Official Google Australia Blog

KinCare goes Google: Elderly care with the cloud

2012-05-22T08:38:00.001+10:00

Today’s guest post is by Jason Howie, CEO of Australian aged care services organisation, KinCare. KinCare employs over 2,000 staff across Australia, most of whom care for the elderly and disabled.

At KinCare, we believe that every person has the right to age with dignity, an affirmation which has guided our business caring for the elderly in their own homes, for over 20 years. With this sentiment, we have grown from an organisation with one nurse and 15 clients, to employing over 2000 people in 13 offices right across Australia.

Historically, our IT solution had been a frustrating patchwork of different systems, which were slow and didn’t talk to each other. While they served a purpose once upon a time, we needed a unified system that had easy sharing and that could accommodate our ever-expanding team. In the end, a cloud-based solution was the natural choice.

With so many staff directly in the field that need access to vital client information, using a totally reliable and mobile system was a top priority for us. With Google partner Cloud Assist, the KinCare team made the transition to Google Apps in just three weeks. The roll-out was simple and feedback from staff has been that the Google Apps platform is easy and intuitive to use, so we didn’t need to provide intensive training. Having a system that just works is absolutely essential because we don’t have the time for people to travel to fix basic IT problems, like email issues. In fact, moving to Google Apps has allowed us to reassign our IT staff to more strategic (and interesting!) projects.

The Google collaboration apps, Gmail, Calendar, chat, and video has allowed KinCare staff to come to one place for collaboration. With Cloud Assist, Gamozzii and the Google App Engine we were able to develop a portal and mobile application (myKinCare app) that provides the field team with access to relevant information on-time, anytime. Information is centralised and secured. The systems have a single sign-on which is particularly good for those who suffer from password fatigue!

As an added bonus, all information is changed and updated in real time, meaning we share and get client updates instantaneously. When there’s no lag, there is no gap in knowledge. We’re even looking at devising a new intranet portal on Google Sites so we can continue to improve on our internal information sharing. When carers know their schedules, are aware of any last minute changes to appointments and have access to the latest health information about their clients, it helps us maintain a high level of informed care and improved patient safety.

Posted by Jason Howie, CEO of Australian aged care services organisation, KinCare.

Zagat: the “burgundy bible” comes to Australia

2012-05-21T18:28:00.000+10:00

The Zagat guide was started more than three decades ago on the simple idea that the combined opinions of restaurant diners are inherently more accurate than reviews from a few critics. Each review contained the most accurate and up-to-date information through curating comments from real customers — making Zagat an early pioneer in what we now call “user generated content.”

Australian foodies may have used Zagat overseas, but they’ve not been able to rate their local spots. That all changes today as we open the voting period for our first-ever Zagat survey of Sydney. Locals are invited to voice their opinions about the Sydney restaurants and Sydney attractions they’ve visited over the past year.

To better ensure the ratings reflect a customer’s full experience, we want diners to separately rate the food, decor, and service on a 0-3 scale and then estimate the cost of a meal. After reading your ratings and comments, Zagat’s editors will curate this feedback and create accurate reviews that represent the combined experiences of local diners. This process ensures that readers are provided with reliable, structured information that doesn’t require going through dozens of comments before making a decision on where to eat.

An example of a Zagat entry

Although Zagat is well-known for restaurant and bar reviews, it’s not just dinner and drinks we want to hear about. With the Sydney survey, we want to hear what you think of all attractions, including Taronga Zoo, Paddington Markets, and Cockatoo Island. In July Zagat will survey Sydney Nightlife and Shopping as well as Melbourne Restaurants and Attractions. A survey of Melbourne Shopping will take place in November.

As we open the survey, we are also setting up special Zagat lounges across Sydney where you’ll be able to write your reviews, find out more about Zagat, and have the chance to win some great prizes.
Here are the locations and schedules:

Westfield Pitt Street Mall 22 May - 26 May	Westfield Bondi Junction 28 May - 2 June
Sydney Film Festival 6 June - 17 June	Good Food and Wine Show 22 June - 25 June

We’ve all got that favourite restaurant we recommend to visitors of our harbour city, and we love to rave to mates about that tucked-away store that stocks our favourite hard-to-find items. Whether we’re foodies, shoppers, travellers, or just enjoy the finer things in life, we hope you find that Zagat makes it easier to share their experiences with your fellow Sydneysiders and the world.

Posted by Anna Kricker, Sydney Community Manager, Google Australia

Good to Know: in Australia and in your language

2012-05-16T10:23:00.001+10:00

Over the past few months, we’ve introduced a consumer education campaign called Good to Know in the U.K., Germany and the U.S. Good to Know shares easy, actionable tips for protecting and understanding your online information.

Everyone wants to stay safe online, so we’re making our Good to Know site (google.com.au/goodtoknow) available in dozens more languages -- about 30 today, and an additional 30 in the coming weeks. (To change languages, just scroll to the toolbar at the bottom of the page). In addition to making our Good to Know site available in Australia, we’re also incorporating relevant local information into the Google Family Safety Center website, which includes tips for keeping your family safe online from Google and others. By partnering with Australian organisations like Kids Helpline and The Australian Communications and Media Authority, we hope to help Australians increase their web savvy.

You’ll be able to learn about how to protect yourself online, gain insight into how your data is used on Google and around the web, and get tips on managing your family’s online experience. For example, you can find out how to choose a strong password, recognise a phishing scam and double your account security with 2-step verification.

We all have a friend who uses the same password for every web service, leaves his mobile phone screen unlocked and thinks that a conversation about spam and cookies must be someone planning an unconventional meal. As digital literacy becomes increasingly important, we hope you’ll take the time to learn more about staying safe online and spread the word to your friends who look to you for tech help!

Visit google.com.au/goodtoknow to see a list of available languages and find out more.

Posted by Ishtar Vij, Public Policy and Government Affairs, Google Australia and New Zealand

The smartphone revolution isn’t coming - it’s already here

2012-05-16T09:50:00.000+10:00

As the number of smartphones in Australia continues to grow, finding data that helps businesses understand mobile is more important than ever. That’s why last year, we teamed up with Ipsos Research to learn more about how Aussies use their smartphones and what that means for the businesses that serve them. Today we’re making a new and up-to-date version of that research available at thinkwithgoogle.com/mobileplanet.

