Australia Blog
News and notes from Google Down Under
Hop aboard! Real time information for public transport in New South Wales is now available on Google Maps
Thursday, June 29, 2017
Since 2005
, we’ve collaborated with transit authorities around the world to make a comprehensive resource for millions of riders to find out which bus, train, tram or ferry can take them to their next destination.
Starting today, commuters in New South Wales will be able to get real time bus, train and ferry information in Google Maps. Google has teamed up with Transport New South Wales to add real-time information about
routes and schedules across the region
on Google Maps – for the first time in Australia.
Whether you are taking the train from Kings Cross to Killara, or boarding the ferries Fishburn or Friendship, you now have all the information you need to plan and adjust your journey at a glance, in one place.
If you're planning a trip between, say Bondi Junction and Circular Quay, you can simply type the two locations into Google Maps to get the latest information about which bus, train or ferry to catch. In addition to bus routes, you’ll be able to see when the next bus is arriving at your stop and an estimation of how long your trip is going to take. If your bus is delayed, Google Transit will automatically update the times in line with the new conditions. Routes that have real-time information available are marked in Google Maps in green.
Know when your bus or train actually arrives with real time information in Google Maps
Google Transit is a feature of Google Maps designed to help you plan your public transport trips quickly and easily. Just search for where you want go and Google Maps will show you how to get there using public transport from your current location. Google Transit is available on Google Maps for Android and iPhone as well as the Web. If you’re using the latest version of Google Maps, you can also compare public transport options to work out when you need to leave to arrive at your destination on time.
Residents of New South Wales who would like to find out when
the next bus, train or ferry is arriving or directions to somewhere using public transport using Google Maps should follow these three
simple steps:
Open Google Maps apps on your Android device or iPhone
Enter your destination and click the "get directions" icon. If it’s not already selected, tap the "transit" icon (the little tram) to view times, bus/train numbers, routes and more
You can change the destination by selecting a different end point at the top of the screen
Google Maps globally provides over one billion km worth of transit results every day and
has schedules for more than three
million public transit stops worldwide.
Google Transit is now available for hundreds of cities across dozens of countries, with new partners joining all the time.
Posted by Cayden Meyer, Google Transit Product Lead
The butcher, the baker and the website maker... regional businesses gain new skills at the Digital Garage
Wednesday, June 28, 2017
The butcher, the baker and the website maker... Businesses of all shapes and sizes across regional New South Wales took part in
Digital Garage
workshops this month to gain new digital skills and learn how they can use the web to grow their business.
Google joined forces with the
NSW Business Chamber
and the local chambers of commerce and councils to host events in
Wollongong
,
Wagga Wagga
and
West Wyalong
designed to help local businesses make the most of the web.
The Minister for Small Business and Member for Riverina, Hon Michael McCormack MP spoke at this week's Digital Garage events in Wagga Wagga and West Wyalong and urged local businesses to get online.
Minister McCormack said digital platforms present huge opportunities for Australian businesses to reach new customers and grow their operations.
Minister McCormack with West Wyalong business owner
In Wagga Wagga and West Wyalong, more than 160 local businesses took part in the workshop and heard from local business champions, including Matt Beaver from
Carry Them Close
, who started a baby carrier business after having his first child and now ships across Australia from their home in Wagga Wagga.
Google’s Duncan McGrath and Richard Flanagan with Wagga Wagga business owners Jill Tucker and Matt Beaver
Another local business leader, Jill Tucker spoke about how the internet has enabled her to reach new customers. Jill started
Erilan
after identifying a gap in the market to provide quality products and understanding for women who have undergone a mastectomy. Jill now has customers across Australia with 90 per cent of sales through the e-commerce site.
Local businesses at The Digital Garage in West Wyalong
Earlier this month, we worked with the NSW Business Chamber and
Illawarra Business Chamber
to host a Digital Garage event at the University of Wollongong’s
Innovation Campus
.
