After a miraculous and drama-filled Lollapalooza weekend (read about the rainstorm if you haven’t yet), we’re pleased we haven’t floated away. And we bring you the following treats to warm your eyes and ears this week on YouTube’s music page.
Antibalas Family Tree Playlist
You know Antibalas, even if you’ve never heard of them -- these are the guys behind the soundtrack to the Tony Award-winning Fela! The Musical. (They were also the musical’s house band during its Broadway run.) The band’s Afrobeat credentials run deep: back in the late ‘90s -- before Afrobeat was hip -- Antibalas crafted itself in Fela Kuti’s image, playing a 21st century take on Kuti’s potent mix of American soul, funk, jazz and Nigerian music. Over the years, the band has morphed an instrumental powerhouse, and its small army of musicians have spawned side projects galore. Today, as they release their new eponymous album, they introduce us to their universe.
Introducing Psy
Just when you thought you understood K-Pop, the genre’s latest phenom Psy breaks the mold. He’s everything K-Pop (as we’ve come to know it) is not: he’s not svelte, and his video is neither heavily produced nor glamorous. In fact, it’s funny, sly and self-mocking. At 17 million views and counting, it’s definitely gone viral -- and his “horse dance” has spawned myriad imitators and reaction videos.
Premiere: Tom Waits “Hell Broke Luce”
Tom Waits has always inhabited characters in his music, painting stories of people on the edge in album after album. It’s a kind of musical theater that runs closer to Bertolt Brecht than anything else, and in “Hell Broke Luce,” he inhabits the character of a soldier returning from recent wars. The music is abrasive: it seems as if Waits thinks he could corrode the surface of the internet with just his voice. And he might be right. The video is a hallucinatory ride -- Waits drags a small home behind him, trudging through military minefields, hounded by explosions and singing body bags. It’s a profound statement by one of the United States’ most iconoclastic musicians.
Sarah Bardeen, music community manager, recently watched “Blevin Blectum - Foyer Fire.”
Tuesday, August 7, 2012
The self-driving car logs more miles on new wheels
Technology is at its best when it makes people’s lives better, and that’s precisely what we’re going for with our self-driving car project. We’re using advanced computer science to try and make driving safer and more enjoyable.
Our vehicles, of which about a dozen are on the road at any given time, have now completed more than 300,000 miles of testing. They’ve covered a wide range of traffic conditions, and there hasn’t been a single accident under computer control.
We’re encouraged by this progress, but there’s still a long road ahead. To provide the best experience we can, we’ll need to master snow-covered roadways, interpret temporary construction signals and handle other tricky situations that many drivers encounter. As a next step, members of the self-driving car team will soon start using the cars solo (rather than in pairs), for things like commuting to work. This is an important milestone, as it brings this technology one step closer to every commuter. One day we hope this capability will enable people to be more productive in their cars. For now, our team members will remain in the driver’s seats and will take back control if needed.
And while these team members are commuting, many of them will be testing our algorithms on a new type of vehicle we’ve added to the self-driving car family over the past few months to help us refine our systems in different environments and on different terrain: the Lexus RX450h.
With each breakthrough we feel more optimistic about delivering this technology to people and dramatically improving their driving experience. We’ll see you on the road!
Our vehicles, of which about a dozen are on the road at any given time, have now completed more than 300,000 miles of testing. They’ve covered a wide range of traffic conditions, and there hasn’t been a single accident under computer control.
We’re encouraged by this progress, but there’s still a long road ahead. To provide the best experience we can, we’ll need to master snow-covered roadways, interpret temporary construction signals and handle other tricky situations that many drivers encounter. As a next step, members of the self-driving car team will soon start using the cars solo (rather than in pairs), for things like commuting to work. This is an important milestone, as it brings this technology one step closer to every commuter. One day we hope this capability will enable people to be more productive in their cars. For now, our team members will remain in the driver’s seats and will take back control if needed.
And while these team members are commuting, many of them will be testing our algorithms on a new type of vehicle we’ve added to the self-driving car family over the past few months to help us refine our systems in different environments and on different terrain: the Lexus RX450h.
With each breakthrough we feel more optimistic about delivering this technology to people and dramatically improving their driving experience. We’ll see you on the road!
Monday, August 6, 2012
The tree versus the shadow
Character is like a tree and reputation like its shadow. The shadow is what we think of it; the tree is the real thing. —Abraham LincolnWhen I was looking for investors for my startup in 1997, I was a lot more interested in the values and character of my potential investors than in the name of the firm on the door. My first investors were not from Sand Hill Road or Palo Alto, but were people I knew would support my company (and me) in the ways we most needed help.
As an entrepreneur, you want to know if your investors will be there for you, help you do the right things, and encourage you to persist and evolve when things seem dark. Perhaps most of all, you want to know they’ve been there before, and that they’ll be calm and confident when things go wrong—when giving up sounds like a pretty good option.
