fidzu : Google

Across the web, there are millions of datasets about nearly any subject that interests you. If you're looking to buy a puppy, you could find datasets compiling complaints of puppy buyers or studies on puppy cognition. Or if you like skiing, you could find data on revenue of ski resorts or injury rates and participation numbers. Dataset Search has indexed almost 25 million of these datasets, giving you a single place to search for datasets and find links to where the data is. Over the past year, people have tried it out and provided feedback, and now Dataset Search is officially out of beta.

What's new in Dataset Search?

Based on what we've learned from the early adopters of Dataset Search, we've added new features. You can now filter the results based on the types of dataset that you want (e.g., tables, images, text), or whether the dataset is available for free from the provider. If a dataset is about a geographic area, you can see the map. Plus, the product is now available on mobile and we've significantly improved the quality of dataset descriptions. One thing hasn't changed however: anybody who publishes data can make their datasets discoverable in Dataset Search by using an open standard (schema.org) to describe the properties of their dataseton their own web page.

We have also learned how many different types of people look for data. There are academic researchers, finding data to develop their hypotheses (e.g., try oxytocin), students looking for free data in a tabular format, covering the topic of their senior thesis (e.g., try incarceration rates with the corresponding filters), business analysts and data scientists looking for information on mobile apps or fast food establishments, and so on. There is data on all of that! And what do our users ask? The most common queries include "education," "weather," "cancer," "crime," "soccer," and, yes, "dogs".

What datasets can you find in Dataset Search?

Dataset Search also gives us a snapshot of the data out there on the Web. Here are a few highlights. The largest topics that the datasets cover are geosciences, biology, and agriculture. The majority of governments in the world publish their data and describe it with schema.org. The United States leads in the number of open government datasets available, with more than 2 million. And the most popular data formats? Tables-you can find more than 6 million of them on Dataset Search.

The number of datasets that you can find in Dataset Search continues to grow. If you have a dataset on your site and you describe it using schema.org, an open standard, others can find it in Dataset Search. If you know that a dataset exists, but you can't find it in Dataset Search, ask the provider to add the schema.org descriptions and others will be able to learn about their dataset as well.

What's next?

Dataset Search is out of beta, but we will continue to improve the product, whether or not it has the "beta" next to it. If you haven't already, take Dataset Search for a spin, and tell us what you think.

Remember that chicken parmesan recipe you found online last week? Or that rain jacket you discovered when you were researching camping gear? Sometimes when you find something on Search, you're not quite ready to take the next step, like cooking a meal or making a purchase. And if you're like me, you might not save every page you want to revisit later.

Today, we're launching some changes to Collections in Search to make it easier to jump back into your task without digging through your search history. Last year, we created activity cards in Search to make your search history more useful, and to help you pick up where you left off. Using AI, Collections in the Google app and mobile web now groups similar pages you've visited from Search related to activities like cooking, shopping and hobbies. You can choose to save these suggested collections so you can come back to them later.

These suggestions can be accessed any time from the Collections tab in the Google app (new on Android!), or through the Google.com side menu on the mobile web. And if you don't want Google to suggest collections for you, you can control this in your settings, which you can visit right from Collections in the Google app.

Once you have a collection, Google can help you make better, faster decisions by showing you what you might want to check out next. Based on what you've saved, you'll see related content behind the "Find More" button within a collection.

There's also a new collaboration feature that lets you share and work on a collection with others. For example, if you're planning a party with friends, you might want to share the recipes you're considering, or the decorations you want to use so you can make a decision together. When sharing a collection, you'll have the option to let others view it or to let others make changes. And you can always make it private again if you don't want to share it anymore.

The ability to share or collaborate on a collection is rolling out now globally; the ability to see related content will launch in the coming weeks. Suggested collections will start to appear for U.S. English users this week. We'll look to bring these features to more languages and regions over time.

Whether you're planning an event, plotting a garden renovation or tracking down tips for tidying up, jump start your next project with Collections.

Editor's note: This week, we're at BETT in London, where you can visit us at booth SE30. If you're #NotAtBett, follow along on Twitter and Facebook.

In classrooms around the world, educators rely on Chromebooks to keep their students' data secure. Students like them because they are fast, easy to use and built for collaboration. And because documents are all stored in the cloud, students can share devices and access their work from anywhere. Most importantly, Chromebook apps and features help teachers customize their lessons for students.

New features in the Chromebook App Hub

When teachers customize learning experiences, students can learn in a way that works best for them. That's why we created the Chromebook App Hub.

