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We're expanding in Texas. Austin has been home to Google for over a decade and today, we’re extending our commitment to the state with a new data center in Midlothian, and the lease of two new buildings for our Austin workforce. These new commitments are part of our larger $13 billion investment in offices and data centers across the United States, which we announced earlier this year.

We’re investing $600 million to develop the Midlothian site, which will create a number of full-time jobs, as well as hundreds of construction jobs to build the new data center. As part of this investment, we’re also making a $100,000 grant to the Midlothian Independent School District to support the continued growth and development of the region’s STEM programs in schools.

In Austin, we already have more than 1,100 employees working across Android, G Suite, Google Play, Cloud, staffing and recruiting, people operations, finance and marketing. As we continue to grow, we’ve leased additional office space at Block 185 and Saltillo—located in downtown Austin and east Austin, respectively—to accommodate our short and long-term growth.

Our current downtown Austin office on W 2nd Street. We will maintain our presence there while expanding to new locations at Saltillo and Block 185.

The Lone Star state has become a hub for tech innovation and we’ve been fortunate to be a part of its growth from the very beginning. It’s the amazing talent and spirit of work and play that brought us to Texas 12 years ago and it’s what keeps us here today. We look forward to meeting our new neighbors in the Midlothian-Dallas Metro area and we’re excited to be a part of these communities for many years to come.

We’re developing a new data center in Midlothian and expanding our presence in downtown Austin.

Founded in 1875, Merz Apothecary is considered a Chicago landmark. For five generations, the pharmacy has been home to a collection of unique, hard-to-find goods from all over the world. Abdul Qaiyum bought the business in 1972, managing to grow the business during a time when most independent pharmacies were giving way to large chain drug stores. Abdul’s three sons worked there growing up and today, Merz Apothecary is run by Abdul and his son, Anthony. “We’re not your traditional pharmacy,” says Anthony. “We carry everything from natural remedies to grooming products to home fragrances.”

One of the secrets to their continued success? Quickly embracing the power of technology. They turned to the internet while it was still in its early days, taking their first online order in 1997 and starting an e-commerce site, smallflower.com, in 1998. In 2001 they started using Google Ads to reach customers searching for their specialty products and their business began to double. They now have 60 employees and the web continues to play a critical role in their business. A YouTube channel has expanded their reach—videos sharing fun and informative product reviews have garnered over 1.5 million views. “I view the web as a way that we can deliver what we do, to everybody,” says Anthony. “Everyone is going online searching for information all the time. Google is the place where most of that gets done, so I want to be there and I want to be seen.”

Abdul & Anthony in 1973 and in 2018

Check out their video to learn more about how this father-son duo continues to grow a business and preserve an American landmark.

Merz Apothecary has sold a rich collection of unique goods since 1875. Today, Google Ads help them reach customers searching for their specialty products.

My father was diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes as a teenager. He spent most of his life on insulin, until he went into kidney failure when I was four years old. After years on the donor list, a kidney and pancreas became available. He received seven blood transfusions in his 14-hour surgery. But two years later, his body rejected the kidney and he was back to square one. Through the kindness of his brother who was a match, my father received his second kidney transplant, along with several pints of blood. Without blood donors, my father wouldn’t have survived those surgeries and might not be alive today, 20 years later.

Katen and her dad

My father's journey has made me passionate about ensuring that people like him have access to blood when they need it. Although 45 percent of Americans have been personally affected by blood donation, only 3 percent of Americans regularly donate blood.

I’m personally unable to donate blood, but I’ve found another way to give back to the cause: organizing blood drives at Google. Through my work organizing 20 blood drives, I’ve encountered countless others who have personal ties to blood donation, including Googlers like Daniel Otts, who regularly donates blood in memory of his son Ferris who required plasma infusions after being born prematurely. Losing Ferris forever changed Daniel’s outlook on blood donation. “I remember how thankful I was that someone, an anonymous stranger, had given of themselves so unselfishly for the benefit of someone else, quite possibly in a life or death situation,” Daniel told me.

Through these drives, we’ve collected thousands of pints of blood. And through Google’s partnership with the American Red Cross, which uses Google Maps Platform to help people find a blood drive near them, we’ve reached thousands more people across the U.S.

This technology also helped Temie Giwa-Tubosun, a Nigerian native and founder of LifeBank, an app that uses Google Maps Platform to connect blood banks with drivers, hospitals, and patients in need. To date, Temie’s app has drastically cut delivery time of blood from 24 hours to less than 45 minutes and helped save more than 4,000 lives.

Through my own experience, I know how important it is to give blood. And Daniel and Temie are proof of that, too. On World Blood Donor Day, we hope you’ll visit the Red Cross site to find a blood drive near you and plan your donation.

