Google+ Hangouts On Air: broadcast your conversation to the world

Last year we introduced Hangouts On Air to a limited number of broadcasters, enabling them to go live with friends and fans, for all the world to see. Since then, this small community has grown the feature in lots of creative ways. And they’ve made one thing crystal clear: when groups of passionate individuals can broadcast live, together, the results are truly remarkable:

Today we're excited to launch Hangouts On Air to Google+ users worldwide. So if you have something to say—as an aspiring artist, a global celebrity, or a concerned citizen—you can now go live in front of a global audience. With just a few clicks, you’ll be able to:

• Broadcast publicly. By checking "Enable Hangouts On Air," you can broadcast your live hangout—from the Google+ stream, your YouTube channel or your website—to the entire world.
• See how many viewers you’ve got. During your broadcast, you can look inside the hangout to see how many people are watching live.
• Record and re-share. Once you're off the air, we’ll upload a public recording to your YouTube channel, and to your original Google+ post. This way it's easy to share and discuss your broadcast after it's over.

Of course, launching millions of live stations takes some doing, so we're rolling out Hangouts On Air gradually, over the next few weeks. In the meantime you can save the date for an upcoming hangout...

- CBS This Morning: May 8th at 4:20am PT / 7:20am ET	- Cadbury UK: May 11th at 1:30pm PT / 4:30pm ET
- Conan O’Brien: May 8th at 7:30pm PT / 10:30pm ET	- The Nerdist: May 11th at 3:00pm PT / 6:00pm ET
- CNBC: May 10th at 1:15pm PT / 4:15pm ET	- Jamie Oliver on Food Revolution Day: May 19th at 5:00pm PT / 8:00pm ET
- Global Poverty Project: May 10th at 4:00pm PT / 7:00pm ET	- A special series from The New York Times’ Opinion department

… sign in to Google+ to see what’s live right now, or find inspiration in the many broadcasts that have already aired.

A news van for everyone. KOMU-TV anchor +Sarah Hill invited locals to share live coverage of the recent protests in Montreal; Fox 11 LA anchor +Maria Quiban invites viewers to join her on Good Day LA.	Town halls with today’s leaders. President +Barack Obama, Governor +Mitt Romney, UN Secretary-General +Ban Ki-moon, and many others have connected with citizens via hangout.
Live concerts from your living room. Musical artists like +Suite 709 and +Daria Musk perform live for those inside the hangout, and for everyone else tuning in.	Classes anyone can attend. Chef +Larry Fournillier, Professor +Noah Diffenbaugh, and +FAWN share their cooking, climate change and fashion expertise, respectively, via hangout.
Roundtables about any topic. Photographer +Trey Ratcliff, soccer football enthusiast +Sabotage Times and celebrity trend spotter +Young Hollywood talk about the issues they find interesting.	Face-to-face meetups with all of your favorites. +David Beckham, the +Miami Hurricanes, +Tyra Banks, the +Indianapolis Colts and +Geek & Sundry have all enjoyed meet-and-greets with their fans.

We can’t wait to see what you’ll share with the world.

Posted by Chee Chew, Engineering Director

Take a virtual trip to Jazz Fest New Orleans this weekend

New Orleans is always alive with music, from the bars of Bourbon Street to the jazz clubs of Frenchmen Street. The New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival—“Jazz Fest” to its friends—is an annual celebration of the unique music and culture of New Orleans, taking over the Fair Grounds Race Course each Spring.

For the first time Jazz Fest will be live streaming the festival, presented by DELL and in partnership with YouTube Presents! The broadcast will combine live music from across the next three days with pre-recorded highlights from last weekend.

It may be Jazz Fest by name, but it’s not entirely jazz by nature. The diverse lineup this weekend includes Bon Iver, Tom Petty, Trombone Shorty, Grace Potter & The Nocturnals, My Morning Jacket and many more. We’re adding artists all the time, so check-out the official Jazz Fest channel for the latest schedule.



The stream begins at 12pm PT today and runs through 6pm this Sunday. Enjoy!

Tim Partridge, music marketing manager, recently watched The Beastie Boys - No Sleep Till Brooklyn

Kabul explosion, Cairo sit-in protest attack, Giant hail storm in Maryland

Everyday on the CitizenTube channel (and @CitizenTube on Twitter), along with our curation partners @storyful, we look at how the top news stories are covered on YouTube. Each week we post a weekly recap of the top news stories of the week, as seen through the lens of both citizen-reported footage and professional news coverage.

• We watched President Obama make a short trip to Afghanistan on the anniversary of Bin Laden's death, only for seven to be killed in a Kabul explosion just hours after he left.
• We saw a sit-in protest in Cairo come under attack by unknown assailants, leading to nine deaths.
• We monitored labour groups hold marches across the world to mark May Day, or International Workers' Day.
• We viewed a shining beacon of light in the United Arab Emirates, but not in the way anyone would have liked, as a fire enveloped the Al Tayer Tower.
• We followed the GOP candidates on another memorable day on the US campaign trail, as Newt Gingrich released a YouTube video announcing his withdrawal.
• We observed police in Malaysia use tear gas and water-cannons to confront protesters calling for reform.
• We saw shock in the French city of Toulouse as an F1 tornado landed nearby, damaging roofs and uprooting trees.
• We witnessed a tragic death in St. Louis as the city endured a powerful storm that brought baseball-sized hail.
• We watched Edward Munch's world famous painting, "The Scream", break records with a $119 million sale at a Sotheby's auction. 

Come back to watch the news unfold on YouTube. 

Olivia Ma, YouTube News & Politics, recently watched "Large Hail Hits Maryland Heights 04/28/12".