The Chromebook App Hub lets educators and developers showcase and discover Chromebook apps and ideas for classroom activities. Since we launched the Chromebook App Hub, educators and developers have contributed over 270 apps and classroom ideas, and counting.

Here are some new features that make it easier for educators to find what they need on the Chromebook App Hub:

• Search for your favorite apps and idea, and share them with other educators

• New filter options that allow teachers to search by class subject, device feature, and Google integrations to find the best app to enhance their lessons

• 20+ apps optimized for Chromebook tablets, and the ability to filter apps by privacy laws like GDPR and COPPA

Better access to touch-based learning

Whether it's tablets like the new Lenovo 10e, Chromebooks with touchscreens, or devices that work with styluses, educators are increasingly turning to touchscreen capabilities to support varied learning styles and encourage student creativity.

And with the new filter functionality in the Chromebook App Hub, it's now easier to find touch-optimized apps like:

• Canva for Education: With drag-and-drop design tools, classroom-friendly content and templates, teachers and students can use Canva to create posters, worksheets, infographics, reports and animated presentations.

• Adobe Spark: With features like drag-and-drop and pinch-to-zoom, students can use Spark to easily create narrated videos, writing assignments, presentations, flyers, newsletters, portfolios, and web pages.

• Nearpod: A student engagement platform with ready-to-run interactive lessons that are touch-optimized for Chromebooks and tablets. Within Google Slides, educators can incorporate Nearpod features, while the Google Chrome extension enables teachers to easily access the Nearpod library within Google Classroom.

• Kahoot: Create, host and play multiple choice quizzes. Teachers can take advantage of Google's single sign-on for log-in and account creation as well as share homework challenges with students easily through Google Classroom.

Supporting diverse learners

The Chromebook App Hub includes apps that support learners with impaired vision or hearing, physical disabilities, and diverse learning styles.

Here are a few available:

• WriQ from Texthelp: With their own personalized mini dashboard, students can track how long they can write for before stopping, and positive nudge notifications spur them to do better each day.

• Clicker Apps, from Crick Software provide customizable support to emergent, developing, and struggling readers and writers. During Bett this year, Crick is also launching a brand new Clicker Writer app.

• Scanning Pens: The ReaderPen reads scanned text aloud or via earphones, aiding learners who need extra reading support. Students can scan the text directly into a Google Doc with the scan-to-file feature and upload recorded audio onto a Chromebook or Android device to allow for easy access when reviewing.

• Wizkids AppWriter: An all-in-one accessibility tool for Chrome that offers support with English as a Foreign Language (EFL), writing and pronouncing words in Modern Foreign Languages (MFL), and assists with everyday literacy needs. Now, AppWriter also includes a new and intuitive speech-to-text synthesizer. Find out more during Bett and register for a free trial.

Editor's note: This week, we're at BETT in London, where you can visit us at booth SE30. If you're #NotAtBett, follow along on Twitter and Facebook.

My favorite part about being on the education team here at Google is talking to teachers about how their classrooms are evolving and how Chromebooks give their students a voice in the world. For generations, "learning" meant memorizing and repeating other peoples' ideas. Today, with the help of classroom computers and creativity apps, schools are reinventing themselves as studios for students to create and share their own ideas. Where students used to be limited to reading and writing, they can now design, record, compose, code, prototype, and share their ideas using a range of digital media tools.

Today, we're updating our collection of creativity apps for Chromebooks-tools for the next generation of authors, filmmakers, journalists, artists and boardroom visionaries to capture and broadcast their ideas to teachers, parents, and students around the world.

Like every good toolbox, our collection offers a range of apps for students across all grades and subjects and is designed to help all types of learners express themselves in their own way:

This collection of six creativity tools comes with the ability to instantly deploy to thousands of students with our new app licensing system in Google Admin Console.

For students and teachers, this means no more usernames and passwords; every app in the collection uses Google Sign-In to quickly and securely confirm the user's app license and unlock all features and content.

For school administrators, this means you don't have to manually roster apps through spreadsheet uploads or server syncs. You simply turn app licenses on or off for organizations in your domain and monitor usage over time-all from Google Admin Console. When students change classes or move grades at the end of the year, app licenses return to the pool to be used by the next student. Finally, since schools can purchase app licenses from their Chromebook provider, you no longer have to approve new vendors or create new purchase orders for every app.

Altogether, we hope our new app licensing system will save admins, teachers, and students both time and headaches-and put a whole lot of megaphones… er "creativity tools" into the hands of imaginative kids around the world. We can't wait to see what you create.