On World Blood Donor Day, visit the Red Cross site to find a blood drive near you and plan your donation.

Editor’s note: This article is a condensed version of a speech Caesar gave at the G20 Finance Leaders Meeting in Japan on Saturday, June 8, 2019.

Let me introduce you to Vijay Babu. Vijay owns a small laundry shop in Bangalore, India. He can’t read or write, but he was eager to go digital to cater to smartphone savvy millennials.

Vijay Babu used Google Pay, formerly known as Tez in India, to help grow his business.

A year ago, he would have to pay $100 for a credit card terminal, deal with cumbersome printed receipts, and wait days to get paid. That’s no longer the case.  Vijay Babu’s daughter helped him set up Google Pay on his Android smartphone. Today, he’s able to keep track of his transactions better, accept payments remotely and build relationships with his customers through Google Pay’s chat-based interface.

I believe technology is about solving the big problems, not just for a few, but for everyone.

That’s more possible today than ever before because of the smartphone. Smartphones are likely the first electronic device that all of humanity will possess. There are about four billion internet users in the world today, with another one billion coming online in the next few years. Almost all of them will be using smartphones. And here’s what’s amazing about the smartphone in your pocket: Today, it has more computing power and access to information than NASA had in 1969 when they put a man on the moon.

One of the biggest opportunities in front of us is how we apply that technology to the world of money. Whether you are an individual, a business or a country, your ability to access modern financial systems is pivotal to your success.

Unfortunately, in today’s smartphone-enabled, always connected world, payments don’t work for everyone. Younger demographics find banking experiences too antiquated. A recent study showed that 48 percent of millennials in the U.S, are considering moving to a digital only bank, and one in three millennials plan to switch banks in the next 90 days.

On the other hand, there are 2.5 billion adults in the world who are unbanked or underbanked—and the majority of them are women. This lack of access has huge implications for families, children, commerce and society at large. Besides consumers, payment challenges have an outsized impact on small businesses, the backbone of every economy.

We need to use technology and deploy it at scale to solve these hard and real problems. Doing so will help move countries from cash to digital, accelerate economic growth, and drive financial inclusion in economies.

At Google, building for everyone is a core philosophy. We know that we do better when everyone is invited in. Because Android is open source, there are 2.5 billion active Android devices today, made by over 1,300 different companies. And because Android is an open ecosystem, there are more than one million apps on the Google Play store. 

It took a global community to put smartphones in everyone’s hands. Today, it’s time for that global community to come together again to digitize economies.

Caesar Sengupta speaking at the G20 Finance Leaders Meeting in Japan about how tech, governments and banks serve people better when they work together.

There's a popular but deeply mistaken belief that companies and banks are rivals that are working against each other. We believe that when tech and banks work together as partners, they're better able to help people.

For Google, partnering with banks helps us build products that work for everyone. By using our global infrastructure and technology platform to connect more customers to a formal financial system, we can support governments as they move societies from cash to digital and transform economies.

Four years ago, Prime Minister Narendra Modi called for a Digital India. We supported the Indian government and financial institutions in realizing their vision for payments. With Google tech and our knowledge of user experience, we created a simple payments app to work on the Unified Payments Interface (UPI), India’s real-time payments ecosystem. Since the launch of Google Pay in India (formerly known as Tez), transactions on UPI have increased 43 times, reaching 734 million transactions in May. Now, the cumulative value has overtaken that of credit and debit cards in India.

Google Pay has grown together with the rest of the digital payments ecosystem in India. Now, two out of every three transactions on Google Pay in India take place outside of India’s top six cities in more than 300,000 towns and villages across India made by millions of people like Vijay every day.

Stories like Vijay’s are examples of what is possible when governments, finance and tech work together. Together, we can and absolutely must empower billions more.

It’s time for global governments, finance and banks to come together to help accelerate economic growth and drive financial inclusion.

As May flowers bloomed, we watched our garden of blog posts grow. New features in Android phones and Gmail cropped up, and we’ve got some updates for cloud developers. Plus, check out photos and details about our new machine learning supercomputers. Here’s what was new.

Android phones help add security.
Android phones (versions 7.0+, Nougat) now come with a built-in security key. This is the FIDO type of security key, an industry standard that can be used for two-factor authentication—an extra verification step on top of a password that makes your sign-ins resistant to phishing scams.

Calendar now comes in dark mode.
When you’re looking at your Google Calendar, or at Keep, our task management tool, you can now see it in dark mode. This is nice in low light, for those of you checking the next day’s schedule in the dark, since it reduces screen brightness. Whether it’s enabled by default will depend on your version of Android and your settings. Plus, we announced the launch of Gmail confidential mode last month, so you’ll soon be able to send messages with built-in information rights management controls. This means you can create expiration dates and revoke sent messages, plus these messages can’t be forwarded, copied, printed or downloaded.