In addition to some fun facts (1 in 4 Australian smartphone owners would sooner give up TV than their mobile device), our research revealed four trends every advertiser, marketer, and business in Australia should pay attention to:

Your customers have gone mobile...so should you: It’s safe to say that Australia’s mobile revolution isn’t coming - it’s already here. More than half of the Australian population now owns a smartphone, which means that more than half your customers do too. Businesses need a strategy that addresses mobile consumers.
Smarter phones make smarter shoppers, so be ready: The overwhelming majority of Aussies we surveyed (94%) have researched a product or service on their smartphone device, which means a mobile-friendly website is now essential to your bottom line: 61% said they wouldn’t return to a website that wouldn’t load on their phone.
If you’re local, they’re looking for you: 86% of smartphone users look for local information on their phone and 88% take direct action as a result, such as visiting or contacting the business. That’s almost double what our research found last year, making it doubly important for small businesses to be ready with a mobile website that clearly displays information like location and trading hours.
Multi-tasking with media: Australian smartphone owners are multi-screen masters, creating extra opportunities for advertisers to reach them as they multi-task. For example, 80% use their phone while doing other things like watching TV (48%), and 57% have searched from mobile after seeing an ad on TV. Businesses should complement their online and offline ad campaigns with mobile ads to reach their audience on all screens.

As before, we’re making this research available in full. So if you’re an advertiser, developer, or business that wants to know more about the Australian mobile consumer, head over to thinkwithgoogle.com/mobileplanet and have a look.

Posted by Jason Pellegrino, Head of Mobile Ads, Google Australia

A picture is worth a thousands words

2012-05-08T14:58:00.000+10:00

What do hammocks, teapots, baby swings and vegan sandals have in common? They are all items you can buy online directly from Australian retailers today. We’re buying more products online than ever - new research from Nielsen shows that more than 8 in 10 Australians have purchased online in the last 6 months, with 29% of us spending more than $1,000.

At Google, we’ve noticed that online shopaholics want one thing above all - and that’s pictures. We launched Google Shopping last year to help you shop faster by comparing product images, and today we’ve started showing images in ads called Product Listing Ads.

For example, if you’re a new parent who is hoping a baby swing might finally get you some peace and quiet, our new Product Listing Ads make it easier to find, compare and choose the perfect sanity-saver, even at 2am at night:

You can expect to start seeing more of these images show up on the right of the search results page in the coming weeks - just in time for Mother’s Day. Happy shopping!

Posted by Kate Conroy, AdWords Product Specialist, Google Australia

Google Apps Vault Brings Information Governance to Google Apps in Australia

2012-05-08T11:27:00.001+10:00

Today we’re announcing the availability of Google Apps Vault (Vault) for Google Apps for Business customers. Vault is an easy-to-use and cost-effective solution for managing information critical to your business and preserving important data. It can reduce the costs of litigation, regulatory investigation and compliance actions.

Businesses of all sizes need to be prepared for the unexpected. In today’s environment, using Vault to manage, archive and preserve your data can help protect your business. Litigation costs can really take a toll on a business when minor lawsuits can run up to many thousands of dollars, and larger lawsuits can cost even more. Significant litigation costs come from having to search and find relevant data, which is also known as electronic discovery (eDiscovery).

E-discovery can be part of virtually any litigation and requires you to search, find and preserve your electronic information such as email. Vault helps protect your business with easy-to-use search so you can quickly find and preserve data to respond to unexpected customer claims, lawsuits or investigations. With an instant-on functionality and availability of your data a few clicks away, Vault provides access to all of your Gmail and on-the-record chats and can provide significant savings to your business over the traditional costs of litigation and eDiscovery.

Additionally, Vault gives Google Apps customers the extended management and information governance capabilities to proactively archive, retain and preserve Gmail and on-the-record chats. With the ability to search and manage data based on terms, dates, senders, recipients and labels, Vault helps you find the information you need, when you need it. Vault gives management, IT, legal and compliance users a systemised, repeatable and defensible platform that will reduce the costs and risks of doing business. With just a few clicks, the business can access a service designed for security and providing auditable access to critical information.

Vault is built on the same modern, 100% web-based architecture as Google Apps. Unlike traditional solutions, it does not require a complex and costly IT environment, and can be deployed in a matter of minutes. Vault brings the security, ease-of-use and reliability of Google Apps to information governance. It can help meet the sophisticated requirements of large organisations and makes these advanced capabilities available to business of all sizes.

Google Apps Vault can be added to your Google Apps account for an additional $5 per user per month starting today, so contact our sales team or a Google Apps reseller if you are interested in signing up for Google Apps and Vault.

We hope that Vault, together with Google Apps, will make a difference to your business and provide the right solution to reducing risk and cost so you can focus on growing your business.

Posted by Jack Halprin, Head of eDiscovery, Google

Google+ Hangouts On Air: broadcast your conversation to the world

2012-05-08T09:31:00.003+10:00

Last year we introduced Hangouts On Air to a limited number of broadcasters, enabling them to go live with friends and fans, for all the world to see. Since then, this small community has grown the feature in lots of creative ways. And they’ve made one thing crystal clear: when groups of passionate individuals can broadcast live, together, the results are truly remarkable:

Today we're excited to launch Hangouts On Air to Google+ users in Australia and around the world. So if you have something to say—as an aspiring artist, a global celebrity, or a concerned citizen—you can now go live in front of a global audience. With just a few clicks, you’ll be able to:

Broadcast publicly. By checking "Enable Hangouts On Air," you can broadcast your live hangout—from the Google+ stream, your YouTube channel or your website—to the entire world.
See how many viewers you’ve got. During your broadcast, you can look inside the hangout to see how many people are watching live.
Record and re-share. Once you're off the air, we’ll upload a public recording to your YouTube channel, and to your original Google+ post. This way it's easy to share and discuss your broadcast after it's over.

In Australia, we’ve already seeing some great uses of Hangouts. Radio station Nova FM recently launched the Digital Red Room, which connects the hottest stars like Canadian songbird Carly Rae Jepsen with fans across the country via Hangouts. And viewers of hit TV show Bondi Rescue can also connect face-to-face with their favourite lifeguard after each show.
Of course, launching millions of live stations takes some doing, so we're rolling out Hangouts On Air gradually, over the next few weeks. In the meantime you can save the date for an upcoming hangout...

