Posted by Chris Morton, Co-founder and CEO, Lyst

Editor's note: From the typewriter to the propelling pencil to our favorite, the world wide web, inventors and innovators from the United Kingdom have brought us brilliant advances that have changed the way we work all around the world. Over the next few weeks, we’ll share a handful of stories from disrupters and trailblazers in the UK who are using Google Apps for Work to enable new, better ways of working in their organisations. Today, we hear from Chris Morton, Co-founder and CEO of Lyst, a platform that aggregates the world's fashion commerce sites in a single place.

Six years ago, I shared both a house and a common frustration with two fashion forward women: we loved shopping online, but couldn’t stand how impersonal and time-consuming it was to jump from site to site in search of a new jacket or pair of jeans. I knew there must be a better way for people to find the fashion that fit their personal style without having to explore and buy from dozens of different websites. In 2010, my co-founder and I created Lyst, an online destination that allows shoppers to customize their feed of clothes and accessories and buy from multiple brands and retailers through a single platform. Today, we’re a team of 60 with offices in London and New York, generating hundreds of millions in dollars in sales for the fashion industry.

Our unique culture has helped us challenge the way the fashion industry works, not only because we can attract great talent, but because we’ve built an environment that encourages everyone to contribute. Here are a few ways we’ve built the kind of inclusive, creative culture that define fast-moving startups like Lyst.


Cultivating autonomy, ownership and creative problem-solving
We hire people who thrive on freedom — they do their best work without someone giving them constant direction. We emphasize this sense of ownership from the moment they join our team: in every employment contract, the responsibilities for the role include “proactively thinking of ways to make Lyst better.” We brainstorm often, both formally and informally, with everyone from founders to new hires, college grads to industry veterans. We evaluate ideas not by who shared them but how much impact they’d have on our business.

We work with flexibility, recognising those instances that demand what we call the “screwdriver mode”, which involves tweaking and optimizing fine details. Sometimes we work differently, applying our “sledgehammer mode” when we literally need to break down one element of our business and rebuild it from scratch.

Encouraging personal communication and recognizing great work
As we grow, we need to be intentional about building a shared culture through meaningful communication. Google Docs helps us work more closely together, whether we’re collaborating on a press release or gathering feedback on an investor deck. Because it’s not always practical to fly our New York team to London, our two offices meet via Google Hangouts for bi-monthly all-hands meetings, where we share company news, celebrate sales milestones, and tip our hats to people coming up with great ideas — like a data scientist’s suggestion to use search data to understand buying patterns around bomber jackets versus varsity jackets. We’re considering setting up a permanent Hangout so people can get to know their colleagues from across the pond over a cup of virtual tea.

We also track progress in shared Google Sheets, so everyone on the team knows the status of key projects across the team. For instance, our product team use shared Sheets to record development updates on implementing various campaigns and releases. And when it’s time for my 1:1 with our Head of Product, I can follow along with every update by looking at each line item in the Sheet.

Empowering employees to work however they want
Building a culture unique to Lyst also means enabling employees to keep up with their colleagues no matter where they are and how they like to work. Google Apps helps us get the information we need at any time and capture inspiration whenever it hits. We often source styles on the go, whether it’s a particular outfit someone sees on the street or trends spotted from the front row at New York Fashion Week. Drive and Gmail apps on mobile let us quickly share the photos we snap and the notes we take with the rest of our team for internal reference and to publish as part of our editorial content.


At Lyst, we embrace the fact that everyone is different by creating customized experiences for every shopper. Self-expression transcends fashion, and we want to build our company culture on this same premise. By obsessing over the quality of people we hire, encouraging autonomy and creativity, recognizing excellent work, and giving our team the tools they need to do their best, we’ve created an engaging environment and a unique culture that helps us achieve our goals.

Posted by Ganesh Shankar, Product Manager, Google Drive for Android

(Cross-posted on the Google Drive Blog.)

Google Drive makes it easy to keep your stuff safe and accessible from any device, but it doesn’t stop there. We want you to easily find and share your documents, photos, and PDFs with others. So, in addition to a Material Design facelift, the latest update for Android gives you new ways to add, locate, and share from Drive.

Improved Search
The search tool makes it even easier to find the content you’re looking for by providing updated results as you type each letter into the search box.

Posted by Sharon Cooper, CTO, BMJ

Editor's note: From the typewriter to the propelling pencil to our favorite, the world wide web, inventors and innovators from the United Kingdom have brought us brilliant advances that have changed the way we work all around the world. Over the next few weeks, we’ll share a handful of stories from disrupters and trailblazers in the UK who are using Google Apps for Work to enable new, better ways of working in their organisations. Today, we hear from Sharon Cooper, CTO of BMJ a subsidiary of the British Medical Association that advances healthcare worldwide by sharing knowledge and expertise.

BMJ published our first medical journal in 1840 and moved to BMA House, an Edwardian building in London, in 1925 where we still operate. We have evolved as a digital business and the way we work has changed significantly over the years. While covering the discovery of chloroform and reporting on the controversy of the MMR vaccine, we’ve also transformed from a print-based publisher to a digital information services provider with a team spread across 12 countries.

It wasn’t always that way: until our recent effort to make our business more inherently digital, technology used to hold us back. Our antiquated email and calendars randomly deleted appointments, which caused us to miss crucial senior sales meetings, delaying projects and even derailing sales opportunities — issues that we estimated cost £30K a month of lost revenue. Because inbox storage was so limited, people forwarded emails to their personal accounts. We had no BYOD policy, so we relied on company-provided hardware, and sent UK PCs out to staff in India.

Our ongoing investment in cloud-based technologies lead to a decision last year to invest in Google Apps for Work. We now work together more seamlessly and share ideas more readily, whether we’re brainstorming around a ping pong table in our London office or meeting via Hangout with a colleague working from India. Here are four ways we’ve started working together differently over the past year.


Delivering new business faster through closer collaborative working
The way we respond to government tender documents exemplifies our new way of working. These 100-page documents, full of dozens of complex tables, used to take two weeks to complete. Now, we create a Google Doc and work collaboratively. Whenever we need someone to insert information or provide specific feedback, we tag them in a comment and they know to jump in and add their edits or suggestions. We save time and avoid confusion by relying on Docs for this kind of collaboration rather than turning to long chains of emails with version after version of attachments. It’s a radically different, more streamlined process.

