Turkey’s President takes your questions

In 2011, YouTube World View has traveled the globe, bringing citizen questions to the world’s most influential leaders. Now, World View is headed to a country that has received heavy news coverage this year -- Turkey. Starting today, Turkish President Abdullah Gül will take your questions at www.youtube.com/worldview and will answer them at the beginning of December.

President Gül wants to hear your questions on topics such as the future of Turkey’s economy, Turkey’s growing role in Middle East, the country’s democratization movement and the recent focus on a new Constitutional draft. Go to www.youtube.com/worldview to submit your question via video or text, and to vote on the questions you think should be asked.

On December 1, the President will answer a selection of the top-voted questions and his answers will be uploaded to YouTube and broadcast by local media partner, NTV. The deadline to submit is November 28.

Zeynep Inanoğlu, Head of Consumer Marketing, Google Turkey, recently watched, "YouTube Space Lab - What will you do?"

Explore open source with the Google Code-in contest

Every time you send a text, check a webpage or post a status update, you are using open source software. The Internet is made of open source. But have you ever created any yourself? If you’re a pre-university student between 13 and 17 years old, now you can—and win prizes along the way. Our Google Code-in contest starts this coming Monday, November 21, and you can sign up now. During the contest, which lasts for 57 days, participants can work on cool online tasks for 18 different open source organizations. Possible challenges include document translations, marketing outreach, software coding, user experience research and a variety of other tasks related to open source software development.

Participants earn points for each task they successfully complete and can earn prizes like t-shirts, cash and certificates of completion. The ten participants with the highest points earned by the end of the competition receive a grand prize trip to Google headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. next spring for themselves and a parent or legal guardian. They’ll spend the day getting a tour of campus, meeting Google engineers and enjoying other fun surprises.

Last year's winners at the Googleplex

Last year’s Google Code-in had 361 students from 48 countries completing 2,167 tasks over the course of the the eight-week contest. We hope to have even more students participate this year. Help us spread the word by telling your friends, classmates, children, colleagues, teachers—everyone!

If you’d like to sign up, please review our Frequently Asked Questions and the contest rules on our program site. You can also join our discussion list for any other questions. For details on important dates for the contest, see the timeline. You can go ahead and register for your account now on the program site so you will be able to start claiming tasks right away when the contest opens on Monday, November 21 at 12:00am (midnight) PST.

We hope you’ll spend your winter (or summer, for our friends in the southern hemisphere) learning about the ins and outs of open-source development through hands-on experience. On your marks...

Posted by Stephanie Taylor, Open Source Programs

A mid-Movember check-in

It’s that time of year...when the trees turn, the leaves fall, and stubble grows to full-fledged 'stache. In honor of Movember, an international mustache growing fundraiser, YouTubers worldwide are “mo”-bilizing to fight prostate and other men’s cancers.

Hundreds of Movember videos are being uploaded every day, with over 1500 every week. In case you’re lacking inspiration or you’re starting to question whether fighting prostate cancer is worth the daily stares directed at your Fu Manchu, the YouTube community has your tips, musical tributes, and vlogs.

For what NOT to do with your stache this Movember season:



If you’re unable to grow facial hair, you can raise awareness for prostate cancer by painting your nails with mini handlebar staches:



Looking for ‘mo’ style tips? Check out this musical tribute to history’s best mustaches:



And you can check out vloggers all around the world chronicling their stache growth:



Don’t forget to check out the official Movember YouTube channel or Movember.com for more information on how you can raise awareness and funds for the fight against men’s cancer.

Jessica Mason, Communications Associate, recently watched, "Mo Sistas Unite."

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

Google Music is open for business

Last May at Google I/O, we launched Music Beta by Google with a clear ambition: to help people access their music collections easily from any device. Music Beta enabled you to upload your personal music collection (up to 20,000 songs) for free to the cloud so you could stream it anywhere, any time. Today, the beta service evolves into a broader platform: Google Music. Google Music is about discovering, purchasing, sharing and enjoying digital music in new, innovative and personalized ways.



Google Music helps you spend more time listening to your collection and less time managing it. We automatically sync your entire music library—both purchases and uploads—across all your devices so you don't have to worry about cables, file transfers or running out of storage space. We’ll keep your playlists intact, too, so your “Chill” playlist is always your “Chill” playlist, whether you’re on your laptop, tablet or phone. You can even select the specific artists, albums and playlists you want to listen to when you're offline.

Purchase and share
We also want to make it easy and seamless for you to grow your music collection. Today, we added a new music store in Android Market, fully integrated with Google Music.

The store offers more than 13 million tracks from artists on Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, EMI, and the global independent rights agency Merlin as well as over 1,000 prominent independent labels including Merge Records, Warp Records, Matador Records, XL Recordings and Naxos. We’ve also partnered with the world's largest digital distributors of independent music including IODA, INgrooves, The Orchard and Believe Digital.

You can purchase individual songs or entire albums right from your computer or your Android device and they’ll be added instantly to your Google Music library, and accessible anywhere.

Good music makes you want to turn up the volume, but great music makes you want to roll down the windows and blast it for everyone. We captured this sentiment by giving you the ability to share a free full play of a purchased song with your friends on Google+.