Learn lots more about these and other topics in the brand-new G Suite Learning Center.

Supercomputers for machine learning arrived.
Machine learning (ML) can help with tasks ranging from image recognition to disease research and medical diagnoses. Machine learning requires data scientists to build a model and train it with examples so that the computer can eventually learn a pattern. This requires a lot of computing power. Super powerful and expensive data centers full of servers were not enough to handle the growth of AI workloads and computational horsepower, so we created TPUs, our own hardware chips, just for the purpose of speeding up machine learning. Now, those TPUs are publicly available in pods, which are essentially stacks of these TPUs linked together to form an AI supercomputer. Data scientists and researchers can use them to do machine learning tasks much faster, in minutes or hours compared to days or weeks previously. Make sure to take a look at the photos in the post—when it comes to massive modern supercomputers, a picture is worth a thousand words. 

What cloud developers are learning about
Behind many of the apps and websites you use everyday are these things called APIs (short for application programming interface), which essentially allow these apps and sites to talk to each other. Think of a website that has a Google map embedded, for example—there’s an API in use there. API design is a hot topic among developers, since they have to make sure that different applications can all talk to each other to make a website or app run more smoothly for users. One popular post last month was about a newer way to design APIs that is simpler and requires less documentation for developers and software.

That’s a wrap for May. Stay tuned to the Google Cloud blog for more.

Here's what you missed on Google Cloud in May 2019.

As our CEO Sundar Pichai announced today in my home state of Oklahoma, we’re making our largest ever computer science education grant from Google.org to support 4-H, the largest youth development organization in the country. This $6 million grant—made as part of Grow with Google's efforts to ensure that everyone has access to future opportunities—will help provide more than 1 million youth across the country with computer science skills, plus computer science training for their educators.

4-H is a second home for students like Decklan Thomas, a high schooler from Bruceton Mills, West Virginia (population 86). Following three generations in the trucking industry, Decklan was certain that he was on a path to becoming a diesel mechanic. The field was appealing not only because of family tradition, but also because it allowed him to do something he liked: identifying problems and fixing them.

One day, he learned about computer science through his local 4-H chapter. He didn’t even know he was coding at first—it just felt like solving a puzzle on the computer. As he began to do more coding, he quickly saw the parallels between the skills you need to be a mechanic and the computer science he was learning at 4-H. He says, “You see something wrong, then fix it—and end up with something amazing.” Decklan is still enthusiastic about becoming a diesel mechanic, but he’s now also exploring other opportunities like becoming a biomedical engineer or even going into the Navy.

I know the impact of these types of programs because I grew up going to my local 4-H chapter in Oklahoma. I loved learning about animal care, teamwork, and practical farm skills—a hallmark of 4-H. Like Decklan, those skills inspired me to learn how to fix things—I went to the Oklahoma State University and went on to work for Google here in Pryor. And I still fix things: the servers in our data centers that power our internet products for people across the country.

Decklan and I are representative of the many students across the United States who lack access to computer science learning opportunities. It’s estimated that computer science-related jobs are created at nearly four times the rate of other jobs, but students in small towns are less likely to have access to classes and clubs at school compared to suburban students, and their parents are less likely to know about CS opportunities outside of school.

Together with 4-H, we believe in the potential of technology–and youth—to change and improve our lives, industries and communities. Today’s Google.org grant will provide 4-H educators with the resources they need to ensure that students can access the skills they’ll need—both technical and non-technical—to create the technology that may improve our future.

We’re making our largest ever computer science education grant from Google.org to support 4-H, the largest youth development organization in the country.

Editor’s Note: This week we’re making some big moves around the $13 billion U.S. investment we announced in February. On Monday, our CFO Ruth Porat was in Michigan to announce an additional investment in our offices in Ann Arbor and Detroit. And tomorrow, we’re breaking ground on a new data center in Midlothian, TX, and expanding our office in Austin.

Today, Google CEO Sundar Pichai was in Oklahoma to announce a $600 million investment to expand our data center in Mayes County, as well as our biggest computer science education grant in Google.org’s history. Read his edited remarks below.

I enjoy visiting the places our data centers call home. I especially love to see the local touches. In the case of Pryor, it’s the mechanical bull in the lobby, which I’m told is a lot of fun. It requires good positioning, strong balance, and sometimes digging in your heels. So, not much different from my day job.

But the real reason I look forward to these visits is the community. It’s a privilege to meet the people who are making Pryor a great place to live and work.

At Google, we are technology optimists. Not because we believe in technology, but because we believe in people. 