Connecting face-to-face across miles and time zones
Technology has changed the way we meet. My London developer team uses an always-on video connection through Chromebox and Hangouts to connect with our team developers in Cardiff, so we feel like we’re one team in a single office, despite the distance between our desks. Teams throughout BMJ coordinate meetings using Google Calendar, create agendas in Docs, and host Townhalls for our whole staff using Hangouts On Air — that way, anyone can join whether they’re in Portland, Oregon or Dubai. Getting all 500 employees involved requires zero cost and minimal planning or technical expertise.

Brainstorming, testing and ideating with a new office design
We’ve redesigned our physical environment to brainstorm and test new product ideas with our users. People can write and draw on the walls, which are covered in whiteboards and post-it notes, then take photos of the notes and save the images in Drive, so they can refer to them later and share them with people who couldn’t be there in person.

Working from trains, planes and automobiles
A year ago, we were tethered to our desks. Now, we can access our email and files on smartphones and tablets, thanks to the Gmail and Drive mobile apps. This means our executives can run our portfolio of over 30 products whether they’re in the office or travelling around the world. Our Editor-in-Chief, who frequently travels for work, quickly views and approves the weekly digital and print issues while on the go, using Docs and the Drive app on her mobile phone.


Thanks to Google Apps, each year we save £135,000 in software licensing fees and hardware costs and an additional 126,500 hours of productivity. But perhaps more importantly, we’ve changed the way BMJ works together to build a healthier world.

Click to expand the full infographic below.

Posted by Bram Bout, Director, Google for Education

(Cross-posted on Google for Education Blog.)

Universities and schools continue to tell us that they want learning without limits. So last month, we announced that Drive for Education would be coming to all Google Apps for Education schools at no charge. This week, we’ll be rolling out unlimited Drive storage to all Google Apps for Education users and free archiving with Google Vault will be coming later this year.

Schools have helped shape our products over time, starting in 2006 when Arizona State University (ASU) was the first institution to make the move to Google Apps for Education. Just two years later, we celebrated two million active Google Apps for Education users at thousands of universities and today, we have more than 40 million students and teachers worldwide actively using Google Apps—from Keio University in Japan to University of Delhi in India, Chile’s Universidad Viña del Mar to the University of Ghana.

Students at George Washington University take advantage of the brisk Fall weather and opt to work outside on campus

But, like any good teacher knows, success is not about numbers; it’s about quality and impact. Students are moving from paper and pencils to cloud-based learning, with information and tools at their fingertips anywhere they are. For them, learning doesn’t end in the lecture hall. From online courses to 1:1 tablets to lectures via Hangouts, innovation in education is removing barriers for students and widening their horizons. We’re grateful that higher education institutions have innovated right along with us and helped provide feedback to improve our products.

Throughout this week, top academic institutions like Georgetown University and UT Austin will share how they’ve been using Google tools, including Google Drive, for the past few years to save money, increase collaboration between students and professors and raise the bar on learning and working, anytime, anywhere, on any device.

To learn more, visit our website: www.google.com/edu/highered

Posted by Amit Singh, President, Google for Work

Today we’re combining PwC’s rich client relationships and unparalleled industry knowledge with Google’s breadth of technology across cloud, applications and mobile. Together, we will provide and build solutions to help companies drive transformation and PwC will help bring the best of Google to work.

• Helping businesses move to the cloud and optimize for success. As part of this new relationship, PwC will help their clients evaluate and plan their move to the cloud. Any company can benefit from the ability to work better together from anywhere with Drive for Work and Android. PwC will also help clients build custom applications and mobile solutions relevant to their industries — improving processes like invoicing and talent management — using Google Cloud Platform. Moving to the cloud requires trust in a new way of working. PwC’s deep industry knowledge and strong client relationships will help businesses realize the security benefits, productivity gains and cultural impact made possible through this move.

• Providing best in class security. With more than 450 full time security engineers, Google offers one of the most secure platforms for customer information. PwC can help enhance its security monitoring practice with new solutions for clients built on Google Cloud Platform. By building custom algorithms on Google Cloud Platform, PwC will identify security threats, alert clients of potential attacks, and prevent or mitigate risks.

PwC is also adopting Google Apps for Work for 45,000 employees in the U.S. and Australia. PwC’s digital transformation will include products like Gmail, Calendar, Hangouts, Drive and Docs, to communicate and collaborate with their colleagues and clients. PwC's use of Google tools will also help them advise clients on the benefits of cloud technology.

We’re excited to be working with PwC to bring the best of Google to work.

To learn more about this collaboration and how PwC and Google for Work can help your company, visit http://pwc.com/google.

Posted by Rich Rao, Director of Global SMB Sales, Google for Work

This year, some of the world’s leading online service providers — Wix, Weebly and Endurance (parent company of Bluehost and others) — chose to offer Google Apps for Work as part of their mission to help small businesses get online. Now, we welcome two more to the Google for Work Partner Program: content management systems Squarespace and WordPress.com, who chose Google Apps for its simple integration process and common goal of helping business get off the ground and grow. And, as Google Apps customers themselves, these companies are deeply familiar with its benefits and understand the value it can bring to customers.

These partners make it simple and seamless for businesses to register a domain name, create a new website and set up custom business email through Google Apps, all at the same time and in a single signup process. In addition to the ability to communicate professionally right off the bat, businesses also get a familiar, easy-to-use productivity suite featuring tools like Google Calendar for scheduling, Google Hangouts for video meetings and Google Drive for storing files. Customers have everything they need to build and maintain their online presence as well as run their day-to-day business in one central place.

With a set of APIs that lets these companies build Google Apps into their existing user interface, the process of integrating with these partners’ own products is just as seamless as their customers’ signup process. That’s one of the reasons Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, chose to offer Google Apps: “We’re constantly looking to optimize customer dashboards,” says Matt Mullenweg, Automattic’s founder and CEO, “so integrating Google Apps was a natural decision for us.”

