Visualize your own data in the Google Public Data Explorer

(Cross-posted on the Google Code Blog)

Over the past two years, we’ve made public data easier to find, explore and understand in several ways, providing unemployment figures, population statistics and world development indicators in search results, and introducing the Public Data Explorer tool. Together with our data provider partners, we’ve curated 27 datasets including more than 300 data metrics. You can now use the Public Data Explorer to visualize everything from labor productivity (OECD) to Internet speed (Ookla) to gender balance in parliaments (UNECE) to government debt levels (IMF) to population density by municipality (Statistics Catalonia), with more data being added every week.

Today, we’re opening the Public Data Explorer to your data. We’re making a new data format, the Dataset Publishing Language (DSPL), openly available, and providing an interface for anyone to upload their datasets. DSPL is an XML-based format designed from the ground up to support rich, interactive visualizations like those in the Public Data Explorer. The DSPL language and upload interface are available in Google Labs.

To upload a dataset, click on the “My Datasets” link on the left-hand side of the Public Data Explorer. Once imported, a dataset can be visualized, embedded in external websites, shared with others and published. If you’re an official provider, you can request that your datasets appear in the Public Data Explorer directory; please contact us to discuss this process.


With this new capability, we hope more datasets can come to life through Public Data Explorer visualisations and enable people to better understand the world around them and make more informed, data-driven decisions. Stay tuned for more datasets, visualization features and DSPL extensions in the future.

Posted by Omar Benjelloun, Technical Lead, Google Public Data Team

Register for Google I/O 2011

We’ve been counting down the days until Google I/O 2011 and hope that you have been, too. With 91 days, 22 hours and 45 minutes to go, we’re excited to announce that registration is now open at www.google.com/io. Our largest annual developer conference will take place on May 10-11, 2011 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, Calif.

The focus of I/O 2011 will be all about the cloud, and feature the latest Google products and technologies including Android, Google Chrome, App Engine, Google Web Toolkit and Google APIs. There will be many opportunities to meet members of Google’s engineering teams and take deep dives into the technologies with more than 100 technical sessions, roundtables and more. The Developer Sandbox, which we introduced at I/O 2009, will be back, featuring developers from more than 100 companies to demo their apps, share their experiences and exchange ideas.

If you liked our countdown, stay tuned for more surprises. We’ll keep you posted on the latest developments for Google I/O 2011 at the website, on Twitter (@Googleio) and Google Buzz. Get your tickets early—last year we sold out in record time!

Registration opens with an Early Bird rate of $450, which applies through April 16 ($550 after April 16). Faculty and students can register at the discounted Academia rate of $150, which will be allocated on a first-come, first-served basis.

Learn more and register today at www.google.com/io.

We look forward to seeing you in San Francisco!

Update Feb 22: The countdown was created and animated using JavaScript and HTML.

Posted by Vic Gundotra, VP Engineering

Android Froyo, with some sprinkles

Since launching the first Android-powered phone with T-Mobile in October 2008, we have worked with operators, handset manufacturers and developers to make Android one of the most useful, innovative mobile platforms available.

We've been thrilled by the adoption of the platform over the past year and a half. Every day, our partners sell more than 100,000 new Android-based handsets, and there are now more than 180,000 active Android developers who have contributed more than 50,000 apps now available in Android Market—up 12,000 since last month alone!

Today at I/O, our annual developer conference, we announced Android 2.2. Codenamed Froyo (for frozen yogurt), this seventh update to the Android platform brings some great new functionality to users (things like making your handset a portable hotspot and support for Adobe Flash within the browser), along with new tools for developers. Read more about the specifics of Froyo on our Android Developer Blog.

Posted by Andy Rubin, VP, Engineering

Google I/O 2010 Day 1: A more powerful web in more places

Today at Moscone West in San Francisco, we’re kicking off our largest developer conference of the year, Google I/O. Over two days, 5,000 people from 66 countries will hear from 200 speakers, see 180+ developer demonstrations and participate in more than 90 technical sessions, breakouts and fireside chats to meet engineers from Google and partner companies.

At last year's I/O, we demonstrated the potential of HTML5. Since then, the web has moved from a promising platform to a compelling setting for developers to build apps. This week we’ll celebrate this ongoing evolution of the web and share some of our latest work in moving the web forward and keeping it open.