The people of Mayes County shared our sense of optimism from the very start. That optimism is why, when Google proposed building a data center here in 2007, you welcomed us with open arms. And that optimism is what’s made it possible for Google to continue our expansion in Pryor in the years since—not once, not twice...but three times. Today’s announcement will make it four.

Pryor is already home to one of Google’s largest data centers in the country. I am pleased to announce that we will be investing another $600 million to expand the data center here and create an additional 100 jobs for the Pryor community. This brings the total investment in Oklahoma to over $3 billion, and total jobs created to more than 500.

It’s part of our $13 billion investment in expanding our data centers across the U.S. This week we also announced new investments in Michigan, and we’re breaking ground on a new data center in Texas.

This national expansion comes at a significant moment for Google. For 21 years we’ve pursued a timeless mission: to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. In that time, we’ve evolved from a company that helps people find answers to a company that helps people throughout their day.

Pryor is a part of our effort to build a more helpful Google for everyone. We’ve spent more than two decades scaling our technical infrastructure to match the growth of information. And we are continuously working to make it more efficient and more reliable.

This site is an important part of our global network of data centers. This network is what powers your searches, your email, all of the photos you store and treasure, and the maps that help you find the fastest way home. And that network includes 13 locations around the world, with new data centers underway in eight additional locations.

It's a privilege to serve billions of people every day. With that privilege comes a big responsibility to ensure that information truly serves everyone. Every day, millions of Americans go online to find answers, learn new skills, and grow their businesses. Two years ago, Google announced Grow with Google, a new effort to expand economic opportunity to all Americans. A big way we do this is through digital skills training. Our partnership with Goodwill is already helping thousands of Oklahomans learn new skills and find jobs.

We’re also excited to help young people learn computer science to prepare them for the jobs of tomorrow. Since 2017, we’ve been working with the National 4-H Council to create a computer science curriculum.

Today we are pleased to be able to build on this work with a $6 million grant to support computer science education in 4-H chapters across the country. This is our largest ever computer science education grant from Google.org. It will help ensure that young people in Oklahoma and 25 other states have access to the curriculum, training, and devices to learn and grow their coding skills. I look forward to joining students to do some coding later today!

Thank you to everyone who has a hand in keeping our data center running smoothly. We’re proud to call Oklahoma home, and look forward to Pryor being a vital part of the engine that powers the internet for years to come.

We’re continuing our U.S. data center expansion with a new investment in Mayes County, OK.

Let’s say you have an idea for a video game. It could be a first-person action game starring a snail on the (slow) run from the law, or a multiplayer game featuring only pugs. There’s only one problem: You’ve never built a game before. You don’t know how to program.You don’t know any 3D artists. And every tool you find won’t let you collaborate with friends.

What if creating games could be as easy and fun as playing them? What if you could enter a virtual world with your friends and build a game together in real time? Our team within Area 120, Google’s workshop for experimental projects, took on this challenge. Our prototype is called Game Builder, and it is free on Steam for PC and Mac.

Built for gamers

Game Builder aims to make building a game feel like playing a game. If you’ve crafted a fort or dug a mine in a game, you already know how to build a 3D level in Game Builder.

Always-on multiplayer

Multiple users can build (or play) simultaneously. You can even have friends play the game as you work on it.

No code required

Bring your games to life with Game Builder’s card-based visual programming system. Drag and drop cards to “answer” questions, such as, “How do I move?” You can make moving platforms, scoreboards, healing potions, drivable cars and more.

Real-time JavaScript

You can build your own cards with Javascript. Game Builder comes with an extensive API that allows you to script almost everything in the game. All the code is live, so just make a change and save it, no compiling required.

Thousands of 3D models

From pugs to rocket ships, there are thousands of options available to craft your characters. Find 3D models on Google Poly and use them in your game instantly.

If you’ve ever wanted to build a video game, but didn’t know where to start, check out Game Builder on Steam. (And if you end up making that snail-on-the-run game, we can’t wait to play.)Game Builder is an experimental game-building sandbox available now for free on Steam for PC and Mac.

Many of you store your photos and videos on both Google Drive and Google Photos, which keeps them safe and easy to access. We’ve heard feedback that the connection between these services is confusing, so next month, we’re making some changes to simplify the experience across Drive and Photos.

Changes to automatic sync between Google Drive and Google Photos

Starting in July, new photos and videos from Drive won’t automatically show in Photos. Similarly, new photos and videos in Photos will not be added to the Photos folder in Drive. Photos and videos you delete in Drive will not be removed from Photos. Similarly, items you delete in Photos will not be removed from Drive. This change is designed to help prevent accidental deletion of items across products.

