Official Google Cloud Blog

Building sustainable supply chains with Google and Smartsheet: Q&A with Shaw Industries

Thursday, July 14, 2016

Editor's note: Today we speak with Melissa Pateritsas of Shaw Industries Group, which uses Google Apps along with Smartsheet. Read on to find out how these integrated solutions foster collaboration and add greater efficiency to the Shaw Industries supply chain. Register here to join our Hangout on Air on July 20 at 10 a.m. PT to learn more about how Smartsheet, a Google recommended app, can improve your business.

Can you tell us about Shaw Industries and why you chose Google Apps and Smartsheet?

Shaw Industries Group is committed to creating an efficient and sustainable supply chain for its flooring enterprise. Being the world’s largest carpet manufacturer and a leading floorcovering provider means sustainability isn’t just a moral or ethical imperative, it’s smart for business. More efficient supply chains produce better, lasting products with fewer costs.

With offices and sales representatives across the United States and world, Shaw’s sales reach nearly $5 billion every year. Our growing business needed an even more efficient (and sustainable) way to bring daily operations into the digital age. So we turned to two powerful collaboration tools: Google Apps and Smartsheet.

In Smartsheet, we could make good use of the collaborative work management (CWM) platform that marries the power of a project and process management solutions suite to the familiar interface of a spreadsheet. And we saw Google Apps as an opportunity to improve efficiency and collaboration across teams. With a strong working history, the two work in tandem very well and together were exactly what we needed to achieve our digital transformation.

You mentioned the importance of supply chains for Shaw Industries. How did considerations around the supply chain impact your decision to switch to Google Apps and Smartsheet?

Part of creating an efficient and sustainable supply chain is lowering overhead costs. The processes used to produce carpet and flooring at our various manufacturing facilities differed slightly from location to location. The many manufacturing divisions had common needs, but also their own unique challenges. Any solution would have to address these differences, while commonalities would cause overlap. It didn’t make sense to have different support teams for each process, especially if half of what the teams did was identical.

Sharing plans and projects was also challenging. The systems we had in place were costly and time-consuming. We needed a way to increase visibility and update project statuses, not only for our team, but also for external parties like clients and vendors.

What results are you seeing now that you’re using Apps and Smartsheet?

Turning to Google Apps’ collaborative tools was a positive first step. Google Drive allowed us to easily share documents and files both internally and externally. Documents could be instantly shared and jointly edited by employees around the world in real time. Plus, going paperless made our operations more ecologically friendly.

Smartsheet’s suite of project and process management solutions, which feature Google Apps integration, further enhanced what Google already had to offer. Smartsheet offers great flexibility. With them, we can easily create templates that we can edit and customize to meet diverse needs.

We also simplified project roll-ups — which were previously done by hand. Using cell linking, engineering managers could automate the process, saving time and effort, and automatic updates solved the problem of visibility that we struggled with. We could now easily share individual projects with stakeholders, both internal and external, ensuring that everyone was on the same page.

Also, today our separate business units are able to build custom and individualized solutions on a strong foundation that addresses both common and distinct needs. Managers and engineers can automate processes that had previously been done by hand, spending more time and energy on devising ways to make our products better and longer-lasting. These new solutions are built using familiar interfaces and services that employees already know how to use.

Can you tell us about the process of adopting Smartsheet?

Adopting Smartsheet was a simple transition because of its familiar spreadsheet-like GUI. We didn’t need additional software. Everything we needed could be done within the frameworks that Google and Smartsheet already offered.

So where does the company stand now in terms of its digital transformation?

We’re definitely in the midst of transformation. With Smartsheet and Google solutions, and their simplicity and the scalability that a worldwide enterprise like Shaw needs, we’ve reduced overhead and complexity and cut time spent on processes. We now have more time and focus on building for the future. We can also proudly say that we’ve met our goal to create easy-to-adopt digital practices and a more efficient, sustainable supply chain.

Azavea’s socially-minded employees work collaboratively together using Chrome devices

Thursday, June 30, 2016

Posted by Robert Cheetham, Founder and CEO, Azavea

Editor's note: Today we hear from Robert Cheetham, founder and CEO of Philadelphia-based geospatial web software and analysis firm Azavea. Read about how Azavea has relied on Google for Work tools for more than eight years and recently started using Chromebox for meetings and Chromebooks so employees can work together from anywhere.

When I founded Azavea in 2000, I dreamed of creating a great work environment focused on driving social impact by applying geospatial technology. We're a certified B Corporation, and our mission-driven work includes climate change, elections, public safety, transit, water infrastructure and natural resources. Inspired by my first job working for a local government agency in Japan, where cubicles don’t exist, I designed our workspace to have an open layout, long before it became popular in contemporary offices. Today, we rely on Google Apps, Chromebooks and Chromebox for meetings to support this collaborative environment and help us work closely together on our software and data analytics projects.

In the early years, when Azavea only had a handful of employees, we installed basic workplace software from a CD-ROM and had limited server space. When we outgrew our email system in 2008, we chose Gmail. Our employees quickly started using Google Calendar, Docs, Hangouts and Sheets because they integrate so closely with Gmail. These tools helped us work effectively together on projects, so it was a natural next step.

In 2012, our software developers started asking for supplementary computers to let them work from home, when traveling for client meetings or even in the office kitchen. We looked into tablets, but they were expensive and didn’t have fully functional keyboards. As longtime Google users, our Operations team investigated options from Google.

Chromebooks are fast, affordable, secure and remarkably powerful, so we started offering them as supplementary devices for people who wanted more mobility. Our colleagues can easily switch between their main workstations and portable Chromebooks, and the long-lasting battery makes them the perfect companion for frequent travelers, office roamers and remote employees. I typically travel for a week each month myself, so I use my Chromebook on long flights as well as meetings and conferences where there may not be convenient power. It typically lasts more than nine hours, while a laptop only lasts two or three.

The company now has more than fifty people, and when we moved to a new office a few months ago, we needed a videoconferencing solution for a dozen new meeting rooms, we once again turned to Google and picked Chromebox for meetings. Like the other Google products we use, Chromebox is affordable, easy to install and integrates with our existing workplace software, like Hangouts and Calendar. Anyone can quickly set up and join a meeting. As a small firm, this ease of use is critical for us — we don’t have a team of dedicated IT staff, so we don’t have capacity to constantly deal with technical difficulties or high-maintenance updates.

I wanted to start a company that felt like a community and made an impact. Over the past several years, Google has significantly enhanced our company’s operations because their products simply work and easily scale as the company has grown. Our teams are able to work effectively together, no matter where we are.