Conan O’Brien: May 8th at 10:30pm ET	Jamie Oliver on Food Revolution Day: May 19th, 8:00pm ET
Global Poverty Project: May 10th, 7:00pm ET	A special series from The New York Times’ Opinion department

… sign in to Google+ to see what’s live right now, or find inspiration in the many broadcasts that have already aired.

A peek at the ocean floor via Underwater Hangouts with the Aussie based +Catlin Seaview Survey. They hope to show the world the Great Barrier Reef in order to draw awareness to the issues arising from warmer sea temperatures.	Town halls with today’s leaders. President +Barack Obama, Governor +Mitt Romney, UN Secretary-General +Ban Ki-Moon, and many others have connected with citizens via hangout.
** Live concerts from your living room. Musical artists like +Suite 709 and +Daria Musk perform live for those inside the hangout, and for everyone else tuning in.	Classes anyone can attend. Chef +Larry Fournillier, Professor +Noah Diffenbaugh, and +FAWN share their cooking, climate change and fashion expertise, respectively, via hangout.
Roundtables about any topic. Photographer +Trey Ratcliff, football enthusiast +Sabotage Times and celebrity trend spotter +Young Hollywood talk about the issues they find interesting.	Face-to-face meetups with all of your favorites. +David Beckham, +Tyra Banks and +Geek & Sundry have all enjoyed meet-and-greets with their fans.

We can’t wait to see what you’ll share with the world. Posted by Chee Chew, Engineering Director

Introducing Google Start-Up “Do”

2012-05-08T09:21:00.001+10:00

At last year’s Google Developer Day in Sydney, a session we held on entrepreneurship was jam-packed with more than 100 people hoping to one day create the next “big thing”.

What struck me about these budding entrepreneurs was that although they were overflowing with ideas and technical know-how, they were hungry for advice on things like how to attract funding, find business partners and market their idea or product. And thousands of kilometers from Silicon Valley, connecting with the right people with the knowledge and capital can be difficult.

So to help fill this gap for start-up wisdom, today we’re announcing Google Sudo, a new initiative for entrepreneurs and others interested in the Aussie startup community. Google Sudo is about helping aspiring Aussie entrepreneurs become successful entrepreneurs. It’s a start up “do" - a shindig - that will blend interesting talks, panels and ample networking time.

(Software engineers and systems administrators around the world know and love the “sudo” Unix command which grants them superuser privileges. So think of a Google Sudo as something that grants entrepreneurs to some of the secrets of access).

Over the next few months, we’ll be hosting free tutorials, events and Hangouts on Google+ that bring together successful entrepreneurs, angel investors, VCs and others who will share their stories and be generous with insights and advice to the Aussie startup community.
The first event on Wednesday, May 30, will be an interactive session that will cover incubation and venture capital and more.

The panelists:

Entrepreneurs Mike Fox & Mike Knapp from Shoes of Prey (and former Googlers),
Angel investor Vivian Stewart, from Sydney Angels, and
VC Bill Bartee, from Southern Cross Venture Partners

Due to limited space we won’t be able to accommodate everyone, but please register your interest here. We will email you an invitation if your registration is successful.

There’s no shortage of budding Aussie entrepreneurs wanting to give startup life a go. Everyone benefits from a robust entrepreneurial eco-system and we think companies like Google can play a role in fostering the enormous talent we have downunder.

Posted by Alan Noble, Engineering Director, Google Australia and New Zealand

Go-ing for a speedy new programming language

2012-05-01T11:43:00.000+10:00

Here at Google, one of the things we care the most about is speed. We are loud and enthusiastic advocates for ubiquitous high-speed broadband access, and we even have a Make the Web Faster team that looks for ways to speed up Google products and the web as a whole.

One of the projects we work on here in the Sydney office is also about speeding things up. It’s called the Go programming language, and it’s been developed by Google and the open source community. And we have a great team mascot: the Go gopher.

Go was inspired by the lessons we've learned building the software that runs behind the scenes at Google. One of the key drivers was speed. We were sitting around one day waiting for a program to compile, and we realized there must be something we could do to speed things up. We wanted to try to design a language that could take full advantage of the power of modern computer networks, machines, and engineering.

Go was designed for big software: large programs written by many developers, growing over time to support networked services in the cloud: in short, server software. Go enables programmers to develop software quickly and maintain and adapt it easily as it grows. With its blazing fast tool suite, Go lets programmers get more done in less time. Their code runs fast, too.

Since it was released, the Go team and the open source community have been actively developing the language to create something that exceeded our original goals: it's become a great general-purpose language, useful and productive for everything from servers to scripting. Today, besides server software, Go is being used for web applications, statistical analyses, image processing, bioinformatics, and even games.

For more information, see the Go blog. For more information about Go in general, visit golang.org, which has documentation, references, articles and an interactive tour of the language.

Posted by Rob Pike, Distinguished Engineer, on behalf of the Go team

Privacy Awareness Week 2012

2012-04-30T14:26:00.004+10:00

Today is the start of Privacy Awareness Week, an annual event across Asia Pacific to remind everyone to take steps to protect their privacy and safeguard personal information online.

At Google we take our users’ privacy and security very seriously. We build transparency, choice and security into our products, starting with the earliest stages of product design. In fact, we have a team of more than 300 world-class engineers and product managers who spend all day, every day, thinking about this. You can read more about our approach to privacy here.

Privacy Awareness Week is a great opportunity for Australians to learn more about the security features and privacy tools we offer. Here are a few to get you started.

Google Dashboard: This is a tool that offers signed-in users a simple view of the data associated with their Google Account. From this one central location, you can easily change your privacy settings for any Google services you use, from Blogger to Gmail, from search to YouTube.

Two-step verification: This feature helps protect your Google Account from threats like password compromise and identity theft. To sign into your account, you’ll enter your normal username and password, and then you’ll be asked to enter a 6-digit code, which will be sent to your phone.

Ads Preferences Manager: From this one place, you can view and edit the information Google uses to show ads on Google search and Gmail, and interest-based ads on websites in Google’s ad network. You can add or edit information to affect how ads are selected, or opt-out of seeing customised ads altogether.

These are just a few in a range of privacy tools and measures you can take to ensure you have meaningful control of your privacy. For more information about Privacy Awareness Week, visit the website.

Posted by Ishtar Vij, Public Policy and Government Affairs, Google Australia and New Zealand

Rent thousands of full-length Aussie and global films on Google Play and YouTube

2012-04-27T09:34:00.000+10:00

Australia has a long and rich history of cinema, with one of the world’s first studios, the Limelight Department, opening in Melbourne in 1897. Flash forward a century, and Australia is an indispensible part of the global film industry, represented by world famous directors such as Baz Luhrmann and Peter Weir as well as an almost endless list of actors, such as Cate Blanchett and Hugh Jackman.