Parliamentarians Senator Katy Gallagher, Shadow Minister for Small Business and Financial Services; Stephen Jones MP, Shadow Minister for Regional Communications; and Sharon Bird MP, Member for Cunningham joined small businesses from the South Coast and Illawarra to hear more about getting online.
Google's Richard Flanagan, Stephen Jones MP, Senator Katy Gallagher and Sharon Bird MP
Local business,
Jamberoo Action Park
spoke about how they used digital tools to promote their offering and reach new customers, resulting in increased ticket sales and ongoing growth.
These stories from local businesses across NSW are consistent with research from
Deloitte
which shows highly digitally engaged small businesses are more likely to be growing revenue, creating jobs and exporting.
However, more than 90% of businesses are not taking full advantage of digital tools. At Google, we believe everyone should have the opportunity to learn the skills necessary to succeed online, that’s why we launched
The Digital Garage
to help close the gap in digital skills and help small business make the most of the web.
The final stop for The Digital Garage this month is
Tamworth
on Thursday 29 June - register now to attend or check out
The Digital Garage
in your own time!
Posted by Richard Flanagan, Head of Business Marketing, Google Australia
GCP expands to Australia with new Sydney region - open now
Wednesday, June 21, 2017
Starting today, developers can choose to run applications and store data in Australia using the new
Google Cloud Platform
(GCP) region in Sydney. This is our first GCP region in Australia and the fourth in Asia Pacific, joining Taiwan, Tokyo and the
recently launched Singapore
.
GCP customers Down Under will see significant reductions in latency when they run their applications in Sydney. Our performance testing shows 80% to 95% reductions in round-trip time (RTT) latency when serving customers from cities in New Zealand and Australia, such as Sydney, Auckland, Wellington, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth and Adelaide, compared to using regions in Singapore or Taiwan.
The
Sydney GCP region
is launching with three zones and several GCP services, and App Engine and Datastore will be available shortly:
Google Cloud
customers benefit from our commitment to large-scale infrastructure investments. With the addition of each new region, developers have more choice on how to run applications closest to their customers. Google’s networking backbone, meanwhile, transforms compute and storage infrastructure into a global-scale computer, giving developers around the world access to the same cloud infrastructure that Google engineers use every day.
In Asia-Pacific, we’re already building another region in
Mumbai
, as well as new network infrastructure to tie them all together, including the SJC cable and
Indigo cable
fiber optic systems.
What customers are saying
Here’s what the new regions means to a few of our customers and partners.
"The regional expansion of Google Cloud Platform to Australia will help enable PwC's rapidly growing need to experiment and innovate and will further extend our work with Google Cloud. It not only provides a reliable and resilient platform that can support our firm's core technology needs, it also makes available to us, GCP's market leading technologies and capabilities to support the unprecedented demand of our diverse and evolving business."
Hilda Clune, Chief Information Officer - PwC Australia
"Monash University has one of the most ambitious digital transformation agendas in tertiary education. We're executing our strategy at pace and needed a platform which would give us the scale, flexibility and functionality to respond rapidly to our development and processing needs. Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and in particular App Engine have been a great combination for us and we're very excited at the results we're getting. Having Google Cloud Platform hosted now in Australia is a big bonus."
Trevor Woods, Chief Information Officer, Monash University
"Modern geophysical technologies place a huge demand on supercomputing resources. Woodside utilises Google Cloud as an on-demand solution for our large computing requirements. This has allowed us to push technological boundaries and dramatically reduce turnaround time."
Sean Salter, VP Technology - Woodside Energy Ltd
Next Steps
We want to help you build what’s next for you. If you’re looking for help to understand how to deploy GCP, please contact local partners:
Shine Solutions
,
Servian
,
3WKS
,
Axalon
,
Onigroup
,
PwC
,
Deloitte
,
Glintech
,
Fronde
,
Dialog
or
Megaport
.
For more details on Australia’s first region, please visit our
Sydney region page
where you’ll get access to free resources, whitepapers, an on-demand training video series called ‘Cloud On-Air’ and more. These will help you get started on GCP. Give us a
shout
to request early access to new regions and help us prioritize what we build next.