 New “Upload from Drive” feature in Google Photos

We’ve heard that many of you would like more granular control when copying photos and videos from Drive into Photos. So we’re bringing a new feature to photos.google.com called “Upload from Drive,” which lets you manually choose photos and videos from Drive, including “Shared with Me” items, to import into Photos. Once copied, these items are not connected between the two products. Since photos and videos will no longer sync across both products, items copied in Original Quality will count towards your storage quota in both Drive and Photos.

 Backup and Sync for Windows and Mac will continue to work

You’ll still be able to use Backup and Sync on Windows or macOS to upload to both services in High Quality or Original Quality. As before, items uploaded in High Quality won’t count against your account storage quota, and items uploaded using Backup and Sync in Original Quality to both services will count only once towards your quota.

 Your existing photos and videos will stay in Google Drive and Google Photos

Any photos or videos from Drive in Photos that you have uploaded prior to this change will remain in Photos. If you have a “Google Photos” folder in Drive, it will remain in Drive, but will no longer update automatically.

 Our goal with these changes is to simplify some features that caused confusion for our users, based on feedback and our own research. We’ll continue to look for more ways to help support Drive and Photos users going forward.

 If you want to take a closer look at these new changes, please check out our guide.

We're making some changes to how Google Photos and Google Drive work together

Violent organized crime is one of the biggest crises facing Mexico, and it places journalists in harm’s way. Murders are a daily occurrence in many parts of the country, and research shows that Mexico is the most deadly place in the world for reporters outside of active war zones. The natural desire to avoid becoming a target has led some journalists to choose to stay quiet to save their lives.

Something akin to a code of silence has emerged across the country. We suspected that there were entire regions where journalists were not reporting on the violence, threats, intimidation and murder that were well known to be part of daily life.

We set out to measure this silence and its impact on journalism. To do so, we partnered with the Google News Initiative to use the power of machine learning and artificial intelligence to quantify and visualize news coverage and analyze the gaps in coverage across the country.

Our first step was to establish a process to determine the absence of news. We explored articles on violence to understand how they compare to the government's official registry of homicides.

In theory, each murder that occurs ought to correspond with at least one local report about the event. If we saw a divergence, or if the government's reports were suddenly very different from local news coverage, we could deduce that journalists were being silenced.

Early on, sorting through news articles seemed impossible. We knew we needed to find a news archive with the largest number of publications in Mexico possible so we could track daily coverage across the country. Google News’ vast collection of local and national news stories across Mexico was a good fit.

The effort required us to identify the difference between the number of homicides officially recorded and the news stories of those killings on Google News. This required machine learning algorithms that were able to identify the first reported story and then pinpoint where the event took place. With that information, we were able to connect reported events by media with the government's reports on homicides across more than 2400 municipalities in Mexico.

A map of unreported murders across Mexico that were identified through El Universal’s project.  

Finally, to measure the degree of silence in each region of the country, we created a formula that allows us to see the evolution of this phenomenon over time. The resulting data shows a fascinating mix of falls or peaks in unreported deaths, which coincide with events such as the arrival of new governments or the deaths of drug dealers. Further investigation will allow us to explain these connections.

At El Universal, we’re committed to continue our search for news deserts, to enhance the vitality of journalism in Mexico and draw attention to how coverage varies according to the type of crimes committed in each region, not just homicides.

This exercise is another reminder that in Mexico, as in many other countries, we cannot take freedom of the press for granted.

Reporters at El Universal partnered with the Google News Initiative to use AI to track unreported stories across Mexico.

“I hope I can entrust you with everything that I haven't been able to share with anyone, and I hope you will be a great support to me." These are the first words Anne Frank wrote in the diary she received on her thirteenth birthday. Three weeks later, the Frank family went into hiding. Since then, the story of Anne has moved people across the globe who want to learn more about her life.

Google Arts & Culture has worked with the Anne Frank House to shed a light on Anne’s life at Merwedeplein 37-2 in Amsterdam, where her family lived before they went into hiding. In honor of what would have been her 90th birthday, you can explore an online exhibit and indoor Street View imagery of Anne’s childhood home. For the first time it will be possible to view all rooms of the flat to get a unique insight into Anne Frank's home that has been restored to its original 1930s style, including the bedroom that she shared with her sister Margot.

The accompanying online exhibit  features precious insights and documents such as the only video of Anne known to exist—taken by pure coincidence at a wedding—as well as the only picture of her an her parents and sister.

• 1. Anne Frank - The Anne Frank House.png

  Anne Frank at the Jewish Lyceum

• SV visual 1.png

  Take a look inside a room that Anne shared with her sister Margot.