At Google Ventures, we try to be the kind of hands-on investors that quietly help to build companies. We try to be the kind of investors we sought as entrepreneurs ourselves. Starting a company can be a lonely business, and it helps to know you’ve got someone on your side who has been through it before.
Today, we're launching a new Google Ventures blog as an experiment, hoping it will help you get to know the people and companies at Google Ventures a little better. We’ll share how we think about things and why, if you’re an entrepreneur, you might want to talk to Joe, Rich, Kevin and the rest of the team.
(Cross-posted from the Google Ventures Blog)
Friday, August 3, 2012
A new way to visualize the global arms trade
Did you know that 60 percent of all violent deaths are due to small arms and light weapons? Small arms, such as revolvers, assault rifles and light machine guns, and ammunition represent a multi-billion dollar industry, and three quarters of the world’s small arms lie in the hand of civilians—more than 650 million civilian arms. As part of the Google Ideas initiative on illicit networks, we’ve created an interactive data visualization of global small arms and ammunition trading to better understand and map the global arms trade.
The tool was produced by Google’s Creative Lab team in collaboration with the Igarape Institute. More than 1 million data points on imports and exports of small arms, light weapons and ammunition between 1992 and 2010 and across 250 states and territories across the world were provided by the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) small arms database. The visualization reveals patterns and trends in imports and exports of arms and ammunition across the world, making it easy to explore how they relate to conflicts worldwide. More of the implications of this data are discussed in this video from the INFO summit hosted by Google Ideas last month:
You can explore these data points by zooming in and out of the globe, clicking on any country to readjust the view, and using the histogram tool at the bottom to see trading patterns over the years. You can see, for example, that the scale of the global trade in ammunition rivals the scale of trade in actual weapons, an insight underexplored by policymakers today in conflict prevention and resolution.
We built this visualization using the open source WebGL Globe on Google’s Chrome Experiments site; since it is open sourced, we hope to see others use the globe as a platform for bringing other complex datasets to life.
Update 8/16/12: This post has been updated to reflect more accurate numbers.
The tool was produced by Google’s Creative Lab team in collaboration with the Igarape Institute. More than 1 million data points on imports and exports of small arms, light weapons and ammunition between 1992 and 2010 and across 250 states and territories across the world were provided by the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) small arms database. The visualization reveals patterns and trends in imports and exports of arms and ammunition across the world, making it easy to explore how they relate to conflicts worldwide. More of the implications of this data are discussed in this video from the INFO summit hosted by Google Ideas last month:
You can explore these data points by zooming in and out of the globe, clicking on any country to readjust the view, and using the histogram tool at the bottom to see trading patterns over the years. You can see, for example, that the scale of the global trade in ammunition rivals the scale of trade in actual weapons, an insight underexplored by policymakers today in conflict prevention and resolution.
We built this visualization using the open source WebGL Globe on Google’s Chrome Experiments site; since it is open sourced, we hope to see others use the globe as a platform for bringing other complex datasets to life.
Update 8/16/12: This post has been updated to reflect more accurate numbers.
Giving you a better Google
We work every day to create a more seamless, beautiful user experience—to give you a better, easier-to-use Google. This means continuously improving the products we offer, and recognizing when users of one product might have a better experience with another. Over the past year, we’ve made changes to around 50 products, features and services—donating, merging and shutting things down so we can focus on the high-impact products that millions of people use, multiple times a day. Today, we’re announcing a few more changes:
- We introduced Google Apps for Teams in 2008 to allow people with a verified business or school email address to collaborate using non-email applications from Google like Google Docs, Google Calendar and Google Talk. Over time, we realized that Google Apps for Teams was not as useful for people as we originally anticipated. Beginning September 4, 2012, we'll start converting existing Google Apps for Teams accounts into personal Google Accounts, and shutting down Google Apps for Teams. This change does not affect other editions of Google Apps.
- We launched Google Listen through Google Labs in August 2009, to give people a way to discover and listen to podcasts. However, with Google Play, people now have access to a wider variety of podcast apps, so we’ve discontinued Listen. People who have already installed the app can still use it, but after November 1, podcast search won’t function. You can access your podcast subscriptions in Google Reader in the “Listen Subscriptions” folder and download them from the Import/Export tab.
- Google Video for Business is a video hosting and sharing solution that allowed Google Apps for Business and Google Apps for Education customers to use video for internal communication. Starting this fall, we’ll migrate all videos hosted on Google Video for Business over to Google Drive, which has similar storage and sharing capabilities. All migrated videos will be stored for free and will not count against a user’s Google Drive storage quota.
- Finally, Google maintains 150+ blogs and other communications channels about our products and services, and so over time we'll also be closing a number of Google-created blogs that are either updated infrequently, or are redundant with other blogs. This doesn't mean that we'll be sharing any less information—we'll just be posting our updates on our more popular channels.