Today we're announcing Google App Engine for Business, which offers new features that enable companies to build internal applications on the same reliable, scalable and secure infrastructure that we at Google use for our own apps. For greater cloud portability, we’re also teaming up with VMware to make it easier for companies to build rich web apps and deploy them to the cloud of their choice or on-premise. In just one click, users of the new versions of SpringSource Tool Suite and Google Web Toolkit can deploy their application to Google App Engine for Business, a VMware environment or other infrastructure, such as Amazon EC2.

There are already lots of great apps out on the web, but there hasn’t been one destination where you could easily find them. Our new Chrome Web Store is an open marketplace for web apps that helps people find the best web applications across the Internet and allows developers to reach new users. We also joined other web companies in announcing WebM, an open web media format project and open-sourced VP8, a high-quality, web-optimized video codec, that we are contributing to the project under a royalty-free license.

We’re pleased to share some updates to our APIs too. Last year, we announced the Google Maps API v3, which was designed to be faster and optimized for mobile devices. Today this API is graduating from Code Labs and is enterprise-ready as part of Google Maps API Premier. We’re also announcing new ways for publishers to improve the relevance of their AdSense ads, a brand-new version of the Feed API with push updates that make the latest PubSubHubbub-enabled feed data available without requiring visitors to refresh pages, and a library of high-quality open-source web fonts, accessible to everyone through the new Google Font API.

Finally, last year we introduced a new way to communicate and collaborate called Google Wave. Today we’re opening Wave to everyone — no invitation necessary — at wave.google.com, as part of Google Labs. Google Apps administrators can also enable it for their domains and help groups of people work together more productively. To learn more about this, our many new API features and more open-source code for developers, visit the Wave Developer blog.

For lots more about Google I/O 2010, visit http://code.google.com/events/io/ and follow us on the Code Blog, Twitter @googleio (#io2010) and Buzz.

Posted by Vic Gundotra, Vice President of Engineering

Remember to tune in to live-streamed Google I/O keynotes

(Cross-posted from the Google Code Blog)

For those not attending Google I/O, remember to tune in to http://youtube.com/GoogleDevelopers on Wednesday, May 19 and Thursday, May 20, to watch the Google I/O keynote presentations live.

Keynote times:
Wednesday, May 19, 9:00am - 10:30am PDT
Thursday, May 20, 8:30am - 10:00am PDT

To stay up to date on I/O news, follow us on Twitter or Buzz — and to go one level deeper on I/O session content, live wave with us.

Posted by Christine Tsai, Google Developer Team

Live, from Google I/O!

(Cross-posted with the Google Code Blog)

More than 4,000 developers will be joining us at Google I/O on May 19-20, and if we had the capacity, we’d host many more. In order to give the entire developer community a chance to participate live, we're happy to announce that both keynote presentations will be streamed live. To watch, just go to http://www.youtube.com/GoogleDevelopers at the start of the keynotes each day. We recommend watching on a high-speed connection for the best quality.

Here’s the schedule for the keynotes at I/O — it’s also available on our agenda page:

• Day 1 Keynote: Wednesday, May 19, 9:00 -10:30am PT
• Day 2 Keynote: Thursday, May 20, 8:30-10:00am PT

Both keynote sessions feature exciting new technologies, so be sure to mark your calendars!

Posted by Christine Tsai, Google Developer Team

Google Code turns five

At age five most kids can hop, skip and tie their shoes without help. Google Code turns five this week, and while we’re still working on the shoelaces thing, we’ve grown from a simple site for hosting a couple of APIs into a destination for developers to prototype their ideas in a Code Playground, host all kinds of open source projects and find out about our growing family of APIs and products like App Engine, Google Web Toolkit and Android.

To learn more about how code.google.com has come alive over the past five years, check out our post on the Google Code Blog.

Posted by Chris DiBona, Open Source Programs Manager

Google’s coming to Austin for SXSW

Like many of you out there, we’re gearing up for the SXSW Interactive Festival, which starts tomorrow, March 12 in Austin, TX. In just a few short hours, dozens of Googlers and YouTubers will be descending on Austin for a packed weekend of panels, demos and parties. Of course, we’ve also got a few fun things up our sleeve:

• Representatives from Google and YouTube will be speaking on more than 20 panels on a variety of subjects, including open source, mobile, real-time communication and user experience design.
• At the Google booth, we’ll be doing demos on a wide range of products, including Google Maps, Blogger, Wave, Reader and YouTube, and sessions on building apps for App Engine, extensions on Chrome and accessibility APIs and hacks for Android.
• On Sunday, our all-day Hackathon will give you the chance to get your hands dirty and build applications using a variety of Google technologies. At the end of the day, we’ll award prizes, including Android phones, for the best apps.
• We’re sponsoring the festival’s first Mothers’ Room, where nursing moms can go for comfort and privacy.