In the cloud: Have trust, will profit

Wednesday, June 29, 2016

Posted by Julien Blanchez, security and privacy, Google for Work

For any forward-thinking business, embracing the cloud is no longer a question of why but how. How do I get there and how will it improve my bottom line?

The answer could be as simple as trust.

According to new research conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) and sponsored by Google, companies with high levels of trust in the cloud report a 9% rise in profitability year on year, compared to 1% for their more skeptical peers.

The survey of 452 senior executives across 10 countries examined their use of the cloud and their attitudes towards its security, reliability, accessibility and scale. The results show a clear link between an organization’s profitability and their trust in the cloud, suggesting cloud adoption alone is not enough to guarantee a positive business impact.

The benefits of trust go beyond profits

Companies that actively foster trust in cloud technology report more than just a boost to their bottom line — they believe their trust in cloud technology drives workplace transformation.

“As organizations expand their use of the cloud, those with higher levels of trust are able to transform their organizations more quickly, and the resulting business benefits can be substantial,” explains EIU Senior Editor Carolyn Whelan.

Guilherme Cruz, CIO at Brazilian shipping company Wilson Sons, credits trust in the cloud with powerful improvements to business communication, easier access to data on mobile and faster collaboration. “It is a company transformation,” he explains. “It is about the way you are working, about changing behavior and processes.”

Although cloud adoption has grown rapidly, trust in this technology hasn’t increased at the same pace. The survey found that about 99% of organizations have already shifted some of their information technology (IT) to the cloud yet only 35% have a “very high” level of trust in the new environment. With regard to the degree of trust, 16% say their trust level is “somewhat high,” 29% say they have only a “moderate” level of trust, and 19% say their trust level is “low.”

How to foster a culture of trust

Building trust in any organization is an ongoing process that needs to be championed by a company’s leadership team. By encouraging education and experimentation, leaders can help to change how their teams embrace working in the cloud.

The survey results support the idea that leaders shape a culture of trust. Nearly half (47%) of respondents whose senior executives prioritize cloud trust note an increase in trust levels over the last three years, versus 6% whose leaders don’t. Of the respondents whose companies have low levels of trust in the cloud, nearly half (45%) said that general management is the most common impediment to cloud adoption.

The greatest benefit of a cloud-enabled world is the potential to fundamentally change the way businesses work, and building trust in the cloud requires everyone, starting with leadership.

To learn more about how moving to the cloud can make businesses more secure and successful, read the EIU report and tune in to Atmosphere Digital: Rethinking Security in the Cloud on June 28, 2016 at 10 a.m. PT.

Redfin helps people find the right house at the right price, using Google Maps APIs

Wednesday, June 22, 2016

Posted by Curtis Howell, Redfin Senior Product Manager for Customer Engagement

Editor's note: Today’s guest blogger is Curtis Howell, Redfin senior product manager for customer engagement. Read how Redfin makes it easier for buyers to find their ideal homes.

Redfin launched in 2006 with the mission to change the way people buy and sell homes. Unlike traditional real estate brokerages, Redfin real estate agents are paid based on customer satisfaction, not just commission, so the agent’s and client’s interests are aligned. Redfin uses technology to improve the customer experience at every step, from the initial home search to the closing table.

We used the Google Maps Javascript API to build the web interface for Redfin.com and the Google Maps Android API for the Redfin Android app. People are familiar with the Google Maps interface so they intuitively know how to navigate and search when they come to our site or use our Android app.

People often want to search for houses based on places-of-interest, such as a park or a landmark, and the Google Places API allows them to do just that. They can also find houses for sale in specific neighborhoods by drawing a polygon on a map and then searching within that area.

Finding houses for sale on a map is only the beginning of the homebuying process. The next step is touring homes in-person with a Redfin agent. Our customers often schedule multiple tours in one day, so Redfin uses the Google Maps Distance Matrix API to estimate the time it takes to drive between homes.

Google’s location-based search increased the rate of completed searches performed on our site by 4 percent. Data shows that faster searches leads to more satisfied and loyal website users, which ultimately leads to more clients for Redfin.

Map-based search is one aspect of our technology that makes our agents more efficient and able to deliver great service to Redfin customers. Because Redfin is more efficient than traditional brokerages, we’re able to provide full service and still save our customers money.

How BlackDog Advertising marries technology and design with Chrome

Monday, June 20, 2016

Posted by John W. Penney, Creative Director & CEO, BlackDog Advertising

Editor's note: Today we hear from John W. Penney, creative director and CEO of Miami-based BlackDog Advertising. Read how the company used Chrome devices to build engaging hotel kiosks for a major hotel chain.

I’d always wanted to start a business that used technology in creative ways — so I founded BlackDog Advertising in 1989. Since then, design has been at the center of our culture.

Members of the Blackdog Advertising team (from left to right): Jason Carbonell, interactive director, John Penney, founder and creative director and Humberto Abeja, art director

We sell to businesses that use technology to engage customers, so our solutions need to be eye-grabbing and intuitive, elegant and approachable. Devices like the Chromebit and Chromebox align perfectly with our design-first approach and provide both cost-effective and dynamic solutions to expensive static light boxes and point-of-sale ads.

Our team became well-acquainted with the efficiencies of Google productivity tools like Hangouts and Gmail when we switched to Google Apps for Work from Microsoft Office about five years ago. This led us to give Chrome for Work a try, and we saw even greater benefits for collaboration, ease of use and cost. That’s how we discovered that Chrome devices could work really well for our clients in the hotel and tourism industries.

We tested whether we could use a combination of devices and monitors to create compelling interactive signs and quickly realized that we could centrally manage a constant stream of images and video with the Chrome device management console, for pennies on the dollar. The decision to build personalized apps on the Chrome Web Store that could be instantly updated across all of our clients’ kiosks was a no-brainer.

Our client, a major hotel group, posed a challenge that pushed this line of thinking even further. They asked us to build something that would replace the three-ring binders their concierge professionals have used for decades to show hotel guests activities and restaurants they might enjoy. We knew the use of tablets, which they suggested, would be expensive to implement over the long run and instead urged them to explore Chrome devices and touchscreen monitors. The Chromebit and monitor together cost less than a single tablet, but offered the added features of easy content deployment and theft protection. Hotels may carry up to 20 pitch books on hand, costing about $75 each. Our Chromebit kiosks, which can each replace all of a hotel's pitch books, cost no more than $400 — a savings of over $1000 for some hotels.