These partners also experience the benefits firsthand in their own companies — they’ve seen how the tools encourage teamwork, improve communication and let employees work the way they live — anytime, anywhere, on any device. “We're huge proponents of giving our customers access to the services that we use ourselves to run our own business,” said Anthony Casalena, Squarespace’s founder and CEO. “We've been using Google Apps since we were a small team, and we continue to use those same tools to power 390 employees.”

We’re thrilled to be teaming up with our new partners, and we’re proud that they’ve chosen to share Google Apps for Work with their users. If your company offers online services to business customers who can also benefit from the value of Google Apps, feel free to email us.

Posted by Dan Hartley, Global Innovation Manager at AllSaints

Editor's note: From the typewriter to the propelling pencil to our favorite, the world wide web, inventors and innovators from the United Kingdom have brought us brilliant advances that have changed the way we work all around the world. Over the next few weeks, we’ll share a handful of stories from disrupters and trailblazers in the UK who are using Google Apps for Work to enable new, better ways of working in their organisations. Today’s guest blogger is Dan Hartley, Global Innovation Manager at AllSaints, a global contemporary fashion brand based out of East London.

For 20 years, AllSaints has mixed old world craftsmanship with new world design to create contemporary clothing that’s as fashionable and relevant on the sidewalks of New Delhi as it is on the streets of New York, Paris and LA. Our aesthetic is sharp and innovative. After all, we’re named after All Saints Road in Notting Hill, a hub for new music and art.

We’re driven by experimentation and creativity and constantly test out new approaches to our style, whether it’s our photography, marketing videos, music sessions or even showroom furniture. Until recently though, our employees were burdened by a technology platform that made it hard to take creative risks or move quickly. That is, until we moved to Google Apps which transformed the way we work.


Google’s tools help make our teams feel closer and more connected to each other, from the designers at AllSaints Studios in East London, to our factories and regional offices in Turkey, Portugal and Hong Kong, to our retail stores throughout the world. We don’t have to rely on email to request an up-to-date document and wait a full day for someone from another region to send it back as an attachment, only to discover their version is obsolete because someone else edited a different copy. Now, our 2,500 employees across 120 stores and 10 regional offices store all their files in Drive, and can rest assured they’re always working on the most up-to-date version. This has also encouraged and developed a much more cross functional working environment, leading to ideas and solutions that may have otherwise never been imagined.

Google Drive has transformed how we store and share files of all kinds across the entire organisation. In AllSaints Studios, we used to have one shared network drive to store all of our files, which suffered from slow load times since so many people used it at once. It got to a point where our photo department used a separate hard drive to handle their own large file formats. With Google Drive, everyone — including the photo department — can access documents anytime, without any performance issues. We use desktop sync, an application installed on the computer that puts a Drive folder on the desktop, to automatically store large files on our computers as well.

We’ve also replaced our old intranet for retail managers with department specific Google+ Communities that are open to the entire organisation. Each week, we release a set of directives that outline where to place new styles on the shop floor. Before moving to Google, we published this information in a PDF on our intranet, and if anything changed during the week, retail managers would receive an email alert and have to find the file on the intranet, download it, then print a number of copies of the new version to hand out to their team. Now, we have a shared Drive folder for Directives, and each manager can pull up the file from their Nexus tablet as they walk around the shop floor, knowing what they’re looking at is always up to date.

We’ve found a technology partner in Google that improves our workflow and processes and enables us to concentrate on the creative work. With Google Drive, we have the tools at our fingertips to turn ideas into fashion, films and other works that inspire and ignite confidence and independence.

Posted by Saurabh Gupta, Product Manager,

(Cross-posted on the Google Drive blog.)

Google Forms is a free and simple way to collect information--from quickly polling your friends about who'll be attending your trip to the haunted hayride, to getting thousands of responses to an awareness survey for work.

Over the last few months, Forms has been getting a bunch of updates to help you make good looking surveys, like new theme choices and the ability to create your own personalized themes.

To give you even more flexibility and options, we’re introducing add-ons for Forms—new tools, created by developer partners, that deliver even more features to your surveys (just like add-ons for Docs and Sheets).

Add-ons bring handy extras to your survey building experience, like setting a survey end date, sending custom emails based on responses, storing lists of choices that you frequently add to questions, and more.

You can access add-ons from the “Add-ons” menu in Forms, or by directly visiting the Forms add-on store.
Here are just a few of the growing list of add-ons that you can use today with Google Forms:

• formLimiter: Close your survey automatically, after a maximum number of responses is reached, or at a date and time of your choosing. 
• Ultradox Trigger: Create custom emails, reports, invoices, newsletters, etc., based on information that people enter into your form. 
• Form Values: Store and pull from lists that you use regularly in Forms, like a list of staff, students, rooms, resources or anything you want. 

We hope these new tools make your Forms creation process even easier and more helpful--and stay tuned for more--our developer partners will be launching even more add-ons in the coming weeks.

PS: If you’re a developer with ideas for creating your own add-on for Forms, here’s some documentation to get you started.

Posted by Michael Dietz, Senior Group Manager, Connected Car at Hyundai Motor America

Editor's note: Today’s guest blogger is Michael Dietz, Senior Group Manager of Connected Car at Hyundai Motor America.

Cars are the next frontier of connected information, but developing safe technology for drivers is no simple task. At Hyundai, we’re invested in delivering the best possible connected services at all times. With a little help from Google and the Google Maps APIs, our Blue Link system does just that. Blue Link acts as a copilot and concierge, guiding people to where they want to go, while keeping drivers’ eyes on the road.

Market research showed us that Hyundai drivers want access to reliable, accurate location information, showing a strong preference for Google Maps. We took these customer requests into account, and in January 2014 began running our Blue Link systems with a destination search engine powered by Google.

Integrating Destination Search powered by Google into Blue Link gives our drivers relevant results, and, most importantly, constantly updated data about the businesses and other locations around them. Before we moved to Google, our customers complained that the location information was stale. For instance, they would search for a restaurant and drive to its address, only to find that it had closed two months ago. Our customers told us they wanted their in-car experience to resemble their smartphone’s, which meant giving them relevant, rich data at their fingertips.