Coming soon, you'll be able to purchase these creativity apps for Chromebooks through your Chromebook provider. Stay tuned at g.co/edu/creativityapps for more information in the coming months.

To learn more about these apps and hear from teachers using them in the classroom, check out our playlist on YouTube. And for more on these apps and ideas on how to use them, check out the Chromebook App Hub.

If you're an educational software developer and interested in participating in Google's app licensing system, please fill out this form.

Editor's note: This week, we're at BETT in London, where you can visit us at booth SE30. If you're #NotAtBett, follow along on Twitter and Facebook.

On the Google for Education team, we think a lot about how to make sure the technology we're delivering and schools are using is sustainable. Devices shouldn't have to be constantly refreshed or replaced after just a couple of years in the classroom. They should be used year after year and consistent updates should continue to expand functionality.

We launched Chromebooks 10 years ago to reimagine what personal computers could do, so we set out to create devices that champion speed, simplicity, and security. Thanks to feedback from administrators, we created the Chrome Education Upgrade, which allows IT admins working in schools to have more control over the hundreds of thousands of devices they manage. To make sure Chromebooks are packed with the latest and greatest and to build long-term value into each device, we automatically send security updates and features to devices every 6 weeks, and we work with Chromebook manufacturers to make sure schools get the most out of them.

We believe in making devices that are more sustainable and packed with features that empower teachers and students to get the most out of their teaching and learning while delivering value for schools around the world. So today, we're sharing new updates to our Automatic Update Expiration date policy, new devices for 2020 with longer life and more capabilities including touch screens and improved UI, and a new price for the Chrome Education Upgrade.

Forty million students and educators now use Chromebooks, and we're still listening to them every step of the way.

Simplifying IT for schools

Chrome Education Upgrade unlocks the full capabilities of Chrome OS and frees up IT resources. When IT admins are given tools to streamline school management, they can work with teachers to simplify workloads. This means that students get more time and attention from educators.

Managed access puts admins in control of what users can access and how the devices can be used. It simplifies device deployment with the help of a cloud-based command center where admins can manage settings and oversee all devices in their fleet. It also provides advanced security controls, which allow IT admins to disable devices remotely, set up persistent enrollment to prevent unrestricted access or set data to remove at the end of each session.

Automatic updates are getting a refresh

Today, we're announcing changes to the Chrome OS Automatic Update (AUE) policy. Based on feedback from customers, Chromebook manufacturers and partners, we are now providing security and feature updates for a longer period.

Automatic updates provide important fixes for security, stability, and new features. With two copies of the operating system on each device, one can be silently updated without disrupting your work-or class! However, at a certain point, we can no longer push updates or guarantee a device's hardware and security.

When we first launched Chromebooks, devices only received three years of automatic updates. Over the years, we've been able to increase that to over six. Last fall, we extended AUE on many devices currently for sale, in many cases adding an extra year or more before they expire. This will help schools better select which devices to invest in and provide more time to transition from older devices.

And now, devices launching in 2020 and beyond will receive automatic updates for even longer. The new Lenovo 10e Chromebook Tablet and Acer Chromebook 712 will both receive automatic updates until June 2028. So if you're considering refreshing your fleet or investing in new devices, now is a great time. For a full list of AUE dates, see the Automatic Update Expiration policy on our Help Center.

With 20+ new devices for education, extended years of automatic updates on more devices and more than 200 controls for admins and counting in Google Admin Console, Chromebooks can provide a stronger return on investment than ever before. To support this greater lifespan, we've increased the list price of the Chrome Education Upgrade from $30 to $38. You can purchase Chrome Education Upgrade through your reseller to manage your devices today.

The new and improved Google Admin Console

We recently rolled out improvements to the admin console, including 10 times faster page loads and search functionality. In Google Admin Console, you'll see a new Devices page where you can search and filter by device, and see the Automatic Update Expiration dates for the devices in your school. All app management for users, browsers, managed guest sessions, and kiosks is now part of a single page where you can manage apps and extensions from the Google Play Store, Chrome Web Store, and self-hosting side by side. You can also pin websites to the taskbar on Chrome OS and provision progressive web apps (PWAs) for your users⁠-all you need to enter is the URL. And in the Settings page, you can manage native printing options more closely with new controls for setting defaults and restrictions on duplex, color and more.

New devices for 2020

Chromebooks are designed for enhanced learning, and the newest devices coming in 2020 are no exception.

The ASUS Chromebook Flip C214 and Lenovo 500e Chromebook come with a rugged design, durable touchscreens, built-in styluses and a 360-degree hinge so students can create and explore in new ways. And with both a user-facing and a world-facing camera, students can collaborate in Hangouts Meet, then flip their screens around to shoot videos for class projects.