• 3.Family Image - The Anne Frank House.png

  This is the only known family photograph of Anne Frank with her parents, Otto and Edith, and her sister, Margot in front of the family's home

• SV visual 3.png

  Inside of the Frank’s family apartment at Merwedeplein 37-2, where Anne lived for 9 years

• 5. The Diary - The Anne Frank House.png

  Anne Frank's red and white checkered diary

• 6. The Hiding Place - The Anne Frank House.png

  The family's secret hiding place had been set up in the annex behind Otto's business on the Prinsengracht

The former home of the Frank family has been leased to the Dutch Foundation for Literature since 2005 and serves as a temporary home and workplace for refugee writers who cannot work freely in their own country. “It is a place where freedom, tolerance and freedom of expression are given the space to breathe,” says Ronald Leopold, general director of the Anne Foundation. The house was decorated in the style of the 1930s when the Frank family lived there.

Learn more about Anne Frank and discover of the treasures, stories and knowledge of over 2000 cultural institutions from 80 countries on Google Arts & Culture or via our iOS or Android app.

Learn more about Anne Frank's history by browsing through a new online exhibition which let’s you visit her former family home in indoor Street--View

One of the privileges of working at the de Young museum in San Francisco is getting to regularly spend time in front of masterworks by artists like Ruth Asawa, Albert Bierstadt, and Mary Cassatt, and learn about the often fascinating stories surrounding their art. Spanning four centuries, the de Young museum’s American art collection includes paintings, sculpture, and decorative art from the 17th century to the present day. We have so many stories to tell.

As the museum’s director of digital strategy, it’s my job to find ways to make these stories more readily accessible for our visitors and to help people understand what the art says about the world, and the cultures, viewpoints, and moments in time that don’t always fit within the short labels in the galleries.

• "California Spring," Albert Bierstadt

  "California Spring," Albert Bierstadt

• The Ruth Asawa insulation in the lobby of the Nancy B. and Jake L. Hamon Tower at de Young

  The Ruth Asawa insulation in the lobby of the Nancy B. and Jake L. Hamon Tower at de Young

• "Mrs. Robert S. Cassatt, the Artist’s Mother," Mary Cassatt

  "Mrs. Robert S. Cassatt, the Artist’s Mother," Mary Cassatt

Our newest collaboration with Google Arts & Culture shows visitors the hidden stories behind the paintings in this collection. Now, using Google Lens, you can search what you see. Point your phone's camera at a work like Edmund Charles Tarbell’s The Blue Veil, and you’ll have a curator at the tap of a finger to tell you more about the artist’s origins, and his fascination with the veil.

Learn more about art with Google Arts & Culture and Google Lens.

This is a way for artists to share their perspective, too. In a new exhibition, Detour, artist Ana Prvački takes you on a tour of the museum, guiding you to specific spots and asking you to rethink parts of the museum visitors many not normally consider, such as the material of the museum’s copper facade. Visitors can trigger Prvački’s short videos on mobile devices via Google Lens at sites throughout the free public spaces of the museum. When you watch the videos, it feels like you’re getting a personal tour from the artist herself.

If you can’t make it to San Francisco before the exhibition concludes in September, you can experience a version of Detour online on Google Arts & Culture.  

To find out more, visit g.co/lens and the de Young Museum on Google Arts & Culture.

With Google Lens and Google Arts & Culture at the de Young museum in San Francisco, you can access information about art in new ways.

Walking down bustling Woodward Avenue in Detroit on Sunday night, I was impressed by the vitality and transformation of the city. This momentum across Michigan is why we've continued to grow our offices there for the past 13 years. Our workforce is growing at a faster rate outside the Bay Area than in it, and with an office in Ann Arbor and a new office in Detroit, we greatly value being a part of the community in both cities.

Yesterday, I visited Michigan to announce we’re investing $17 million to expand our offices in Detroit and Ann Arbor. The result will be a combined total of 260,000 square feet in office space, giving us the capacity to significantly increase our local workforce in the coming years.

As we continue to grow in Michigan, we want to help people in the state have the opportunity to learn the skills they need to succeed in the digital economy. So I also spent the morning participating in Grow with Google workshops at Taylor Community Library, west of Detroit, where community members came out to learn digital skills, from making a professional presentation to helping their businesses grow online.

• Grow with Google in Michigan

  The Grow with Google team outside Taylor Community Library.

• Ruth Porat with Grow with Google in Michigan

  Kim Schott from Detroit SCORE speaks during our partner roundtable. 

• Grow with Google in Michigan

  Google trainers answered questions from workshop participants. 

• Grow with Google in Michigan

  Grow with Google volunteers spoke about the importance of digital skills. 

• Grow with Google in Michigan

  Participants at the Grow with Google workshop learned key digital skills. 

Across the country, we’ve teamed up with public libraries and nonprofits that are helping to close the skills divide. The Grow with Google Partner Program makes it easier for these local partners to get the latest resources and materials to teach digital skills; since our launch in January, more than 5,000 organizations have joined the program, with 200 based in Michigan.