Chromebit kiosk showcasing area events, activities and attractions for hotel guests

Blending vivid imagery, video and interactive features, Chrome kiosks provide a modern alternative to the three-ring binders concierge professionals used to use when showcasing area events, activities and attractions. And hotel guests can interact with the kiosks on their own to plan or add to their itineraries, even after normal work hours, when the concierge desk is closed.

We can use Chrome to design, test and introduce new solutions that our clients love. It’s reliability, ease of use and affordability make it an attractive option to replace all kinds of signage — not just concierge kiosks. Our clients have requested Chrome for other uses, such as ticket sale kiosks — all possibilities we’re eager to explore. Chrome’s marriage of approachable design and robust technology has created a new revenue stream for us, and we couldn’t be more thrilled to uncover where else Chrome will take us.

Disney and Spitfire Studio bring Winnie-the-Pooh’s Hundred Acre Wood to life in new ways with Google Maps APIs

Wednesday, June 15, 2016

Editor's note: Today Jac de Haan, Developer Marketing for Google Maps for Work, speaks with Anna Hill, Chief Marketing Officer of The Walt Disney Company, UK & Ireland, and Spitfire Studio Client Services Director Tim George. They give us insight into how Disney and Spitfire Studio used Google Maps APIs and Google Street View. The immersive experience brings together more than 1,000 Winnie-the-Pooh assets, including videos, images, stories, downloadable content and games while also providing helpful guides, hints and tips for new mums. Fans navigate the 3-dimensional site and explore different character locations, including Pooh’s house, all through 360° photospheres.

Jac de Haan: Anna, the first question’s for you. The new Hundred Acre Wood site is both modern in its immersive and interactive nature and historic, paying homage to Hundred Acre Wood, the home of Winnie-the-Pooh that we all know and love. What was Disney’s goal in building the website, and why did Disney choose Google Maps for it?

Anna Hill: 2016 marks 90 years since families were introduced to the characters from the Hundred Acre Wood, when A.A. Milne’s first story was published. Winnie-the-Pooh and friends have stood the test of time with their heart-warming stories that continue to inspire children and adults alike.

Disney wanted to create the world of Winnie-the-Pooh for parents and children to easily interact with the classic characters and inspire their play time. Google was the perfect partner for delivering the platform—research shows that mothers are very actively searching the Internet for advice, tools and new content. So, we partnered with Spitfire Studio to design and develop the site, which we wanted to be optimised for tablets as well as traditional desktop computers. We anticipated that the site would continue to evolve, so it was intentionally designed to make adding new map locations and content within existing areas over time incredibly easy and seamless. We want to continue building on the experience as we see how children and parents engage with the site and content.

Jac de Haan: Tim, tell us about how you used Google Maps APIs to develop the site.

Tim George: The site’s main interface is a map of the Hundred Acre Wood, which includes graphics of characters — Pooh, Rabbit, Eeyore, Piglet and others — and their houses. It’s built using the Google Maps Javascript API, so you can navigate, with zoom and panning, just like any other Google map. We provided our own graphics, so you really feel like you’re in the world of Winnie-the-Pooh.

Places on the map like Pooh’s House and Eeyore’s field are marked with customized pins. Click on a character, and the Google Maps Street View Service launches you into a Street View of that location — you can find yourself right inside Pooh’s House or out in Eeyore’s field. You can pan and look around, just like you can in Street View. We did this using our own creative assets. Once you’re there, you can click objects and access games, advice, videos and more.

We wanted to personalize the experience, so we used the Geolocation capability of the Google Maps JavaScript API along with a Weather API to reflect the weather in your location. The site will suggest play ideas best suited to your local weather, such as rainy-day activities during a stormy afternoon.

Jac de Haan: Anna, how does this Google Maps API integration empower your developers and benefit Winnie the Pooh fans?

Anna Hill: Google Maps APIs are great to have in your creative toolkit, and they let you think and work in unexpected ways. Integrating Google Maps by detecting the locations of website visitors lets us create a more well-rounded experience for both parents and children. In partnership with Spitfire, we’ve created something we’re immensely proud of, and Google Maps play a big part in that. We look forward to seeing how families interact with the Hundred Acre Wood experience and hope that they have a lot of fun engaging with our characters — just as they have for the last 90 years, but now in a thoroughly modern way.

Powering a more connected and collaborative enterprise

Monday, June 13, 2016

Posted by Prabhakar Raghavan, Vice President of Engineering, Google Apps

Editor's Update October 13, 2016: We're no longer accepting signups for the Google Sites Early Adopter Program. Please monitor the G Suite Updates Blog for an announcement when new Sites launches to general availability.

Google Atmosphere, Google’s global enterprise event series, lands today in Tokyo, where I’m addressing an audience of several thousand enterprise IT execs, along with our very own Diane Greene and local customers such as ASICS and Fujitec. We have two exciting announcements to share — new experiences we’re adding to the Google Apps suite, with Search and Sites.

It’s no secret that the growth of information inside the enterprise continues to accelerate. In fact, today the average knowledge worker spends the equivalent of one full day a week searching for and gathering information.¹

Google Springboard puts the right information at your fingertips

Google is no stranger to helping enterprise customers sort through their corporate information and making it more useful for employees. We’ve been a leader in Enterprise Search for nearly 15 years and have partnered with some of the largest companies in the world. As we continue to invest in applying technologies like machine intelligence to power our web search engine, we’re working on a new way to bring all of this power to the enterprise: Google Springboard.

Google Springboard helps you find the right information that you need at the moment that you need it. It searches quickly and easily across all of your information in Google Apps including Gmail, Calendar, Docs, Drive, Contacts and more. Springboard also assists you throughout your workday by proactively providing useful and actionable information and recommendations.

A totally rebuilt Google Sites

Google Sites is one of the most popular products among our enterprise customers, and we’ve been working on an update that makes it even easier for employees to share information within their company.

With the new Google Sites, you can build beautiful, functional pages to aggregate and distribute content across your enterprise, optimized for every screen. A new intuitive drag-and-drop design experience supports real-time collaboration by multiple editors, just like in Docs, and offers easy access to all your content from Calendar, Docs, Drive, Maps and more. The new Sites also includes themes and layouts designed to scale and flex to any screen size, so they’re as useful when you access them on the 30-inch monitor at your desk or your smartphone on your commute.

Ready for early adopters

We’ve been previewing Google Springboard and the new Google Sites with a small set of customers, and we’re excited to begin to extend each of these new apps to more customers through an Early Adopter Program. If you’re the admin of a company that runs on Google Apps for Work you can express your interest in the Google Springboard Early Adopter Program or the Google Sites Early Adopter Program. We have a lot more in store for both Google Springboard and Google Sites, and we’re excited to help you start to take back the time you spend searching for and gathering information.²

1 Study from McKinsey states that the average information worker spends 8.8 hours or 19% of their average work week searching for or gathering information.
2 The Early Adopter Program for the new Google Sites will have no impact on customers’ usage of classic Google Sites.