This great tradition makes us excited to announce today that we have launched Movies on Google Play (play.google.com/movies) and a brand new Movies page on YouTube for Australia (youtube.com.au/movies), where you can rent thousands of films from both Hollywood and local Aussie studios. You can see films from The Walt Disney Company, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, NBCUniversal, Village Roadshow Pictures and Lionsgate, as well as from local distributors such as Roadshow Films, Icon Film Distribution, Madman Entertainment, Hopscotch and Transmission Films.

Sit back and watch recent releases such as Oscar-award winning Midnight in Paris, The Help, Moneyball, Tower Heist and The Iron Lady as well as picks from a big library of all-time classics such as Toy Story 3 and The Bourne Ultimatum. If you are feeling in the mood for something local, check out break-out hits like 2011 release Snowtown or other Australian classics such as Bra Boys and Chopper.

On the web, you can rent and watch movies from Google Play and on YouTube. On Android phones and tablets, you can rent films from the Google Play store app and start watching them instantly on the Google Play Movies app. Movies can also be downloaded to the device so they’re available for viewing during the rental period without an internet connection. And if you are signed in using your Google Account, you can watch the same movies across both Google Play and YouTube.

Movies are available at competitive pricing, with new releases available at $5.99 for standard definition and $6.99 for high definition and library titles at $3.99 for standard definition and $4.99 for high definition. For most movies, viewers will have 30 days to begin watching their rental, and, once started, 48 hours to finish.

We will be adding many more recent and classic films over the course of the year so keep checking back to Google Play and YouTube to see what’s new.

Posted by Felicity Mcvay, Manager, Content Partnerships.

Built in Sydney: Google Drive

2012-04-26T08:57:00.003+10:00

For the last few years, many of us in Google’s Sydney office have been working on the latest new features for Google Docs. But a lot of them have been “under the hood” type pieces of engineering -- hard to explain to friends and family, or any non-technical crowd. Until today.

Yesterday’s launch of Google Drive is special to our team because many of our contributions are central to this evolution of Google Docs. These contributions include things like rendering files of many types in a browser, using optical character recognition (OCR) and other technologies to enable search across those files, social commenting, and the Drive app for Android.

The Google Docs team in the cloud — above Penrith!

Since late 2010, we’ve enabled users to upload any kind of file to Google Docs. Drive builds on that capability but adds technology to view and organise those files on the web. Also new in Drive: we’ve created visual thumbnails for all your files, which can be seen in the brand new “grid view” in Drive. Processing all these files for so many users requires massive computing power. This is a pretty cool challenge for any engineer and one of the reasons we enjoy working at Google.

Google Drive also better incorporates the optical character recognition technology that we developed in Sydney and originally launched in 2010. We’ve now extended this technology to search, so that the text in all the files you upload into Drive becomes searchable: not just file names, but all the text, even in images and scanned PDFs. Imagine if you’re a small business with thousands of documents stuffed into cardboard boxes and filing cabinets — now you can scan those documents, upload them to Drive, and search across them in seconds. The capability to search text across PDFs, image files, and other types of files is unique to Google Drive.

On top of that, the Sydney team has started to integrate the technology from Google Image Search and Google Goggles into Drive so you can search across your files for images related to a certain keyword — even if that keyword is not in the image’s title. For example, if you want to find a great photo you took of the Sydney Opera House, but you’ve not changed the file name from AUS5_009.jpg, you can find your photo simply by searching for “Sydney Opera House” or even “Australia”. We’re pretty proud of this feature, as we believe it’s an example of something only Google can do: bringing the power of cloud computing and web search technology together to create a magical and delightful way to find what you’re looking for, even within your personal files.

We’re also proud that the Android app for Google Drive — which lets you access your most important Docs on the go — was also developed in Sydney, as well as the social commenting feature that lets you discuss any Drive file you’ve shared with others.

Give Google Drive a go and let us know on the Google Australia Google+ page what you think — and what you think we should work on next!

Posted by Ken Hoetmer, Product Manager, on behalf of the Sydney Google Docs Engineers.

Introducing Google Drive... yes, really

2012-04-25T12:01:00.000+10:00

This is a cross-post from the Official Google Blog

Just like the Loch Ness Monster, you may have heard the rumours about Google Drive. It turns out, one of the two actually does exist.

Today, we’re introducing Google Drive—a place where you can create, share, collaborate, and keep all of your stuff. Whether you’re working with a friend on a joint research project, planning a wedding with your fiancé or tracking a budget with roommates, you can do it in Drive. You can upload and access all of your files, including videos, photos, Google Docs, PDFs and beyond.

With Google Drive, you can:

Create and collaborate. Google Docs is built right into Google Drive, so you can work with others in real time on documents, spreadsheets and presentations. Once you choose to share content with others, you can add and reply to comments on anything (PDF, image, video file, etc.) and receive notifications when other people comment on shared items.
Store everything safely and access it anywhere (especially while on the go). All your stuff is just... there. You can access your stuff from anywhere—on the web, in your home, at the office, while running errands and from all of your devices. You can install Drive on your Mac or PC and can download the Drive app to your Android phone or tablet. We’re also working hard on a Drive app for your iOS devices. And regardless of platform, blind users can access Drive with a screen reader.
Search everything. Search by keyword and filter by file type, owner and more. Drive can even recognise text in scanned documents using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology. Let’s say you upload a scanned image of an old newspaper clipping. You can search for a word from the text of the actual article. We also use image recognition so that if you drag and drop photos from your Grand Canyon trip into Drive, you can later search for [grand canyon] and photos of its gorges should pop up. This technology is still in its early stages, and we expect it to get better over time.

You can get started with 5GB of storage for free—that’s enough to store the high-res photos of your trip to the Mt. Everest, scanned copies of your grandparents’ love letters or a career’s worth of business proposals, and still have space for the novel you’re working on. You can choose to upgrade to 25GB for $2.49/month, 100GB for $4.99/month or even 1TB for $49.99/month. When you upgrade to a paid account, your Gmail account storage will also expand to 25GB.

