Australia Blog
News and notes from Google Down Under
Puparazzi alert: Tips for your pet photos
Thursday, April 12, 2018
If you’re a pet owner, you've probably taken countless photos of your pooch. Here are a few pet-tential ways you can celebrate your pets with Google Photos:
Identify popular breeds with Google Lens
Recently, we made
Google Lens preview
available in Google Photos across Android and iOS. Now, when you take a photo of an animal—like a cute cat or dog—you can use Lens to help identify its breed and get more information.
Create a movie dedicated to your furry friend
Your pet may have a leading role in your life, but it’s time to show the rest of the world that your animal is a star. If your pet is ready for a big screen debut, open your Google Photos app, go to the Assistant tab, and click on the movie button. Then, if available, choose the Meow Movie or Doggie Movie option, select your pet, and we’ll compile the best photos of your four-legged pal into a movie, set to pet-themed music.
Label your pet to easily find photos of them
In most countries, you can label your cats and dogs so that you can search to quickly find photos of them. Or even better, you can find photos of that one time you dressed them up for Halloween by searching “Oliver hat” or pictures of them in the park by searching “Oliver park.”
Search by breed and emoji
Speaking of fast ways to find photos of your pets, you can also search by breed, species, or emoji — try
or
– or q
uickly search “pitbull” to rediscover photos of your sister’s cute canine.
Howevfur you pampurr your pets, we hope you can try out a few of the features that Google Photos has to off-fur.
Posted by Kristi Bohl, Product Manager and Cat Enthusiast, Google Photos
Hop through the school holidays with new Google Assistant experiences designed for families
Wednesday, April 11, 2018
School’s out! Whether you’re home making pancakes with the family or out on an adventure with the kids, we’ve added new experiences for the Google Assistant so you can learn, play and stay entertained with the family over the school holidays. Monday musical chairs? Tuesday night trivia? Saturday storytime? The Google Assistant has many games, activities and stories designed for families. And if you want to create your own personal trivia game to play with friends, you can try out one of our
Actions templates
. Talking to your Assistant screen-free is an easy way to be there – in the moment – spending time with loved ones. These experiences are available today in Australia with the Assistant on Google Home, other smart speakers and eligible phones.
Below are some things you can ask—just start with “Ok Google.”
Play
đŻ
"Play Lucky Trivia for Families”
“Play Musical Chairs”
“Play Musical Statues”
“Let’s play a game”
Learn
đ
“Play ABC Behind the News”
“Help me with my homework”
“Tell me a fun fact”
“How do you say “Let’s have cr
ĂȘ
pes for breakfast” in French?”
Entertain
“Let’s
make ANZAC biscuits”
“Play Kinderling Radio”
“Read The Complete Adventures of Blinky Bill”*
“Tell me a joke”
T
he new activities are rolling out today so you can go on a family adventure together. With their parent's permission, children under 13 can also have their own personalised Google Assistant experience when they log in with their own account, powered by
Family Link
. Family Link helps parents manage their child’s Google Account while they explore. And with Voice Match, your family can train the Assistant to recognise who’s speaking - up to six voices.
So round the family up this school holidays to unlock a world of magic!
Posted by Aisling Finch, Marketing Director, Google Australia & New Zealand
*Audiobook purchase via Google Play Books is required (
see more details here)
.
Just call us Googz
Sunday, April 1, 2018
We Aussies are a unique lot, on a unique land.
Since we arrived in Australia in 2002, our goal has been to build and adapt our products to best serve Aussies – whether you’re finding your way around town using Google Maps, or chatting with your Google Assistant about brekkie recipes.
And j
ust like our products, we’re always testing and iterating on our visual identity
to keep our communications
relevant, relatable and real
for Aussies. Over the years, w
e’ve played with our logo through Google Doodles celebrating various Australian icons – from
gumnut babies
to our
Great Barrier Reef
.
Recently, we’ve been prompted to examine how our brand might be shaped by rising popular culture and linguistic trends in Australia. We all know abbreviations are the hallmark of Australian English. And upon further analysis of this evolving dialect, we made a fascinating discovery: Just like Maccas, Aussies are increasingly calling us “Googz.”
We had a real
“yeah, nah” moment. That inspired us
to re
imagine our brand from the ground up, in partnership with leading Australian d
esigner
Jazza
. We conducted in-depth focus groups on beaches and in skate parks across Australia – and went back to the drawing board to define a new logo identity that would be authentic to Aussies, roll off the tongue but still anchored in our heritage.