Online Travel Agent (OTA) Travix takes off with Google Apps for Work

Sunday, June 12, 2016

Posted by Jan Castelijns, Head of Systems Engineering and IT Operations, Travix, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Editor's note: Today we hear from Jan Castelijns, Head of Systems Engineering and IT Operations at Travix, a global online travel technology company that sells low fare flight tickets to 2.5 million passengers from 28 countries every year. Founded in 2011, Travix has rapidly built up a network of 500 staff in seven offices worldwide. Read why they chose Google Apps as the IT infrastructure behind their rapid expansion.

When Travix started out in 2011, it was through the merger of three companies. We gained strength from that diversity, but we also inherited three corporate IT systems. So the first thing the CEO asked me to do when I joined was to find one system we could use across the whole company. He recommended Microsoft Office 365, but implementing it was more demanding than anyone had expected. Months into the process, I went back to him with a realistic projection of the time and resources necessary to finish the rollout, and a recommendation that we put the project on hold. The hunt began for alternatives. That’s where Google Apps came in.

Google Apps is perfectly suited for an expanding global business. We have offices in Amsterdam, Oosterhout, Berlin, Bangalore, Singapore, California and London, and in all of these places, Office 365 required infrastructure modifications before implementation. By contrast, Google Apps was ready to go right out of the box.

Our corporate IT systems need to be quick, reliable and safe, with a minimum of costs and management overhead. Google Apps costs less to implement, less to maintain and allows greater contractual flexibility than Office 365. Because Google Apps is also entirely cloud based, we don’t need to install servers, as recommended in the hybrid server-cloud Office 365 solution. In fact, Google Apps allowed the decommissioning of 10 existing servers, each of which is priced at $3,000.

Rolling out Google Apps took just six weeks. g-company led training with one-on-one sessions for executives, small workshops for staff and even presentations over Hangouts for our Bangalore team. But key to our rapid deployment were the “ambassadors” – staff prepared to support their colleagues when Google Apps went live. After setting up our systems engineers on Google Apps, I sent out a Form for people to register as ambassadors and the response was overwhelming: 104 people signed up for 50 positions. This was a clear sign for us that our people were willing to embrace this change and make this transition work.

At Travix, we already worked with other Google products in particular fields, like Google Analytics and Google Adwords in marketing and Google BigQuery and kubernetes in engineering. Now we have Google Apps for everyone.

Staff here have become very enthusiastic about Google Apps, as they see how the tools fit into their working lives. Gmail, Calendar and Hangouts let staff stay on top of their work anytime, from anywhere. Rather than book meeting rooms through a separate app, now everything is on Calendar, saving time and hassle. Drive has been organically and rapidly adopted across the organisation, and Forms has been a huge success that we didn’t even plan for. Instead of starting a gigantic email thread or using a free survey tool found on the internet, we now use the simple Forms interface to get swift feedback, with answers fed directly into Sheets for analysis.

Hangouts in particular has changed the way we communicate, whether through the efficiency of instant messaging or by working more closely with colleagues abroad. Hangouts on Air allows staff in other offices to participate in our CEO’s presentations in Amsterdam, and because the stream is recorded, engineers in Bangalore and California can watch it too, despite the time difference. Collaboration between team members no longer requires a kind of “email ping pong” and stressful version control. We can just open Hangouts and Drive and go through a document together, whether an engineering design in Docs, a marketing product plan on Slides, or details of a tender on Sheets.

A growing global technology company demands an IT solution that works in any location, on any device. On top of that, it has to be cost-effective, easy to maintain and ready to use in short time. It’s my job to provide that for my colleagues. With Google Apps, that’s exactly what we’ve got.

Fancy.com grows merchant partnerships with Google Apps and ProsperWorks

Monday, June 6, 2016

Posted by Paul Hsu, Chief Operating Officer at Fancy

Editor's note: Today we hear from Paul Hsu, Chief Operating Officer at Fancy, which uses Google Apps with ProsperWorks CRM to help manage merchant partnerships, gain transparency into sales team activity and optimize their internal processes. Register here to join our Hangout on Air on June 14 at 9 a.m. to learn more about how ProsperWorks, a Google recommended app, can improve your business.

Fancy, the place to discover, engage with and buy goods from top brands, works with trendsetters and tastemakers to curate thousands of goods. Keeping track of new merchant product launches can get complicated, but Google Apps helps ease the coordination process. For example, we often need to schedule last minute meetings to review products that we want to feature at the start of every day. We use Calendar to find meeting times that fit our schedules, Drive to share product launch proposals and Sheets to manage product launch timelines. Since Google Apps tools are designed to work and integrate smoothly with one another, running these meetings is a seamless process. We’ve used it heavily since we started the company, and the tools have been vital to our productivity and growth.

Growing with Google

With a quickly growing merchant partnership base, we’ve found it increasingly important to keep track of all potential vendors and new interactions. Working with thousands of merchants and even more products, we needed a CRM solution to help scale this part of our business.

Since we were already using Gmail, Calendar, Sheets, Contacts and Drive for most of our operations, we saw ProsperWorks as an effective CRM solution, given how integrated it is with Google’s entire ecosystem of apps.

ProsperWorks with Gmail and Calendar

After we integrated the ProsperWorks Chrome extension — which only took a few short hours — our brand development team began using it immediately. They used ProsperWorks to track communications and interactions with merchants in Gmail and identify items that required follow-up. We saw an increase in our team’s productivity and growth in our brand partner network that we directly attributed to this integration.

With easy-to-use and intuitive tools from ProsperWorks, we experienced a significant increase in the number of merchant partnership deals closed due to the ability to better track customers and share real-time information that helped us close deals.

ProsperWorks with Drive and Sheets

In addition to the benefits for our brand development team, our executive team gained tremendous insight through ProsperWorks reporting capabilities, which work perfectly with Sheets. ProsperWorks' integration with Sheets allowed our brand development team to simply aggregate, organize and visualize our sales in a single dashboard. This gave us immediate access to important insights, such as those gleaned from comparing pipelines by stage, opportunity assessments, customer types, team workload, monthly team progress and even the status of our leads. We were able to get a bird’s eye view of all our sales pipelines without leaving Google Apps.