Devices like the Pixelbook Go and the new Lenovo Chromebook 10e tablet give teachers and students access to tons of creative tools. Google Slides and Docs make it easy to work together with podcasting, video or coding apps, all of which can be found on the Chromebook App Hub.

Editor's note: This week, we're at BETT in London, where you can visit us at booth SE30. If you're #NotAtBett, follow along on Twitter and Facebook.

As students grow, their learning needs change. At Google, we're committed to supporting learners throughout their development with tools for student-directed learning and personalized feedback.

That's why today, we're making our latest Classroom tools, originality reports and rubrics, available to everyone who uses G Suite for Education.

Empowered learning and accelerated grading

Today's students have more information at their fingertips than ever before. As part of Google's mission, we are invested in making the world's information universally accessible and useful, especially for curious students. We want to make sure students have the tools to not only find information, but also learn from it and make it their own.

Educators also face a big challenge in helping students keep their work authentic, and they don't always have the tools to easily evaluate which passages are students' own. Often the best tool available to instructors is to manually copy and paste passages into Google Search to check if work is original. We're simplifying the process by integrating Search into our assignment and grading tools.

Originality reports are a new assignment feature that can help students improve their writing, while also providing instructors with a fast and easy way to verify academic integrity without leaving the grading interface. When instructors turn on originality reports for an assignment, students can check for missed citations or poor paraphrasing before they turn something in, and instructors automatically get an originality report to view while grading.

Over the next month, originality reports will roll out to all Classroom instructors whose language is set to English. With this launch, instructors can enable originality reports on three assignments per class for free. Instructors whose admins have purchased G Suite Enterprise for Education get unlimited access to originality reports, as well as other premium tools.

Upcoming features

We're also announcing two new betas to originality reports for the top-requested features from our instructors. With student-to-student matches, available toG Suite Enterprise for Educationinstitutions, we're expanding originality reports to include checks against previous student submissions. With this, instructors can receive originality reports with student-to-student matches within the same school along with the usual web matches. This allows schools to have their own database of student submissions-owned by your school, not Google. Once this feature is enabled for your school, student submissions on assignments that use originality reports will automatically be added to the school's repository and administrators will be able to add or delete files manually. There's also a beta for international languages to enable originality reports for those whose language is set to Spanish, Portuguese and French.

If you use another learning management system, originality reports are also available through our Assignments LTI tool which is currently in beta--stay tuned for availability updates later this year.

Teachers were buzzing [about originality reports], excited by the simplicity and ease of use, and even more so about the accessibility of the tool for students so that they could work alongside them and have meaningful learning conversations. Jonathan Wyeth
Assistant Principal at Green Bay High School, NZ

Enhanced student feedback

Educators often spend a lot of time grading assignments and providing constructive comments to help students grow. They often use rubrics as scoring frameworks to make it easier to evaluate student assignments, set clear expectations and provide actionable feedback.

That's why we launched a beta for rubrics in Google Classroom last June. This streamlined how rubrics are created in Classroom to help educators provide additional transparency around students' grades. Tom Mullaney is a high school Digital Learning Coach in North Carolina who's enrolled in the beta program, and he knows how helpful rubrics can be. "[Rubrics enable] teachers to give much more detailed feedback than just a text comment. Students can now see both what is expected of them and how they did in meeting expectations," Mullaney says. "Rubrics save teachers times in two ways: You can reuse rubrics and you can also duplicate criterion."

Thanks to all of the feedback and feature requests from our beta, today we're making rubrics available to everyone who's using Classroom and Assignments.

With the new rubrics feature, educators can now create a rubric while they create an assignment, reuse rubrics from a previous assignment rather than having to create one from scratch. They can also export and import Classroom rubrics to share them with other instructors, as well as grade student work with a rubric from both the student listing page and Classroom's grading view, where instructors can select rating levels as they review the assignment.

Sync grades across systems

Since Google Classroom launched, administrators and instructors have frequently requested a way to keep student data in sync with their SIS. We listened, and now G Suite administrators can sign up for the beta to sync grades from Google Classroom and select SIS. We're expanding the beta to include schools that use Capita SIMS, Infinite Campus and Skyward SMS 2.0, with more SIS integrations to come.

Many app publishers attempt to maintain stability in their app by not making any changes, despite the constantly evolving mobile ads business. This approach can be detrimental in the long run by causing you to miss out on growth opportunities. Continuously testing new approaches in your app is an essential part of an effective monetization strategy, so we'd like to go over a few examples of tests you can implement now to get you started.