After months of sketching, mood boarding, foraging and finger painting, we are delighted to unveil our shiny, new ‘Strayan logo:
In the end, we landed on exactly the same typography and colour palette, with a gorgeous, gumtree green, lowercase ‘z.’ We opted for the ‘z’ over an ‘s’ as the former felt unexpected and gave us snazzy typographic angles to work with. To get a glimpse into the design journey, check out Jazza’s video:
Starting today on April 1, you’ll see this new brand identity out in the wild - in Pyrmont and in our products. Just ask your Google Assistant “Ok Google, What’s your name?” on your
Google Home device or Assistant enabled iOS and Android phone.
With Jazza’s help, we’ve also produced some swanky swag:
To get your hands on these Googz goodz, head over to the
Google Store
.
UPDATE:
April Foolz
!
Posted by Gabi Conlon, Head of Brand, Google Australia & New Zealand
Building a stronger future for news
Wednesday, March 21, 2018
People come to Google looking for information they can trust, and that information often comes from the reporting of journalists and news organizations around the world. And while the demand for quality journalism is as high as it’s ever been, the business of journalism is under pressure, as publications around the world face challenges from an industry-wide transition to digital.
That matters deeply to Google. After all, our mission to build a more informed world is inherently tied to the reporting of journalists and news organizations. Our shared mission also reflects shared business interests. Platforms like Search and YouTube depend on a healthy ecosystem of publishers producing great digital content. That’s why it’s so important to us that we help you drive sustainable revenue and businesses. Last year, we paid US$12.6 billion to partners and we drove 10 billion clicks a month to publishers’ websites for free.
It’s also why over the years, we’ve worked closely with the news industry to address key challenges. We worked with the industry to launch the open-source
Accelerated Mobile Pages
Project to improve the mobile web, YouTube Player for Publishers to simplify video distribution and reduce costs,
Flexible Sampling
to help with discovery of news content on Google,
Google News Lab
to provide newsrooms with trainings and editorial partnerships, and the
Digital News Initiative
to drive innovation in the European news industry.
We invested a lot time and energy in these collaborations. But the hard truth is—all of this might not be enough. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish what’s true (and not true) online. Business models for journalism continue to change drastically. The rapid evolution of technology is challenging all institutions, including the news industry—to keep pace.
We need to do more. That’s why we’re launching the
Google News Initiative
(GNI), our effort to help journalism thrive in the digital age. The GNI signifies a major milestone in Google’s 15-year commitment to the news industry, and will bring together everything we do in collaboration with the industry—across products, partnerships, and programs—to help build a stronger future for news.
The GNI will build on these efforts and deepen our commitment to a news industry facing dramatic shifts in how journalism is created, consumed, and paid for. It’s focused on three objectives:
Elevate and strengthen quality journalism
Evolve business models to drive sustainable growth
Empower news organizations through technological innovation
Elevate and strengthen quality journalism
Over the past few years, we’ve worked with publishers to elevate accurate, quality content and stem the flow of misinformation and disinformation.
On our own platforms
, we’re focused on combating misinformation during breaking news situations. Bad actors often target breaking news on Google platforms, increasing the likelihood that people are exposed to inaccurate content. So we’ve trained our systems to recognize these events and adjust our signals toward more authoritative content. There are comparable challenges on YouTube, and we’re taking a similar approach, highlighting relevant content from verified news sources in a “Top News” shelf.
But we’re also working directly with news organizations to combat misinformation. We’re launching the Disinfo Lab alongside the
First Draft
to combat mis- and disinformation during elections and breaking news moments. Finally, to help consumers distinguish fact from fiction online, we’re teaming up with the Poynter Institute, Stanford University, and the Local Media Association to launch MediaWise, a U.S. project designed to improve digital information literacy for young consumers.
Disinfo Lab continues our work with First Draft, which includes last year’s CrossCheck FR. This is a photo from a verification training in the runup to the French elections last year.
Disinfo Lab continues our work with First Draft, which includes last year’s CrossCheck FR. This is a photo from a verification training in the runup to the French elections last year.
Evolve business models to drive sustainable growth
Over the last decade, we’ve worked closely with news organizations to grow their digital advertising revenue. In just the past few years, we’ve applied our advanced machine learning expertise to
automatically surface key insights
about revenue opportunities (generating recommendations worth over US$300 million in additional revenue) and supported the creation of faster, better ad experiences for the mobile web through AMP and native ads.
But consumers are willing to pay for digital news content, creating an opportunity to expand beyond ad revenue. Today we’re delivering on a vision outlined last year to enable publishers to diversify their revenue streams. We’re excited to launch Subscribe with Google, a way for people to easily subscribe to various news outlets, helping publishers engage readers across Google and the web. Our goal with Subscribe with Google is to ease the subscription process to get more readers consuming publishers’ journalism, as quickly as possible.
