Category "notizie dai blog"

If you’re hoping to attract new advertisers and earn the most value from your first-party data, it’s critical to explain what makes your audiences special. But it often takes technical skills or data expertise to develop insights that add order and meaning to your data. 

To help simplify this process and increase the value of publishers’ first-party data, in the coming weeks we’ll be launching Audience Explorer for partners using Google Ad Manager’s Audience Solutions — a suite of premium features that enable publishers to ingest, build, activate and now analyze first-party audience segments within the platform. 

Audience Explorer was built to help publishers better understand and activate their first-party audience data. Without needing advanced tools or technical capabilities, publishers will be able to analyze their audience segments, develop enhanced narratives about their data and optimize their monetization strategies for both reservation and Programmatic Direct deals.

Easing access to audience insights

Audience Explorer delivers new dashboards and improved workflows that help publishers who are investing in first-party data strategies more easily understand their audiences. To ensure the new capabilities met the needs of publishers, we worked with over a dozen global partners to help develop and test the new solution. 

“Macy’s Media Network uses a data-driven approach to connect our shoppers with brands through a wide range of digital advertising services. Ad Manager’s Audience Explorer tool helps us manage and scale our first party audiences to effectively plan and deliver targeted media for our advertising partners.”

– Melanie Zimmermann, Vice President, Macy’s Media Network, Macy’s 

“Partnering with Ad Manager on the development of Audience Explorer has been important for our first-party data initiatives. With more than 100 million monthly active users across our 1,200+ communities, the new dashboard will help us better understand our audiences and package our inventory in new, compelling ways for our advertiser clients.”

– David Domitrovic, Director, Data Strategy & Analytics, VerticalScope

Integrating the feedback we received, Audience Explorer allows publishers to visualize and interpret their first-party data in a variety of different ways. Partners can now explore the composition and behavior of a single audience segment, compare two segments side by side, or even overlap segments to better understand the similarities or differences in membership. Here are a few different ways publishers can benefit from Audience Explorer.

Scorecard table

When an Ad Manager user navigates to Audience Solutions in the platform, they’ll now be able to click on the title of an audience segment to open the new Audience Explorer dashboard. At the top of the dashboard, users will see the segment’s Scorecard. The Scorecard provides a quick snapshot of an audience segment over a specified period of time. High-level metrics in the Scorecard, like total unique identifiers or total ad impressions, can help publishers quickly understand which segments offer enough scale for the deals they’re working on.

It’s far from just fun and (video) games:  esports is a rapidly-growing $1.5 billion industry.In 2020 alone, there was a 70% increase in the number of eSports viewers in the U.S., and it’s expected to total 474 million viewers by the end of this year.There are a range of lucrative careers in the competitive video gaming industry:  professional player, announcer, coach, tournament organizer and game developer and designer, just to name a few. But not everyone is exposed to these opportunities. 

As a lifelong gaming enthusiast and an educator with a PhD in computer science, I was concerned that Black and Brown school-aged kids and older youth weren’t being drawn to work in technology in general and esports in particular. While Black and Latinx youth in the U.S. spend more time per day on both mobile and console games than white youth, they make up less than 6% of the professional video game industry as adults. So my husband, Erich, and I founded Pharaoh’s Conclave (PCX), a platform, league and apprenticeship program that creates pathways for meaningful careers and wealth generation for Black and Brown youth.  

Even pre-pandemic, the adoption of cloud services was on the rise as organisations looked to drive digital transformation for business resilience and innovation. The impact of COVID-19 has only served to accelerate this momentum. As we continue to support the digital future of businesses, we are launching our second Australian Cloud region in Melbourne, Victoria. 

In 2017 we launched our first Cloud region in Sydney and, since then, we have continued to invest and expand across Australia in an effort to support the digital future of businesses. According to AlphaBeta, Google Cloud delivers almost AU$3.2 billion in annual gross benefits to business and consumers in Australia, including AU$686 million to our customers and AU$698 million to our partners.

The Melbourne Cloud region represents one part of our continued expansion in cloud infrastructure to support Australia’s digital future, and is a strong reflection of our commitment to enabling our Cloud customers and partners to continue growing, innovating, and driving digital transformation forward in the region.

Of the launch, Victorian Minister for Government Services Danny Pearson said, “We welcome Google’s investment in local cloud infrastructure that will support the growing cloud requirements of Victorian businesses.”

Our investment in local cloud infrastructure

Melbourne joins the existing 26 Google Cloud regions connected via our high-performance global network, helping customers benefit from low latency and high performance of their cloud-based workloads and leverage the cleanest cloud in the industry. Through our second Cloud region in Australia, customers will benefit from improved business continuity planning with distributed, secure infrastructure needed to meet IT and business requirements for disaster recovery, all while maintaining data sovereignty in-country.