Using ProsperWorks with Drive gave us insight into product category gaps that we weren’t pursuing and showed us categories that had more partners than we needed. With ProsperWorks, we were able to easily identify these areas and refine our focus to develop partnerships that would expand our reach into new categories while reducing time spent on categories we had already built out.

Optimizing our brand management team with ProsperWorks and Google Apps for Work

On the ground level, our brand management team used ProsperWorks as a way to communicate, manage workflow, manage and assign tasks, share documents and more. Our brand development team has thousands of interactions daily across Gmail, Calendar and Hangouts, and it’s really helpful that on ProsperWorks, the profiles and status of each lead are automatically updated so that every email exchange, event and file is easily accessible by any team member.

Using Google Apps alongside ProsperWorks has helped us optimize the processes of our brand development team and make better decisions faster, which definitely gives us an edge over our competition.

8 ways to make your Android for Work apps even more secure

Friday, June 3, 2016

Posted by Adrian Ludwig, Lead Engineer for Android Security

The Android ecosystem has grown to 1.4 billion devices worldwide and more than one million Play Store apps, with many of those titles focused on consumer usage. At the same time, mobile productivity has grown in importance and businesses are spending more on applications for their work devices. Gartner says businesses spent $143B in 2015 on application software on all platforms.

That presents developers with a large opportunity for work apps that advance collaboration, workflow, data analysis or taking measurements in the field. Android developer tools help developers answer this call for innovation while meeting the important business need of protecting work data.

Here are a few tips and techniques for developers striving to build safe, secure Android apps for work environments.

Integrate with Android for Work

Make sure you test app intents between both work and personal profiles for devices that take advantage of managed Android profiles, which separate work data and applications from personal information.
Prepare for workplaces that enforce application restrictions and configurations by having your app listen for managed configuration changes, which are centrally handled by IT departments.

Encrypt your data

Use HTTPS in lieu of HTTP whenever possible for encrypted, in-app web communications; don’t expect your app users to rely solely on VPN or other encrypted connections.
If you encrypt any data in your app, don’t put the key within the app. Use a KeyStore so the keys are bound to the device hardware and not directly accessible from your app.

Use Android’s built-in and expanded protections

Rather than using the MODE_WORLD_WRITEABLE or MODE_WORLD_READABLE modes (which don’t limit data access to specific applications) consider using content providers, which implement data read / write permissions to other apps.
Call Google Play service APIs to improve app security and check device compatibility. Specifically, the ProviderInstaller class has methods to verify if device’s security provider is current and SafetyNetAPI.attest can let you know if the device’s security model is intact; if not your app can throw an exception or work around the issue.
Check security warnings provided by the Google Play Store when uploading your app; this is part of the Android Security Improvement program and can highlight potential security risks in your app before you publish it.
Consider implementing single sign-on (SSO), which makes it more convenient for end users to safely access business apps and data. This also enables a consistent session expiration to harden app security. See this section of our recorded session from Google I/O on this topic a demonstration of SSO.

Following these tips is easy and makes your Android apps more secure and more attractive to businesses so you can take advantage of the growing support for Android devices in enterprises and small businesses alike.

For more information or other ways to build secure Android apps, see our growing list of security tips and take advantage of the tools Android offers you.

Introducing New and Notable apps in the Google Apps Marketplace

Thursday, June 2, 2016

Posted by Rahul Sood, Managing Director, Apps and Search for Work

For six years, the Google Apps Marketplace has helped businesses do more by being the number one source to find third-party apps and integrations that extend what's possible with Google Apps. But with hundreds of popular apps to choose from, it’s sometimes hard for customers to discover the newest and most innovative ones.

Enter New & Notable, a new section in the Google Apps Marketplace that surfaces the latest and best third-party apps and integrations for Google Apps, and the developers behind them.

Here’s a preview of some of the products highlighted this month:

Asana Dashboard: The new Asana Dashboard integrates with Google Sheets, allowing users to export task completion and performance information for wider tracking across teams. Read more here.
Hubspot CRM: With the new HubSpot CRM app, users can now log emails sent from Gmail into HubSpot with one click, and automatically sync meetings between Google Calendar and HubSpot, no matter which system they came from. Read more here.
Xero: With their latest integration, Xero — a provider of online accounting software for small businesses — lets users view Gmail messages alongside Xero transaction and activity details. Users can also save emails in Xero for reference, start a quote or invoice from within a Gmail message. Read more here.
Zendesk: With their latest integration, Zendesk automates the Google Apps admin tasks of forwarding support e-mails into Zendesk and listing Google users within Zendesk. Read more here.
Zoho People: Zoho People is a new HR management app for small businesses that lets users manage their HR portal directly from their Google Apps account, as well as add users directly to Zoho People, saving them from having to manually re-enter employee information. Read more here.

Find these apps and many more (like AppSheet, GQueues, ZipBooks, Any.Do, Infogram, and LogoMix) in New & Notable. If you’re on the hunt for killer apps that help you get more done with Google Apps, it’s the best place to start.

Bartle Bogle Hegarty takes good ideas global with Google Apps for Work

Wednesday, June 1, 2016

Posted by Andy Coppin, Operations Director at Bartle Bogle Hegarty

Editor's note: Today we hear from Andy Coppin, Operations Director at Bartle Bogle Hegarty, a global advertising agency based in London. Founded in 1982, BBH has twice won Agency of the Year at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival with groundbreaking campaigns for clients including Audi, British Airways, Tesco and Unilever. With offices in London, Los Angeles, New York, Shanghai, Singapore, Mumbai and Stockholm, read how the BBH team uses Google Apps for Work to enhance its global network.

A good idea can cross borders. That’s one reason why we have just one office in each global region, instead of one office in each country like most of our competitors. It keeps campaigns focused and recognises that our adventurous staff see travel as a perk, rather than a chore. So when we overhauled our IT system in 2010, we needed a system that enabled both close international collaboration and great mobility. Google Apps for Work opened up far-reaching creative possibilities that change the way we work.

Mobility we need with lower cost, more dependable tools

Google Apps is ideal for flexible and mobile working. Gmail and Calendar are web-based, so client-facing teams are never out of touch as they travel to meetings abroad. Previously, remotely connecting to our old servers could only be done with an unreliable VPN. It proved to be an expensive liability with a tendency to fail. Drive is not only cheaper, it’s also dependable. The instant messaging function on Hangouts is perfect for teams on the road. Chromebox for meetings has become so powerful and easy to use that it’s entirely superseded the separate video conferencing system we installed five years ago.