With the Google Maps APIs, we’ve been able to bring the freshest location data to our Blue Link system — whether using the app on their smartphones, on the Web or in their vehicles. Before they get on the road, drivers can open up the Blue Link mobile app or visit myhyundai.com to search for an address, point of interest or category, then send the destination directly to their car. If they’re already in the car, they can press the Blue Link button and search for a nearby location via voice commands.

Now, more than 400,000 of our vehicles have access to the new service. Since implementing Google technology, we’ve made closer connections with our customers by improving their satisfaction with Blue Link and the Hyundai experience. We’ve also seen more free trial sign-ups and fewer complaints, letting our team focus on bringing new services to our customers.

We’re not about selling a car and then saying goodbye; we’re about building relationships. Making the switch to Google has helped us deliver better connected services, deepen our customers’ engagement with their vehicles, and help keep our drivers safer.

Posted by Lawrence Olszak, Director of Technology Services and William Cheaks Jr., Deputy Commissioner of Infrastructure Management, Chicago Department of Transportation.

Editor's note: Today’s guest bloggers are Lawrence Olszak, Director of Technology Services and William Cheaks Jr., Deputy Commissioner of Infrastructure Management at the Chicago Department of Transportation. See how other forward-thinking organizations are investing in mapping technology and transforming their business: Maps are Going Google.

When Rahm Emanuel became mayor of Chicago in 2011, the city’s infrastructure was seriously aging. Under an ambitious program to reinvest in making Chicago a world-class city, we repaved city streets, replaced sewer and gas lines and installed new water pipes all across the city. There were a lot of projects happening and little to no coordination between the 26 different utilities and agencies doing the work.

To better manage the many overlapping projects—which often meant pavement and streets were dug up and restored twice—the Chicago Department of Transportation (CDOT) launched the Project Coordination Office (PCO). The PCO, which is overseen by locally based Collins Engineers, Inc., needed a way to make it easy to share data stored in different siloed databases and display it on a map. The PCO contracted with Google for Work Premier Partner SADA Systems to develop dotMaps, an interactive web mapping service providing collaborative tools that allows people to manage, create and edit, as well as resolve overlapping projects—or conflicts—using geolocation, all in real-time. This application was built on many Google products: Google Maps Engine, the Maps API and Cloud Platform, which offer infrastructure for hosting applications and includes App Engine, a hosted service used for building web applications.

Lawrence Olszak, Director of Technology Services

Before dotMaps, workers spent a lot of time jumping around between different applications in order to validate the accuracy of the data provided. Now, the processes for overseeing projects are streamlined, permit and project data is accessible in one central location and it’s all viewable on a “live” interactive map. We’ve ported information on all the 30,000 current projects, including details like type of project, agency in charge, date of construction and other data, into the dotMaps so agencies can easily search for projects using that information and by address. For instance, users can attach construction contract plans directly into the map so a field inspector can view it on a mobile device while visiting a project site, without having to ask someone in the office to email it. Workers in the field—affectionately dubbed “asphalt helpers”—can search in the mapping application for information on projects, such as why there may be a hole in a sidewalk at any particular intersection. In the past they would have had to make several phone calls to try to find the employee who could answer that question.

Not only is all the data now in one place, we are able to improve our inter- and intra-agency communications. Employees used to share information about new projects and updates in weekly three-hour meetings where dozens of people would provide input. Today, people share that information in real-time directly in the dotMaps. They provide updates, ask questions and communicate via a pop up “chat” window that is displayed just by clicking on a project location marked on a map. Email notifications are sent out to people who need to see the updates.

The new PCO processes and dotMaps mapping solution helps officials to make more informed decisions about scheduling projects which has already saved the city $14.5 million YTD 2014, by eliminating duplicated work—saving resources and reducing the amount of time streets are closed. Citizen complaints about works projects to local officials also have been dramatically reduced. In the future, we plan to use Google satellite imagery, traffic and transit data to make the mapping even more useful. With the help of Google tools we’re on target to rebuild Chicago one construction project at a time.

Posted by Kalin, Director of Open Data, Socrata

Editor's note: Today’s guest blogger is Ian Kalin, Director of Open Data at Socrata, a provider of cloud-based software that helps public sector organizations increase transparency, improve citizen service and make data-driven decisions. Ian is a former U.S. Navy Officer and White House Presidential Innovation Fellow who led open data projects for the U.S. Department of Energy. See how other forward-thinking organizations are investing in mapping technology and transforming their business: Maps are Going Google.

As a former government employee, I know firsthand that there is tons of valuable data locked away in databases and spreadsheets on government computers; data that may never see the light of day. Until recently there was no easy way for citizens to view, use and share that information. Now, technology is liberating data so organizations can use it in new ways.

Socrata publishes its geospatial datasets onto Google Maps Gallery to make it easier to discover and use public sector maps. Before using Maps Gallery, people would have to do separate online searches for different types of information, and hope that it was in a web-browser friendly format. Then they would have to visualize all the data points on a map. Now that we’ve added maps to Google Maps Gallery, users don’t need sophisticated technical skills to get to the data and make it actionable. They can more quickly find answers to their questions — such as, where should I open a restaurant? or which neighborhood should I move into? — then personalize the information to their needs, and make informed decisions.

Using the Socrata platform, the City of Chicago has published several helpful maps on Google Maps Gallery for its residents. This map shows locations of affordable housing developments with contact information for potential renters.

We’re seeing all sorts of exciting things happen with open data projects like these. Governments are becoming more transparent and providing better service to the public, enabling citizens to access and consume information in more useful and beneficial ways. Our partnership with Google Maps means that even more data will be opened up and easier to consume. Displayed on the web’s most popular mapping interface, we’re one step further in ensuring that valuable data is in the hands of the people who need it most.

Posted by Dr. Naoyuki Kitamura, CEO, Japan’s Medical Network Systems Inc.

Cross-posted on the Google Cloud Platform blog

Japan faces a critical shortage of radiologists. Although major hospitals are well equipped to conduct scans, the scarcity of experts to read them and give patients their diagnoses means that people, especially those in rural areas, often have to wait a long time to discover their results. This can have tragic consequences for people with serious conditions.

