Neil A Conway

On behalf of Ridley Scott, Kevin MaCDonald, LG, the Sundance Film Festival and all of us at YouTube, thank you to everyone who took part in “Life in a Day.” Using the footage you shot, Kevin will now begin to build the world’s largest user-generated documentary, capturing what it was like to be alive on July 24, 2010.

Remember that even though filming day is over, you have until July 31 at 11:59 p.m. PST to upload your video to the Life in a Day channel. Be sure to subscribe as well, so you can receive directorial updates from the cutting room floor. If your video is selected for inclusion in the final film, you’ll be hearing from Life in a Day Films, so be on the lookout for an email.

We’ll be in touch again in early January with more details on the film’s premiere at Sundance.

Congratulations to everyone.

Posted by Nate Weinstein, Entertainment Marketing Associate

(Cross-posted from the YouTube Blog)

This year we held the third edition of the Google Online Marketing Challenge — a global university competition that gives students hands-on exposure to online marketing. Each team receives the equivalent of $200 to work with a local company and create an online marketing campaign. Teams have three weeks to mastermind a strategy before submitting a campaign report to an international judging panel of professors.

We’re delighted that 3,034 teams from 60 countries participated in the 2010 Challenge, representing an increase of 39 percent from last year and making the Challenge one of the world’s largest university competitions.

The global winners of the Challenge are Lauren Williams, Ganesh Chaudhari, Jeeana Atmarow, Allison Miller, Mohammed Assiri and Hui Min Chua from the University of Western Australia, who promoted the kids’ novel The Adventures of Charlie & Moon. Over the three week campaign, the novel’s website saw a huge jump in visits—nearly 800 percent. The team will visit the Googleplex in Mountain View, California and each of the members will receive a laptop for their great performance in the Challenge.

We also had three regional winners: for the Americas, the winning team comes from Carnegie Mellon University in the U.S. and a team from the Warsaw School of Economics in Poland won in EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa). In the Asia Pacific region, the winners come from the Edith Cowan University in Perth, Australia. Find more details about our winners here.

Since we first held it in 2008, the Google Online Marketing Challenge has grown each year, allowing thousands of students globally to learn about online advertising and help small businesses to improve their online presence. The education they’ve already received becomes real in the Challenge: real money, real campaigns, real businesses and real results. And the hands-on experience with online marketing gives them real skills they can use in their careers.

If you’re interested in competing in the 2011 Challenge, register now. We’ll open the sign-up period in the fall.

Posted by Alex Gibelalde, Product Marketing Manager

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For artists, YouTube is a 21st century canvas. Since the YouTube Play project was announced last month, more than 6,000 videos ranging in genres, topics and budget have been submitted from 69 countries, and the YouTube Play channel has received over 2 million views.

Today, we’re unveiling the jury for YouTube Play, which includes some of the world’s leading artists, from international film festival winners and renowned photographers to performance and video artists on the cutting edge of art.

YouTube Play jurors include musician and performance artist Laurie Anderson; musical group Animal Collective; visual artists Douglas Gordon, Ryan McGinley, Marilyn Minter and Takashi Murakami; artists and filmmakers Shirin Neshat, Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Darren Aronofsky; and graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister, with Guggenheim Chief Curator and Deputy Director Nancy Spector serving as jury chairperson.

Over the course of the next few months, these jurors will watch countless hours of videos submitted by the international YouTube community and select the most creative and inspiring work to showcase at the Guggenheim museums in October.

Already, this campaign has drawn some remarkable talent, and we’re looking forward to seeing more of your submissions in our quest to find the most creative video art in the world and showcase it alongside van Gogh and Picasso. The deadline for getting your videos in is July 31. For more information about the jurors and to learn more about how to participate, check out youtube.com/play.

Posted by Ed Sanders, Senior Marketing Manager

Back in June, our Zurich engineering headquarters welcomed 100 of EMEA’s brightest computer science students to our annual Europe, Middle East and Africa Scholars’ Retreat. Recipients of the Google Europe Scholarship for Students with Disabilities joined Anita Borg Memorial Scholars and Finalists for three days of workshops, technical talks, poster sessions, networking events and, of course, lots of fun! Check out our video below to hear from scholars and speakers in their own words:

Our academic scholarships are designed to support a new generation of talented, diverse computer scientists from all backgrounds. If you want to learn more, visit www.google.com/university/emea for a complete list of scholarships, grants and other opportunities available to students and academics.

Posted by Caitlin Pantos, University Programs Specialist

This is part of our summer series of new Search Stories. Look for the label Search Stories and subscribe to the series. -Ed.