Managing IT and administrative controls internally, for faster troubleshooting

The simple administrative interface and modular design of Google Apps for Work means we can solve IT problems internally instead of spending on external support. My colleague Will Triantos, our Global Google Technical Lead, not only administers the entire platform for 1,000 staff in eight offices, he’s also constantly creating new ways of using Google Apps to improve work at BBH. Fast, friendly and comprehensive support from Cloud Technology Solutions (CTS) means all the advice we need is always on-hand. With their support, we migrated our entire Stockholm office to Google Apps in less than a week.

Fostering a culture of creative IT, sharing and efficiency

Using Sites, Drive and Google APIs, Will has created a much-improved new intranet. While our previous intranet was based on servers around the world that cost us £20,000 a year to license, the new intranet is entirely cloud-based, so we don’t pay to maintain our own hardware. Because it uses Sheets to present our global company directory, we can always be confident we have up-to-date contact details for all our offices. With its connections to Drive, we can upload documents like historical advertising pitches in a few seconds, instead of in ten to thirty minutes. And because any of our staff can upload, rather than just one administrator in London, each office can share news and holiday information specific to them. Teams anywhere can access their local Google+ communities or submit Forms to make catering requests from kitchen staff, and users access the intranet with their Google Account single sign on, too, so their Gmail, Calendar and Drive is embedded and only a click away.

Most IT FAQs are answered on our intranet, so Will is free to find other applications for Google Apps. To take a simple example, before new BBH staff arrive at the office, they fill in a Form on Sites that connects to a Sheet in HR, so we have all their details in advance. And at the building entrance they sign-in to a Form on a tablet that emails reception, so the right person can be there to meet them. Small things like that add up, make a great impression and prove that cutting admin in one area frees creative thinking elsewhere.

After busy M&A activity, AOL unifies with Google Apps

Tuesday, May 31, 2016

Posted by Steve Coulbourne, Technical Director, AOL

Editor's note: Today we hear from Steve Coulbourne, technical director at AOL, a global digital media and technology company focused on “Culture and Code.”

I’ve been part of the AOL team for more than 15 years. In that time I’ve seen the technology we use evolve immensely. When I first started, the company had standard desktops and a legacy IT system. Since then, we’ve shifted from clunky hardware and software to “lightweight enterprise” — prioritizing convenient, immediate access and ease of use.

Our CEO, Tim Armstrong, believes that if you keep doing things the same way, you’ll continue to get the same results. We take this philosophy seriously when it comes to our technology. Our global Chief Technology Officer, William Pence, provided clear vision for modern, cloud-based, and forward looking technologies, which propelled our investment and focus in this space. When we decided to start using Google Apps, we were most interested in unifying and improving how we work together across teams — especially between AOL’s different entities.

In recent years, we’ve completed many acquisitions (think Huffington Post, TechCrunch, and the integration of Verizon’s Digital Media Services to name a few). Having Google Apps during the period of potential confusion and chaos has helped us perform due diligence activities even quicker.

We started exploring Google Apps in 2010 and chose it over Office 365 because Microsoft required us to staff a whole team to manage SharePoint and its infrastructure. We also realized that adoption of Google Apps would be easier and more cost effective because of Google’s reputation for ease of use and the familiarity many of our employees already had with its tools.

Over the course of six months, we unified 13 domains into one with help from a third-party integrator to move from Microsoft Exchange to Google. From a set-up perspective, it took about two to three weeks to get everyone up and running with local peer (i.e., collaboration champions) and IT helpdesk support. Employees immediately started sharing their favorite Apps “hacks” with colleagues (for example, we use Google Forms for invite submissions, which alerts employees when events are filled and creates a culture of excitement and inclusion).

As a result, we were able to decommission 18 of our 22 globally distributed Messaging servers (more than 80 percent), eliminating 130 terabytes (TB) of drive space needs. We’re also migrating on-premise file shares into Google Apps, which will allow us to reallocate another 120 TB of file storage.

I led the initiative for company-wide adoption of Google Drive, Docs and Hangouts, and the entire company has been fully migrated since February 2015. With recent acquisitions, we've quickly integrated our collaboration tools to maintain focus on business value and production.

In terms of security (such as granting and denying access to data as needed), we’ve reduced costs. When you’re working in the cloud, there’s no need to bring on a third-party vendor to ensure data is secure. Moving away from premise-based solutions has provided us the flexibility to decrease our acquisition integration timeline from a messaging and collaboration perspective. We’re now able to offer the services of companies we acquire the same day that a deal is signed.

In certain instances, the collaboration capabilities of Google Apps enabled quicker time to market for our products. For example, the content and assets for each morning’s AOL homepage is queued up in real time on Drive. Also, our Business Communications team can edit articles at the same time — greatly reducing time to publication.

With multiple brands under the AOL umbrella, Apps also allows us to be more transparent and give everyone access to files and documents. With Apps, our employees are productive from anywhere — whether it’s on AOL’s campus or on the network — and connected as a unified team.

How Mimeo moves fast as a global company using Google Apps

Monday, May 23, 2016

Posted by Doug Bohaboy, VP of Marketing, Mimeo

Editor's note: Today we hear from Doug Bohaboy of Mimeo, a content distribution and digital printing company based in New York City. Learn how Google Apps helped Mimeo deliver at breakneck speed while keeping its employees connected.

When I first started at Mimeo, a content distribution and digital printing company, in 2005, we had fewer than 100 employees. I could stand up and talk to anyone in our New York office. I knew everyone.

Today, we have over 800 employees in six locations, including four international offices in the UK, Germany, India and China. Our New York office had ballooned to multiple floors. That’s why we turned to Google Apps to keep our distributed workforce productive, efficient and competitive in an evolving market. Google Hangouts, Google Docs and Google Calendar keep us organized and coordinated across multiple time zones.

To compete with other online suppliers, we need to move fast and fulfill orders quickly. Customers can place an order for a complex printed document on our website at 10 p.m. EST and expect it to be fulfilled and delivered the next day. This means people at our New York headquarters need to communicate rapidly with our global manufacturing facilities. With Hangouts, our teams can video or text chat instantly from any device, whether it’s a desktop computer or mobile phone, at any time of day or night.

We made the switch to Google Apps from Microsoft Exchange in 2010 to give people tools to work more closely together — without wasting time on IT issues. Before 2010, our IT team had to deal with issues that didn’t add value to the company, like scheduled server maintenance and helping employees fix email problems. These minor issues added up to 1,000 hours each year. Now, our IT team spends 100-200 hours a year addressing minor issues — equating to huge financial and time savings.