To address this shortage and help people get accurate diagnoses faster, Medical Network Systems Inc. (MNES) in Hiroshima started running a remote diagnosis service in 2000. Rather than waiting for patients to come to hospitals, we bring the radiology equipment to them. This teleradiology service has helped combat the challenge of getting scanning technology to people in remote areas; however, we are still short on specialists that can read the scans, and we wanted to find ways to give access to patients in areas without specialists.

Last year, our team started using Google Cloud Platform to power our remote-diagnosis systems. Patients used to be given a hard copy of their scan to take to a doctor or specialist. Moving the process to the cloud speeds everything up. All of our buses are equipped with CT scanning machines, so our technicians upload images and scans right from the bus. Specialists can then log into the system from wherever they’re working and see the scans and diagnose the patient remotely.

Reading scans is a very specialized process. Radiologists must examine lots of images and scans in a very particular sequence, and it’s important that this process isn’t laggy or slow. One of the benefits of using Google’s services is that they can handle massive volumes of information. Google App Engine processes the images and data in the right sequence and enables us to cross reference patient inputs with existing radiographic and pathological information.

Instead of waiting for a few days or a week for a diagnosis, which was the usual turnaround for our teleradiology service, patients get their results within a few hours. And it’s not just our patients benefiting from remote diagnosis; enabling our radiologists to work from anywhere has meant that many of our female specialists are able to stay in the workforce — diagnosing scans while working from home and taking care of their kids. With so few radiologists in Japan, this flexibility helps us keep skilled technicians in the workforce.

We’re optimistic about the potential for cloud-based technology to enrich our understanding of pathological issues and believe it signals a new chapter for the healthcare industry by removing geographical barriers between patients and doctors.

Posted by Milt Baker, CEO, Blue Water Satellite

Editor's note:Today’s guest blogger is Milt Baker, CEO at Blue Water Satellite. BWS is the leading provider of algorithmically enhanced satellite images that identify the presence and concentrations of minerals, vegetation, chemical and biological constituents on land and in water. See how other forward-thinking organizations are investing in mapping technology and transforming their business: Maps are Going Google.

At Blue Water Satellite (BWS) we use satellite imagery to monitor the world's land and water resources. Our goal is to change the way these resources are managed by helping our customers get detailed, real-time data about the minerals, vegetation and chemical constituents on land or in water, anywhere in the world. We’re doing it better and faster now that we we’re using Google Earth Engine and Maps Engine to automate the image-serving process.

Our customers need accurate, digital information about the resources in a particular area. For instance, power plants use our imagery to measure water effluent temperature and ensure they’re complying with cooling regulations. Previously, an engineer would have to travel to take manual samples and send them back to the lab for testing. This provided information about a finite area, but didn’t show what was happening in the entire region over time. Our imaging technology makes it possible to get that data without having to get in a boat or car, take samples, then wait for the results.

The richness of our satellite imagery provides valuable information to our customers, but poses a challenge when it comes to delivering data at scale. After being quoted hundreds of thousands of dollars for a single software product that would automatically process and serve our images, we asked one of our engineers to investigate Google Earth Engine. Using Earth Engine, within three days we had figured out how to integrate the functionality we previously got from multiple products in a unified, high-speed, cloud-based solution. Soon we were processing and delivering our imagery using Earth Engine, without buying expensive hardware and software licenses, or training people to use the software.
Using Google Earth and Maps Engine, BWS can deliver processed images to customers seamlessly formatted for any browser-enabled device — desktop, smartphone, tablet — anywhere in the world. In addition to being familiar and easy-to-use, Google Maps imagery is rich in detail and comprehensive. Google has archived historical shots going back to 1984, which means our customers can see how resources have changed over time and note degradation trends. Google also provides ancillary data, so we can see the names of buildings and other physical objects that are in and around the water and land sites.

With nano-satellites, drones and hyperspectral cameras on the horizon, we’re excited for the future of mapping. Google Earth and Maps Engine are very much a part of that vision too, giving us and our customers the processing power we need to improve the way we use data and solve resource issues on earth.

Posted by Sanjeev Kumar, Group CIO and Group President - Business Excellence, Adhunik Group

Editor's note: Today’s post comes from guest blogger Sanjeev Kumar, Group CIO and Group President – Business Excellence of Adhunik Group, a conglomerate in India with businesses in mining, steel and power. Read Adhunik Group’s full story here.

The name of our business is both a moniker and a reflection of our philosophy: just as 'adhunik' means 'cutting-edge' in Hindi, the Adhunik Group is always looking for new ways to innovate, both in creating better products and services and in making our operations more efficient. Our focus on staying ahead is the key to our success. We are one of the fastest-growing conglomerates in India, overseeing more than 15 mines, three steel plants, 1 merchant power generation unit and 14 offices around the world.

Time is money for the Adhunik Group. Our businesses operate round-the-clock, so project delays, mechanical or IT based, can cost us almost US$1 million a day in penalties and costs. We’re always looking for reliable technology solutions that can improve our business operations.

We adopted cloud computing in 2010, but continued to look for more cost-effective, innovative alternatives as we grew. If we had better visibility into our operations, we could accelerate project delivery and make decisions faster. What we needed was a reliable, intuitive platform in line with our culture of productivity. We found our solution in Google Apps for Work, and moved over with help from our partner, MediaAgility.

We felt the benefits immediately. Our employees feel better connected across the organisation with Google Apps for Work, and are able to respond faster to each other. They’re now more energised and showing much higher morale. The numbers speak for themselves: Google Apps for Work is 70 percent cheaper than our previous solution and yet delivers up to a 15 percent increase in productivity. We also see further cost savings because of its reliability and effectiveness. There’s no need for frequent servicing, IT support or customisation.

The technology has completely transformed the way we work. Teams spread across different business units and locations use Google Sites as an internal project management portal to help them work together, track progress and share ideas. The added visibility provided by Google Sites means that everyone can look for ways to improve project effectiveness and optimise timelines. Today, project timelines are more predictable, so we don’t have to deal with penalties from project delays. Instead of sharing files over email, we now store them in Google Drive, where team members can work on them together at the same time.

