The rumors were right: Google took the bold step of running a Super Bowl ad in the third quarter of the game today, marking its first main push into TV advertising and a new frontier of marketing for the company that has triumphed in online ads above all else.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt's Tweet hinted at the ad yesterday, reading: "Can't wait to watch the Superbowl tomorrow. Be sure to watch the ads in the third quarter (someone said 'Hell has indeed frozen over.')"
Every year, Vogue and the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) sponsor a Fashion Fund to support emerging designers. In 2009, every participating designer was asked to create a one-of-a-kind item inspired by Google in some way - whether through our logo's colors, technology or our commitment to equal access to information. Last October, Google transformed 10 of the finalists' designs into iGoogle Artists themes. While Google loved seeing fashion meet iGoogle, they wanted to see these pieces in person - and wear them! Now, they're debuting three of our favorite designs from this challenge. These three featured designers have customized their original designs for a broader audience, and they're making them available to the public to purchase for a limited time.
Today, we're excited to announce our third annual Doodle 4 Google contest in the U.S. Google doodles, created by our talented team of doodlers, have helped us celebrate events and anniversaries from Van Gogh's birthday to Valentine's Day. And since 2008, Doodle 4 Google has given K-12 kids the opportunity to create their own logo and have it displayed on the Google homepage for hundreds of millions of users to enjoy for a day.
In addition to the winner's art appearing on Google.com on May 27, 2010, they'll also receive a $15,000 college scholarship, a laptop computer and a $25,000 technology grant for their school.
This year's theme is "If I Could Do Anything, I Would..." and it's all about pushing the limits, dreaming big, and seeing what you can accomplish in life. When coming up with inspiration for this year's contest, we turned to some of our very own Googlers, including Ed Lu, a former astronaut.
Ed typifies this year's theme in action, and shares an inspiring anecdote:
On my first mission STS-84, one of my crewmates and I were having dinner aboard the Space Shuttle Atlantis. After all our work for the day was done, we decided to eat "upside down" on the ceiling, gazing out at the Earth moving by below our feet. As we flew around the Earth, watching the continents go by, my crewmate remarked how amazingly large the Earth really is. But at that same time, it also felt small to us. There we were, flying at 18,000 miles per hour around the Earth in a machine built by humans, with a crew made up of astronauts from all over the world. Both of our observations were true at the same time. The world is indeed a big place with many challenges. But by using science, technology and the power of people working together, nearly anything is possible.
So dream big! If you could do anything, what would you do?
For even more inspiration, you can see last year's winner, Christin Engelberth, a sixth grader at Bernard Harris Middle School in San Antonio, Texas. She titled her doodle "A New Beginning" to express her wish that "out of the current crisis, discoveries will be found to help the Earth prosper once more."
We're happy to let you know that this year, we've also assembled a panel of well-known "Expert Jurors," including creative directors, cartoonists and famous animators ranging from Sesame Workshop to Pixar Animation Studios. Our Expert Jurors will help us narrow down the cream of the crop to 40 regional finalists, who will come to the Google office in New York City on May 26, 2010. For the second year, we'll also be partnering with the Smithsonian's Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, where the top 40 regional finalists will get to have their artwork displayed in a national exhibit. And for the first time this year, we'll give out eight Technology Booster awards to schools that submit maximum number of doodles per school by March 10th and have students in our 400 State Finalists.
Please visit the official competition website for a full listing of all contest rules and requirements. Only students from registered schools can enter, so be sure your school is registered by March 17, 2010. All doodles must be submitted by March 31, 2010.
We hope you're as excited about this year's contest as we are. Good luck!
Thursday, January 28th marks International Data Privacy Day. We're recognizing this day by publicly publishing our guiding Privacy Principles.
Use information to provide our users with valuable products and services.
Develop products that reflect strong privacy standards and practices.
Make the collection of personal information transparent.
Give users meaningful choices to protect their privacy.
Be a responsible steward of the information we hold.
We've always operated with these principles in mind. Now, we're just putting them in writing so you have a better understanding of how we think about these issues from a product perspective. Like our design and software guidelines, these privacy principles are designed to guide the decisions we make when we create new technologies. They are one of the key reasons our engineers have worked on new privacy-enhancing initiatives and features like the Google Dashboard, the Ads Preferences Manager and the Data Liberation Front. And there is more in store for 2010.
You can find out more about our efforts at the Google Privacy Center and on our YouTube channel.
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's promised speech on Internet freedom took place last morning. Clinton called for China to "conduct a thorough review of the cyber intrusions" that Google implied were conducted by Chinese government against human rights activists.
A small background: In response to the cyber attacks, Google said that it may shut down Google.cn and its Chinese offices if it can't strike a deal with the Chinese government to run an uncensored search engine. The circumstances might also threaten Google Android's place in China's cell phone market.
China is already censoring the news reports about the Google situation within its borders. Its representatives have said that it doesn't need the conflict between it and Google to be "over interpreted," and that this incident shouldn't affect its relationship with the United States. Hillary Clinton does not agree. "Countries or individuals that engage in cyber attacks should face consequences and international condemnation," she said.
Clinton's speech also addressed some other issues, (indirectly) including Iran's decision to censor Twitter and Facebook in the wake of the country's election crisis. She announced that the United States will spend more million dollars on initiatives to protect Internet freedom around the world.
Google's been investing heavily in its future over the past quarter, both in the form of main acquisitions and new product launches.
Today, the company is out with its recent earnings report, with the results indicating that the economy may indeed be recovering, and the company's CEO Eric Schmidt painting a bullish picture on Google's future prospects.
Here are some of the highlights:
Google's income for the quarter jumped 17% year-over-year to $6.67 billion.
Google grew its cash position to $24.5 billion - up from the $22 billion it reported previous quarter.
Google's headcount increased slightly during the quarter to nearly 20,000 employees in worldwide. That's significant given the company was forced to create the first cutbacks in its history during the worst of the economic downturn.
As for the 2010, Eric Schmidt offered the following statement: "We remain hugely optimistic about the Internet and are continuing to invest heavily in technological innovation for the benefit not only of our users and customers, but also the wider web." With $24 billion in cash, expect those investments to include more acquisitions, as well as further spending on huge projects including handsets, the Chrome OS and even potentially tablet computers.
Wall Street doesn't seem to be sharing Schmidt's optimism, however, in the instant aftermath of the numbers - shares of Google are trading down about $30/share after hours, or about 5%.
Google has released new, higher-resolution satellite images of the Port-au-Prince area of Haiti that was devastated by a magnitude 7.0 earthquake on January 12.
The new impressively detailed photos were taken on Sunday, January 17 and have resolution of around six inches, according to Google. You can see the full set of images in Google Maps in the Satellite mode.
Last week, Google and GeoEye released a set of satellite images of Haiti taken on January 13, just a day after the earthquake, along with earlier images of the area from 2008.
Google is working to create the new imagery available as a layer in Google Earth as well. An updated Haiti earthquake layer for Google Earth is presently available with images from multiple sources as well as maps, including earthquake epicenters.