What are some things I can test?

With AdMob, you can test any feature of your app that can be defined with a variable. Here are some experiments you can start with:

Ads alongside in-app purchases

If you currently monetize your app exclusively through in-app purchases (IAPs), testing ads alongside IAPs is a low risk approach that allows you to understand the impact of including another monetization model. For example, game publisher Four Thirty Threeused to rely exclusively on in-app purchases (IAP) for their revenue. They used smart segmentation to divide their users into likely purchasers and likely non-purchasers. This allowed them to remove any risk of harming their IAP revenue by ensuring that ads were only shown to users who did not spend within their app anyway. After serving rewarded ads to non-paying users, their retention, session duration, and revenue increased.

New features

A/B testing can be a great way to gauge your user's reaction to new features before rolling them out to your entire app. For example, Onefootball, a leading soccer app, wanted to test a Top News section in their app's News stream. However, they first wanted to determine whether this potential change would lower revenues. They set up a test with a control group and two exposed groups, which showed them that this proposed change would not hurt revenue. As a result, the feature increased daily engagement by 5 percent, and articles read on the app rose by 6 percent.

Pricing

A/B testing can be an invaluable tool to help determine the best price point for a subscription or in-app purchase. Le Figaro, France's oldest and largest daily newspaper, was looking to increase paying customers and retain paid subscribers. They used Firebase to test different subscription price points, and even found that the largest increase in paid subscriptions was driven after embedding real time interactive infographics into their mobile and web articles.

How can I test it?

If you haven't yet linked AdMob to Firebase and wish to A/B test, we recommend you do so. Integrating Firebase into your AdMob account is simple, and lets you test small changes to your apps without having to push updates. After setting up your account, endless experiments become available to you with just a few clicks. If you'd like a quick summary of what Firebase can do for your AdMob account, check out this YouTube video.

MolenGeek started in 2015 in Molenbeek, Belgium, as a coding school for anyone to learn digital skills. But unlike many other schools, MolenGeek is driven by a social mission of fostering inclusion, integration and community development in this culturally diverse suburb of Brussels.

In five years, it's become a co-working space for young people from all backgrounds, enabling them to network and share their experiences. Out of Molengeek's community of 800 active members, 195 people from predominantly underprivileged backgrounds have gone through entrepreneurship skills training, and 35 new startups have been built and grown out of their incubator program. We've been proud to help support their mission since 2015.

Today, Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and Alphabet, visited MolenGeek to announce an additional Google.org grant of $250,000-over EUR 200,000-to expand its coding school and increase the community's access to new kinds of digital skills training. MolenGeek will use the funds to develop a new six-month content module focused on artificial intelligence and data analytics. This is part of MolenGeek's longer-term plan to open a second hub in Brussels later this year, which will include an incubator dedicated to the needs of AI-focused startups, as well as a six-month AI training program. In addition to funding, Google AI experts will also provide MolenGeek with ongoing mentorship and opportunities for Googlers to volunteer.

"MolenGeek's mission to make sure technology, entrepreneurship, and innovation is accessible to everyone is personal to me, and to the work we do at Google," said Sundar. "Increasingly that means helping people get the skills they need to succeed in a digital world. We're proud to support MolenGeek as it expands its digital trainings, including a new module focused on artificial intelligence, to give more people the tools for success."

"It's important that we offer the younger generations a way to invest in themselves," says Ibrahim Ouassari, co-founder of MolenGeek. "As the momentum is picking up, we are grateful that we can once again count on Google to lend their support and knowledge to the many potential entrepreneurs who look to MolenGeek as a gateway to the tech sector and a springboard for their future careers."

And this grant support is especially important when it comes to AI, one of the most exciting technologies humanity is working on today. We're already seeing its potential to change lives, from helping doctors better detect breast cancer, forecast floods in India, to supporting nonprofits applying AI tools to address issues like illegal logging and plastic waste reduction. To help more Belgian businesses make the most of this technology, we'll be expanding our Machine Learning Checkup tool to small and medium businesses here in Belgium, as well as 10 other markets in Europe.

With such a huge scope for positive change, countries must invest now in reskilling and education. It all starts in communities like Molenbeek, in organizations like this one, who believe not just in technology, but in the people creating it.

