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Last June, Google announced an expansion of our support for Black entrepreneurs, including the launch of the inaugural Google for Startups Accelerator: Black Founders. Today, we are opening applications for a second series of the accelerator. And this year we have expanded the program to include Black-led startups across all of North America, newly opening the program to applicants from both Canada and the Caribbean. 

Our inaugural 2020 cohort featured twelve Black-led startups for a 10-week virtual program. Today, these founders have collectively raised over $40 million in venture capital funding. With the support of Google, our alumni have used technology, data and machine learning to solve a wide range of meaningful challenges, from helping individuals to get out of debt to improving the healthcare system for at-risk youth to increasing sales for small businesses.

During the upcoming accelerator, we will pair startups with Google experts to identify and solve their most pressing technical challenges, from implementing machine learning to developing mobile apps to improving user experience design. Founders will also participate in workshops focused on fundraising, hiring and sales. 

Kanarys, a diversity, equity and inclusion-focused platform, graduated from the inaugural Black Founders Accelerator in 2020. Founder and CEO, Mandy Price, says she found the program provided key mentorship for the technical challenges her company faced around machine learning, since her team uses hundreds of data sources to quantify equity and inclusion, uncover structural biases and drive systemic change. “Our partners at Google were instrumental in helping us scale our use of machine learning and natural language processing through AutoML (automated machine learning),” she says. “The accelerator was a wonderful experience with great leadership.”

With the Google for Startups Accelerator: Black Founders, we are excited to continue investing in top founders as they tackle today’s biggest challenges. If you or someone you know would be a great fit for the program, we encourage you to apply here by July 9. The program will start on August 16, 2021.

Creators everywhere have embraced stories, the new tappable storytelling format made up of videos, GIFs, images, text and other visual elements. Audiences love engaging with stories content — and the best part is that they’re not just limited to social platforms. Web Stories are available on the open web, meaning they’re crawlable by search engines and you can share them — and link to them — just like any other webpage. Web Stories also don’t automatically disappear and can stay live as long as you like.

It’s easy to create your own Web Story — and takes just five steps. Here’s a deeper look at the process.

1. Choose a visual editor

A visual editor is a program that enables you to produce and customize your photos, videos and graphics. They often come with simple functionality and built-in templates, so you don’t need to be an expert at video editing or design to make beautiful and engaging content. Web Stories for WordPress, MakeStories and Newsroom AI are just a few examples that might work for you. See more suggestions here.

2. Draft the story

The best Web Stories tell a complete narrative from the moment they are published to keep the reader engaged. Since all pages of a story are published at once, it’s important to think through the narrative of your Web Story in the same way you would for a blog post or video. 

Although the creative process varies from person to person, we recommend outlining your Web Story in Google Docs. The Storytime team uses this script template to plan each page’s content and any text, videos, photos or animations we plan to use.  

3. Find the visual assets

Choosing the right imagery or videos is essential to creating a compelling Web Story. This can be the most time-consuming task, but if you’ve been blogging, you probably already have videos or other images you can use. It’s important to remember all full-page videos should be formatted vertically. That way your Web Story will use less bandwidth and load more quickly. 

Last month, we supported new business development programs, media literacy and elections programs around the world. We’re collaborating with news partners through virtual events, supporting innovation in journalism through new tools, and much more. Read on for May updates.

Providing new resources to drive Advertising revenue 

Starting June 1, the GNI Digital Growth Program is launching Advertisingworkshops in six languages. Workshops will be available in English in North America and the Asia Pacific region, as well as Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean and Indonesian. Register today to join them live or on-demand. 

Developing LGBTTQI+ leaders in Latin American media

We partnered with Chicas Poderosas to launch a Leadership Incubator aimed at addressing workplace dynamics in Latin American newsrooms. The program will provide mentoring and training to journalists at local and hyperlocal startups founded by women and people who identify as LGBTTQI+. Participants will work with experts to create a plan to strengthen innovation, collaborative work, diversity and gender perspectives on their teams.