Finding and following new channels you love

If you’re interested in aerial silk or Rubik’s Cubes or anything in between, we want YouTube to have a channel ready and always updating for you.

In our goal to help you find great channels and videos you care about, we created Topics on Search to narrow your search results using commonly-used phrases. We took this a step further by auto-generating whole channels of topics in the ‘Top YouTube Collections’ tab, giving you constantly updated and uniquely-focused channels. Now, you’ll start seeing these channels more broadly available around YouTube, like in ‘Recommended for You’ section of our channels page and on a video watch page.

So if you’re into surfing, you could find the Big wave surfing channel, get introduced and subscribe to the NetworkA channel, and then enjoy this video of Garret McNamara surfing one of Poseidon’s finest. Here’s what the channel looks like:



Lots of complex algorithms are working behind the scenes to give you the channel you’re looking for, for example, being able to tell when the word ‘Chicago’ means the music band and when it means the movie/musical. We’re still tweaking everything to make sure it works just right for you, so let us know what you think of the channels or learn more in our help center.

So when you see a channel “auto generated by YouTube” around the site, give it a browse to find whole collections of channels and videos you might like, updated everyday with the freshest and finest videos you’re sharing on YouTube.

Mur Viswanathan, product manager, recently subscribed to the Parkour channel and Palash Nandy, software engineer, recently subscribed to the Brickfilm channel.

70 young women recognized as Google Anita Borg Memorial scholars

The Google Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship honors the memory of Dr. Anita Borg, who devoted her life to encouraging the presence of women in computing and founded the Institute for Women in Technology in 1997. Anita passed away in 2003, and we created the Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship in 2004 to honor her memory. Anita’s legacy lives on today through this scholarship and the organization she created, which has since been re-named the Anita Borg Institute for Women in Technology.

This year we’d like to recognize and congratulate the 70 Google Anita Borg Memorial scholars and the 79 Google Anita Borg Memorial finalists, all of whom attend universities in the United States, Canada, Europe, the Middle East or Africa. These students will attend the annual Google Scholars Retreat this summer, where they will have the opportunity to attend tech talks on Google products, network with other scholars and participate in social activities. Students from the U.S. and Canada will attend the retreat in Mountain View, Calif., and students from Europe, the Middle East and Africa will attend the retreat in Zurich, Switzerland.

Here’s a full list of this year’s scholars and finalists along with the institutions they attend. In the coming months, we’ll also announce the recipients of the Google Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship in Asia, Australia and New Zealand.

For more information on all our scholarships, visit the Google Scholarships site.

Posted by Jenny McColl, University Programs Specialist

Get stuff done in the cloud. Go Google.

You probably hear terms like “the cloud” or “cloud computing” being used a lot these days. While the idea of the cloud may seem abstract, many things you already do on your computer and smartphone today, such as email, photo sharing and video streaming, are made possible by the cloud.

At the heart of it, Google is about cloud computing—helping people live online and get things done in the cloud. Whether you need to add “milk” to a shared shopping list from the train, collaborate with your teammate back in the office to finish your presentation from a hotel lobby, or chat face-to-face with your mom from halfway around the world, we believe that getting stuff done in the cloud is a better way. We like to call it “going Google.”



We’ve built cloud-based tools like Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Docs to help you connect and collaborate online with others more quickly and easily, without having to deal with the hassles and frustrations of installing and managing traditional software. Last week’s launch of Google Drive is the next step: Google Drive brings together many Google services—documents, spreadsheets, images and more—all in one place so you can easily create, collaborate, and share in real-time. Files are saved automatically, and friends, teammates, roommates, families and co-workers can do things together—even when they’re not. If you haven’t already tried it, Google Drive is a great place to start going Google.

Today, hundreds of millions of people, including 16 million students and teachers at 66 of the top 100 U.S. universities, employees at more than 4 million businesses worldwide including Burberry, Costco and National Geographic (and maybe even your 13-year-old daughter and her entire soccer team) have all already gone Google.

If you’re going Google to build a company, great. If you write your grand opus poem, even better. If you have to turn a project around from different time zones overnight, awesome. And if you video-chat with grandma while you do—well, that’s just showing off.

So go on. See what it’s like to get stuff done and go Google.

Posted by Venkat Panchapakesan, VP Engineering

The Doodle 4 Google State Winners—and time to vote for the National!

Today we’re excited to announce the 50 State Winners of the 2012 U.S. Doodle 4 Google competition. We received a record-breaking 114,000 submissions from all corners of the country—from North Pole, Alaska, to Suwanee, Ga. Young artists doodled their way from the prehistoric to the futuristic and everywhere in between with this year’s theme, “If I could travel in time, I’d visit...”.

To recognize the amazing level of talent, Googlers are celebrating the young artists at school events in their communities along with thousands of their teachers, parents, friends and classmates.

Now it’s time for your voice to be heard. From today until May 10, we invite the public to vote and help us select the five National Finalists. On May 17 at our national award ceremony in New York City, we’ll announce the National Winner. You’ll be able to see the winning doodle on the Google homepage on May 18.

We also hope everyone gets a chance to see these State Winners’ masterpieces, so at the end of the contest, all of the 50 State Winners will have their doodles displayed in an exhibit at the New York Public Library. And, for the first time this year, the artwork of all 250 State Finalists (including the 50 State Winners) will be displayed in local exhibitions in their respective states.

We’d like to thank the countless teachers, parents and administrators for supporting their young artists as they doodled their way through time for this year’s contest. Please join us in congratulating all participants—they did a fantastic job of inspiring us with their creativity.

Posted by Marissa Mayer, Vice President of Product Management