the technology gap. Last year, our FUSE, CSSI, BOLD and BOLD Practicum summer programs brought hundreds of students from culturally diverse backgrounds to Google offices worldwide for summer internships. We hosted national pitch night for The Technovation Challenge for girls. The BGN’s efforts to aid minority and low-income communities included its annual BGN New Orleans Outreach Trip, and we hosted speakers Condoleezza Rice, Alice Walker, Belva Davis and Soledad O’Brien among others. We have even more plans for promoting diversity in 2012.

If you’re interested in volunteer opportunities in your area, visit mlkday.gov or allforgood.org.

Posted by Chad Sanders, Global Learning Systems, Talent

Beckham kicks it at Google

International soccer phenom +David Beckham is taking off his boots and heading to Google for an exclusive live interview. Have a question you’ve been dying to personally ask Becks? Post it on Google+ with hashtag #GoogleBeckham, and maybe he’ll answer it live!

Watch the interview on Thursday, January 19 at 9am PT on youtube.com/atgoogletalks. And as an added bonus, hangout with him directly afterward on his Google+ profile at 10:30am PT. Add him to your circles now for all the latest updates.



Don’t worry if you can’t make the live interview or Google+ hangout—we’ll post them to YouTube shortly after.

So, what are you waiting for? Punt us your best questions on Google.com/+!

Posted by Andrew Schulte, Product Marketing Manager

(Cross-posted on the YouTube Blog)

Inaugurating our new French headquarters

Last year, our Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt promised to open a research and development and culture centre in France. Today, Eric returned to Paris to inaugurate our new 10,000-square meter office in a refurbished 19th century Second Empire building near the St. Lazare Train Station.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy honored us with his presence. “Why as President, do I make this symbolic move and come to Google?" he asked rhetorically to a packed courtyard auditorium. “I love the United States, and its motto that everything is possible whatever your origins.” President Sarkozy also officially launched the Elysee Palace’s YouTube channel and his visit was shown on YouTube Live, the section of the site where we list all live streamed events.

The President participated in a Google+ Hangout, taking questions from French-speaking Googlers around the world. (“What time is it there?” he asked someone dialing in from California.) On a serious note, he expressed his gratification for how Google has moved to dig deep roots in France. “When I first met Eric, we had a frank conversation,” he recalled, saying his message was clear. “I asked him how long Google was preparing to make money in France without investing here. I told him that Google must have its feet in France.”



Our new Paris office is emblematic of our commitment to one of Europe’s fastest-growing Internet economies. According to a recent McKinsey study that we helped sponsor, the web contributed to 3.2 percent of the French GDP in 2009 and created more than 700,000 jobs during the past 15 years. Between now and 2015, McKinsey estimates that the digital contribution will grow to 5.5 percent of GDP, and 450,000 additional jobs will be created. In order to help accelerate the French digital engine, we’ve launched a Startup Café, an online platform offering information and tools.

Our investment plan for France is ambitious, and extends far beyond buildings. We’re expanding our engineering presence to take advantage of France’s strong engineering talent pool and are making significant academic investments, including a partnership with the French national research center CNRS.

France is a global cultural leader and we’re working hard to partner with French writers, filmmakers and musicians. Over the past year, we've reached an agreement with the biggest French publisher Hachette to scan and sell digital versions of out-of-print books and are providing payment systems for French news publishers from Hachette. YouTube has signed royalty-collection agreements with music copyright societies and our new Cultural Institute will be located in the Paris headquarters. It will aim at driving innovation in cultural preservation, creation and access, not just in France, but across the world.

Just before the President left, he asked to say a few final words. He praised our “dynamism” and wished well our expanded operations, before making a parting promise. “I hope this inauguration is one of a long series,” he said. “If you invite me to another building opening, I will come.”

Posted by Anne-Gabrielle Dauba Pantanacce, Head of Communications, France

(Cross-posted from the European Public Policy Blog)

Gravity Games highlight future scientists and engineers

The Google data center in Caldwell County, NC lies close to the birthplace of NASCAR and any visitor can tell—even our data center is decked out in NASCAR paraphernalia and pretty much everyone is a NASCAR fan. When we learned that many competitive drivers got their first start behind the wheel in soapbox cars, we put two and two together and thought there would be no better way to get local students excited about science and engineering than by giving them a chance to build and race a soapbox car in the first ever Western North Carolina Gravity Games Soapbox Races.