Customer relationships have significantly improved too with the help of Google Hangouts. We connected cameras that were already installed at our manufacturing sites around the world to Google Hangouts to show customers how we work in real-time. Our customers love it. They can now see the progress of their orders and be assured that their items will arrive on time. This unique capability helps us stand out in a crowded market.

Google Apps for Work has raised our efficiency levels. With Google Apps for Work driving innovation in the company, Adhunik Group can now truly live up to our name.

Posted by Meheriar Patel, Chief Information Officer, USV Limited

Editor's note: Today’s post comes from guest blogger Meheriar Patel, Chief Information Officer of USV Limited, a healthcare company from India. See what other organisations that have gone Google have to say, and find USV Limited’s full story here.

At USV Limited (USV), we’ve been in the business of pharmaceuticals for more than half a century. Today, more than 4,000 employees work in six offices and four plants in India, manufacturing and marketing our products to 75 countries around the world. We believe that the key for us to succeed in the highly competitive healthcare industry is to constantly innovate on internal collaboration, operational processes and research capabilities. Technology is key to delivering faster market response.

A few years ago, we realised our client-server email system, which we had developed in-house, was inefficient. Our IT team spent too much time trying to overcome storage and bandwidth limitations and hardware breakdowns. Productivity was hit hard as employees lost emails. It was definitely time for us to look for a better way to foster internal collaboration and support growing employee demand for mobile email access.

Google Apps for Work stood out as the ideal solution to achieve our productivity goals. We rolled it out swiftly in all areas of the business, from manufacturing to office operations. Employees found Google Apps for Work very easy to use, while Google's 99.9% uptime guarantees us peace of mind.

Employees appreciate the flexibility they have when it comes to accessing and sharing emails and documents from anywhere, whether they’re on their laptops, tablets and smartphones. We can access business-critical information more quickly too. With our previous in-house system, sales reports used to take us at least 10 days to complete. Now, by sharing sales information in Google Drive, our employees update and analyse sales performance in real-time, and respond to customer demands faster.

We found Google Sites and Hangouts to be great employee-connectors, and morale boosters too. We use templates in Sites to develop internal websites with just a few clicks. Employees can upgrade their skills when they choose with the educational resources shared on Sites. Google Hangouts saves us travel time and costs by connecting everyone in multiple cities and locations. With the “screenshare” feature, we edit documents in Drive and make critical decisions on-the-spot.

Our IT Department also experiences greater benefit from the highly secure system. Google’s Apps Script helps us automate the logging of all IT actions, a requirement for any company operating in a regulated environment. Our IT team now focuses on enhancing the customer experience instead of low-value tasks like spam control and updating security software.

At USV, we believe that successful healthcare companies must continue improving themselves. We are looking for new ways to move forward, with further process automation to connecting with channels and customers directly. And we believe that Google for Work helps us secure long-term benefits for our employees and customers.

Posted by A V Dharmakrishnan, CEO of The Ramco Cements Limited

Editor's note: Our guest blogger this week is A V Dharmakrishnan, CEO of The Ramco Cements Limited. Read more about RCL Wind Farms’ full story here.


RCL Wind Farms was established in 1993 to help supply power to our group’s cement manufacturing operations. Previously, power costs took up as much as 40% of our expenses. Generating our own captive power gave us significant savings on cost of operations.

Today we have built a capacity of approximately 160 MW of electric power from over 200 wind farms. Some of this is used to power our manufacturing facilities and the rest is sold to the state (Tamil Nadu Electricity Board).

From the start, we wanted everything to be automated. And in the 1980s, we were one of the first companies to have an ERP system. The ERP served us well, generating more than 1,200 reports to support planning and decision-making. However, we wanted to take a step further. We thought about integrating the ERP system with a mapping solution that could immediately show us how individual wind turbines are performing. We envisioned a visually rich dashboard where we could quickly pinpoint areas that need immediate attention.

We found what we needed in Google Maps API for Work. We plotted the location of our 229 wind turbines and integrated this with performance data information from the ERP system. The result is a single screen that tells us all the key turbine performance indicators at-a-glance.

For example, similar turbines located within the same area should be able to produce roughly the same amount of electricity at any one time. On the Google Maps API for Work dashboard, the performance of each wind turbine is marked using a colour coding system. Wind turbines of similar make, in close proximity, should show the same colour coding on the dashboard. One look at the colour bullets will tell us if a wind turbine is not performing at its expected level. This important insight lets us address issues that are impacting turbine efficiency and output levels quickly.

The new solution has also realised benefits in other ways. Using Google Maps API for Work, field maintenance crew can now plan the most effective routes to reach faulty wind turbines. In meetings with vendors, we use the data generated from the solution to drill down our discussions to maintenance and efficiency improvements. Overall, Google Maps API for Work has increased our use of wind farms for power generation by 10%.

Google Maps API for Work helps us turn complex data into simple information that we can use to achieve greater cost savings and efficiency. In fact, with Google Maps API for Work, expanding the use of green power in our business just makes perfect business sense.

Posted by Chris Roggenbuck, Support Program Manager, Google for Work

After more than a decade working with customers of all sizes from all over the world, we know that if you encounter an issue with your Google for Work services, you want reliable help—fast. As part of our commitment to customers, we’re announcing improvements to the Google Apps support program to make it even easier for administrators to resolve issues quickly. Here’s an overview of new features:

Chat Support
A couple months ago, we started a pilot for chat support with a subset of Google Apps administrators. Based on the tremendous feedback we received (over 90% were satisfied), we’re now rolling out chat support as an option for English-language Apps administrators globally, and we’ll be adding more languages over the coming months. Admins of verified domains can initiate a chat session directly from our Help Center.
In-Product Help
Finding help should be easy, which is why we put our support documentation and help articles at your fingertips in the product interface. Help is also useful when its contextual — if you’re having trouble in Gmail we want you to have the phone number to call Google without leaving Gmail. To access these resources, sign into one of our Google Apps products, such as Gmail, or the Admin Console then select ‘Help’ from the gear icon drop down in the upper right of your screen. You’ll see a direct link to call Google under ‘Contact Us’ and be able to search our Help Center from the same window.
Hangouts is ready for business
This summer we announced that Google Hangouts is now covered under the same Terms of Service that support our other Google Apps services, like Gmail and Drive. That means we’ve got your back with 24x7 phone support and a guaranteed 99.9% uptime.

