So to all of you who picked up a guitar and sang a love song, held your camera phone high above a rioting crowd, danced along to Friday, or just forgot the webcam was on, thank you. You make YouTube what it is, and we can’t wait to hear your stories next year.
Posted by Kevin Allocca, YouTube Trends Manager, recently watched “Miracle on 42nd Street.”
As the holiday season approaches we thought it was a good moment to update you on
some grants we're making to support education, technology and the fight against modern
day slavery.
In India, eight of the selected grantee organisations will receive funding to aid them in the
valuable work they are doing across the country.
Fighting slavery and human trafficking
Modern day slavery is a multi-billion dollar industry that impacts the lives of around 27
million people. So we're funding a number of groups that are working to tackle the
problem. For instance, in India, International Justice Mission (IJM), along with The BBC World Service Trust, Action Aid and Aide et Action, are forming a new coalition. These
organizations will work on the ground with governments to stop slave labor by identifying
the ring masters, documenting abuse, freeing individuals and providing them with therapy
as well as job training. Our support will also help expand the reach of tools like the
powerful Slavery Footprint calculator and Polaris Project’s National Trafficking Hotline.
STEM and girls’ education
Science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) open up great opportunities for young
people so we've decided to fund 16 great programs in this area. These include
Boston-based Citizen Schools and Generating Genius in the U.K, both of which work to
help to expand the horizons of underprivileged youngsters. In total, our grants will provide
enhanced STEM education for more than 3 million students.
In addition, we're supporting girls’ education in the developing world. By giving girls an
education, you not only improve her opportunities, but that of her whole family. The African Leadership Academy provides merit scholarships to promising young women
across the continent, and the Afghan Institute of Learning offers literacy classes to
women and girls in rural Afghanistan. Groups like these will use our funds to educate
more than 10,000 girls in developing countries.
Empowerment through technology
We've all been wowed by the entrepreneurial spirit behind the 15 awards in this category,
all of whom are using the web and open source programming to connect communities and
improve access to information. Vittana, for instance, helps lenders offer loans to students
in the developing world who have have a 99 percent repayment rate--potentially doubling
or tripling a recipient's earning power. Code for America enables the web industry to share
its skills with the public sector by developing projects that improve transparency and
encourage civic engagement on a mass scale. And Switchboard is working with local
mobile providers to help African health care workers create networks and communicate
for free.
To learn more about these organizations and how you can get involved, visit our Google
Gives Back 2011 site and take a look at this video:
These grants, which total $40 million, are only part of our annual philanthropic efforts.
Over the course of the year, Google provided more than $115 million in funding to various
nonprofit organizations and academic institutions around the world; our in-kind support
(programs like Google Grants and Google Apps for Education that offer free products and
services to eligible organizations) came to more than $1 billion, and our annual
company-wide GoogleServe event and related programs enabled individual Googlers to
donate more than 40,000 hours of their own volunteer time.
As 2011 draws to a close, I’m inspired by this year’s grantees and look forward to seeing
their world-changing work in 2012.
From your favorite sports highlights and dance competitions to make-up tutorials, science experiments and great movies, there’s a ton of great stuff on YouTube — over three billion views worth per day by last count. More and more, behind every great video is a great Channel, and with our announcement last month that more of them are coming to YouTube, we want to make it easier for you to find and keep tabs of what you want to watch.
So, today we're introducing a new homepage, Channel design and a fresh coat of digital paint. Here are three ways these updates will improve your life on YouTube:
1. A new homepage The YouTube homepage is your gateway to a vast entertainment universe. To help you get more into YouTube, we’re making it easier to find and follow great Channels when you arrive. On the left side of the homepage you can create your own, personal, customizable YouTube Channel line-up. Sign-in, or create a YouTube account. Then you can browse recommended Channels; customize your homepage’s feed; even link your YouTube account to Google+ and Facebook to see what your friends are sharing. The new homepage feed we launched earlier this year is now front and center on the homepage. You can switch between feeds by clicking on different Channels on the left.
For step by step instructions on using the new YouTube homepage, you can go to our help center.