Strengthening Media Literacy in Spanish-speaking Latin America

We’ve launched DigiMente — the first major media literacy program for young people in Spanish-speaking Latin America. Over 12 months the project will provide 20,000 students with the skills to sort fact from fiction online using relevant topics such as memes, video games and music, among others. Building on the foundational work of Google-supported projects such as Civic Online Reasoning (Stanford University) and EducaMidia (Brazil), this new effort was developed in partnership with Movilizatorio and Teach for All. 

Celebrating GNI Innovation Challenge recipients

Building on the Digital News Innovation Fund in Europe, GNI Innovation Challenges have supported more than 150 projects that inject new ideas into the news industry. Around the world, we’re learning from former Innovation Challenge recipients who are using their funding to drive innovation in news.

Every day, millions of people around the world turn to Google to search for travel related information. These searches help connect businesses and customers — but they also help us understand people’s enthusiasm when it comes to their travel and holiday plans.

The message we’re seeing is clear: people are eager to travel, so long as they can do so safely.

For over 20 years, Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International airport has been the busiest in the U.S., welcoming millions of travelers. As we recover from COVID-19, we’re thrilled to once again be one of the main international traveling hubs. To inspire your next trip, Discover Atlanta is one of 30 partners launching a new online destination  at Google Arts & Culture. The site is dedicated to all the city has to offer, from civil rights history to our metropolis of food, our modern-day rap scene, and much more. Check out these 7 things to get started:

1. Dive into the history

• Experience Atlanta’s rich history of the civil rights movement with Georgia Public Broadcasting’s story of movement leaders and see an exhibiton John Lewis with the National Center for Civil and Human Rights.
• Meet Georgians who fought for human rights, like Rosalynn Carter’s advocacy for women’s rights with Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and Museum, and Jewish pilot Evelyn Greenblatt Howren with the Breman Jewish Heritage Museum.

2. Meet the artists

• MINT will introduce you to up-and-coming artists like Caleb Jamel Brown, Atlanta Contemporary shines the spotlight on outsider artists like Charles Williams, and High Museum of Art points you toward the Atlantan artists you’ve got to know.  Don’t forget to dive into Fahamu Pecou’s original painting as a tribute to the city.

3. Explore the neighborhoods

• Let local radio station WABE take you on a tour through the city’s neighborhoods, discover community murals with Living Walls, and take a breather in Atlanta’s urban oasis with Atlanta Botanical Garden.

4. Discover the museums

• The city’s universities hold extraordinary art, with Hale Woodruff linocuts from Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, public art on Clark Atlanta’s campus, and Albrecht Durer prints at Emory’s Carlos Museum.
• Step inside Hammonds House Museum to discover Black art and artists ranging from Romare Bearden to Grace Kisa Nu, or venture to Museum of Design Atlanta to see how social justice and design overlap.

5. Get a taste for the food scene

• Feel at home in the international restaurant hub of Buford Highway with oral histories from restaurateurs and community figures, shared by Southern Foodways Alliance, and discover how the city’s culinary scene combines global and Southern influences with Discover Atlanta

6. Enjoy performing arts and festivals

• Let Atlanta Symphony Orchestra serenade you with their outdoor concert series, catch a pre-Broadway show at Alliance Theatre, step out in the crowd at the AtlantaBeltLine Lantern Parade with ChooseATL, and stop by one of the oldest free jazz festivals in the country.

7. Learn about rap and hip hop

• Most of America’s hip hop, rap, and trap gets it start in Atlanta: go back in time with an iconic record collection thanks to the HipHop2020 Innovation Archive at Georgia Tech, explore paintings of your favorite trap artists from the Trap Music Museum, and listen to experts from Bottom of the Map Podcast dissect the “grind and hustle” of Atlanta’s hip hop.

Want to learn more? Visit g.co/exploreatlanta, or download Google Arts & Culture’s Android or iOS app.