In Taylor, I met librarians and nonprofit leaders who have used resources from the Partner Program to train Michiganders in digital skills. Kim Schott, Chapter Chair of Detroit SCORE, has mentored small businesses and entrepreneurs throughout 40 years of working experience. Today, she’s one of Grow with Google’s most active partners and has conducted dozens of trainings to help local small businesses grow by increasing their presence online.

We've held Grow with Google workshops in more than 60 cities and towns across the country since 2017, and one thing is clear: Our partners are leading the way in connecting entrepreneurs, educators, students and job-seekers with digital skills training that can help them succeed. Through our partnerships and our own capital investments, we’re excited to be a part of the momentum in Michigan.

In Michigan, we’re expanding our offices and working with libraries and nonprofits to help teach digital skills.

It's graduation season, which means that students who have spent years researching, writing and learning are off to the next big thing. But whether you’re bound for college or the workplace, you may want to hold on to your papers and presentations for record keeping or sentimental value. And we have a way to take that work with you.

With Google Takeout, you can keep the papers you wrote and submitted in Google Docs, the emails you sent with classmates in Gmail, and the Slides presentations you worked so hard on. Instead of losing all digital work or spending hours downloading and migrating emails and school work, you can copy these from their G Suite for Education accounts into another Google account before you leave the school’s domain. This allows you to easily retain emails, projects, essays, resumes, and any other files stored on Google Drive if your school revokes access to your old account.

Protecting students’ privacy and data is critical for schools, so we ensure administrators have control over this feature. Administrators adjust their Admin Console settings for Takeout based on the needs of their schools, like allowing access for just one grade level.  

Pack a Pixelbook

Whether embarking on the path to college, trade school, or a career (like an astronomer at NASA), graduates need a laptop that works as hard as they do. Over 30 million students have known and loved Chromebooks and Chrome OS throughout K-12, so to ease the transition from school to the working world, between June 9 - 16, 2019, you can save up to $250 on Google Pixelbook.* 

Why Pixelbook?

• Pixelbook has a super thin design with a 360° hinge— perfect for watching movies or converting into tablet mode.

• Powered by Intel® Core™ processor and Chrome OS, Pixelbook starts fast and stays fast.

• Get through a full day of classes with up to 10 hours of battery life.**

• It’s light, so take Pixelbook wherever you go.

• Write, draw, and design with the Pixelbook Pen.

• Protect yourself with built-in virus protection and automatic updates.

• Read emails, check your calendar, edit documents, watch movies, and more, even when you're offline.

• Download your favorite apps, including Evernote and Slack, for your field of study or work.

• Use tools for study, research, writing and content creation, including Adobe Acrobat Reader and Adobe Lightroom.

• Access and edit across Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides and other productivity suites.

*$100 off i5 128GB model. $250 off i5 256GB and i7 512GB models. From regular retail price. US authorized retailers only. Offer expires on 06/16/2019. While supplies last. Cannot be combined with any other offer. Non-transferable. Not valid for cash or cash equivalent. Void where prohibited. Restrictions apply.

**Battery performance is based on a mix of video, web browsing, productivity and other use. Actual results may vary.

Congratulations, class of 2019. We’re here for you with the tools you need as you take your next step.

The Class of 2019 can take their achievements with them as they transition to the next phase with Google for Education- their Docs, emails and Drive files as well as with a discount for a new Pixelbook.

Nicholas Scott's job is out of this world. He’s an astronomer working with NASA, and he uses Pixelbook for everything from servicing telescopes on the road to drawing maps for “Dungeons and Dragons” with Pixelbook Pen. Below, Nic shares how Pixelbook helps him get his job done.

Working at a NASA facility must be exciting, tell us about your work.

I work in high angular resolution imaging at NASA, including speckle imaging and long-baseline optical interferometry.  

Explain what that means for the non-astronomers among us.

Looking up from the ground, the atmosphere acts like a giant ocean and the turbulence in the ocean of air above us distorts the incoming light from stars. This leads to blurry and corrupted astronomical images, but speckle imaging can eliminate that by capturing images faster than the turbulence in the atmosphere can change. Another technique I use is long-baseline optical interferometry, which links up a bunch of small telescopes to create one one giant telescope. These techniques allow you to observe stars and stellar systems and in great detail. With this work, I travel to places like Chile and to the summit of Mauna Kea in Hawaii to service and build telescope instruments.

What’s your typical day like and why do you carry a Pixelbook with you?

It’s hard to know what my day is going to be like. I travel extensively, and I’m gone up to 70 percent of the time between conferences, meetings, and working on telescopes. Technology is completely infused throughout my day, and I need something that is lightweight, has good battery life, and good build quality that I can carry around everywhere. I also love that I only have to carry one charger because I can charge my phone with the same charger as my Pixelbook.