Only nine percent of C-level positions-and six percent of CEOs-at European startups are women. Of all the funds raised by European venture capital-backed companies in 2018, a staggering 93 percent went to all-male founding teams. In order to combat this, last year Google for Startups introduced the first Women Founders Residency at our Campus in London-one of seven Campuses around the world-to back women-led startups using technology to tackle key social issues. Founders receive access to Google products, resources, and mentoring to level the playing field for startup success. The program proved so successful that we are now currently accepting applications for the second Women Founders cohort.

To learn more about the Google for Startups Residency, we chatted with Elina Naydenova: biomedical engineer, data scientist and founder ofFeebris, a healthcare startup that graduated from Campus Residency in 2019. Not based in the UK? Explore other Google for Startups places and programs for founders of all backgrounds at startup.google.com.

What inspired you to start found Feebris? What problem are you trying to solve?

Healthcare should be a human right; yet, millions of people can't get the care they need, when they need it. It's unacceptable that in 2019, we can do our communications, our banking, our navigation, our shopping at a touch of a button, but still nearly one million children die of pneumonia because it gets diagnosed too late.

When I realized these deaths can be avoided through early diagnosis, I became obsessed with solving the problem. We set up Feebris so that the most vulnerable patients-children and the elderly-can diagnose pneumonia early. The Feebris AI platform lets anyone capture and interpret important health information in order to identify disease early and monitor conditions in the community. Feebris algorithms paired with sensors, such as digital stethoscopes, can be used by anyone, such as a teacher or a parent, in any remote area to detect issues early, avoid complications and prevent hospitalization.

How did Google for Startups Residency help you achieve your goals?

The most valuable training we received from Residency was how to implement an Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) framework for our startup. When we started Residency, we were going through due diligence with investors, so we worked with a senior Googler to set clear goals. This gave our investors confidence in our ability to map out our journey and identify appropriate milestones, and we went on to close our seed round of £1.1 million. Striking a balance between structure and agility is tremendously important in tech, and even more so for a startup. Residency gave us the right tools to forge a framework that we continue to follow and adapt as we evolve.

Second, the pool of expertise and deep knowledge that Google offers to the Residency startups is second to none. We've been connected with the leading experts in technology, like TensorFlowor ChromeOS, to help us develop core product functionality and our technical infrastructure.

Third, as a health technology startup, credibility is hugely important as we grow our footprint with healthcare providers. Residency provided us with a public platform to share our story and build awareness for the work we are doing, from public speaking opportunities to media articles.

What does Residency offer that is different than a traditional accelerator or other program you've attended?

Support at Campus is personalized to your needs and led by people who have successfully launched and scaled startups. Unlike the one-size-fits-all classroom programs, Residency is focused on unlocking opportunities and removing barriers for each business individually.

What does Google 1:1 mentorship offer you specifically? What were the most helpful takeaways?

Our Google mentor, Vitor Rodriguez, was generous with his time and advice. He has built a career at Google and also worked in a startup, so he understood the challenges we faced. Vitor spent hours with us, thinking through software architecture options and nurturing our ability to make scalable decisions. Vitor was our conduit into the immense pool of Google knowledge. He helped us analyze the problems that we faced and connected us with domain experts who hold essential insights to reach a solution. Vitor also taught us how to conduct highly technical interviews and cut through the wall of jargon that candidates build to reach a true evaluation of their abilities.

Mentorship also helped us recruit some of our key hires. We went in as a team of two, and by the end had grown to six. The Googlers we worked with during Residency helped us structure evaluation criteria and even conducted technical interviews with us, proving fundamental to the recruitment process.

What advice would you want to share with other founders?

Prioritize hiring, even when you are not hiring. As a founder, finding the right people is one of the most important jobs you have. But it can take a long time and you don't want to feel rushed and get it wrong. Over time, build relationships with people you like and admire because they might become your future dream team.

We've all been there: You have lots of tabs open and one of them starts playing a video, but you can't figure out which one. Or you're listening to music in your browser in the background and want to change the song without stopping your work to find the right tab.

With Chrome's latest update, it's now easier to control audio and video in your browser. Just click the icon in the top right corner of Chrome on desktop, open the new media hub and manage what's playing from there.

Designed to minimize any disruptions to whatever you need to get done in your browser, the new media hub helps you to be more productive by bringing all your media notifications to one place and letting you manage each audio and video playback, without having to navigate any tabs. We first brought these media controls to Chromebooks in August, and today we rolled out the media hub in Chrome for Windows, Mac and Linux.

These new controls are the latest in a series of updates to enhance your media experience in Chrome, including support for media hardware keys for easy access to your media, and the Picture-in-Picture extension and API to help you with multitasking in your browser. We'll continue to add more functionality for you to control media in Chrome over time.