For many publications, including Germany’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (F.A.Z.), subscriptions are increasingly important to maintaining a healthy bottom line. Known for its in-depth coverage, the German-language daily reaches 148 countries and 17.3 million readers each month. F.A.Z. operates what’s known as a freemium paywall. Some articles are free, while others can only be accessed with a paid subscription. Those subscriptions generate crucial revenue, so to continue producing quality news, F.A.Z. needs its paywall to convert as many readers as possible into subscribers.

According to Nico Wilfer, Chief Product Officer at F.A.Z., subscriptions are highly important due to their business goal to achieve 300,000 sustainable digital subscribers by 2025. Together with the Google News Initiative, F.A.Z were able to realize some of its innovative project ideas, and thereby got closer to reaching the goal.

F.A.Z. established an artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML)-driven solution for one of their most critical areas of their business: subscriptions. The tool, developed with the support of the Google News Initiative, delivers their editors predictions on which articles will work best behind the paywall.

The past six months have seen some of the most widespread and alarming cyber attacks against our digital infrastructure in history — against public utilities, private sector companies, government entities and people living in democracies around the world. Attacks by nation-states and criminals are increasingly brazen and effective, penetrating even widely used products and services that are supposed to keep you safe.

We are deeply concerned by these trends. Security is the cornerstone of our product strategy, and we’ve spent the last decade building infrastructure and designing products that implement security at scale: every day Gmail blocks more than 100 million phishing attempts that never reach you. Google Play Protect scans over 100 billion apps for malware and other issues. We strive to deliver the most trusted cloudin the industry.  And we have dedicated teams like Project Zero who focus on finding and fixing vulnerabilities across the web to make the internet safer for all of us. 

Our security-first approach builds on awareness of an evolving threat environment, industry-wide information sharing, and the leadership of the international security community. We welcome growing efforts by governments around the world to address cybersecurity challenges. The recent cyber attacks create an opportunity to improve international cooperation and collaboration on areas of common concern. 

In the United States, we are committed to supporting the most recent White House Cybersecurity Executive Order, which makes critical strides to improve America’s cyber defenses in three key areas: 

Modernization and security innovation 

One of the most promising aspects of the U.S. government’s approach is to set agencies and departments on a path to modernize security practices and strengthen cyber defenses across the federal government. We strongly support modernizing computing systems, making security simple and scalable by default, and adopting best practices like zero trust frameworks. As we saw with SolarWinds and the Microsoft Exchange attacks, proprietary systems and restrictions on interoperability and data portability can amplify a network’s vulnerability, helping attackers scale up their efforts. Being tied to a single legacy system also keeps public sector agencies and businesses from taking advantage of the latest cloud-based security solutions. 

Modern systems create the ability to make frequent security updates and changes safely, a critical part of cyber-defense for both the government and private sector. If we are going to solve big security problems, we need to move beyond security band-aids to eliminating entire classes of vulnerabilities, like the risk of clicking on bad links. 

Secure software development

The U.S. government’s call to action to secure software development practices could bring about the most significant progress on cybersecurity in a decade and will likely have a significant long-term impact on government risk postures. 

At Google, we’ve emphasized securing the software supply chain and we’ve long built technologies and advocated for standards that enhance the integrity and security of software. We continue to work with the U.S. Commerce Department on these issues and support their effort to develop and share best practices. 

Public-private partnerships

In the last few weeks, ransomware attacks have targeted our schools, hospitals, oil pipelines and food supply. Meaningful improvement in cybersecurity will require the public and private sectors to work together in areas like sharing information on cyber threats; developing a comprehensive, defensive security posture to protect against ransomware; and coordinating how they identify and invest in next-generation security tools. 

We are committed to advancing our collective cybersecurity. We have had to block many attacks, including some from nation-states.  Those experiences have given us insights into what works in practice, so our government and private-sector customers don’t have to tackle these issues on their own or depend on the same enterprise technology that created the issues in the first place. Governments need industry-wide support and we are ready and willing to do our part.

We look forward to expanding our work with the United States and other governments, as well as with private sector partners, to develop security technologies and standards that make us all safer. 