Drive is built to work seamlessly with your overall Google experience. You can attach photos from Drive to posts in Google+, and soon you’ll be able to attach stuff from Drive directly to emails in Gmail. Drive is also an open platform, so we’re working with many third-party developers so you can do things like send faxes, edit videos and create website mockups directly from Drive. To install these apps, visit the Chrome Web Store—and look out for even more useful apps in the future.

This is just the beginning for Google Drive; there’s a lot more to come.

Get started with Drive today at drive.google.com/start—and keep looking for Nessie...

Posted by Sundar Pichai, SVP, Chrome & Apps

Girl Guides Go Google

2012-04-24T09:50:00.000+10:00

Today’s guest post is by Wendy Lewis, CEO of Girl Guides Victoria. The Girl Guides is a global movement, and in Australia, a not-for-profit organisation that supports girls from five years of age, equipping them with skills, confidence and friendships to help them to succeed throughout their lives.

Girl Guides Victoria celebrated its centenary anniversary last year, a significant milestone appreciated by over so many women who have been Girl Guides since 1911. The growth of the organisation continues and today, Girl Guides Victoria has 1,200 members and volunteers, 400 supporters and 5000 girls involved in programs right across the state.

Our centenary has also prompted us to reflect on how to ensure that the next 100 years are just as successful and part of staying relevant and up-to-date means being equipped with the right technology that can future-proof us as we move forward. We wanted to keep our connection to the grassroots of the organisation while still allowing advanced functionality and productivity in our administration. Going Google was the first step in streamlining our operations and creating a more efficient communication platform across the organisation.

So far, we’ve transitioned 100 Girl Guide leaders to Google Apps in locations across our 79 Victorian districts. With an older demographic of volunteers, it was essential that we had a solution that was intuitive to learn and easy to use. After a little bit of instruction we were all using it proficiently and since then discovering a new trick always proves exciting.

We use Google Apps as an email service as well as for sharing and collaborating on documents that help run the organisation across the state. It has transformed the way our geographically disparate organisation can share education programs and essential safety information. For example, we use Google Talk for instant communication. This means that our volunteers are able to access information or contact details for a girl’s family in the event of an emergency, or keep up to date with planned activities and contingency plans instantly. The fact that they can access this information from any of their personal devices like phones and tablets is vital for their roles which are often in the field, literally!

For Girl Guides Victoria, the girls are our top priority, so having the best technology to support what we do seamlessly has been most beneficial for us. We are now looking to expand on our initial success with Google Apps, finding simple and cost effective ways to extend what we do, for example, by offering online learning and promoting the involvement of parents through online portals.

Going Google has given us the tools to strengthen our commitment to push, challenge and grow the girls in our program.

Posted by Wendy Lewis, CEO of Girl Guides Victoria.

Helping more businesses online with COSBOA

2012-04-19T11:07:00.000+10:00

Last month, we celebrated the first birthday of Getting Aussie Business Online--as well as the news that more than 50% of Australia’s small businesses are now online. That’s something to cheer about, but it still leaves nearly half of Australia’s 1 million SMBs sitting on the sidelines of the digital economy.

That’s why we’re pleased that Council of Small Business of Australia (COSBOA) has announced they’ve joined the party by becoming an official supporter of the movement. Their support will enable the program to reach small businesses in COSBOA’s network of organisations and educate them about the importance of being online.

Small businesses are a vital part of our economy and communities. Together with MYOB, we’re looking forward to working with COSBOA to help businesses across Australia make the most of the web.

Posted by Claire Hatton, Head of Local Business

GoMo Australia: Helping businesses create a mobile friendly website

2012-04-17T17:18:00.003+10:00

When it comes to mobile, your customers are moving faster than you know: according to our research, 60% of Australians expect the websites they visit on their phones to be as easy to navigate and access as on a desktop PC. That’s why last month, we launched the GoMoMeter, which helps you figure out whether or not your business is prepared for the mobile revolution by showing you what your website looks like on mobile. Now, we’re adding even more resources to help you go mobile (or “Go Mo,” as we like to say).

For starters, we’ve added a list of best practices for mobile sites, as well as research data to help you understand consumer behaviour on mobile devices. You can also download an advertiser guidebook with extensive tools and resources that can help your business to Go Mobile. Finally, we’ve added list of Aussie web developers who can help you take your site mobile.

So if you are ready to Go Mo, head to howtogomo.com/au and get started!

Posted by Soyeon Kim, Mobile Product Marketing Manager.

Google Currents goes international

2012-04-13T08:46:00.000+10:00

We strive to give you beautiful and simple ways to experience all the content the web has to offer, such as sharing photos on Google+ and watching YouTube videos. Today we’re expanding our content offering in Australia with the introduction of Google Currents, an app for Android and iOS devices that lets you explore online magazines and other content with the swipe of a finger.

With Google Currents, you can browse and read full length articles from top international publishers in a format optimised for smartphones and tablets, allowing you to navigate intuitively between words, pictures and video on large and small screens alike, even if you’re offline.

After the U.S. launch, the top features readers requested were to make the app available internationally and to allow content to sync in the background. We’ve heard you, and in addition to making Google Currents available around the world, we’ve added a new dynamic sync feature, improving your reading experience with fresh content wherever you are.

Read in more places
With this update, we’ve made Google Currents available globally, wherever apps are available on Google Play and the Apple App Store. International publishers, using Google Currents Producer, can now begin adding local content, choosing whether to make it available globally and whether to enable auto-translation. For example La Stampa in Italy, Financial Times Deutschland in Germany, Neue Zürcher Zeitung in Switzerland and Hindustan Times in India have already started publishing editions with local content. You can also add your favorite local blogs which are instantly converted into Currents editions.

In Australia we’ve worked with more than a dozen local publishing partners to offer editions with full-length articles from publications including ABC News, Gizmodo Australia, mUmbrella, and Gizmag. We’re also offering a self-service platform to make content available on Google Currents, giving Australian publishers the flexibility to design, brand and customise their web content.

Read in your favorite language
To help you enjoy content in your preferred language, we’ve also integrated Google Translate into Google Currents. Just press the globe icon while reading an edition, and you can automatically translate that edition to one of 38 supported languages. So it’s easier than ever to keep up with Italian sports (Corriere dello Sport) or German sport (kicker.de).

Read fresh content, automatically
With our new dynamic sync feature, you’ll always have fresh content to read. As you open each edition, new content is dynamically delivered, using a minimum of your phone or tablet's battery and storage. Those of you who travel on planes and trains can choose which editions you would like fully packaged for offline reading, including images.