How does it make your day more productive?

It makes my workflow easy because I can have multiple tabs and apps open at the same time. I love that I don't get interrupted by program updates or trying to configure a new installation. Since I travel often, I do a lot of work out of coffee shops, and I don't have to worry about where the nearest plug is. Overall, I do everything from answering emails, developing software, running a laser cutter, and even drawing maps for Dungeons and Dragons right on my Pixelbook.

What are your favorite things about Pixelbook?

My favorite thing about Pixelbook is the ability to run Linux on it—everyone needs to know about this. It allows me to run a secure development environment to code. (You can get started using the Chrome Developer Toolbox).

Outside of astronomy, what are you passionate about?

I’m passionate about travel (particularly to remote regions of Southeast Asia), motorcycling, environmentalism and conservation, photography, and tabletop gaming.

Any advice for young astronomers?

Find what you're passionate about and dedicate yourself to that goal. Look for every opportunity you can to enable you to reach it. Be adaptable and driven, but know you will have to make some hard compromises and sacrifices to be successful. In my path, I had to take several chances to get to this stage of my career and this required a balance between listening and taking advice from people I respected and directly going against their advice to do what I felt was best for me.

We sat down with Nicholas Scott, an astronomer working with NASA, to learn how he uses Pixelbook.

Think about the last time you were stuck in traffic—the minutes you spent staring at a long line of red taillights probably didn't feel productive. The Assistant can already help with navigation in Google Maps, so it’s easier to search for places along your route or add a new stop while you’re on the go. And starting to roll out today in the U.S., you can get help from the Assistant in Waze on Android phones in English.

Thanks to its community of millions of drivers contributing real-time data every second, Waze helps you beat traffic, while the Assistant lets you to play music and podcasts, message your friends and call your family hands-free—without ever leaving the navigation screen. Many of your favorite Waze features, like reporting traffic, pinpointing a pothole or checking for alternate routes, can also be accessed simply by using your voice. Just say “Hey Google, report traffic” or “Hey Google, avoid tolls” when navigating with Waze and your Google Assistant will help keep you connected, informed and minimize distractions while you’re on the go, so you can keep your hands on the wheel and your eyes on the road.

Voice commands in the car help minimize distractions so you can focus on the road. We look forward to continue making your driving experience even better with help from the Google Assistant.

You can now access the helpfulness of the Assistant directly within Waze.

Editor’s Note: Lee Da-rang is a graduate of the Campus for Moms program at Campus in Seoul, a hub run by Google for Startups where entrepreneurs can discover a supportive community, work on their big idea, and gain access to resources like mentorship and technical training. Recently, the author and six other Campus for Moms graduates published a book about their experience.

I’ll be honest, I was a bit overwhelmed as a new mom. I found it hard to reconcile my former work as a counselor with this new role as a mom, which I felt ill-prepared for. I blogged about my experience and found a community online, which became the inspiration for my business. My idea was to create an online community for parents that offers training and solutions to guide them through the many choices, challenges, and joys of parenthood.

But growing an idea into a successful online business is not easy, especially with my hands full as a busy mom. I had no idea where to start. One day, I happened upon Campus for Moms, a program operated by the Google for Startups Campus in Korea. The program provided training and mentorship to help you start your business, but they also gave us support, like childcare services, so that parents can fully dive into their work, while having their child nearby. It was just what I was looking for. The Campus for Moms program taught me different things every week—from customer outreach and marketing, to product development and investment. Little by little, I received the training and feedback to help my little business idea flourish.

The part of the program I remember most vividly is going out onto the streets of Seoul and interviewing potential customers as part of the market research training module. Talking with strangers on the street about my potential business was no easy task. But the feedback from these everyday people, and the survey data I collected during the program, provided invaluable insights. And perhaps more importantly, by explaining my business to others, I eventually developed the courage needed to actually make my idea a reality.  

Today, I’m the CEO of a flourishing business. Growing Mom has more than 40,000 social media followers, and we employ regular data management and analysis to constantly improve (a bit more sophisticated than my woman-on-the-street interviews!). We work with trusted psychology and education professionals to provide parents with information in a creative and approachable way. In the future, I want to provide more services and offline experiences that further build community and provide support for parents.

I’m sharing my story for other new mothers who might have an idea, but feel like they don’t have what it takes to grow it into reality, especially while raising their own children. It was Campus for Moms, and the community that shared the experience with me, that gave me the courage to take that leap, and the skills I needed to grow into the mother and the CEO I am today.

Lee Da-rang, CEO of Growing Mom, shares about her journey through on the fourth anniversary of Campus Seoul