We teamed up with Appalachian State University (ASU) to co-host a soapbox race, hoping that young people would bring the same excitement they had for NASCAR to this hands-on engineering activity and gain some technological ingenuity along the way. The race was divided into three divisions: middle school, high school and an open group for university, corporate or private teams. Each car would compete for both speed and creativity honors. During the months leading up to the event, ASU’s physics, technology and design graduate students and Googlers from the data center in Caldwell County served as mentors for the teams and provided the students with technical assistance and advice.

On November 19, I joined a team of Googlers from the data center and several hundred parents, kids and their derby cars in downtown Lenoir for the race. While most families were still in their PJs, we were busy transforming Church Street into a race track—complete with hay bales, a custom-built starting gate, finish line, a race timer designed by the team at the data center, an event emcee and 34 colorful soapbox cars. Some even had sponsor logos, just like real race cars.

Teams from Alleghany, Avery, Burke, Caldwell, Catawba and Watauga counties competed to be the fastest car on the hill and the kids had an “in-it-to-win-it” swagger. Some had designed their own custom T-shirts, while one driver dressed up in a Super Mario costume. One team created a box-turtle car made from metal and wood and there were several cars with custom paint jobs that included bright red flames and a few bug eyes.

The vehicles had to run solely on potential energy. No electrical, chemical or animal-powered sources were allowed. (Because you never know what kids are capable of, we forbade nuclear power in the rules, too, just in case.) The only thing cars could run on was gravity and—for the upper age divisions—potential mechanical energy, such as springs, weights, elastic or flywheels. Most of the teams stuck with gravity as the primary accelerator and focused on reducing friction, optimizing vehicle weight and selecting the fastest path down the race course.

The Church Street race track was 650 feet long, and the average speed over the course of the track was 17 miles per hour. Top speeds at the finish line topped 30 miles per hour, and our winners clocked in with total times around 26 seconds.

With a time of 26.213 seconds, Hudson Middle School won the speed category in the middle school division, beating 22 other teams. Caldwell Career Middle College won the speed category in the high school division, defeating seven other high school teams with a time of 26.962. Hudson Middle School also won the People’s Choice Award, given to the car the attendees voted as their overall favorite. Each team entered a car that was either custom-built or was created from an approved kit.

In the creativity category, Jacobs Fork Middle School and St. Stephens High School took home top honors. In the open division, ASU’s North Carolina Center for Engineering Technologies won for its two-bicycle design.

The Gravity Games was one of my proudest moments as a Googler. Beyond being a great time, it gave young people a way to get excited about science, technology and engineering. The students who participated in the soapbox races are future engineers and scientists (and possibly Googlers), and I hope they’ll have more opportunities to inspire their peers and this community with the incredible abilities we saw that morning.

Naturally, we’re already planning to host another Western North Carolina Gravity Games in the spring of 2012 and we’ll be including more North Carolina communities. You can view the complete results and event photos at www.ncgravitygames.com.

Posted by Enoch Moeller, Hardware Operations Manager

Celebrating LEO, the world’s first business computer

This year marks the 60th anniversary of LEO, the world’s first business computer—built by J.Lyons & Co, a leading British food manufacturer at the time that also ran a famous chain of tea shops.

Lyons management had long been keen to streamline their back-office operations. In 1947, two Lyons managers visited the U.S. to learn about the latest business processes, including whether the electronic computers they’d heard about during their wartime service, like ENIAC, might be useful. (At the time, the closer-to-home advances at Bletchley Park were still a well-kept military secret.)

They returned inspired by the possibilities and keen to build a machine of their own. After several years of development, LEO, a.k.a. Lyons Electronic Office, took on its first office job on November 17, 1951—weekly valuations for the bakery division, calculating margins on Lyon’s output of bread, cakes and pies.



Until LEO, computing in a work setting was treated like a specialist bit of kit on a factory production line. Each machine was dedicated to a single task. In essence, they were narrowly defined calculating machines. The vision for LEO, in contrast, was bravely broad. LEO was a single computer capable of handling a whole swathe of accounting and bookkeeping tasks, as well as producing daily management reports.