My sister is my best friend in the world. But that wasn’t always the case. When we were young, my sister and I always had our sibling rivalries. Quarrels over who got more (or fewer) birthday presents, ongoing debates around whose week it was to walk the dog and your average diary lock-picking weren’t uncommon. But now that we’ve grown older, it’s become clear that those moments have brought us closer together, and today my sister is my best friend.

Our search story this week really struck a chord with me, and I’m excited to help introduce our latest video, “Brother and Sister.” It’s a fun, playful snapshot of an evolving sibling friendship. I hope you enjoy this week’s video as much as I did.

Posted by Bernardo Hernandez, Head of Consumer Marketing

When you think about “information,” what probably comes to mind are streams of words and numbers. Google’s pretty good at organizing these types of information, but consider all the things you can’t express with words: what does it look like in the middle of a sandstorm? What are some great examples of Art Nouveau architecture? Should I consider wedding cupcakes instead of a traditional cake?

This is why we built Google Images in 2001. We realized that for many searches, the best answer wasn’t text—it was an image or a set of images. The service has grown quite a bit since then. In 2001, we indexed around 250 million images. By 2005, we had indexed over 1 billion. And today, we have an index of over 10 billion images.

It’s not just about quantity, though. Over the past decade we’ve been baking deep computer science into Google Images to make it even faster and easier for you to find precisely the right images. We not only finds images for pretty much anything you type in; we can also instantly pull out images of clip art, line drawings, faces and even colors.

There’s even more sophisticated computer vision technology powering our “Similar images” tool. For example, did you know there are nine subspecies of leopards, each with a distinct pattern of spots? Google Images can recognize the difference, returning just leopards of a particular subspecies. It can tell you the name of the subspecies in a particular image—even if that image isn’t labeled—because other similar leopard images on the web are labeled with that subspecies’s name.

And our “Similar colors” refinement doesn’t just return images based on the overall color of an image. If it did, lots of images would simply be classified as “white.” If you’re looking for [tulips] and you refine results to “white,” you really want images in which the tulips themselves are white—not the surrounding image. It takes some heavy-duty algorithmic wizardry and processing power for a search engine to understand what the items of interest are in all the images out there.

Those are just a few of the technologies we’ve built to make Google Images more useful. Meanwhile, the quantity and variety of images on the web has ballooned since 2001, and images have become one of the most popular types of content people search for. So over the next few days we’re rolling out an update to Google Images to match the scope and beauty of this fast-growing visual web, and to bring to the surface some of the powerful technology behind Images.

Here’s what’s new in this refreshed design of Google Images:

• Dense tiled layout designed to make it easy to look at lots of images at once. We want to get the app out of the way so you can find what you’re really looking for.
• Instant scrolling between pages, without letting you get lost in the images. You can now get up to 1,000 images, all in one scrolling page. And we’ll show small, unobtrusive page numbers so you don’t lose track of where you are.
• Larger thumbnail previews on the results page, designed for modern browsers and high-res screens.
• A hover pane that appears when you mouse over a given thumbnail image, giving you a larger preview, more info about the image and other image-specific features such as “Similar images.”
• Once you click on an image, you’re taken to a new landing page that displays a large image in context, with the website it’s hosted on visible right behind it. Click anywhere outside the image, and you’re right in the original page where you can learn more about the source and context.
• Optimized keyboard navigation for faster scrolling through many pages, taking advantage of standard web keyboard shortcuts such as Page Up / Page Down. It’s all about getting you to the info you need quickly, so you can get on with actually building that treehouse or buying those flowers.

When we decided in 2007 to voluntarily become carbon neutral, our intent was to take responsibility for our carbon emissions and promote sustainable environmental solutions. We approach this goal in three ways. First, we minimize our energy consumption; in fact, we’ve built some of the world’s most energy efficient data centers. Second, we seek to power our facilities with renewable energy, like we did in Mountain View, CA with one of the largest corporate solar installations. Finally, we purchase carbon offsets for the emissions we cannot directly eliminate.

We just completed a substantial 20-year green Power Purchase Agreement that allows us to take responsibility for our footprint and foster true growth in the renewable energy sector. On July 30 we will begin purchasing the clean energy from 114 megawatts of wind generation at the NextEra Energy Resources Story County II facility in Iowa at a predetermined rate for 20 years. Incorporating such a large amount of wind power into our portfolio is tricky (read more about how the deal is structured), but this power is enough to supply several data centers.

The wind farm, which began operation in December 2009, consists of 100 GE 1.5MW XLE turbines.

By contracting to purchase so much energy for so long, we’re giving the developer of the wind farm financial certainty to build additional clean energy projects. The inability of renewable energy developers to obtain financing has been a significant inhibitor to the expansion of renewable energy. We’ve been excited about this deal because taking 114 megawatts of wind power off the market for so long means producers have the incentive and means to build more renewable energy capacity for other customers.