Our continued guarantee to you
Over the past few years we’ve been improving our Apps support program to provide a better experience to our customers. We stand behind these improvements and our products, so today we’re happy to announce updated Technical Support Service Guidelines that reflect and guarantee the many improvements we’ve made, including 24/7 phone support for Admins, numerous language options for support, and Google moderated help forums.

So how are we doing? Customer satisfaction is one important way we measure success and a few years ago we set a goal to reach 95% customer satisfaction. We’re proud to report that we achieved this milestone for Google Apps. We’ll continue innovating and improving our support program to bring you new ways of getting expert help quickly.

If we’ve done our job well, you shouldn’t need to reach us. But rest assured that if you do, we’ll help you get the most from Google Apps for Work. So drop us a line — we’re happy to chat!

Mark assignments as “done”
Not all assignments require students to submit work online — like reading a chapter or conducting an experiment — so we’ve added the ability for students to simply mark assignments as "done" if there's nothing to turn in. We’ve also given the Assignments page a refresh, to make it easier for students to keep track of upcoming work.

Students can mark assignments as "done" if there isn't anything to turn in

Greater teacher controls
We’re also giving teachers greater control over their class stream. Teachers can now set permissions for whether or not their class can post or comment in the stream, they can mute individual students from posting or commenting and can even view previously deleted items in the stream.

Export all grades
Teachers will now have the ability to download grades for all assignments at once, making it easier to export assignments to any gradebook.

Sort by first or last name
And now teachers can also choose to sort students by first or last name, depending on their needs.

We hope that these updates make Classroom even more efficient and effective to use with your students. We'll be making regular updates throughout the year, so keep submitting feedback and stay tuned.

Posted by James Stuart, Office Manager, Blue Carrot Catering

Editor's note: Today’s guest blogger is James Stuart, Office Manager for Blue Carrot Catering, a catering company in Wellington, New Zealand.

One of the key ingredients to a successful event is that your food and drink are served on time (nothing fizzles out a cocktail party like an empty glass!). At Blue Carrot Catering, our job is to not only make mouth-watering food for all occasions, but to make sure that it gets to people where and when they need it. We’re one of the biggest corporate catering companies in Wellington, making 60 deliveries each day to everything from weddings and birthday parties (and occasionally serving canapes at the zoo). Getting all these tasty treats laid out on trestle tables and perched on cake stands around the city not takes both a team expert chefs and a team of Greg Murphys.

To help us get a more accurate picture of where drivers are and make it easier to update information about deliveries on the fly, we started using Google Maps Coordinate. Maps Coordinate helps us manage our drivers and the way we schedule deliveries by plotting drivers on a map and making it easy to update jobs and see driver locations in real time.

Now, instead of having a piece of paper with a list of the day’s deliveries, drivers have everything they need on their handset — from the route for their deliveries plotted out on a map, to a list of the day’s jobs. If a delivery address changes we can update drivers automatically, and if a customer calls to see where their delivery is, we can jump online and see exactly where it is and let them know if the driver is two blocks down the road, or two kilometres away stuck in a traffic jam. Maps Coordinate also integrates with our email and calendar system, Google Apps so we can plan and manage things like menus and rosters in a more integrated way.

At Blue Carrot we pride ourselves on attention to detail and this includes being able to offer punctual and reliable deliveries. Since making the move to Maps Coordinate over a year ago we’ve not only been able to give our customers more accurate estimations of our delivery times, but we’ve been able to track the status of all our orders and benchmark our delivery times so our overall service is now better.

Posted by Steve Huffman, Co-founder and CTO of Hipmunk

Editor's note: Today’s guest blogger is Steve Huffman, Co-founder and CTO of Hipmunk, a San Francisco-based travel startup focused on taking the agony out of travel search. 

We started Hipmunk in 2010 with a simple notion: take the agony out of booking travel. We wanted to build a travel website that we would want to use. Based on our own travel experiences we knew that people want a faster, easier way to search and book travel. In our recent hotel search redesign, we incorporated Google Maps to enable our users to better identify and compare hotels located near the things they care about most.

Many of our users are tech-savvy travelers who appreciate the problem we’re trying to solve and understand what it takes on the back end to deliver a great product. Using Google Maps allows us to sort through and simplify complex travel data so we can present the factors that are most important to users in an easy-to-understand and visual way.

Travelers often want to stay close to family, a particular attraction, or even a business meeting location. That’s why 70 percent of Hipmunk visitors use maps when searching for a hotel. Our Heatmaps feature now relies on Google Maps data to highlight the areas with the highest concentration of food, nightlife, tourism, shopping, and “vice” (i.e., casinos, bars). By simply clicking Heatmaps and selecting a filter option, users can quickly and easily see which areas suit their travel style.
Since location is a top factor in deciding where to stay, another update we rolled out in the recent redesign is the ability to drop a pin near a specific point of interest. This allows users to locate a tourist attraction or relative’s home and then pick a place to stay in close proximity. Another feature that highlights the importance of location and proximity is our integration with Google Calendar. Users can even integrate their calendar so that they can easily see where their meeting or events are taking place so they can stay somewhere convenient nearby.

At Hipmunk, we consider an interactive and personalized map experience to be integral to a positive user experience. Thanks in part to Google Maps, our users avoid the agony of travel planning and spend less time planning so they can spend more time relaxing.

Posted by Saswat Panigrahi, Product Manager, Chrome for Work

Editor's note: To learn more about the new features and pricing options available with Chromebooks for Work, join our Chrome for Work product team for a Hangout on Air on Wednesday, October 29th.

After an office flood displaced 40 workers from a regional site, Just Eat, a UK-based online food ordering company, found a simple way to work through the disruption. The company delivered dozens of Chromebooks overnight to its headquarters and configured them by the time workers came in the next morning.