In October, at our Partner Leadership Summit, we told publishers about how we’re experimenting with ways to grow their subscriptions using Google data, machine learning, and DoubleClick infrastructure. We’re now in the early stages of testing a “Propensity to Subscribe” signal based on machine learning models in DoubleClick to make it easier for publishers to recognize potential subscribers, and to present them the right offer at the right time.
Of course, not every publication has the resources to dedicate a team to collect, analyze and understand their user data. News Consumer Insights, our new dashboard built on top of Google Analytics, will help news organizations of all sizes understand and segment their audiences with a subscriptions strategy in mind. At the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, this project led to a 150 percent increase in page views to their Subscribe pages and a month-over-month tripling of new digital subscription purchases.
Empower news organizations through technological innovation
We work with news organizations around the world to develop and deploy technology that improves newsroom efficiency, creates enriching storytelling experiences, and protects journalists from cyber attacks around the world. For example, we’re using our natural language processing API to help Hearst Newspapers sort, label and categorize more than 3,000 articles every day. We’ve also worked with the South China Morning Post to use Google Earth Studio to create immersive VR experiences that show the evolution of Hong Kong throughout history. With AMP Stories, which is now in beta, publishers can combine the speed of AMP with the rich, immersive storytelling of the open web. This is just the beginning. We want to continue working closely with publishers to experiment on new ways they can reach audiences and produce impactful storytelling.
Finally, we’re also launching today Outline, an open-source tool from Jigsaw that lets news organizations provide journalists more secure access to the internet. Outline makes it easy for news organizations to set up their own VPN on a private server—no tech savvy required.
Our commitment Over the next three years, we’re committing $300 million toward meeting these goals. We’re also deepening our commitment to building products that address the news industry’s most urgent needs. In the past, we’ve done this by working closely alongside the industry in product working groups, resulting in projects like AMP and the DNI. We’ll be expanding that model globally.
The commitments we’re making through the Google News Initiative demonstrate that news and quality journalism is a top priority for Google. We know that success can only be achieved by working together, and we look forward to collaborating with the news industry to build a stronger future for journalism.
Philipp Schindler, Google Chief Business Officer
Philipp Schindler
Chief Business Officer
Google
Footy fans, stay on the ball with Google
Wednesday, March 21, 2018
Since the beginning, Google’s mission has been to organise the world’s information. That mission is just as relevant today – and in Australia – as it was back then. From building our coverage of Australia on Google Maps, to
charting the Great Barrier Reef through underwater Street View
and
surfacing high-quality health information in Google Search,
we’re carrying out that mission in Australia in many ways.
We know that sport sparks the Aussie spirit like nothing else, and getting information about the sports and teams you love is important to keep you cheering, and across the action. And with the AFL, NRL and Australian Rugby seasons here, it’s the perfect time to gear up for the games that captivate our nation.
Starting today,
Aussie fans can check live scores, match results, upcoming fixtures, and ladders for their favourite footy codes, including AFL, NRL, and
Australian Rugby
, in Google Search and using the Google Assistant.
Whether you’re a Geelong Cats tragic, a Rabbitohs die-hard or a Reds fanatic – or even a newcomer to the game – here’s how you can follow all things
footy:
Stay ahead of the game
For the first time, you can get the key details you need for your pre-game planning – at a glance – in Google Search. You’ll be able to see the fixtures and game times in a nice, neat panel at the top of the Search Results Page on mobile or desktop.
You can also lean on your Google Assistant to keep you up to date through your Google Home device, or while you’re out and about on your mobile.
Just ask your Google Assistant “Ok Google,
when are the Brisbane Lions playing next
?”
Check live scores, as they happen
If you’re stuck in meetings or at the farmer’s market with the in-laws, you can stay in the game with up-to-the-minute scores for your team across AFL, NRL or
Australian Rugby
. Live scores will be available in a snapshot at the top of Google Search Results, so you can sneak a quick glance when you’re on the edge of your seat. With a simple voice command, you can also ask your Google Assistant to check the ladder to see if your team is safe.
Get the scoop on sport news
Looking for a download on on the latest sports stories? Stay up to date with news bulletins from ABC Sport, Fox Rugby and AFL News, thanks to Telstra. You can follow the news of all 18 AFL clubs by asking “Hey Google, play the Sydney Swans news” or “Play the West Coast Eagles news.” The AFL news briefings are updated once a day during the off-season, and twice a day in the regular season.