LEO was such a success that Lyons set up a commercial subsidiary to sell spare time on LEO to other businesses, including the Ford Motor Company, which used it to process the payroll for the thousands of workers at its U.K. plant. Later, Lyons also built entirely new LEOs and sold them to other blue-chip companies of the era. In total, more than 70 LEO’s were built, with the last remaining in service until the 1980’s (not bad for a computer that took up an entire room!).

Today we view IT as critical to any enterprise, but in the 1950s, this was by no means a given, as evidenced by a quote from a 1954 issue of The Economist: “There are those who do not believe in the desirability of introducing anything as esoteric as electronics into business routine.” Things certainly have changed, and in a sense, all modern day businesses owe a debt to the LEO team.

Last week at the Science Museum in London, we were delighted to sponsor a small gathering of early LEO programmers  to celebrate their accomplishments and reminisce about their pioneering work. Today, on this 60th anniversary, we invite you to have a cup of tea and join us in toasting LEO—a remarkable ancestor in IT’s family tree.



Posted by Lynette Webb, Senior Manager, External Relations

Raising awareness for breast cancer through the Pink Pin Initiative in NYC and beyond

Every October marks Breast Cancer Awareness Month, a time when organizations and individuals around the world come together to raise awareness to support the fight against breast cancer.

This year, Google joined in and partnered with Susan G. Komen for the Cure on the Pink Pin Initiative, which challenged local businesses in New York City to rally their customers, friends and families around breast cancer awareness. Using Google’s products, including Maps, YouTube, Picasa and Google+, we made it easy for local businesses and New York residents to show their support for the cause. On an interactive website, pinkpin.com, people could register their businesses on the Pink Pin Map, share their experiences by uploading their own videos and photo stories, as well as donate to Susan G. Komen for the Cure.

More than 300 businesses signed up to participate in the first 24 hours, and we saw an outpouring of public support from both businesses and individuals, demonstrating how small, random acts of participation can translate to larger scale impact. In fact, some businesses took it upon themselves to take Pink Pin a step further. One New York business offered $100 of free services for every $100 donated. A Brooklyn restaurant hosted a one-day “Dine-out” for Pink Pin, where a percentage of their earnings for that day went to Susan G. Komen for the Cure. Pink Pin was a tremendous demonstration of what people will do if you give them the tools to use technology for good. We’re thrilled that Pink Pin has been so positively received by New Yorkers and hope to continue and expand our efforts next year.

Googlers also celebrated Breast Cancer Awareness month in 23 of our offices around the globe. In addition to health talks encouraging Googlers to learn more about breast cancer prevention, we heard a panel of survivors speak in Mountain View, held walk/runs in California, New York and Washington, and participated in flash mobs to raise awareness in Dublin and London. On Wednesday, October 19, we celebrated a global “Wear Pink, Think Pink Day.” We also encouraged donations (and gift matching!) to organizations like Susan G. Komen for the Cure and the Breast Cancer Research Foundation. You can see a photo album of all our activities below:



Posted by Noel Paasch, Pink Pin team

Honey harvest 2011: the sweetest time of year

The second year at the Google Hiveplex was a busy one, and two weeks ago, we harvested a delicious bounty from our wildly productive hives. But the sweetest part about having the four hives on campus is the Googlers from all departments who have gotten into beekeeping or become more aware of honeybees because of their presence on campus.

During the honey harvest, guided by Bill and Debbie Tomaszewski of Marin Bee Company, Googlers from all walks joined in with the Google Beekeepers and local beekeeping friends from the San Francisco Chronicle on the harvesting activities. We pulled frames of honeycomb out of the honey supers (the boxes stacked on the very top of the hives in which the bees store the honey), uncapped comb, worked the extractor and filled jars bound for our cafes and beyond.

We also participated in a tasting featuring nine honeys from around the country, including entries from Google beekeepers’ personal hives, the San Francisco Chronicle’s urban rooftop hive, the Marin Bee Company’s suburban hive and more. The colors, consistencies and flavors varied as much as their origins, and everyone got a chance to note their own impressions of these honeys during a “Silent Tasting” where participants added their guesses about the honeys’ flavors and origins to tasting sheets. Afterward, we revealed the honeys’ “hometowns” (one came from as far away as Illinois) and nectar sources, which ranged from pine and fennel to eucalyptus and mustard flower.