When Grow with Google launched the IT Support Professional Certificate, we aimed to equip learners around the world with the fundamentals to kickstart careers in information technology. Now, on the program's two-year anniversary, we're expanding our IT training offering with the new Google IT Automation with Python Professional Certificate. Python is now the most in-demand programming language, and more than 530,000 U.S. jobs, including 75,000 entry-level jobs require Python proficiency. With this new certificate, you can learn Python, Git and IT automation within six months. The program includes a final project where learners will use their new skills to solve a problem they might encounter on the job, like building a web service using automation.

With over 100,000 people now enrolled in our original certificate program, we've seen how it can aid aspiring IT professionals. While working as a van driver in Washington, D.C., Yves Cooper took the course through Merit America, a Google.org-funded organization that helps working adults find new skills. Within five days of completing the program, he was offered a role as an IT helpdesk technician-a change that's set him on a career path he's excited about. All over the world, people like Yves are using this program to change their lives. In fact, 84 percent of people who take the program report a career impact-like getting a raise, finding a new job, or starting a business-within six months.

Among the many people who've enrolled in the IT certificate, 60 percent identify as female, Black, Latino, or veteran-backgrounds that have historically been underrepresented in the tech industry. To ensure learners from underserved backgrounds have access to both IT Professional Certificates, Google.org will fund 2,500 need-based scholarships through nonprofits like Goodwill, Merit America, Per Scholas and Upwardly Global. Along with top employers like Walmart, Hulu and Sprint, Google considers program completers when hiring for IT roles.

Self-paced and continuous education is one way we're helping expand opportunity for all Americans. Our Grow with Google trainings and workshops have helped more than 3 million Americans grow their businesses and careers. With this new professional certificate, even more people can continue to grow their careers through technology.

Enterprises regularly contend with evolving security threats. Their mobile devices and operating systems must create trust so IT teams, managers, and employees have confidence that their information is backed by strong security measures.

To assist our enterprise partners and customers with accurate and timely information about the Android approach to security, we've published a new update to the Android Enterprise Security Whitepaper. This document serves as a comprehensive overview of how Android enables best-in-class security by using multi-layered protections, Google-powered artificial intelligence and the collective contributions of the wider community.

The newest edition of this whitepaper includes the latest Android 10 security enhancements, which make Android even more secure and helpful for businesses. Learn about how Android has made it simpler to distribute updates and security patches through Google Play System updates, new VPN capabilities, and how Google Play Protect works to help protect enterprise devices. Android 10 also has a number of improvements that provide better security and privacy for employees, whether they are bringing their own devices to work or using ones issued by their employer.

Additionally, the paper outlines key updates to the personal and corporate data separation of the Android work profile; details on device and profile management; and how the Android team continues to enhance and extend our defenses with initiatives like the Android Security Rewards program and the App Defense Alliance.

Check out the latest Android Enterprise Security Whitepaper for further details on our ongoing work to provide best-in class security for the demanding needs of today's enterprises.

Millions of people from global enterprises, small businesses, governments and educational institutions are choosing Data Studio to make data-driven decisions. Over the last year, people used Data Studio to monitor ad performance, track brand performance, visualize student progress, and build machine learning models.

In 2019, we launched more than 80 new features and over 50 new connectors to data. A heartfelt thanks to our users and developers who made 2019 a year to remember. Here are a few highlights.

Visual Analysis

Throughout the year, we invested in visual analysis allowing faster data exploration and insights discovery. We made it possible to turn a chart into a filter using chart interaction controls. We also launched cross-chart interactions and drill downs. These investments, alongside updates like optional metrics, give users the tools they need to explore and interact with their data.

Fast performance through In-Memory BI Engine

Having the right tools to interact with and analyze data is critical but if report performance is slow, analyzing and visualizing large data sets can be frustrating. In collaboration with the Google Cloud BigQuery team, we launched BI Engine to bring sub second performance to Data Studio. BI Engine is an in-memory analysis service that integrates with your BigQuery data to return blazingly fast results in Data Studio. No more waiting for the page to load!

Scheduled PDF export

Listening to what our users need has always been a priority for the Data Studio team. Two of the top requests we heard from our users was the need to create PDFs and schedule emails of reports. Users can now do both. We're happy to let you know that as of last week you can now set a custom schedule for scheduled emails. Learn more.

Conditional formatting

We recently launched conditional formatting, which allows users to apply formatting based on a set of rules, making it easier to tell a story with your data. We're continuing to invest in conditional formatting and recently added AND and OR conditions to support compound conditions. Learn more.