2. Simpler, customizable Channels Given the homepage’s new focus on helping you find and organize your favorite Channels, we would be remiss if we didn’t update the look and feel of the Channels themselves. Today we're launching an improved Channel design focused on what matters most: helping users find great videos. As different uploaders have different goals, we've created new Channel templates to meet your needs whether you produce one video a week or have thousands of videos for a fan to browse. Some partners have even uploaded videos talking about the features, or giving tips on how they’re taking advantage of the new design. To learn how to opt-in to and test this new Channel design, check out our help center.
3. A new overall design To bring the new homepage and Channels designs together we’ve also applied a fresh coat of digital paint across the whole site. In July, we unveiled an experimental design called Cosmic Panda. We’ve used your feedback to improve our overall design, and today, we’re presenting a cleaner and simpler YouTube, with a consistent gray background, bigger video thumbnails and a more streamlined watch page.
Ready to get started? Your new YouTube is already shipped and waiting for you at YouTube.com, and like every new toy, we included an instruction manual (and video) to help.
Our recent Channels expansion, our grants and educational programs, and this new design are all focused on helping you discover a broader range of entertainment on YouTube. We’re always innovating and testing new stuff out to make the experience the best it can be for you. We rely on your feedback to figure out when we've gotten it right and when it needs further tweaks. So let us know what you think.
The updated app supports the ability to view dictionary results for single words and to display romanizations for these new Indic languages. So even if you can't read the script the words are written in, you can still take a shot at reading the translation.
Since these are still experimental alpha languages, you can expect translations be less fluent and include many more untranslated words than some of our more mature languages—like Spanish or Chinese—which have much more parallel data to power our statistical machine translation approach. Despite these challenges, we believe users will find these new languages helpful and we're excited to be making them available through the Translate app.
Google Translate for iPhone now supports text translation among 63 languages, voice input in 17 of those languages, and text-to-speech in 24 of them. Get the latest version of the Google Translate for iPhone app from the App Store now and start breaking down language barriers wherever you are!
Posted by Jeff Chin, Product Manager, Google Translate
Varsha Gupta, who attends Ryan International School, Greater Noida, submitted her design around this year’s theme, ‘India’s gift to the world’. Varsha Gupta’s doodle of the Google logo artfully depicts how India is a land of different cultures and music plays an important role in it. The doodle artfully represents many musical instruments that India has introduced to the to the world- Tabla, Sarod, Veena and Shehnai. The Doodle team and Jennifer Hom – the creative force behind the legendary Gandhi birth anniversary doodle, chose the winning doodle for India.
Varsha Gupta’s artistic merit, creativity, and expression of the theme has won her a technology starter package that includes a laptop, a year’s Internet connection and a Rs.2,00,000 technology grant for her school. Her doodle will also be featured on the Google India homepage on 14th November 2011 to mark the occasion of Children’s day in the country.
We are overwhelmed to see great participation from young children and schools year-on-year since 2009. The designs for this year’s theme “India’s Gift to the world” were incredibly creative across all grade groups. In addition to selecting Varsha Gupta as the national winner, more than 1 million public votes helped us determine the three group winners, each of which will receive a Technology Starter package.
Grades 1-3: Shibajyoti Choudhury (Group I) from Jamshedpur won the group prize for his doodle titled ‘Developing excellent India and World’
Grades 4-6: Abhinav R. (Group II) from Coimbatore won the prize for his doodle titled ‘India’s contribution to the world - Tradition’.
Grades 7-10: Nishi Bordia (Group III) from Indore won the prize for her doodle titled ‘India’s gift to the world - India itself’.
As part of today’s announcement at an event organized in the capital, all 45 regional finalists enjoyed on-ground activities and interacted with Rajan Anandan, MD & VP, Google India, Jennifer Hom, part of the Mountain View Doodle Squad.
Big thanks to all of you who voted and helped us select this year's winners. More importantly, we thank all the students who submitted entries this year and our partner schools & guest judges who helped us in the difficult task of selecting the winning doodles from among the amazing entries this year. Keep on doodling and we’ll see you next year!
This renovated Movies page not only brings together the site’s Bollywood and Indic films into one convenient place but breaks down films by genre, spotlights new and interesting films, and gives you a Top 10 list of recent favorites. If you’re looking for a comedy this weekend, just scroll down to the Comedy section and check out Golmaal or Andaz Apna Apna.