Get your Assistant cheering, joking and learning
Your Assistant is always learning, so it will understand your preferred team nicknames
and the sports you care about over time.
You can also ask your Assistant to tell you an AFL joke, or make season predictions by asking “Ok Google, who’s going to win the flag?.” And after the siren sounds on full time, say “Talk like a footballer” to get that classic post-match commentary full of the footy cliches we all know and secretly love.
Whether you are celebrating a win or lamenting a loss, we hope these updates offer some useful and fun ways help you keep up to date and get your game on!
Posted by Aisling Finch, Marketing Director, Google Australia & New Zealand
Connecting newsrooms with local communities
Friday, March 9, 2018
Technology has changed the way that newsrooms reach their audiences and engage them with compelling stories. There are myriad new ways that consumers can access the news, including through their smartphones and now even through smart speakers like the Google Home.
But how do newsrooms connect with their communities and make sure they’re including everyone’s voice in their coverage? Often the quiet voices and those from isolated and remote communities are overlooked in mainstream media coverage - and it can be hard for them to find a journalist to tell their stories.
The hackathon sought to help newsrooms connect with their communities and make sure they’re including everyone’s voice in their coverage.
That’s the problem that 40 journalists and coders from around Australia tried to solve at a hackathon organised by the
Global Editors Network
(GEN), the
Walkley Foundation
and
Google News Lab
. We gathered some of the best media innovators from Australia and New Zealand at Google Australia’s headquarters in Sydney over two days to develop innovative news prototypes around the theme of "Connecting with local communities".
The Seven West Media team at work on 'Newsroom Hotline'.
The winning team was from
Seven West Media
, publisher of
The West Australian
, with their prototype
Newsroom Hotline
, a simple but ingenious tool that enables anyone to dial a phone number and leave a voice message that is converted to text using artificial intelligence and emailed to the newsroom.
The Conversation team won the Public Choice vote.
As Seven West’s team said: “It is too difficult for people to get tip offs to journalists. Many simply don’t know how who to contact or how. This is because we no longer have editorial assistants to receive calls, our reporters are often on the road and news editors in the office are managing breaking news and competing deadlines across multiple newspapers, websites and social media channels.”
“The structure of newsrooms are constantly evolving, which makes it confusing for people without media experience to navigate to say what they want to say. Emails get lost in the white noise of press releases and too many phone calls bounce around the office. We need to make the connection between our community and our journalists as easy as possible.”
Teams from 10 different media organisations pitched their ideas to a panel of judges.
The Seven West team will next head to Lisbon to compete in the global
GEN Editor's Lab
final over three days. Special mentions go to
The Conversation
for their prototype
On the Ground
, which received the Public Choice, and to
Junkee
for
YarnBot
, and we’re grateful to all the teams who came from around the nation to contribute their time and resources to the hackathon.
Each of the ideas that were pitched are valuable contributions to helping solve the problem of connecting communities with the newsrooms that can tell their stories, and we can wait to see how they evolve and grow over time.
Irene Jay Liu, Google APAC News Lab Lead and one of the judges at the hackathon
Female business leaders driving digital skills at #IWD2018 Digital Garage
Wednesday, March 7, 2018
Small business owners are always looking to stay one step ahead, so it’s fitting that Sydney’s leading female business owners came together today to celebrate International Women’s Day (one day ahead of the main event) and learn new skills at the
International Women’s Day Digital Garage
, hosted by Google and
Business Chicks
.
More than 120 business leaders joined the workshop to learn new digital skills and find out more about how they can grow their business online.
Guests had the chance to hear from other small businesses doing great things online and the New South Wales Minister for Women, Hon Tanya Davies MP.
Minister Davies spoke about the importance of supporting women in business and beyond, and invited guests to #PressForProgress - this year’s International Women’s Day theme.
We also heard from Leona Watson, Director of
Cheeky Food Events
, who shared her inspiring story of founding a team-building cooking company. She spoke about how she uses digital tools to reach new customers.
“About 70 percent of my new business is generated from people calling after seeing my ads on Google Search. As a business owner, there’s nothing better than being able to track down to the dollar where your marketing budget is going and to see the results it’s returning, it enables my business to just keep growing and gives me confidence... invaluable really!”
The workshop covered practical steps business owners can take to help put their
business on the map
and be found online by new customers.
Businesses right across Australia can take advantage of free, in-depth trainings on the
Digital Garage
site, which features tips on everything from taking your first steps online to analytics and mobile advertising.
Check out the
Digital Garage
today and stay tuned for more International Women’s Day news this week!
Posted by Richard Flanagan, Head of Business Marketing, Google Australia and New Zealand
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