In 2020 the Data Studio team is committed to delivering a great product that helps our users make better decisions with data. To stay in the loop on what's happening in Data Studio, subscribe to email updates under Settings > Marketing Preferences or check our Help Center each week to learn "What's new."

When you're shopping online for something to wear, like a down jacket for winter or dress shoes to match a new outfit, it can be useful to see style options across lots of different stores. But with the number of options online, it isn't always easy to know what's out there, find inspiration, compare your choices and decide what and where to buy.

Search has always let you find links to different products and stores, but starting today and rolling out this week in English in the U.S., you'll begin to see clothes, shoes and accessories from across the web in one place on Search on your mobile device, so you can easily browse lots of different stores and brands at once.

To start browsing, just search for clothes or accessories like "running shoes," "womens leather belt" or "wide leg pants." Google identifies popular products from stores across the web and brings them together in a new section on Search. You can filter by style, department and size type, or look at multiple images of a product. And if you want to learn more or you're ready to buy, you can easily visit a store's website.

Once you know what you want to buy, it can sometimes be hard to uncover all the different stores that carry an item so you can pick exactly what you want. With this new experience, we've done the hard work for you by bringing products from many stores together. You'll also have quick access to reviews in case you need help making a decision.

To make this feature possible, Google indexes and organizes products from over a million online shops, and updates this information regularly. Just as we don't charge sites to be part of the Google Search index, participating retailers appear in this new feature for free. Retailers can learn more about what types of products are eligible to appear in this shopping experience on Search.

We're excited to take this step toward making it easier for people to find products they need on Search, and to connect people with great retailers across the web. In the future, we'll look to expand this feature to more queries, categories, devices and products.

We aim to secure all of our users with simple, powerful and personalized protections. The Advanced Protection Program helps high-risk users-like members of political campaign teams, journalists, activists, executives, employees in regulated industries such as finance or government-shield themselves from targeted, sophisticated attacks on their Google Accounts. We've helped protect these types of people for many years: we introduced our government-backed attack warnings in 2012, and from July to September 2019, we sent more than 12,000 warnings to users around the world.

People consistently tell us the Advanced Protection Program has been a leap forward for their security, but we haven't made it easy enough to enroll. Today, we're simplifying Advanced Protection while maintaining the same high level of security protections. Now, if you have an Android phone or iPhone, you can sign up and enroll into the program with just a few clicks. Here's how it works.

Advanced Protection, simplified

Advanced Protection offers added protection from phishing attacks because the program requires exclusive use of security keys. According to a study we released last year, people who exclusively used security keys to sign into their accounts never fell victim to targeted phishing attacks. But, using security keys can be a hurdle for users: they can be costly, and acquiring and keeping track of two extra pieces of hardware is a burden.

Everything becomes much simpler when the things we're already carrying around-our smartphones-have a built-in security key. That's been the case on Android since last year, and starting today you can activate a security key on your iPhone as well. Millions of people around the world-many high-risk users among them-use iPhones, and this new capability makes Advanced Protection significantly easier for them. To learn more about using your iPhone's security key, check out this post on our security blog.

Getting started with Advanced Protection

You can enroll in Advanced Protection with a few clicks if you have a phone running Android 7+ or iOS 10.0+.

• iPhone: Download and sign into the Google Smart Lock app to activate a security key on your iPhone. Then visit g.co/advancedprotection to enroll in the Advanced Protection Program.
• Android: Visit g.co/advancedprotection to activate your phone's security key and enroll in the program with one click.

With attacks on the rise, and many major events on the horizon this year like the U.S. elections in November, the Advanced Protection Program offers a simple way to incorporate the strongest account protections that Google offers. Enroll now.

Google has long been committed to helping small businesses grow and thrive in the online world. One of the challenges small merchants face is getting their in-store inventory information online in a way that is easy to manage and reliably up to date. Since organizing the world's information is core to what we do, we've been working to make it easier for local merchants to better showcase their products to interested shoppers on Google.

Today, we're excited to share that we've entered into an agreement to acquire Pointy, a company based in Dublin, Ireland that has helped thousands of local retailers bring their product inventory online. The deal is subject to customary closing conditions, and is expected to close in the coming weeks.

With Pointy, merchants simply plug a small box into their barcode scanner or install the Pointy app on their point of sale system, which surfaces the products that they sell directly into the "See what's in store" section of their business profile on Google Search. Since we introduced this functionality a few years ago, Pointy has been one of our key partners, helping thousands of local merchants display this data within Google. We're looking forward to working with Pointy to help even more local retailers bring their product inventory online. You can read more in their blog post.