Designed for high availability, the region opens with three availability zones to protect against service disruptions; we’re the first hyperscaler to provide this capability in Melbourne today. It offers a portfolio of key products, including Compute Engine, Google Kubernetes Engine, Cloud Bigtable, Cloud Spanner and BigQuery.

We also continue to invest in expanding connectivity across the Australia and New Zealand region by working with partners to establish subsea cables, including INDIGO and JGA South, and points of presence in major cities including Sydney, Melbourne, Perth, Canberra, Brisbane, and Auckland. We also work with interconnect partners to extend the reach of our secure network.

Helping customers in the era of the transformation cloud

Navigating the past year has been challenging for Australian organisations as they grapple with changing customer demands and greater economic uncertainty. Technology has played a critical role in managing these changes, and we’ve been fortunate to partner with and serve people, companies and government institutions to help them adapt, including Australia Post, Bendigo and Adelaide Bank, and Optus. Hear more about what they have to say here. 

Today we are publishing a paper that draws from our decades-long experience working with news publishers and journalists. It offers some ideas for constructive paths forward to foster the sustainability of the quality journalism that informs and strengthens communities, and elevates the essential stories in our lives. This paper includes possible areas for public policy support, such as incentive structures, innovation programs and projects to share best practices. While this is by no means an exhaustive list of ideas, we are publishing it to contribute to the wider discussion.

Supporting journalism has always been important to Google. As a company whose mission focuses on access to information, and whose success depends in large part on having a diverse open ecosystem of quality information, we are committed to helping find a path to a sustainable future for journalism. It’s why 20 years ago, we built Google News to help connect people to stories that impact their daily lives. We launched the Google News Initiative to support news publishers in their transition to a digital world; we do this through tools, technology and significant financial support for both existing newsrooms and new, diverse online news outlets and projects. More recently, we launched Google News Showcase, through which we pay publishers to create and curate quality content for a new online news experience. 

Quality journalism enables communities to learn and share essential information, establish shared, accurate understandings of key public developments, and hold elected officials and institutions to account. And in this information age it has never been more essential for democratic discourse and social well-being. But digitization has challenged the underlying commercial model. That said, ensuring a sustainable, vibrant future for quality journalism needs to be done thoughtfully, and as a collective endeavor. 

Sensible public policy can be a key component to addressing these challenges; such policy will work best if it is informed by a robust dialogue among a diverse range of stakeholders including publishers, journalists, policymakers, civil society and the private sector. We must identify the underlying challenges and consider novel solutions. 

In the paper we are publishing today, we discuss three foundational proposals that we believe could help inform public policy approaches to supporting the future of quality journalism:

1. Convening cross-sector experts to identify focus areas and collaborate on shared solutions;
2. Investing in newsroom innovation and experimentation to identify and support sustainable business models; and 
3. Providing support for legacy institutions as they go through the digital transformation. 

There are no easy solutions to the complex set of challenges facing the news industry today, which is why we have been working for years to support legacy newsrooms and new entrants focused on providing local news and quality journalism.  The challenge is urgent – and across society we must work together to create sustainable solutions to these issues.

The experiences and lessons we describe in this paper would not have been possible without the valuable input we’ve received from the news partners we have worked with and learned from over the years. While there may be no simple solution, we are eager to listen, learn more and help drive innovation to support a successful public policy approach that results in a vibrant journalism ecosystem.

Sundar sent the following email to Google employees earlier this morning. The email has been edited to remove internal links. 

Hi everyone,

I hope you are all taking good care. Since the beginning of the pandemic, we’ve put the wellbeing of our Google community front and center. We’ve done this while also taking care of our customers and partners, launching over 200 new products and features to help people and businesses navigate this difficult time. 

In March of 2020, we made the early decision to send employees home to slow down the spread of COVID. Since then, we’ve extended our Carer’s Leave coverage to help employees care for loved ones. We’ve continued to cover the full wages of on campus workers who couldn’t perform their jobs because of office closures. And, we’ve made sure that Googlers and our extended workforce have access to vaccines as soon as they are available locally. Additionally, thanks to the generosity of Googlers and support from Google.org, we’ve helped Gavi to fully vaccinate over 1 million people in low-and middle-income countries globally. 

Even as the virus continues to surge in many parts of the world, it’s encouraging to see very high vaccination rates for our Google community in areas where vaccines are widely available. This is a big reason why we felt comfortable opening some of our offices to employees who wanted to return early. And I have to say it’s been great to see Googlers brainstorming around whiteboards and enjoying meals in cafes again in the many offices that have already re-opened globally. 

