Last year the company gave more than $145 million to non-profits and academic institutions, and more than $184 million when including Google Grants, Google.org technology projects and in-kind product support for non-profits.How is this philanthropic work different from that of other companies?Like other companies, we have charitable giving programs, we provide products in-kind and we have a range of employee volunteering programs. Some companies like ours may also have experiments like Google.org to leverage their strengthsa form of skills-based giving. moncler clairy jacket pink However, many companies do amazing charitable work through a centralized Corporate Social Responsibility arm that tackles a key issue or two. We approach philanthropy the way we do our core business, with big goals and a launch early and iterateapproach. Ideas come from all over the company and we work to tackle a range of issues we care about, from clean energy to education to development, but we think this is how we can have the most impact.We remain determined, as our founders said when they set the vision for Google.org, "to find original ways to extend our assets, so that we can drive scalable, sustainable efforts. ...the underlying principle: Never stop looking for ways to do the best with what you have."Posted by Urs H?lzle, Senior Vice President, OperationsIts been one year since the 7.0 magnitude earthquake struck Haiti, and governments and NGOs are continuing to respond, many using high-resolution images of the area. To support these efforts, weve updated our aerial imagery in Google Earth of the Port-au-Prince area to include images from before and after the earthquake, as well as made updates throughout 2010. These pictures provide an evolving view of the movement of people, supplies and rubble.To access this imagery directly, use the Historical Imagery feature of Google Earth.Complementing our online efforts moncler red newstyles down jacket with belts with this imagery, a webpage and crisis response tools such as Person Finder, Google has made an effort to contribute to relief in Haiti by providing technical and financial support to NGOs. These organizations such as Doctors Without Borders and Partners in Health and specific technology NGOs such as Samasource and Frontline SMS continue to help the Haitian people. Weve looked to them to help us guide our ongoing response to this crisis.In November, we gathered updated aerial imagery, and sent a second wave of Google teams to Haiti to evaluate our earlier response efforts and see where Google could continue to provide help. We met with local Haitians and technology NGOs under tents, in trailers, in Internet cafes and at restaurants.From these visits we witnessed the difficulty involved in using our mapping tools under the unpredictable nature of the Internet in Haiti, and so have focused on developing better offline capabilities and have proposed ideas for improving overall Internet access in Haiti. We also ran training for aid workers on our collaborative tools like Google Apps, which can help coordinate resources. While there, we spent time understanding how NGOs are combating the cholera epidemic, and brainstorming tools that could help aid workers produce specialized maps of epidemic case data and chlorination levels at water points, which are critical for planning and prevention.If youre interested in helping with Googles efforts in Haiti, you can:Support our open source Crisis Response projects such as Person Finder or attend conferences like the Random moncler black newstyles down jacket with belts Hacks of Kindness. Volunteer with NGOs working on Crisis Response technology such as Crisis Commons and Ushahidi.Our experience and the updated imagery demonstrate that there are still significant needs on the ground in Haiti. Were continuing our efforts to support locals and NGOs and look forward to seeing how technology will continue to help both Haitians and victims of disasters worldwide.Posted by Prem Ramaswami, Product Manager, on behalf of Google Crisis Response (Cross-posted from the Google.org blog)Today, we launched a new Google Labs product called Google Earth Engine at the International Climate Change Conference in sunny Cancun, Mexico. Google Earth Engine is a new technology platform that puts an unprecedented amount of satellite imagery and datacurrent and historicalonline for the first time. It enables global-scale monitoring and measurement of changes in the earths environment. The platform will enable scientists to use our extensive computing infrastructurethe Google cloudto analyze this imagery. Last year, we demonstrated an early prototype. Since then, we have developed the platform, and are excited now to offer scientists around the world access to Earth Engine to implement their applications.Why is this important? The images of our planet from space contain a wealth of information, ready to be extracted and applied to many societal challenges. Scientific analysis can transform these images from a mere set of pixels into useful informationsuch as the locations and extent of global forests, detecting how our forests are changing over time, directing resources for disaster response or water resource mapping.Congo Basin Water Map (detail): Original satellite image (left) and derived water map (right), created using Google Earth Engine [Potapov, P., Hansen,M. - South Dakota State University].The challenge has been to cope with the massive scale of satellite imagery archives, and the computational resources required for their analysis.
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