Beyond Bollywood, the page also offers top Telugu hits like Pokiri and Kick, as well as Tamil films Kanchivaram and Baashha. You can watch movies in the language of your choice by selecting their preferred language in the top-right hand of the page.
With all the action surrounding Shah Rukh Khan and Ra.One on YouTube, we decided to line up a treat for all his fans with a month long film festival dedicated to the super star. YouTubeBox Office (www.youtube.com/boxoffice), the special destination for all movie buffs in India, will host five mega blockbuster movies of Shah Rukh Khan absolutely free. Starting with the mega hit Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, YouTube Box office will host a new movie every friday. The festival will showcase super hit movies like Chak De India, Kal Ho Na Ho, Om Shanti Om and Kuch Kuch Hota hai.
Four months into its launch, the Intel sponsored YouTube Box Office channel continues to be popular with our users and has already garnered over 15 million views in India making it the #19 most subscribed (all time) channel in India. The channel is available to all Indian users absolutely free and users based in India can enjoy the movies by directly streaming it online. We are grateful to all our partners who continue to embrace the YouTube platform and offer our users, the most entertaining and premium content available on the web.
Apart from featuring full-length movies, the channel also engages users with movie trivia and contests. Users can also choose to watch movies from YouTube movie catalogues which offers over 1500 movie titles including over 400 titles from regional movies in languages such as Gujarati, Marathi, Telugu, Tamil and Bengali.
Now playing:
Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge A romantic comedy, the film marked the directorial debut of Aditya Chopra, and stars Shahrukh Khan and Kajol. All Time Blockbuster and remains the longest-running film in the history of Indian cinema. Kajol plays a young girl from India, brought up in London who falls in love with Raj, played by Shah Rukh Khan, much against her father’s wishes.
Movies of the month - ‘Shaitan’ & ‘Pyaar Ka Punchnama’
You asked for it and we have got it. Starting this month, YouTube will feature two new blockbuster movies every month for free on its YouTube Box Office channel (www.youtube.com/boxoffice) for users in India. After the overwhelming response to Band Baaja Baaraat, 3 idiots and Bheja fry 2, YouTube has lined up a special treat for the month of September - featuring the latest edgy entertainer from Anurag Kashyap & Binoy Nambiar - ‘Shaitan’ and the hilarious anti rom-com ‘Pyaar Ka Punchnama’. Shaitan is making its online debut first on YouTube even before its television premiere.
Launched three months back, the Intel sponsored YouTube Box Office channel has already got over 11.5 million views in India and is the #20 most subscribed (all time) channel in India. Apart from featuring full length movies, the channel also engages users with movie trivia and contests. Users can also choose to watch movies from YouTube movie catalogues which offers over 1500 movie titles including over 400 titles from regional movies in languages such as Gujarati, Marathi, Telugu, Tamil and Bengali.
Now playing: Shaitan - the gritty crime drama sees Kalki Koechlin play a disturbed teenager who joins a group of rich young friends who get into a mess after a road accident, leading to a seething cauldron of crime and violence.
An illustration of inefficient server utilization by smaller companies compared to efficient utilization in the cloud.
If you’re more of a romantic than a businessperson, think of it this way: It takes more energy to send a message in a bottle than it does to use Gmail for a year, as long as you count (PDF) the energy used to make the bottle and the wine you drank.
We ran a similar calculation for YouTube and the results are even more striking: the servers needed to play one minute of YouTube consume about 0.0002 kWh of energy. To put that in perspective, it takes about eight seconds for the human body to burn off that same amount. You’d have to watch YouTube for three straight days for our servers to consume the amount of energy required to manufacture, package and ship a single DVD.
In calculating these numbers, we included the energy used by all the Google infrastructure supporting Gmail and YouTube. Of course, your own laptop or phone also consumes energy while you’re accessing Google, so it’s important to choose an efficient model.
There’s still a lot to learn about the global impacts of cloud computing, but one thing we can say with certainty: bit for bit, email for email, and video for video, it’s more efficient in the cloud.
Posted David Jacobowitz, Program Manager, Green Engineering and Operations