Getting vaccinated is one of the most important ways to keep ourselves and our communities healthy in the months ahead. As we look toward a global return to our offices, I wanted to share two key updates:

• First, anyone coming to work on our campuses will need to be vaccinated. We’re rolling this policy out in the U.S. in the coming weeks and will expand to other regions in the coming months. The implementation will vary according to local conditions and regulations, and will not apply until vaccines are widely available in your area. You’ll get guidance from your local leads about how this will affect you, and we’ll also share more details on an exceptions process for those who cannot be vaccinated for medical or other protected reasons.

• Second, we are extending our global voluntary work-from-home policy through October 18.We are excited that we’ve started to re-open our campuses and encourage Googlers who feel safe coming to sites that have already opened to continue doing so. At the same time, we recognize that many Googlers are seeing spikes in their communities caused by the Delta variant and are concerned about returning to the office. This extension will allow us time to ramp back into work while providing flexibility for those who need it. We’ll continue watching the data carefully and let you know at least 30 days in advance before transitioning into our full return to office plans. For those of you with special circumstances, we will soon be sharing expanded temporary work options that will allow you to apply to work from home through the end of 2021. We’re also extending Expanded Carer’s Leave through the end of the year for parents and caregivers.

I know that many of you continue to deal with very challenging circumstances related to the pandemic. While there is much that remains outside of our control, I’m proud of the way we continue to take care of each other while helping people, businesses and communities through these difficult times.  

I hope these steps will give everyone greater peace of mind as offices reopen. Seeing Googlers together in the offices these past few weeks filled me with optimism, and I’m looking forward to brighter days ahead. 

-Sundar

Between 2020 and 2050, Africa’s population is expected to double, adding 950 million more people to its urban areas alone. However, according to 2018 figures, a scarcity of affordable housing in many African cities has forced over half of the city dwellers in Sub-Saharan Africa to live in informal settlements. And in rural areas, many also occupy makeshift structures due to widespread poverty.

These shelters have remained largely undetectable using traditional monitoring tools. Machine learning, computer vision and remote sensing have come some way in recognizing buildings and roads, but when it comes to denser neighborhoods, it becomes much harder to distinguish small and makeshift buildings. 

Why is this an issue? Because when preparing a humanitarian response, forecasting transportation needs, or planning basic services, being able to accurately map the built environment – which allows us to ascertain population density – is absolutely key.

Enter Google’s Open Buildings

Google’s Open Buildings is a new open access dataset containing the locations and geometry of buildings across most of Africa. From Lagos’ Makoko settlement to Dodoma’s refugee camps, millions of previously invisible buildings have popped up in our dataset. This improved building data helps refine the understanding of where people and communities live, providing actionable information for state and non-state actors looking to provide services from sanitation to education and vaccination.

Open Buildings uses AI to provide a digital footprint of buildings. This includes producing polygons with the outlines of at least 500 million buildings across the African continent, the majority of which are less than 20 square meters. The full dataset encompasses 50 countries.

The data provides the exact location and polygon outline of each building, its size, a confidence score for it being detected as a valid building and a Plus Code. There is, however, no information about the type of building, its street address, or any identifying data. We have also excluded sensitive areas such as conflict zones to protect vulnerable populations.

Satellite mapping using AI 

The Open Buildings dataset was generated by using a model trained to detect buildings using satellite imagery from the African continent. The information for the buildings detected is then saved in CSV files which are available to download. The technical details of the Open Buildings dataset, including usage and tutorials, are available on the dataset website and the Google AI blog.

How will this improve planning?

There are many important ways in which this data can be used, including — but not limited to — the following:

Population mapping: Building footprints are a key ingredient for estimating population density. This information is vital to planning for services for communities. 

Humanitarian response: To plan the response to a flood, drought, or other natural disaster.

Environmental science: Knowledge of settlement density is useful for understanding the human impact on the natural environment. 

Addressing systems: In many areas, buildings do not have formal addresses. This can make it difficult for people to access social benefits and economic opportunities. Building footprint data can help with the rollout of digital addressing systems such asPlus Codes.

Vaccination planning: Knowing the density of population and settlements helps to anticipate demand for vaccines and the best locations for facilities. This data is also useful for precision epidemiology, as well as prevention efforts such as mosquito net distribution.

Statistical indicators: Buildings data can be used to help calculate statistical indicators for national planning, such as the numbers of houses in the catchment areas of schools and health centers, mean travel distances to the nearest hospital or demand forecast for transportation systems.

Google’s AI Center in Accra

This project was led by our team at the AI Research Center in Accra, Ghana. The center was launched in 2019 to bring together top machine learning researchers and engineers dedicated to AI research and its applications. The research team has already been improving Google Maps with AI, adding 120 million buildings and 228,000 km of roads across Africa to Maps in the last year. This work is part of our broader AI for Social Good efforts.