Posted by Dave Stiver, Product Manager, Google Cloud Platform
Four steps we’re taking today to fight online terror
Monday, June 19, 2017
Editor’s Note: This post appeared as an op-ed in the
Financial Times
earlier today.
Terrorism is an attack on open societies, and addressing the threat posed by violence and hate is a critical challenge for us all. Google and YouTube are committed to being part of the solution. We are working with government, law enforcement and civil society groups to tackle the problem of violent extremism online. There should be no place for terrorist content on our services.
While we and others have worked for years to identify and remove content that violates our policies, the uncomfortable truth is that we, as an industry, must acknowledge that more needs to be done. Now.
We have thousands of people around the world who review and counter abuse of our platforms. Our engineers have developed technology to prevent re-uploads of known terrorist content using image-matching technology. We have invested in systems that use content-based signals to help identify new videos for removal. And we have developed partnerships with expert groups, counter-extremism agencies, and the other technology companies to help inform and strengthen our efforts.
Today, we are pledging to take four additional steps.
First, we are increasing our use of technology to help identify extremist and terrorism-related videos. This can be challenging: a video of a terrorist attack may be informative news reporting if broadcast by the BBC, or glorification of violence if uploaded in a different context by a different user. We have used video analysis models to find and assess more than 50 per cent of the terrorism-related content we have removed over the past six months. We will now devote more engineering resources to apply our most advanced machine learning research to train new “content classifiers” to help us more quickly identify and remove extremist and terrorism-related content.
Second, because technology alone is not a silver bullet, we will greatly increase the number of independent experts in YouTube’s Trusted Flagger programme. Machines can help identify problematic videos, but human experts still play a role in nuanced decisions about the line between violent propaganda and religious or newsworthy speech. While many user flags can be inaccurate, Trusted Flagger reports are accurate over 90 per cent of the time and help us scale our efforts and identify emerging areas of concern. We will expand this programme by adding 50 expert NGOs to the 63 organisations who are already part of the programme, and we will support them with operational grants. This allows us to benefit from the expertise of specialised organisations working on issues like hate speech, self-harm, and terrorism. We will also expand our work with counter-extremist groups to help identify content that may be being used to radicalise and recruit extremists.
Third, we will be taking a tougher stance on videos that do not clearly violate our policies — for example, videos that contain inflammatory religious or supremacist content. In future these will appear behind an interstitial warning and they will not be monetised, recommended or eligible for comments or user endorsements. That means these videos will have less engagement and be harder to find. We think this strikes the right balance between free expression and access to information without promoting extremely offensive viewpoints.
Finally, YouTube will expand its role in counter-radicalisation efforts. Building on our successful Creators for Change programme promoting YouTube voices against hate and radicalisation, we are working with Jigsaw to implement the “Redirect Method” more broadly across Europe. This promising approach harnesses the power of targeted online advertising to reach potential Isis recruits, and redirects them towards anti-terrorist videos that can change their minds about joining. In previous deployments of this system, potential recruits have clicked through on the ads at an unusually high rate, and watched over half a million minutes of video content that debunks terrorist recruiting messages.
We have also recently committed to working with industry colleagues—including Facebook, Microsoft, and Twitter—to establish an international forum to share and develop technology and support smaller companies and accelerate our joint efforts to tackle terrorism online. Collectively, these changes will make a difference. And we’ll keep working on the problem until we get the balance right. Extremists and terrorists seek to attack and erode not just our security, but also our values; the very things that make our societies open and free. We must not let them. Together, we can build lasting solutions that address the threats to our security and our freedoms. It is a sweeping and complex challenge. We are committed to playing our part.
Posted by Kent Walker, General Counsel, Google
Google Flights has landed down under
Tuesday, June 13, 2017
Pack your bags! Whether you’re traveling from
Wollongong to WA
, or
Tullamarine to Townsville
, Google Flights will give you travel inspiration and surface the best available flight options. Starting today, you can search on Google for flights to a destination by searching for things like “
Flights to Cairns
” or “
Flights to New Zealand
”. Or, you can go directly to google.com.au/flights to quickly and easily compare and book flights in $AUD — from your mobile device, tablet or desktop.