Google Apps, and particularly Docs, increases our efficiency. Today we create about 90 percent of our documents using Docs. Employees often collaboratively edit documents together when they’re sitting across the room from each other. Docs also makes meetings more efficient by giving us the ability to take shared notes and assign owners. The whole team doesn’t need to be in every meeting — we can tag team members who need to share their input on one small section, and they can contribute on their own time.

With offices in the UK, Germany, China and India, we use Hangouts to collaborate more meaningfully with more face-to-face time. The ease of meeting person to person also helps us appreciate the cultural diversity of our team, which contributes to our open culture that embraces diverse ideas and paths to problem solving. Whether from Memphis or Berlin, any of us could easily hop on a video chat in Hangouts while also having access to intuitive tools, making training new employees from any location seamless.

As companies like ours grow increasingly global, Google Apps is helping to create more mobile, flexible work environments. Our biggest goal is to do more for our customers while keeping our employees in sync by making Mimeo a great place to work. We know that our customers depend on Mimeo for fast, reliable service that consistently exceeds their expectations. Google Apps helps our employees make the most of their time and creativity, ensuring we retain the competitive advantage that’s made us a globally recognized company.

Google I/O: What’s new for enterprise developers

Wednesday, May 18, 2016

Posted by Diane Greene, SVP, Google

Applications have long been the lifeblood of the enterprise. This has never been more true than in today’s market. And Google has never been more committed to the enterprise. We’re excited to expose our APIs to enterprise developers who can now incorporate advanced technologies such as image recognition, speech recognition, location and maps, email and calendaring into their applications.

Google I/O is a great opportunity to share what excites us about the massive digital transformation happening at companies around the globe. We’re thrilled about the speed of innovation with all of our enterprise products, particularly Google Cloud Platform, Google Apps, Maps, Android and Chromebooks. We’re laser focused on creating what developers need to build successfully in the cloud.

At Google, we continue to push new innovations that enable developers to turn great ideas into world class applications. We can also help you get your apps in the hands of your customers through marketplaces like Google Play, Chrome Web Store, Google Apps Marketplace and Cloud Launcher, which serve billions of Android and Chrome users and millions of businesses.

Today’s announcements at I/O further build out our developer toolkit, with new features to help developers build what’s next for the enterprise.

Whether you’re using Google Cloud Platform, integrating with our Machine Learning APIs or building on top of our Google Apps suite, we’re committed to delivering the tools and technologies that help businesses improve productivity, securely connect information across platforms and power new workflows. Earlier this month we announced a BigQuery integration with Google Drive that allows customers to run queries, gather insights and then share that data with teams in a familiar and easy to understand template, no matter where they are. We also recently added two new security certifications, ISO27017 for cloud security and ISO27018 for privacy. And customers like Land O Lakes are taking advantage of our cloud and APIs to revolutionize their fields — in this case, modern farming.

Ever since I began my career in technology, I’ve been working to advance the way the enterprise runs. I worked on some of the first relational databases for Sybase and Tandem and then, at VMware, helped to create an entirely new industry centered around virtualization. Fast forward to today, and I can say that I’ve never been more excited about the potential for the cloud to transform businesses. There was a period in time where the energy was around consumer applications, but we can now see that people are realizing just how much innovation can be done in the enterprise, and it’s enticing more and more developers. While we’re excited about the innovations that we’re bringing to market, we’re even more excited about how you will take advantage of these new advancements. As the momentum continues in the enterprise, we can’t wait to see what you build next.

How oil and gas company Imaginea Energy built a productivity pipeline

Tuesday, May 17, 2016

Posted by Greg Bennett, Imaginea

Editor's note: Today we hear from Greg Bennett of Imaginea Energy, an oil and gas company based in Calgary, Alberta Canada. Learn how Google Apps helps Imaginea defy industry stereotypes as they work to produce energy sustainably, securely and profitably.

At Imaginea Energy, our vision is an Oil and Gas industry that is much better for the Planet, and for People, and for Profits. This vision is reflected in our culture, the mindsets of our people as well as in our organizational model. Together, our organizational model and culture promote curiosity, teamwork and 10X thinking — values that affect everything from our team-driven project pitches, to idea generation to the tools that are integral to creating solutions that match our aspirations, like Google Apps for Work.

We switched from our previous platform because our legacy storage, productivity and email tools didn’t reflect our open and transparent culture or our vision of the future. The closed IT environment made it difficult to collaborate together beyond very small teams: file-sharing was non-existent, which created insane revision situations and confusion about document version control. Google Drive changes all of that. We've migrated nearly 260,000 files to Drive, all of which can be accessed from anywhere, on any device, without deploying a rigid shared drive structure.

Google Docs, Sheets, Slides and Forms have absolutely transformed how we work together. With real-time editing, commenting and data collection, we can quickly share ideas and insights and rapidly move work forward together. At a recent meeting we had over 30 people generate 20 pages of new ideas in under two hours. Seamless collaboration and rapid ideation like this simply wasn’t possible before.

Google Apps for Work combined with our flexible working environment provide maximum autonomy, which our employees leverage to increase their productivity both in and out of the office. Visit our headquarters on a Friday and you might find up to 40% of our people foregoing their commute in favour of working from home (or a coffee shop, or a park). This flexibility really works for our company and our team.

With access to information online or offline, the ability to work remotely extends to the vast 30,000 km2 of rolling prairie that our operations cover. Operators can capture data even without internet access. Once they re-connect, all of their offline work is instantly synced, eliminating redundant data-entry and confusion.

Our ability to work from anywhere has been further enhanced by using Google Hangouts. Whether a field operator is at one of our 600+ active wells or a team member is running a training presentation from 7,000 kms away in Europe, Hangouts connects our people face-to-face. Our field staff have cut down on the 500 km round trip visits to headquarters — now they can spend more time on-site, and less time driving by communicating and holding meeting via Hangouts. Reducing driving time increases the safety of our team, and also reduces our environmental footprint and operating costs.

Not only has switching to Google Apps saved us significant time, it will also reduce our IT spend. By mid-2016, we’ll have saved over 50 percent on IT maintenance, money that can be redeployed to develop solutions to business problems and maximising our team’s capabilities.

Google Apps gives us the security we need without compromising information flow or flexibility. The Admin console lets us customize mobile device management and quickly respond to changing security events. On a recent trip to Paris, a company device was stolen on the subway. Within 12 minutes, access credentials were changed and our data was secured. This security extends behind the scenes to every part of Google Apps. We may never have world-leading security experts on our staff, but luckily we don’t have to: Google does. Having trust in our tools, combined with the trust we invest in our employees, means we can focus on creating value without obsessing over security.