Watch Lollapalooza live all weekend on YouTube
Live music is a beautiful thing. It’s unpredictable, it’s sweaty and crowded -- and it’s LOUD. It’s also the best way to really get to know an artist -- if they can deliver the magic live, they may hook you for life.
That’s why YouTube is so pleased to present Lollapalooza Music Festival, in partnership with Dell, streaming all weekend on youtube.com/lollapalooza. The festival that helped launch alternative music in the 1990s has become a cornerstone of the summer music festivals, and this year fans will be treated to an incredible array of artists over three days, starting today at 11:30am PT.
The artist lineup is nothing short of epic: you’ll see growing artists Michael Kiwanuka, GIVERS and Gary Clark Jr. rubbing shoulders with crowd favorites like The Red Hot Chili Peppers, Avicii, The Shins, Florence + the Machine and Jack White. There will even be a few reunions in the mix -- the Afghan Whigs and At The Drive-In are both back together for the occasion. (Insert fist pump here.) Be sure to check out the full schedule.
Live shows by artists like U2, Kenny Chesney and Coldplay have drawn millions of viewers to YouTube, and last year’s Lollapalooza webcast saw viewers spending an average of 44 minutes watching the show. We look forward to keeping you glued to your screen again this year.
So get your dancing shoes on, and remember: Lollapalooza kicks off today at 11:30am PT. We want you there.
Sarah Bardeen, music community manager, recently watched “Lollapalooza: Rain or Shine (Timelapse).”
That’s why YouTube is so pleased to present Lollapalooza Music Festival, in partnership with Dell, streaming all weekend on youtube.com/lollapalooza. The festival that helped launch alternative music in the 1990s has become a cornerstone of the summer music festivals, and this year fans will be treated to an incredible array of artists over three days, starting today at 11:30am PT.
The artist lineup is nothing short of epic: you’ll see growing artists Michael Kiwanuka, GIVERS and Gary Clark Jr. rubbing shoulders with crowd favorites like The Red Hot Chili Peppers, Avicii, The Shins, Florence + the Machine and Jack White. There will even be a few reunions in the mix -- the Afghan Whigs and At The Drive-In are both back together for the occasion. (Insert fist pump here.) Be sure to check out the full schedule.
Live shows by artists like U2, Kenny Chesney and Coldplay have drawn millions of viewers to YouTube, and last year’s Lollapalooza webcast saw viewers spending an average of 44 minutes watching the show. We look forward to keeping you glued to your screen again this year.
So get your dancing shoes on, and remember: Lollapalooza kicks off today at 11:30am PT. We want you there.
Sarah Bardeen, music community manager, recently watched “Lollapalooza: Rain or Shine (Timelapse).”
Thursday, August 2, 2012
Our roots go global: Apply for a RISE Award today
The application for the 2013 Google RISE (Roots in Science and Engineering) Awards is now open. Given once a year, Google RISE Awards are designed to promote and support education initiatives in two key areas: Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics (STEM) and Computer Science (CS). Google grants awards of $5,000 - $25,000 USD to organizations around the world working with K-12 and university students in these fields.
This year, our community welcomed more than two dozen organizations from around the world, from Denmark to Uganda and California to Romania. The RISE grants have helped these groups to scale their reach by allowing for more scholarship recipients, to deepen their impact by providing hands on robotics kits, and to ultimately inspire their students by creating a community for CS outreach.
Now, the RISE Awards have expanded to include applicants from Latin America and the Asia Pacific region, bringing our total to six continents and 243 countries. All eligible nations are listed on our website.
The growth of technology is undoubtable, and the impact technology will have on our future is equally undeniable. We believe it’s our duty to support students who have the uncanny ability not only to consume technology, but also to create it. We believe that inspiring the next generation of computer scientists will enrich the lives of not only individual students, but also the communities and countries they live in.
Show us what you can do to get students excited about STEM and CS! Submit your application by September 30, 2012. Awardees will be announced by January 2013.
This year, our community welcomed more than two dozen organizations from around the world, from Denmark to Uganda and California to Romania. The RISE grants have helped these groups to scale their reach by allowing for more scholarship recipients, to deepen their impact by providing hands on robotics kits, and to ultimately inspire their students by creating a community for CS outreach.
Now, the RISE Awards have expanded to include applicants from Latin America and the Asia Pacific region, bringing our total to six continents and 243 countries. All eligible nations are listed on our website.
The growth of technology is undoubtable, and the impact technology will have on our future is equally undeniable. We believe it’s our duty to support students who have the uncanny ability not only to consume technology, but also to create it. We believe that inspiring the next generation of computer scientists will enrich the lives of not only individual students, but also the communities and countries they live in.
Show us what you can do to get students excited about STEM and CS! Submit your application by September 30, 2012. Awardees will be announced by January 2013.
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