Still daydreaming about your next trip? Try using Explore to get ideas on where to go based on popular destinations. If you want to get away for a holiday next month just choose “July” and a trip duration like “2 weeks” to see the dates with the lowest prices to visit each place.
Once you select your departure and return dates, you’ll be presented with a list of ‘Best flights’; which represents the best tradeoff of convenience and price. Before you select a specific flight, you may see a notification bar with tips on how to find the best price for this route. Tips can include things like recommendations for alternate airports, suggest the cheapest dates to fly, or tell you about an expected price jump based on historic prices for that route.
If you’re not ready to book yet, you can choose to track a flight and receive email notifications when prices are expected to change or when the price actually does increase or decrease significantly.
Whether you’re ticking off your bucket list or taking a quick business trip, our goal is to help you find the best flight with confidence so you can plan, book and take off in a couple of clicks.
Happy travels!
Posted by Nabil Naghdy, Product Manager, Google Flights
Experience the songlines of Uluru with Google Maps Street View and Story Spheres
Thursday, June 8, 2017
In the heart of Australia’s red centre lies the UNESCO World Heritage site
,
U
lu
r
u-Kata Tju
t
a National Park. It is deeply sacred to the A
n
angu people, who have lived there for more than 30,000 years. It’s also home to a wide range of species, 21 mammals, 73 reptiles, 178 birds—and Australia’s most iconic natural landmark,
U
lu
r
u.
Starting today, people across the world
will be able to visit
U
luru-Kata Tjuta National Park on Street View
, walk on the desert sand and enjoy the vibrant hues of the rock—from ochre to rust to wild plum and charcoal.
T
alingu
r
u Nyakunytjaku on
Street View
S
tanding 348 m (1,142 ft) high, and with a total circumference of 9.4 km (5.8 mi), the immense scale, colours and contours of Ulu
r
u stir a sense of reverence. While visually and geologically extraordinary, the
physical features of
Ulu
r
u
hold a deeper meaning for its traditional owners.
For A
n
angu, the
land carries sacred songlines—creation stories about the journeys, battles and adventures of their ancestral beings.
Traditional Owner of
U
lu
r
u-Kata Tju
t
a National Park, Reggie Uluru
All aspects of A
n
angu life are
governed by
Tjukurpa
,the knowledge which guides relationships, values and behaviour. At the core of Tjukurpa law is a deep respect for the land. A
n
angu believe that if they look after the land, it will look after them. These teachings are passed down from generation to generation through stories, songs and inma (ceremony).
‘’Sometimes visitors come here and they see a beautiful place, but they don't understand the Tjukurpa, the culture and the law and the knowledge and the history that this place holds…. It’s the living keeper of our culture, ” says Sammy Wilson, A
n
angu traditional owner of U
lu
r
u-Kata Tju
t
a National Park. “
We want to teach those visitors about the A
n
angu understanding of this place.”
Traditional owner, Sammy WIlson, sharing Tjukurpa stories with Miranda Schooneveldt, Parks Australia
Over the past two years,
we collaborated with A
n
angu Traditional Owners of
Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park
,
Parks Australia
and the
Northern Territory Government
to capture the park for Street View according to
Tjukurpa law. The Street View journey ventures to the vista of T
alingu
r
u Nyakunytjaku, the
winding trail of the Kuniya Walk, the cool respite of Kapi Mu
t
itjulu (
waterhole) and ancient art at Kulpi
Mu
t
itjulu
(Family Cave). It invites you to zoom in on the curves, crevices and textures of
U
lu
r
u—and gaze up at its glowing gradient of colour.
Lindsey Dixon, of Northern Territory Tourism, captured the Street View content at
U
lu
r
u-Kata Tju
t
a National Park in accordance with Tjukurpa law
Since 2007, Google has mapped
imagery of unique locations across 83 countries, including heritage monuments, touristic sites, museums, national parks and transit locations across the globe.