Learn more about what’s new in Currents here.

Google Currents is now available for download on Google Play (for devices running Android 2.2 and above) and in the Apple App Store, wherever apps are available. Whether you’re a reader or a publisher, we hope that Google Currents helps you easily experience the best content on the web, now in even more languages.

Google Currents launched in the U.S. in December. We’re pleased at how many readers and publishers have begun using it there -- nearly 400 publisher editions and over 14,000 self-produced editions are now available, and publishers can now choose to make these editions available worldwide.

Posted by Mussie Shore, Product Manager

Everything is possible. Now.

2012-04-11T14:17:00.005+10:00

This blog post was first published on marketingmag.com.au

I spent the last few days at The Circus Festival in Sydney, which, for someone new to the city has been an insight into the energy, creativity and passion for ideas that is bubbling over here. I kind of knew all this anyway... but it was great to have it confirmed emphatically.

It was a panoply, too many bright battlers to pull out individual big thinkers, and interesting to see dominant themes revolve less around advertising and technology than the principles of story-telling, going beyond advertising, some philosophical musings on the nature of our world, and how to let brands simply do good all in a world where communication tools are becoming more rich, more complex, and overwhelmingly digital. Something that resonated strongly with my own beliefs. It was an impressive range of vision. For me three trends stand out:

New toys, old stories
We have tools now that are destroying our understanding of what we do. That’s a challenge. The rise of digital platforms, new ways of connecting and talking to our customers and to each other create far less controllable, multi-authored experiences which have enormous potential to define and augment your brand within a market, but which are also more troubling and harder to control; everything from early experiments like iSnack 2.0, via crowd-sourced movies like YouTube’s Life in a Day or the Tate Movie Project, to user-led campaigns like Old Spice, Pepsi Refresh or Skittles’ Mega Super Updater. The festival had a level of anecdotal encouragement that was reminiscent of schoolboys on a high diving board, exhorting each other to experiment and explore, to push the boundaries and reap the rewards. The speed of technological innovation will almost certainly accelerate, and there was a lot of discussion about how brands become part of the conversation, become a platform, or a utility, rather than simply decoration. The potential of the latest hottest technology is never the story, the really interesting things happen when mass adoption occurs.

We are all geeks
We all want technology to work seamlessly, and perhaps we have reached a point where digital technology and the internet have become so ever-present, so fundamental to our lives that we simply expect a digital experience from our institutions and brands. Furthermore, if my generation doesn’t quite think high-speed internet is a human right, well there is a generation below who think the internet has always existed and they are now in their late teens. Behind that generation are some very young people, mini power-users, who consider magazines to be broken, because the touch-screen doesn’t work.

Unfortunately we will not be able to simply tell them that they are wrong. We need to plan around our audience, not ourselves. This is post digital. How many times a day do you stop, and think, "computers are amazing!" (they are by the way).

Digital is prevalent in every aspect of our lives, for better or worse, from a mother of two using her smartphone to compare prices in a supermarket, to her parents planning retirement holidays on their ipad, to her children using an interactive Shakespeare app for homework. We do not feel awed by this day to day, we use the technology that we are comfortable with, when we are ready. And we appear to be ready.

The new celebrities of the web will be surfacers
One hour of content hits YouTube every second, the world is creating more than it can consume in photos, blogs, updates, videos. And the model for finding this new content and for valuing it, and for extracting value from it is in flux too. It feels that those adding the most value will be the creatives and the producers, the makers, the designers, the editors, the stylists, the critics, and then the surfacers, the curators, the collectors who share that content. Discoverability, filter bubbles, surfacing, curators, trusted guides - these are words we will probably hear a lot more of as the content explosion continues.
The desire to lean back, do nothing, and passively consume is a powerful driving force. At least with me, so I would like someone to create packages of great content online that I can just stop thinking and watch.
There is a market for curated bundles of content that appeal to niche interests, whether it’s aggregated, syndicated or just links - that has value, either for the channel owner or sponsors. A trusted guide to follow for entertainment, or for culture, or for politics - a curator who embodies your values. It’s a wide open market.

So what is the most exciting thing the future holds for creatives? Well despite the speed and the complexity, I think it is the fact that everything is possible, especially as the mainstream truly embrace digital tools. You can still, more than ever, turn the world upside down with a well executed idea. That doesn’t happen to industries very often. While it may feel to some like it has always been this way, and however much we may yearn, nostalgically, for the simpler days of broadcast media, this is a moment, a window, that should be grasped and explored while we can.

Posted by Tom Uglow, Google Creative Lab APAC

Australian Art Goes Global

2012-04-04T08:06:00.000+10:00

Last year, we launched the Google Art Project, which brought artworks from some of the world's most famous galleries within reach of Australians who would otherwise have to spend thousands of dollars and dozens of hours on a plane.

6 of Australia’s leading galleries have now joined more than 151 cultural institutions in 40 countries in the Art Project. Anyone with a computer and an Internet connection can now explore more than 1400 artworks from the National Gallery of Australia, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the National Gallery of Victoria, the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, the Melbourne Museum and the Griffith University Rock Art Research Centre.

You can now view more than 30,000 photos of artworks and exhibits in high resolution, and you can easily search across the entire collection, whether you’re looking for a particular artwork (e.g. “Sunflowers”) or browsing and comparing pieces in groups (e.g. all Rembrandts, or all etchings). You can also consult additional reading material or videos as you’re viewing a piece by clicking the “Details” button next to it.

The Art Project also includes 46 ‘gigapixel’ super high resolution images that reveal brushwork details beyond what is visible to the naked eye. This level of detail often leads to a very different experience with the artwork. One striking example is Arthur Streeton’s “Fire’s On”, a famous evocation of Australian heat and sunlight. At high-levels of zoom, you can see in much sharper focus the human drama surrounding the death of a railway worker in an explosion.

You can also take a virtual tour through 46 galleries using Google’s Street View technology. Using the same technology that enables you to wander through city streets, you can stroll through the halls of The Met and the Musee D’Orsay. The Google Art Project also includes a “My Galleries” feature where you can collect your own favourites from across the site, leave comments, upload related YouTube videos, and share your collection with your friends, fellow students, or teachers.

You can find a wide range of art types in the Art Project, from paintings and sculptures to architecture and aboriginal art. Whether you’re a student, an aspiring artist or a casual museum-goer, we hope that the Art Project gives you a fun and innovative way to interact with art—and hopefully inspires you to visit the real thing!