Finally, we’ll be seeing you at as many parties as we can go to at one time, including Bikehugger’s Mobile Social, where representatives from the Google Maps team will be handing out schwag and dishing dirt on how they built bike directions, the Blogger/Reader party, where you’ll have a chance to chat with members of those teams about new features, and (last but not least) the SXSW Film Closing/Music Opening, co-sponsored by YouTube and VH1.

You can read more about all of the Google happenings on our SXSW website, and follow @googlesxsw on Twitter for last-minute updates and news from Austin. We can’t wait to hit the ground running (or biking), and we look forward to seeing you there!

Posted by Emily Wood, Editor, Google Blog and Twitter team

Now playing: Apps Script for Google Docs

The Google Apps team here in New York City is a hotbed of movie fanatics. But while planning a recent movie night, we realized we spend too much time organizing our events and not enough time discussing, debating and watching movies.

To take the hard work out of planning, we turned to Google Apps Script, which lets you write short programs that automatically perform simple actions within a spreadsheet. For example, our Movie Night script figures out which movies are playing close by and invites everyone to vote on what they’d most like to see.


Google Apps Script has been available to businesses, schools and other organizations using Google Apps since January, and today we’re excited to bring it to everyone who uses Google spreadsheets. Apps Script can be helpful for all kinds of things, from customized party invites to sending out holiday letters — in fact Apps Script can be especially helpful for those repetitive, time consuming tasks.

To help you find useful scripts, we’ve also launched a public gallery where you can check out our Movie Night script and browse other available scripts. If you’re feeling adventurous, try your hand at writing your own script and submit it to the gallery for others to use. To see the gallery or install a script in your spreadsheet, click on “Insert” and select “Script.”

Check out the Google Docs blog for more information about Apps Script, and to learn about writing your own scripts, visit the Google Apps Developer Blog.

Posted by Evin Levey, Product Manager, Google Apps

Over 4,000 developers at Google I/O 2010

As of today, this year's Google I/O conference has sold out and registration is closed. That means more than 4,000 developers will be joining us on May 19-20 at Moscone West in San Francisco.

Like years past, I/O will feature over 90 in-depth sessions and the opportunity to meet and learn from other developers, including those from the more than 160 companies that will demo in the Developer Sandbox. For those unable to attend, video recordings of technical sessions will be available on YouTube following the conference.

From now until May, we'll continue to list new speakers, new sessions, and new Sandbox participants on the Google I/O website. To keep up with the latest event info and details, follow us on Twitter.

Posted by Vic Gundotra, Vice President of Engineering

What to expect at Google I/O 2010

Back in January, we announced the start of early registration for Google I/O (our annual developer conference), and our team was excited to publish our new website for this year's event. Today, we're excited to give you a quick update on what's in store for this year's Google I/O and a brief look at what we've announced in the past five weeks.

• 63 sessions to be led by the engineering teams behind all the products to be featured at I/O, including Android, Google Chrome, Google Web Toolkit and Google Wave. We'll have over 80 sessions listed by May.
• 58 companies are listed on the Developer Sandbox page, and we expect over 150 companies to participate in the Sandbox at I/O.
• 99 speakers, including Google engineers and prominent web development experts from other companies.
• We introduced our very first I/O BootCamp, which sold out in just two days.

Of course, some things will stay under wraps until the event itself, but we're excited to share some Google I/O planning details with you in advance.

We'll be teaming up with Maker Faire again this year for our After Hours evening party. Google I/O attendees will get to preview some of the amazing DIY projects that will be showcased at Maker Faire in San Mateo just a couple of days after I/O, and discounted Maker Faire tickets will be available during After Hours. We've also invited the organizers of Gadgetoff. They'll be bringing along exciting, interactive gadgets, robots and vehicles.

Whether you're already developing apps using products like App Engine, or wondering how to get started on your first Android app, we hope to see you at Google I/O in May. To learn more and to sign up, visit code.google.com/io.

Posted by Joyce Sohn, Google Developer Team