In the case of Ulu
r
u-Kata Tju
t
a National Park, Tjukurpa warranted a more nuanced approach. For A
n
angu, there is no distinction between the physical and metaphysical, or the animate and inanimate. People, earth, plants and animals are inextricably connected. This means that Ulu
r
u-Kata Tju
t
a National Park could never be truly
represented or understood (virtually or otherwise) without the presence and voices of its people.
We knew we had to bring these cultural and spiritual dimensions to the Street View experience. So we used
the
Story Spheres
platform to add immersive audio stories and songs of A
n
angu traditional owners to the 360° Street View imagery. The result is an interactive, audio-visual guided tour, narrated by Sammy Wilson and with song and music by Traditional Owner and A
n
angu Elder, Reggie Uluru.
The Kun
i
ya Walk
on
Story Spheres
Because Tjukurpa teachings are traditionally handed down through an
ancient oral tradition,
A
n
angu
stories, songs and ceremonies are largely unrecorded. T
he generosity of traditional owners has made a rare and revered piece of culture available to, and archived for, the world.
Traditional owner, Sammy WIlson, sharing Tjukurpa stories with Miranda Schooneveldt, Parks Australia
Together with our partners, we’re privileged to help celebrate and preserve A
n
angu c
ulture through technology. We hope this model will lead to stronger partnerships with indigenous communities across Australia—to share more sacred sites and instill greater value and respect for the land.
Get a behind-the-scenes view of the Google Maps Street View and Story Spheres project in our
video
:
Posted by Jason Pellegrino, Managing Director, Google Australia & New Zealand
The power of video to help #ShareSomeGood
Thursday, June 1, 2017
Video affects us like no other medium. It can heighten our passions, stoke our fears, awaken us to new experiences, make us laugh and cry. It can educate, build understanding and even change the way we see our world.
Last year we launched the
Share Some Good
initiative, bringing together more than 100 creators and activists to the YouTube Pop-up Space in Sydney to inspire them to use their voices to promote tolerance and inclusion.
The talented artists who participated in
Share Some Good
at the premiere of their stories.
We challenged these people to come up with an idea or a story that tackles difficult issues such as hate and extremism, and that seeks to spread a more positive message. Today we’re privileged to share
these 15 Australian stories
with you:
BEND
Ocean 12
Don't Play the Hate Game
Dear Future Me
L-FRESH the Lion and Mirrah: 90-Second Rap Up
Walrus Boy
Politics in the Bush
Captain Fizman
Where Are You From?
Stand By Your Name
Raqib The Ethical Compass
Islamophobia Story
Navigating the Net
Hijab and Curls
United Nations of Australia
We hope you will be as impressed as we were by the diversity of perspectives and the creativity behind each of these stories.
Share Some Good is the Australian chapter of
YouTube Creators for Change
, a global movement that amplifies the voices of YouTube role models who are confronting tough social issues through committing US$1 million in equipment and production grants and the appointment of champions from different areas around the world to work on social impact projects.
From combating hate speech, to countering xenophobia and extremism, to simply making the case for greater tolerance and empathy toward others, these creators are helping generate positive social change with their global fan bases.
YouTube Creators for Change fellow
L-FRESH the Lion
and ambassador
Natalie Tran
We’re thrilled to have Australia’s
Natalie Tran
among the 11 Global YouTube Creators for Change ambassadors, as well as
L-FRESH the Lion
appointed as a Creators for Change fellow.
We partnered with social change agency
Love Frankie
, the
Foundation for Young Australians
, the
Australian Film Television and Radio School (AFTRS)
and
Vice
, which generously offered mentorship, training, and broader support to these creators.
Our goal is to enable a chorus of voices using digital platforms such as YouTube to drown out content that promotes violence, hate, or fear. We hope that Australians share these creative stories are motivated to contribute to this growing community of Australians who are seeking to Share Some Good.
Posted by Samantha Yorke, Public Policy and Government Relations Counsel, Google Australia and New Zealand, who recently watched
Dear Future Me
by emerging YouTube creator
Oliver Levi-Malouf
.
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