It’s tough to say how our harvest this year compares to last year, as we still haven’t devised an ideal method for weighing the honey harvests, but we did end up with more honey supers on the hives at harvest time this year than we did last year. After the harvest, the supers and their empty frames were returned to the hives to allow the bees to pick every cell clean as they get ready to settle in for a cozy winter.



Everyone who participated in the harvest walked away with a sweet reward and, we hope, a new appreciation for the work our tens of thousands of busy gals put in to make it happen.

Posted by Jessica Vaughan, Google Grants

Navigating a proposal with Google Maps for mobile

I recently decided to propose to my girlfriend, Faigy. I knew I wanted to do something meaningful and —yes—a little over the top, so I decided to put my software engineering skills to work to create the ultimate romantic scavenger hunt. On the road to “The Big Question,” I wanted Faigy to visit places around New York City that were filled with memories of our relationship. My plan was to construct a map of the route and get my girlfriend from one destination to the next, all with the element of surprise. Google Maps gave me the tools I needed to make the magic happen.


View Faigy & Ari's Engagement Route in a larger map

I used My Maps to plan out the route—from the Trader Joe’s we shop at on the Upper West Side, to Magnolia Bakery where we spent part of our first date, to Hudson Bar & Lounge where we enjoyed a night of dancing, to Carnegie Hall where Faigy once surprised me with tickets to a Beethoven concert, all the way to the lighthouse on Roosevelt Island where we went on our second date.

I secretly coordinated with Faigy’s manager at work to give her a Nexus One preloaded with Google Maps for mobile, a camera and instructions to go to the first location. I had a friend stationed at each of the six locations before the final stop to give Faigy a rose, take a picture of her with the roses and make sure she checked in with Google Maps. Meanwhile, I anxiously awaited her arrival at the Roosevelt Island lighthouse.

Her phone had a custom mobile app I’d built (with the help of my fellow Google engineers Andrew Oplinger and Matt Keoshkerian). The app would let Faigy check in to each location, then prompt her for a password to find out the next location. I provided each friend with a question to ask Faigy, tied to our memories of that particular place, the answer to which was the password. When Faigy entered the password, the app would automatically initiate walking navigation to the next location.

When she got to the checkered pin that marked her last destination, her seventh and final rose also came with a question—but this one was from me, and it wasn’t any ordinary question. I’ll leave it to you to guess what her answer was!

Posted by Ari Gilder, Software Engineer

Taking cars off the road with our transportation programs

This is the third in a short series of posts and videos spotlighting our efforts to make Google greener. In this post, we give you a glimpse at how our transportation programs help Googlers get to work while leaving their cars at home. -Ed.

Commuting to work without driving, meeting with someone on another continent without flying and riding cars without gasoline? It’s not a futuristic dream, but a way of life at Google. We support and encourage carbon-free commuting because it’s a vital part of our longstanding commitment to sustainability.

We help take cars off of the road—not quite like the Hulk, but we are green. Back in 2004, one motivated Googler started a vanpool that ran from San Francisco to Mountain View as a 20 percent project. As demand grew, the program morphed into what is now one of the largest corporate shuttle services in the country. Today, up to a third of employees ride the GBus shuttles throughout our Bay Area offices five days a week—that’s more than 3,500 daily riders, or 7,000 one-way car trips avoided each day.



Beyond the convenience and comfort that our shuttle rides offer—of which I’m reminded during my daily 35-mile commute from Alameda to Mountain View—they’re also environmentally friendly. Our shuttles have the cleanest diesel engines ever built and run on 5 percent bio-diesel, so they’re partly powered by renewable resources that help reduce our carbon footprint. In fact, we’re the first and largest company with a corporate transportation fleet using engines that meet the Environmental Protection Agency’s 2010 emission standards.

