In 2019, powerful conversations on how to solve climate change took place all over the world. In that spirit, the DevFest community recently joined the discussion by looking at how tech can change how we approach the environment. For our new readers, DevFests are community-led developer events, hosted by Google Developer Groups, that take place all around the world and are focused on building community around Google’s technologies.
From DevFests in the rainforests of Brazil to the Mediterranean Sea, our community has come together to take part in a high-powered exchange of ideas, focused on how to solve for the environment. Out of these DevFests have come 3 new solutions, aimed at using tech to create eco-friendly economies, safer seas, and care for crops. Check them out below!
Blockchain for Biodiversity comes out of the “Jungle’s DevFest”, an event hosted by GDG Manaus that took place in the Brazilian Rainforest with over 1,000 participants. Imagined by Barbara Schorchit’s startup GeneCoin, the idea focuses on using blockchain based solutions to track how “biodiversity friendly” different products and companies are. Her goal is to help create a more eco-friendly economy by providing consumers with information to hold companies accountable for their environmental footprint. This tool for tracking environmentally conscious products will allow consumers to better understand what materials goods are made from, what energy sources were used to produce them, and how their creation will impact climate change. Welcome to a whole new take on purchasing power.
The ECHO Marine Station comes from a partnership between the Italian Coast Guard and DevFest Mediterranean hosted by GDG Nebrodi, Palermo, and Gela. The marine vehicle was created with the hope of becoming the “space station of the seas” and is rechargeable via solar panels, equipped with low-consumption electric motors, and does not create waves or noise - so as to not disturb marine life. The DevFest team took the lead on developing the software and hardware for the station with the intention of creating a tool that can analyze and monitor any marine environment.
At the DevFest, two innovative ideas were proposed on how to best purpose the marine station. The first was to program it to collect radioactive ions released by nuclear power plants, with the goal of analyzing and eventually disposing the waste. The second was to program the station to carry out expeditions to collect water samples, analyze pollution levels, and report dangerous conditions back to the coast guard.
With DevFest and the Italian Coast Guard working together, the ECHO Marine Station is ready to change how we save our seas.
Doctor’s Eyes for Plants is an idea that came out of DevFest Vietnam’s “Green Up Your Code event”, hosted by GDG MienTrung, Vietnam. You can watch highlights from their event here. Created by local students, the program uses a public dataset with Tensorflow to train a region-convolutional neural network to recognize 6 diseases on 3 different plant species, all in 48 hours. The team was recently able to apply the technology to rice plants, which could revolutionize the world’s capacity and efficiency for growing the crop. The rewards of this technology could be unprecedented. The creation of a healthier eco-system paired with the chance to feed more people? Now that’s high impact.
Inspired by these stories? Find a Google Developer Groups community near you, at developers.google.com/community/gdg/
We have invested heavily in our API and service infrastructure to improve performance and security and to add features developers need to build world-class APIs. As we make changes we must address features that are no longer compatible with the latest architecture and business requirements.
The JSON-RPC protocol (http://www.jsonrpc.org/specification) and Global HTTP Batch (example) are two such features. Our support for these features was based on an architecture using a single shared proxy to receive requests for all APIs. As we move towards a more distributed, high performance architecture where requests go directly to the appropriate API server we can no longer support these global endpoints.
Today we're announcing some improvements to the review process for smart home Actions, aimed at making the experience more transparent in the Actions console and reducing the time it takes for your Actions to get approved.
The smart home review process is slightly different from other Actions on Google projects because it has two separate phases: a policy review and a certification review. All Actions undergo a policy review, which verifies that your Action follows the policy guidelines for Actions on Google. Smart home Actions go through certification review for additional quality assurance validation. Certification reviewers verify the content you provide through the certification request form, including your test suite for smart home results.
Glass Enterprise Edition 2 has helped people working in logistics, manufacturing, field services and a variety of other industries do their jobs more efficiently through hands-free access to the information and tools they need to do their job. Enterprises who have deployed Glass with experiences built by our network of solution providers, have seen faster production times, improved quality, and reduced costs.
Since Glass Enterprise Edition 2 launched last May, we’ve seen strong demand from developers and businesses who are interested in building new, helpful enterprise solutions for Glass. In order to make it easier for them to start working with Glass, they can now purchase devices directly from one of our hardware resellers, such as CDW, Mobile Advance or SHI.
Glass Enterprise Edition 2 is built on Android, so it’s easy for developers to work with, and for businesses to integrate the services and APIs (application programming interfaces) they already use. We’ve also shared new open source applications and code samples, including sample layouts and UI components that may be helpful examples for those just getting started developing for Glass.
We’re excited to see what kinds of new experiences and solutions developers will make for Glass to shape the future of work.
MediaPipe is a framework for building cross-platform multimodal applied ML pipelines. We have previously demonstrated building and running ML pipelines as MediaPipe graphs on mobile (Android, iOS) and on edge devices like Google Coral. In this article, we are excited to present MediaPipe graphs running live in the web browser, enabled by WebAssembly and accelerated by XNNPack ML Inference Library. By integrating this preview functionality into our web-based Visualizer tool, we provide a playground for quickly iterating over a graph design. Since everything runs directly in the browser, video never leaves the user’s computer and each iteration can be immediately tested on a live webcam stream (and soon, arbitrary video).
We’re excited to see you at the upcoming Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco. Join us March 16th-20th, 2020 to learn about new products and solutions from Google that will help developers for all platforms take their game to the next level. If you can’t make it in person, sign up to keep up to date with our announcements and view the livestream.
Everything kicks off with the Google for Games Developer Summit Keynote on Monday, March 16th where product leaders from across Google will share the newest announcements for game developers. After the keynote, join in on two days of developer sessions and learn how to use Google solutions to create great games, connect with more players, and scale your business. Check out the agenda today.
Starting Wednesday, March 18th, visit our booth in the GDC Expo to experience demos and meet one-on-one with Google product experts.
If you can’t attend GDC in-person, watch the Keynote and other Developer Summit sessions via the live stream at g.co/gdc2020.
We’ll be sharing more details about what we have planned at GDC in the coming weeks — be sure to sign up to be among the first to hear the latest updates. On-site events are part of the official Game Developers Conference and require a pass to attend.
See you there!
See the full agenda
Google is announcing Project Connected Home over IP, a new Working Group alongside industry partners such as Amazon, Apple and the Zigbee Alliance (separate from the existing Zigbee 3.0/PRO protocol). The project aims to build a new standard that enables IP-based communication across smart home devices, mobile apps, and cloud services. Device manufacturers, silicon providers, and other developers are invited to join the working group and contribute existing open-source technologies into the initiative to accelerate its development so customers and device makers can benefit sooner.
Google Developers Launchpad is an accelerator program that excels in helping startups solve the world’s biggest problems through the best of Google, with a focus on advanced technology. However our impact doesn’t stop there. A distinguishing aspect of our program is the network that we build with, and for, our founders. Over the past five years, Launchpad has created a global community of founders based on deep, genuine connections that we foster during the program, and that community supports one another in remarkable ways.