Exclusively on Google Music
We’re celebrating our launch with a variety of music that you won’t find anywhere else, much of it free. There’s something for everyone, with a variety of free tracks to choose from:

• The Rolling Stones are offering an exclusive, never-before-released live concert album, Brussels Affair (Live, 1973), including a free single, “Dancing with Mr. D.” This is the first of six in an unreleased concert series that will be made available exclusively through Google Music over the coming months.
• Coldplay fans will find some original music that’s not available anywhere else: a free, live recording of “Every Teardrop Is A Waterfall”, a five-track live EP from their recent concert in Madrid and a remix of “Paradise” by Tiësto.
• Busta Rhymes’s first single from his upcoming album, Why Stop Now (feat. Chris Brown), is available for free.
• Shakira’s live EP from her recent concert in Paris and her new studio single, “Je L’Aime à Mourir” are both being offered up free.
• Pearl Jam are releasing a live album from their 9/11/11 concert in Toronto, free to Google Music users.
• Dave Matthews Band are offering up free albums from two live concerts, including new material from Live On Lakeside.
• Tiësto is offering up a new mix, “What Can We Do” (feat. Anastacia), exclusively to Google Music users.

Artist hub
Whether you’re on a label or the do-it-yourself variety, artists are at the heart of Google Music. With the Google Music artist hub, any artist who has all the necessary rights can distribute his or her own music on our platform, and use the artist hub interface to build an artist page, upload original tracks, set prices and sell content directly to fans—essentially becoming the manager of their own far-reaching music store. This goes for new artists as well as established independent artists, like Tiesto, who debuts a new single on Google Music today.



Starting today, Google Music is open in the U.S. at market.android.com, and over the next few days, we will roll out the music store to Android Market on devices running Android 2.2 and above. You can also pick up the new music app from Android Market and start listening to your music on your phone or tablet today. And don’t forget to turn your speakers up to eleven.

Posted by Andy Rubin, Senior Vice President, Mobile

Watch Mary J Blige perform live on Thursday

In recent years, artists like the Flaming Lips and Van Morrison have taken to the stage to perform classic albums in their entirety. It’s an amazing way to re-experience a significant moment in a musician’s career -- and to make old favorites new again. Tomorrow, you’ll get a chance to hear Mary J Blige’s breakthrough 1994 album My Life in its entirety -- performed by the queen of hip-hop soul herself.

Tune in to youtube.com/maryjbligevevo at 8 p.m. PT/11 p.m. ET on Thursday, November 17 to see the legendary singer perform live as part of Amex’s UNSTAGED concert series, in partnership with YouTube and VEVO. The concert will be directed by Adam Shankman, the noted dancer/choreographer/director who’s also directing Blige in the upcoming film version of the Broadway musical Rock of Ages. His credits include the film Hairspray as well as innumerable music videos. (He has also found time to judge on the television show So You Think You Can Dance.)

Many music critics credit Mary J Blige with inventing hip-hop soul, with help from a very young P. Diddy, on her first album What’s The 411? The song “Real Love” became a monster hit.



For My Life, her second album, Diddy (then known as Sean “Puffy” Combs) pulled samples from a who’s-who of soul music: Curtis Mayfield, Isaac Hayes, Al Green and many more. (Check out our playlist of My Life’s soul music influences.) Those samples pervade the album, and though Blige had the pipes to vie with the old masters, she was unmistakably of the hip-hop generation in attitude and style; this was no clean-cut Whitney Houston. She co-wrote many of the songs on the album, working off material from her own life.



The singer quickly became a pop music phenomenon, but privately she was battling demons. Later albums such as 2001’s No More Drama saw Blige speaking openly about the challenges she’d faced in her personal life and using her music to deliver life-affirming messages to her faithful fanbase.



Blige has been stalwart of the R&B scene for so many years that it’s easy to forget just how influential she’s been. She was the first artist to forge ties between hip-hop and R&B that we now take for granted; before Blige’s Grammy-winning collaboration with Method Man, R&B singer/rapper collaborations were nearly unheard-of. They’re now de rigeur. On the eve of the second installation of My Life, we’re proud to welcome a musical legend to UNSTAGED.

Sarah Bardeen, Music Community Manager, recently watched “Mary J Blige - All That I Can Say.”

Music Tuesday: Drake, live sessions from London and more

Update 11/16: Pardon us, we got our musicians mixed up. Please see below for Killa Kela & Eklips performing a Swedish Mafia House cover, not the other way around. 

Last week we featured some buzz videos, celebrated the Puerto Rican hip-hop duo Calle 13’s big wins at the Latin Grammy Awards, and got hip to the latest and coolest by SPIN Magazine’s editors. And, oh yeah, we debuted the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ newest video yesterday. But hold onto your seats: it just gets better for music on YouTube this week.

Got Drizzy?
Drake is something of an enigma -- a pop star who publicly proclaims his support for underground acts, a rapper who will admit to making “sex-driven, chauvinistic” music. (That’s some kind of self-awareness.) He’s also pretty talented. We asked him to curate the YouTube homepage today, and he took to the task with a list of videos that influenced (and in many cases are sampled on) his new album Take Care. The album was delayed by nearly a month so he could clear all the samples, and you’ll see some of them today, including Juvenile’s “Back That Azz Up,” which he turned into an R&B song (!?) with help from The Weeknd. The playlist also features Jon B, who is sampled on “Cameras,” and a very special mash-up cover by YouTube darlings VanJess24.



The Mahogany Sessions
We recently re-discovered the UK channel The Mahogany Sessions, which records intimate a cappella performances in and around London. Yes, rather like an English La Blogotheque -- and they’re similarly devoted to introducing you only to music they absolutely love. They also get some pretty rousing spectacles going: you need to see Killa Kela & Eklips performing a cover of "One" originally by Swedish House Mafia, a cappella while strolling in a London park.



Simian Ghost: Bicycle Theme
Is there room for yet another chillwave act in the world? We sincerely hope so, because Sweden’s Simian Ghost sure make some pretty videos (and songs).



Sarah Bardeen, Music Community Manager, recently watched “Redoles: ‘El Espejo.’”