Not only do we encourage self-powered commuting, we reward it. Googlers earn credits each time they get to work via alternative (non-engine) means—by bike, foot, skateboard or kayak. These credits are then translated into a dollar amount that gets donated—$100 for every 20 days of participation—to the Googler’s charity of choice. This year, 56 offices also participated in “Bike to Work Day,” with more than 2,500 Googlers who biked to work worldwide. The annual celebration is meant to reward daily cyclists as well as introduce many new riders to biking.

The green life doesn’t stop once Googlers get to work. In Mountain View, our GBike system distributes about 1,000 bikes across the campus that Googlers can pick up whenever they have to get to another building. For longer distances and off-campus trips, we have the GFleet, our electric vehicle car share program, and our on-campus taxi service GRide. We're also installing hundreds of electric vehicle charging stations throughout several of our offices, making it easy for Googlers to charge up their own electric cars for free at work. If Googlers need to chat with their colleagues in other cities or continents they can use video conferencing technology, which cuts down on potential air travel.

In total, the combination of the GFleet and our shuttles result in net annual savings of more than 5,400 metric tons of CO2. That's like taking over 2,000 cars off the road every day, or avoiding 14 million vehicle miles every year. With the help of Googlers, we’ll continue powering the wheels of sustainable transit innovation.

Posted by Kevin Mathy, Transportation Manager

Food for (green) thought

This is the second in a short series of posts and videos spotlighting our efforts to make Google greener. In this post, we give you a glimpse at our sustainable food programs. -Ed.

When it comes to eating sustainably, it’s about more than being organic, grass-fed or cage-free. Through our food program, we delight and support Googlers as well as uphold our company’s health and environmental values. And it’s a job we relish, because food is such a defining part of our unique culture. Our cafes and microkitchens help spark greater innovation and collaboration, allowing different teams to come together to share ideas, problem-solve or just get to know each other better over lunch or a mid-morning snack.

As part of Google’s Food Team, we serve roughly 50,000 healthy and delicious meals every day at nearly 100 cafes around the world—and strive to apply sustainable food principles to all the cafes we operate. We aim to source food that’s as local, seasonal and organic as possible. This helps us prevent artificial additives, pesticides and hormones from entering Google’s food supply—whether that means sourcing our eggs from cage-free chickens or using steroid- and antibiotic-free poultry. It’s fresher, and it tastes better!



Through Google’s Green Seafood Policy, we’ve established guidelines to help ensure that (whenever and wherever possible) we purchase species caught locally from independently managed fisheries that use environmentally responsible catch practices. At our Mountain View headquarters, where we benefit from our proximity to the ocean and local agriculture, we’ve been able to establish close relationships with several local, independent farmers and fishermen. We see firsthand how they raise and harvest their stock, and what sustainable catch methods they use. Much of our Mountain View produce (nearly half of which is organic) comes from farms in California, and our seafood comes from within 200 miles. Many of our campuses also have edible gardens that empower green-thumbed Googlers to grow herbs for their own cooking.

Because optimal eating habits extend beyond the walls of our offices, we’re committed to helping Googlers make the most informed choices possible as part of a healthy lifestyle. We want to not only become the healthiest workforce, but also make it easier for employees to take Google’s sustainable food values home to share with friends and family. Many of our offices in the U.S. offer Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) programs where Googlers can buy fresh, seasonal produce directly from local farms that’s delivered right to campus. In Mountain View, we also recently launched the Google Green Grocer program, where Googlers can order the same high-quality, sustainably sourced seafood, meat and eggs they already enjoy in our cafes, while supporting local community fisheries and farms.

We also pay very close attention to how we manage and reduce waste from our food program. Most employees use non-disposable dishware, and all of our grab-and-go containers are compostable. We have recycling and composting bins throughout many of our offices worldwide, and 20 percent of food waste from our cafes is recycled. In fact, organic food waste from our cafes in Europe, the Middle East and Africa is recycled to help produce bio-diesel or electricity. In some of our U.S. offices, any untouched, edible food is donated to local shelters, and the rest is put to use as compost.

Through our our cafes, microkitchens, edible gardens and community-supported food programs, we’re connecting Googlers to sustainable values on a daily basis. The more we care about what happens to the food on our plates and where it comes from, the more it can improve our health, our local economies and the environment.

Posted by Scott Giambastiani, Executive Chef