Posted by Amanda Scott, Product Partnerships.

Google Street Roo - exploring the outback one bounce at a time

2012-04-01T07:07:00.016+10:00

After announcing tens of thousands of 360-degree panorama pictures of the Great Barrier Reef in Google Maps earlier this year and launching Street View imagery for the Amazon last week, one of the final frontiers we have yet to bring to your favourite computing device has been the Australian outback. One of our top requests from our users is the ability to roam the vast Australian continent. Unfortunately, the remoteness of the outback has posed a challenge for our traditional Street View cars and trikes.

Today, we’re happy to announce that Google has found an innovative way to capture a special collection of images from the back of beyond to include in Google Street View.

Over the next four weeks, more than a thousand Big Red kangaroos will be equipped with a 360-degree head camera that will automatically capture images when the marsupial is on the move during daylight hours.

What’s up, Skippy?

The cameras on our Street Roo collection team will be powered by solar panels stitched into the back pocket of custom-made roo jackets. Images will be wired to Google in real-time. A GPS tracker embedded into the jacket will match the location of the kangaroo to ensure the image is accurately uploaded onto the new Street View layer.

To ensure a seamless experience - and to avoid motion sickness - we have also developed software that will smooth over the bouncing effect experienced with the raw data. Users will be able to move backwards or forwards in Google Street Roo as they would use Street View, like this:

(original picture by Ryan Wick)

Leading marsupial specialists undertook extensive research to ensure that the image capture activity would not interfere with the roo’s grazing, sleeping or breeding activities. The cropped jackets that the kangaroos will wear have been designed to keep the pouch area completely accessible for the joey at all times.

The deployment of the ‘roo force’ will begin today and we believe 98% of the Australian outback will be captured on Google Maps within three years.

Posted by Andrew Foster, Product Manager, Google Maps

Australia’s cultural boom

2012-03-29T07:28:00.004+11:00

As I was growing up in Newcastle in the 1970s, my access to information and entertainment was limited to a handful of media outlets — two television channels, one newspaper, and a handful of radio stations. Given that airtime and column inches were scarce and expensive resources, it’s not surprising that I had so few choices.

Fast forward a few decades, and the situation could not be more different. There’s been an unprecedented explosion of content. On YouTube alone 4 billion videos are viewed every day, and 60 hours of video are uploaded every minute. My family has endless choices of what to watch, listen to, play, and read.

This is obviously an era of major change, and, rightly, many questions are being asked about how the media sector is evolving and what the future holds for Australian consumers and content creators. These are important questions that go beyond mere economics. We’re talking about the building blocks of our culture and identity. A strong, diverse media sector is central to that.

Wanting to better understand the current landscape, we commissioned the Boston Consulting Group to prepare an independent, fact-based report — which we believe is the first of its kind in the world -— on the impact of Internet media on consumers, artists, and the industry in Australia.

Here’s some of what BCG’s “Culture Boom: How Digital Media Are Invigorating Australia” found:

Australians like the new media world, where their access to, and choice of, media has never been greater. We’re consuming more media than ever before, and we’re happier with both the quantity and quality of material available.
Australians love Australian content. We are choosing to watch Australian-made content, despite the fact that we can easily watch content from anywhere in the world.
Overseas they love Australian content too. Australian content performs so well overseas that we have a trade surplus: overseas they watch more hours of Australian-made online video than Australians watch of overseas-made online video.

This dynamic new media world is creating tremendous opportunities for new and existing media businesses. According to the report, the media industry will grow over the next four years, with revenue projected to rise to $29.1 billion and 15,000 new jobs created. The Internet will be a key driver of that growth.

Furthermore, BCG calculates that new media is generating a consumer surplus of $24 billion — this is the value that Australian consumers believe they’re deriving from new media above what they already pay. As new content, new distribution platforms, and new monetization mechanisms come together, there’s a lot of opportunity ahead. Existing companies stand to gain, but we’re also seeing a generation of new artists and entrepreneurs emerge here in Australia, from Brisbane games developer Halfbrick to Perth’s Nick Bertke, alias POGO, whose remixes on YouTube earned him work with Disney and Pixar, as well as an exhibition at the Guggenheim in New York.

It’s clear that Australian consumers, media businesses, and content creators are all benefiting from the Internet, but just as exciting is that Australian content — and the Australian culture and identity — is staking out an even stronger place in the world.

Go here to read more and download the full report.

Posted by Nick Leeder, Managing Director, Google Australia & New Zealand

Half of Australia’s small businesses now benefit from the digital economy

2012-03-22T09:59:00.008+11:00

What do a bicycle shop in Newcastle, a coffee roaster near Melbourne and an eyelash extension salon in Brisbane have in common?

For one, they’re all Aussie-owned small businesses. And second, you can find all of them online--something that wasn’t true one year ago.

Business owners Brian Birrell, Dean Scholes, and Amy Asperios are part of a growing tide of small businesses making the move online. We just learned how large this tide is: in a recent survey of small business owners, we found that 52% had a website. That represents growth of 50% year over year; a study conducted in 2011 by MYOB put that number at 35%.

The research is timely, given it’s been 1 year since Google and MYOB launched the “Getting Aussie Business Online” program to help SMBs make the move online. Our goal is to help businesses throughout the nation realize all the benefits that an online presence brings: the chance to reach new customers, make more sales, and save money and time. Over the past year, more than 30,000 businesses have created free websites through the program.

So who are these businesses and where are they? We took a look at the numbers and here’s what we found:

Tempting tourists: Queensland may be top of mind when it comes to holidays, but Tasmania claimed the highest proportion of tourism sites created. 9% of all Getting Aussie Business Online sites in Tassie are tourism-related, which is nearly 3 times the national average. It also took top prize in retail--nearly 1 in 4 websites created in Tasmania came from retailers, a rate roughly 25% higher than the national average.
Swinging the hammer: Western Australia leads the rest of the country in websites created in the construction and trades category, which represented nearly 1 in 4 websites created there.
Country mouse, city mouse: Two-thirds of businesses who’ve taken advantage of Getting Aussie Business Online hail from areas outside of major cities. Queensland had the highest percentage of websites created outside the capital city (84%). South Australia had the lowest at 49%.