The story highlights some of the key reasons why a growing number of companies are adopting Chromebooks: they offer easy manageability and heightened security as well as speed and simplicity for IT and end users. Companies such as Woolworths, Auberge Resorts and Chapters Health have equipped their workers with devices in a matter of days thanks to Chromebooks’ simple cloud-based architecture.

Today, we’re taking a big step toward making it even easier for companies to select Chromebooks as their device of choice by announcing features specifically focused on improving identity, manageability, virtualization, performance and pricing:

Simplified and enhanced identity: Single sign-on, a popular customer request, lets you log in with the same credentials and identity provider that you use in the rest of your organization. This feature uses the universal SAML standard and works with most of the major identity providers including CA SiteMinder, Microsoft AD FS, Okta, Ping Identity, SecureAuth, and SimpleSAMLphp. We’re also adding multiple sign-in, which allows you to securely and quickly switch between work and personal accounts on your Chromebook.

Improved certificate management for wireless networks: Businesses, schools and government institutions can now easily provision Chromebooks with client certificates to access 802.1X EAP-TLS wireless networks and mutual TLS protected web resources. Using the Admin Console, IT admins can pre-configure their secure networks, push certificate management extensions and pre-select certificates to be used with certain websites and networks. Partners such as Aruba Networks, Cloudpath Networks and Aerohive Networks have already integrated this functionality.

Expanded Chrome management for any device: Getting new workers or contractors provisioned with web apps on Chrome is now easier than ever. With the Admin Console, IT administrators can push a list of bookmarks and many other settings to signed-in workers on all platforms including mobile devices.

Improved virtualization options: We’ve worked with virtualization partners like Citrix and VMware to expand the boundaries of what’s possible on Chromebooks. Recently, Citrix released a new Citrix Receiver optimized for Chromebooks, which provides more direct integration with Chromebooks and enables new features including seamless integration with Google Cloud Print; cut-and-paste between local and virtualized applications; better audio and video playback; improved license and application usage monitoring; and protection from end-to-end SSL connections.

Rich graphics experiences: Chromebooks are perfect for web applications and they can support rich graphics and powerful 3-D applications. Google recently teamed with Nvidia and VMware and announced at VMWorld technology to speed the delivery of graphics-heavy virtualized applications to Chromebooks, allowing you to seamlessly run 3-D modeling and simulation applications often associated with heavier hardware.

More flexibility on pricing: Starting today, customers can purchase all of these advanced features, management, and support through a new annual subscription option of $50 per device per year. This new pricing option is available first in the US and Canada, with more regions to follow. We’re also supporting licensing portability, which means if you lose or replace a Chromebook you can easily apply your existing license to a new device.

These new features and options reflect our commitment to making Chromebooks an everyday business tool that both IT admins and users can rely on over the years to come.

Posted by Tom Percival, CTO, graze

Editor's note: From the typewriter to the propelling pencil to our favorite, the world wide web, inventors and innovators from the United Kingdom have brought us brilliant advances that have changed the way we work all around the world. Over the next few weeks, we’ll share a handful of stories from disrupters and trailblazers in the UK who are using Google Apps for Work to support their mission while growing at faster and faster speeds. Today, we hear from Tom Percival, CTO of graze, who chronicles a selection of technology milestones behind graze’s growth and explains the role Google Apps for Work is playing in their growth story.

graze is a snack company with a technology-centric culture. What started as an idea between friends in 2007 has spiralled into an international snack business, employing 350 staff and generating over £50m in annual revenues. Along the course of our healthy snacks revolution, we’ve learnt how smart technology decisions can often hold the keys to growth opportunities. I’m delighted to highlight several milestones where we drove some incredible growth through inventive technology decision making.

Muscle up new technology with robotics
In 2010, two years into our journey, graze began investing in infrastructure for it’s first fully-automated production line, for faster and larger production. We rallied our smartest brains to collaborate with the top engineering firms in the world to invent a giant robotic food weigher that could pack product 24 hours a day. Within a year, we’d increased production (and sales) so much that we’d outgrown our space and needed more room to both breath and grow. Now, we’re operating out of a new top-secret “mega-factory” in West London.

Personalisation is the key to our customer’s heart
graze snacks are personal: we love that customers can find the snacks they love, no matter the palate or diet. Serving personalised snack combinations is both challenging and rewarding: we rely heavily on our proprietary algorithm, DARWIN, to enable us to create 4 million box combinations from over 200 products, each individually composed. This data is driven by our intense attention to detail around customer feedback — over 300 million customer ratings — which ultimately feed into our database to make our graze machine even smarter.

Constraint can inspire invention
In 2013 we made the leap across the pond and launched the graze service in the United States. We built a powerful postal ‘brain’ to monitor deliveries there in order to efficiently route packages nationwide, which we tested by posting 10,000 cardboard rabbits and monitoring their progress across the U.S. in real-time. Within 24 hours we had a customer in every state and within 2 weeks - 20,000 customers nationwide. Our postal brain really captures how much we have a technology-first approach in our DNA.

48 hour turnarounds on new product inspiration
At the heart of our advantage over traditional FMCG companies is our ability to rapidly design and release a new product. Because of the close relationship we have with our consumers we get rapid and detailed feedback on the products that we send out. Custom built analytics tools allow us to easily and quickly spot trends that help us reformulate our range. The tight vertical integration we have achieved thanks to our custom built supply chain platform means that our manufacturing and logistics can react just as quickly. This means we can now conceive of, design, manufacture and release a new product within 48 hours. Our ability to react to customer feedback meant that within 6 months of launching the US we had localised 40% of our range. This is an agility that traditional food companies cannot achieve.

Transforming our teams with Google Apps for Work
Our priority has been to pick tools that can transform our business — and for this we rely on Google Apps for Work. Moving from Microsoft Exchange to Google Apps for Work saved us 50% in IT costs alone. But beyond the financial savings, Gmail and Calendar connect our team and their applications under single-sign on, so we can stay on track and secure. By successfully migrating our platform to Google Apps for Work we’re noticing improved speed, easier unleashing good ideas and improvements in how we collaborate as a team. Combined, these improvements are helping our company to grow and to bring healthy snacks to customers in the UK and US.

Click to expand the full infographic below.