We depend upon large quantities of electricity to power Google services and want to make large actions to support renewable energy. As we continue operating with the most energy efficient data centers and working to be carbon neutral, we’re happy to also be directly purchasing energy from renewable resources.

Posted by Urs Hoelzle, Senior Vice President, Operations

Over time we’ve improved search by deepening our understanding of queries and web pages. The web isn’t merely words—it’s information about things in the real world, and understanding the relationships between real-world entities can help us deliver relevant information more quickly. Today, we’ve acquired Metaweb, a company that maintains an open database of things in the world. Working together we want to improve search and make the web richer and more meaningful for everyone.

With efforts like rich snippets and the search answers feature, we’re just beginning to apply our understanding of the web to make search better. Type [barack obama birthday] in the search box and see the answer right at the top of the page. Or search for [events in San Jose] and see a list of specific events and dates. We can offer this kind of experience because we understand facts about real people and real events out in the world. But what about [colleges on the west coast with tuition under $30,000] or [actors over 40 who have won at least one oscar]? These are hard questions, and we’ve acquired Metaweb because we believe working together we’ll be able to provide better answers.

In addition to our ideas for search, we’re also excited about the possibilities for Freebase, Metaweb’s free and open database of over 12 million things, including movies, books, TV shows, celebrities, locations, companies and more. Google and Metaweb plan to maintain Freebase as a free and open database for the world. Better yet, we plan to contribute to and further develop Freebase and would be delighted if other web companies use and contribute to the data. We believe that by improving Freebase, it will be a tremendous resource to make the web richer for everyone. And to the extent the web becomes a better place, this is good for webmasters and good for users.

We look forward to working with the talented Metaweb team. We’ll be sure to share details on our progress in the coming months. In the meantime, if you’re interested to learn more about Metaweb’s technology, we encourage you to check out a helpful video they’ve posted on their blog.

Posted by Jack Menzel, Director of Product Management

This is part of a regular series of Google Apps updates that we post every couple of weeks. Look for the label “Google Apps highlights” and subscribe to the series. – Ed.

Over the last couple of weeks we rolled out some nice updates in Gmail, improved on Google forms, added new mobile device security features and celebrated many new applications recently added to the Apps Marketplace. Enjoy!

Rich text signatures in Gmail
You’ve been able to add plain text signatures to your messages in Gmail for some time, but last Thursday we stepped it up a notch by adding rich text signatures, one of our most requested features. Now you can create signatures with different fonts, font sizes, font colors, links and images. The feature also supports different signatures for different custom “From:” addresses that you’ve configured. Head over to the “Settings” page in Gmail to get started.

HTML5 features in Gmail on Safari
Gmail has recently added some new interactive features, like drag-and-drop attachments and images, and new windows that “outlive” your original Gmail window. These features are possible thanks to HTML5, but until this week, Safari users have been left out. All of that changed on Monday, and users of Safari 5 can now enjoy these helpful HTML5 features, too.

Simpler page navigation in Google forms
With Google forms (part of Google Docs), you can quickly create and send surveys to your contacts or publish surveys on the web. We started out offering simple one-page forms, but last week we made some big improvements to our logic branching capabilities. Now you can easily create multi-page surveys that adapt depending on how people answer your questions. Try it out for yourself in the form-based choose your own adventure game that we built.

More security controls for mobile devices
Businesses and schools using Google Apps often want the ability to centrally manage mobile devices that their users connect to Google Apps, and on Tuesday we rolled out several new device management capabilities. Organizations can now require devices to use data encryption, auto-wipe devices after a certain number of failed password attempts, require device passwords to be changed periodically and more.

Apps Tuesday: 10 new additions to the Apps Marketplace
Some technology companies burden IT departments with software patches and fixes every month, but our cloud computing approach means that customers get improvements automatically with Google Apps. In addition to all the new features built by Google, this month we added 10 new applications from third-party software companies to the Apps Marketplace. Third-party apps integrate seamlessly with Google Apps and can be activated by administrators with just a couple clicks.

Who’s gone Google?
More and more organizations are getting with the times and switching to Google Apps. Today we welcome Vektrex, Rypple, XAOP, Limbach Facility Services, Riley Chartered Accounts and tens of thousands of other businesses worldwide that have moved to the cloud with Google since my last update here.

More universities are preparing to reopen their doors in the fall with new campus technology tools, too. We’re excited to have University of Minnesota College of Liberal Arts, Universitat de Girona in Spain and The College of St. Scholastica join us!

I hope you’re making the most of these new features, whether you’re using Google Apps with friends, family, coworkers or classmates. For more details and updates from the Apps team, head on over to the Google Apps Blog.

Posted by Jeremy Milo, Google Apps Marketing Manager