Coffee roaster Dean can attest to the difference a website can make to a small business. Before he got his site up and running with Getting Aussie Business Online, his business was strictly local; there was no way for him to reach people outside of Melbourne. “The response has been phenomenal; starting my own website has allowed me to get my name out to potential customers all over Australia,” he says. Amy Asperios, owner of Glamm Lash eyelash extension salon, uses her web presence as a free marketing tool, adding “There has been an increase in clients coming through since I started my website; the ‘contact us’ option has proved to be a great tool and I get a steady flow of enquiries from it.”

Posted by Claire Hatton, Head of Local Business, Google Australia

Test your site’s smartphone savvy with Google’s GoMoMeter

2012-03-05T09:48:00.010+11:00

While on holidays, a tourist uses her smartphone to find a dive shop that provides snorkel tours in Queensland. She searches, finds your site, and clicks through, prepared to research and reserve a package, or find your store nearby and arrange one from there. But, after she clicks to your site she runs into trouble - it doesn't load fully, and she spends more time zooming-in and squinting than she does studying your snorkel packages! Frustrated, she gives up and looks for another shop. You lose a potential customer.

This happens hundreds, even thousands of times every day in Australia, because 4 out of 5 businesses’ websites don’t work well on smartphones. With half the population of Australia now owning a smartphone, the most important thing you can do to grow your business using the mobile web is to create a mobile-friendly website: a website designed specifically for mobile users and mobile devices. It should be fast to load and easy to use—no pinching and zooming required.

Not everyone knows how to get started on mobile, so today we’re launching an initiative called GoMo that helps businesses “Go Mobile” by showing them how their website looks on mobile with a smartphone simulator called the GoMoMeter, and then providing a personalised report to help you figure out what to do to make make your site more accessible on mobile.
To find out whether you’re ready to Go Mo, visit www.howtogomo.com/au. Enter your website’s URL to see how your site performs on mobile phones with the GoMoMeter. The GoMoMeter will analyse your site and give you customised recommendations on how to make your site more mobile-friendly. You can even download a free customised report!

Every day more and more of your customers are looking for you using their mobile devices, and if your site isn’t mobile-friendly chances are you’re missing out. So don’t shut the door on mobile: visit www.howtogomo.com/au and take the first steps towards going mobile, today.

Posted by Jason Pellegrino, Head of Mobile Ads, Google Australia

Supporting Mardi Gras

2012-03-02T14:39:00.003+11:00

From Gayglers to Greyglers to VetNet (that’s the Google Veterans Network), Google has a whole range of interest groups in our company because diversity matters to us and our users. Representing different perspectives and ideas is fundamental to our mission to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.

Here in Australia, we’re proud to support +Sydney Mardi Gras for the second year. Tomorrow night we’ll join half a million people on the streets of Sydney with our very own float. Our hundred dancing Gayglers will march down the famous Oxford Street strip to show our support for the LGBT community and you’ll be able to join us via a Google+ Hangout (add +Google Australia to your circles to see details on how to take part).

Last month, the Google team also was out at Fair Day, attended by 70,000 people, to talk about diversity in the workplace.

As part of our partnership with the Mardi Gras Festival, we also recently hosted two Queer Thinking seminars on Activism in the Internet Age and Queer Careers. Experts joined us on stage and via a Google+ Hangout to talk about how the web has changed campaigning for a cause and what it means to be a LGBT business leader.

Thank you to the speakers who participated -- Alex Greenwich from Australian Marriage Equality, Aaron Hulse of GetUp! Australia (who were behind the It's Time campaign that went viral), Alan Seah and Paerin Choa from Pink Dot Singapore, Senator Louise Pratt, Washington D.C based Bob Witeck, Feyi Akindoyani of Kreab Gavin Anderson, and Megan Smith, Google’s VP of Business Development.

You can see highlights from the Hangout here.

Happy Mardi Gras!

Verne Smith, Gayglers Sydney lead, Google Australia and New Zealand.

Google’s new Privacy Policy

2012-03-01T11:11:00.002+11:00

Our updated Privacy Policy takes effect today, March 1. As you use our products one thing will be clear: it’s the same Google experience that you’re used to, with the same controls.

And because we’re making these changes, over time we’ll be able to improve our products in ways that help our users get the most from the web.

While we’ve undertaken the most extensive user education campaign in our history to explain the coming changes, we know there has been a fair amount of chatter and confusion.

Here are a few important points to bear in mind:

Our privacy policy is now much easier to understand.

We’ve included the key parts from more than 60 product-specific notices into our main Google Privacy Policy—so there’s no longer any need to be your own mini search engine if you want to work out what’s going on. Our Privacy Policy now explains, for the vast majority of our services, what data we’re collecting and how we may use it, in plain language.

Our privacy policy will enable us to build a better, more intuitive user experience across Google for signed-in users.

If you’re signed in to Google, you expect our products to work really beautifully together. For example, if you’re working on Google Docs and you want to share it with someone on Gmail, you want their email right there ready to use. Our privacy policies have always allowed us to combine information from different products with your account—effectively using your data to provide you with a better service. However, we’ve been restricted in our ability to combine your YouTube and Search histories with other information in your account. Our new Privacy Policy gets rid of those inconsistencies so we can make more of your information available to you when using Google.

So in the future, if you do frequent searches for Jamie Oliver, we could recommend Jamie Oliver videos when you’re looking for recipes on YouTube—or we might suggest ads for his cookbooks when you’re on other Google properties.

Our privacy controls aren’t changing.

The new policy doesn’t change any existing privacy settings or how any personal information is shared outside of Google. We aren’t collecting any new or additional information about users. We won’t be selling your personal data. And we will continue to employ industry-leading security to keep your information safe.

If you don’t think information sharing will improve your experience, you can use our privacy tools to do things like edit or turn off your search history and YouTube history, control the way Google tailors ads to your interests and browse the web “incognito” using Chrome. You can use services like Search, Maps and YouTube if you are not signed in. You can even separate your information into different accounts, since we don’t combine personal information across them. And we’re committed to data liberation, so if you want to take your information elsewhere you can.

We’ll continue to look for ways to make it simpler for you to understand and control how we use the information you entrust to us. We build Google for you, and we think these changes will make our services even better.

Posted by Alma Whitten, director of privacy for products and engineering, Google.

Editor's note: Earlier this week, we received a letter from Australian Privacy Commissioner Timothy Pilgrim on behalf of the Asia Pacific Privacy Authorities. We have responded with this letter.