Editor’s note:  Rachel Hislop is the Editor in Chief of Okayplayer, which represents the innovative, artistic and progressive voice of black culture through the amplification of music, art, film and politics.

In December of 2019, I was onstage at a Google News conference in Chicago giving a short presentation about creating stories for diverse audiences. I wanted to introduce Okayplayer’s approach towards telling stories about marginalized communities to the room of small to midsize publishers. My thesis was straightforward: If you want to change the story, you have to change the storyteller. The following months would prove me right: There’s a very real need to find new storytellers.

Nearly 200 counties in the United States do not have a local news publication — this means nearly 3 million people nationwide are very likely to be unaware of what’s happening in their communities. Publications, journalists, and credible news accessibility are all destabilized when access to local stories is limited.

It was clear that there needed to be some innovation around how newsrooms get stories out the door, and how new bylines — of those most qualified to tell the stories of their communities — got on our pages. 

With bootstrapped budgets and disappearing resources due to archaic advertising models, getting new voices on the page is a difficult task for newsrooms. The pandemic and resulting lockdown also limited mobility and made people more reliant on community news. The social justice protests last summer are a perfect example: We saw cities like Minneapolis and Louisville, Ky. become hubs for stories with global impact while publications scrambled to get more diverse voices on their pages.

One of the main complaints about representation in media is finding journalists from diverse backgrounds with differing world views. This is the problem Okayplayer focused on as a recipient of the Google News Initiative Innovation Challenge — we used the support to address the decline of on-the-ground reporting opportunities for local journalists. In addition to targeting the issues affecting our newsroom, we wanted to focus on the industry-wide need for revenue model innovation that amplifies new voices and local stories. From that, The Byline Project was born.

The Byline Project is a completely free digital tool that empowers small and mid-size publishers and local storytellers to help bring local reporting back to their communities while connecting the work of storytellers to financial support from a broader digital audience.

The Byline Project is open-source software that publishers can install into their WordPress platform. It will streamline the reporting process, starting with receiving pitches from writers, photographers and creators, and take editors all the way through to the moment a story goes live. It will also integrate with industry-standard collaboration Google products — like Google Docs. And once stories are published, the online community can financially support content creators directly by tipping writers.

For writers and storytellers,The Byline Project provides direct access to editors who are accepting pitches. It also provides a centralized hub where they can collaborate on projects as well as the previously mentioned capability to directly earn money for their work from readers.

We hope The Byline Project can support a community-driven local reporting landscape on Okayplayer’s pages, while giving small and mid-size publishers like ourselves the tools to do the same.

Journalists can begin submitting pitches to Okayplayer via thebylineproject.com. Local news publishers can learn more about installing The Byline Project software for their news platforms by visiting TheBylineProject.com.

Android provides people with more choice than any other mobile platform. People can freely choose which apps they use, download and set as default — and research shows that Europeans understand how to easily switch search engines should they wish. Android also enables thousands of developers and manufacturers to build successful businesses.

We have been in constructive discussions with the European Commission for many years about how to promote even more choice on Android devices, while ensuring that we can continue to invest in, and provide, the Android platform for free for the long term. 

We complied with a 2018 ruling that required us to distribute Search separately from Google Play. In consultation with the Commission, we then went even further by introducing a promotional opportunity for search apps and browsers and, subsequently, a choice screen requiring Android users to choose a default search provider. In both instances, we balanced introducing additional choice for device manufacturers and users with changes to our commercial terms. 

Following further feedback from the Commission, we are now making some final changes to the Choice Screen including making participation free for eligible search providers. We will also be increasing the number of search providers shown on the screen. These changes will come into effect from September this year on Android devices.

We have always believed in offering people and businesses choice and competing on the merits of our services. And we know that people choose Google because it’s helpful; not because there are no alternatives. That’s why we will continue to invest in Google Search and Android to make them the most helpful products available, and we appreciate the open dialogue with the European Commission on these areas. 

For further details, visit https://www.android.com/choicescreen/.