At Imaginea, we defy industry stereotypes by focusing on Planet, People and Profit together. When you set out to reimagine an industry like oil and gas, achieving that vision is only possible with the right people and the right tools. With Google Apps, we’ve set course to truly transform our business and the energy industry.

Vallie helps Londoners get on-demand valet parking fast, using Google Maps APIs

Thursday, May 12, 2016

Posted by Nash Islam, Vallie Co-founder

Editor's note: Today we hear from Nash Islam, co-founder of the UK-based parking service Vallie. Read how Vallie used Google Maps APIs to launch an on-demand valet service in London.

The idea for Vallie came from a problem that so many Londoners face: finding parking in one of the world’s largest and most congested cities. The Daily Telegraph reports that it takes Londoners 20 minutes on average to find a parking spot, and that motorists spend up to 106 days of their lives circling streets to find a spot across the UK.

Using the Vallie app, customers pay £5/hour (up to £25 per day) to drop their car off in any central London location and hand over their keys to a Vallie driver who parks their car in a safe commercial car park. Vallie drivers can return a car anywhere in our serviced zone within 20 minutes. Customers can also request additional services: Vallie offers electric re-charging, car wash and Matters of Testing (MOT) services.

The mapping experience is so fundamental to our on-demand valet service that we wanted to invest in a high quality mapping service. We decided to use Google Maps APIs because it provides a consistent mapping service across all our platforms with quality routing and location data. We worked with Google for Work Premier Partner Ancoris for licensing and general implementation questions, and Google's support team worked with us to ensure we had an efficient implementation.

Customers request pick-ups and returns through the Vallie app. Vallie drivers have their own app that tells them where to meet customers and where to park. We used the Google Maps SDK for iOS to build our iOS app for customers and parkers and the Google Maps Android API for our upcoming Android app. Our online booking process is powered by Google Maps JavaScript API.

A variety of Google Maps APIs are core to our app’s services. We use the Google Places API to display building names or points of interest at meeting locations, which helps both the customers and Vallie drivers. We use Google Maps Directions API to show estimated arrival times. Finally, the Google Maps Distance Matrix API helps us calculate the nearest valet and car park so we can minimize customer wait times.

In the future, we plan to expand further afield in London, and then to other cities across the UK and Europe. We hope to expand our car maintenance services while also exploring ways to make parking much smarter and more effective. As we grow, Google Maps APIs will continue to be at the center of the quality parking and transportation services we provide to our customers.

Creative entertainment provider Paint Nite uses Google Apps to create a flexible workplace

Wednesday, May 11, 2016

Posted by Courtney Osgood, Head of Communications at Paint Nite

Editor's note: Today we hear from Courtney Osgood of Paint Nite, a Boston-based events company that offers consumers a creative social experience at local bars. Learn how Google Apps helps Paint Nite maintain its close-knit company culture and keep teams connected no matter where they work.

Paint Nite offers a different kind of nightlife experience. Guided by a local artist, our customers spend a few hours sipping cocktails and painting at a local bar.

Working together to create something great is in our DNA, which is why we’ve used Google Apps since the company was founded in 2012.

As we’ve grown, Google Apps has helped us maintain our tight-knit culture while successfully scaling our business. In the past year, we’ve added more than 950 cities and towns that are now hosting Paint Nite events, and more than doubled our employees at headquarters from 40 to 100+.

Work-life balance is a big priority at Paint Nite. Our founders recognize that everyone has commitments outside of work, whether it’s spending time with family, pursuing a hobby or volunteering. Paint Nite offers unlimited vacation time and allows employees to work from home any time. Tools like Google Apps help our employees take advantage of this policy. Teams use Google Hangouts to chat about projects throughout the day, whether they’re at the office, at home or working from a coffee shop. We use Hangouts for our weekly all-staff meeting so all employees can join from anywhere and feel like they’re in the same room.

Google Apps helps teams stay organized, which is important given how quickly the company is growing. Our employees love using Google Calendar, which makes it easy to schedule meetings with colleagues who are working remotely. Calendar also lets us book conference rooms in advance, which is a small but critical feature for a rapidly growing company with limited meeting space.

Google Apps also saves us time. Our data analytics team, for example, uses Google Forms to manage dozens of data requests each day. At Paint Nite, we rely on our data to make decisions or share information — a digital marketing manager needs to know how many cities we operate in for a new advertisement, or our communications team wants to share year-over-year growth figures with the local newspaper. Before they started using Forms, our analysts spent hours each week sorting through requests manually. It was an inefficient and frustrating process. Now, if anyone at Paint Nite needs company data, he or she can submit a request using Google Forms.

As we continue to scale from a local startup to a international brand, it’s crucial that our teams stay connected, whether people are working from our main office, at home or on the road. Google Apps helps us do this while maintaining the close-knit, flexible work environment we've grown to love.

How Infoxchange and Google Maps are empowering Australia’s homeless

Monday, May 9, 2016

Posted by Diana Brown, Product Manager at Infoxchange

Editor's note: This is the fifth in a series of “Mapping a Better World” posts, highlighting organizations using location data to affect positive local and global change. Today’s guest post comes from Diana Brown, Product Manager at Infoxchange, creators of Ask Izzy, a mobile app for Australia’s homeless that connects them with shelter, food and other essential services. The company was founded in a Melbourne garage in 1989.

No one expects to become homeless. For those that do, knowing where to find resources like water, shelter and medical supplies — resources we can’t live without but can take for granted when we have a roof over our head — can be a daily struggle.

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and his wife Lucy Turnbull speak with a former homeless man who helped consult on Ask Izzy.

In Australia, 1 in 200 people are homeless, but 80 percent of them have a smartphone. We realized that these smartphones could act as lifeline to basic resources, providing real-time information about nearby services, including services that offer food and shelter. That’s how we came up with the idea for the Ask Izzy app.

With the help of Google Maps APIs, Ask Izzy gives homeless people information about over 350,000 vital nearby services such as shelter, food, needle exchanges, employment resources, technology facilities like Wi-Fi and charging stations, legal and financial advice. The Places API allows us to suggest specific destinations and services based on a user's current location. We can tell a user how far away various services are with the Distance Matrix API and provide transit options with the Directions API.

We work closely with those who have overcome homelessness to understand the specific needs of the homeless population and provide the best access to resources. We also collaborate with the service providers who help meet these specific needs.

None of the benefits provided by Ask Izzy would be possible without our partners, whose cutting-edge technology we depend on every day. We’re thrilled to call Google a partner and we look forward to growing our working relationship and doing more to address the needs of our users.

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