Find Time for Goals with Google Calendar

Whether it’s reading more books, learning a new language or working out regularly, achieving your goals can be really hard. One day it's "I got called into a last-minute meeting." The next day it's "I have a friend in town." And before you know it, your goals are delayed or forgotten. In fact, with all the things you need to do in a given week, it’s probably harder than ever to find the time—even when your goal really matters to you.

That’s why starting today, we’re introducing Goals in Google Calendar. Just add a personal goal—like “run 3 times a week”—and Calendar will help you find the time and stick to it.

Goals are easy to set up

To set a goal (like “Work out more”), simply answer a few questions (like “How often?” and “Best time?”), and you’re all set. From there Calendar will look at your schedule and find the best windows to pencil in time for that goal.

Goals adjust to your busy life

Goals aren't easy—especially when the unexpected comes up—but Calendar can help you adjust in a number of important ways. For example, Calendar will automatically reschedule if you add another event that's a direct conflict with a goal.

You can also defer a goal at any time, and Calendar will make time for it later.

Finally, Calendar actually gets better at scheduling the more you use it—just defer, edit or complete your goals like normal, and Calendar will choose even better times in the future.

Calendars should help you make the most of your time—not just be tools to track events. So as Google Calendar turns 10 today (🎉), we're excited to invest in more updates like Goals, and to help you find time for everything that matters—from your daily must-dos, to exercising more, to just a little "me time."

To get started, download the Google Calendar app for Android or iPhone, and set your first goal.

Also read: Google Flight Search Service Usage

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Google Flight Search Service Usage

To be more user friendly, the Google Flight Search service has been updated to get best deals whenever the user wants to fly. More languages have been added to make it simple and you can also view the fares in the desired currency.

Google Flight Search Service

It seems Google wants to make the flight search service incredibly smart as of their other services. This search service is providing more options in its new update such as the number of stops, desired airlines, multiple price options, time duration and many more. With these many options and collection of information user can pick the suitable airline and price to complete the journey easily.

Flight search service

Flight search service also search for the number of airports in the particular area, if you are not sure about the nearest airport to the destination you want to reach. Likewise, you can also search for the lowest possible fare for any desired airport in the region. With the help of this service, you can check the arrival and departure timings of the flights, sort fares and duration of the journey from distinctive airlines.

This ITA Software built service also provides easy and simple way to book your flight. Once you have filled the relevant parameters and picked the suitable flight, you are redirected to the applicable payment page through a reliable third party booking service.

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Google Analytics 360 Suite and its products

Google released a new version of its Google Analytics product, adding new features and bringing in existing offerings that previously worked separately. Marketers can use the suite to track and respond to their customers more seamlessly than ever before. Above all, it’s a response to the growing threat by Facebook.

The suite comes with the following six products. The first four are brand new, Google says. And if some of the details on these are vague, that’s by design. Google purposefully didn’t release details on many of these.

1. Google Audience Center 360 (beta)

This data management platform (DMP) helps marketers understand their customers and find more like them across channels, devices, and campaigns. It offers native integration with Google and DoubleClick, plus it’s open to third-party data providers and DSPs.

Significance: This could be the strongest update of the announcement. Facebook launched its Atlas product last year, built on social profile data that’s become hugely valuable. Google doesn’t have the profile data that Facebook has built, and it’s clearly been threatened by becoming an underdog in user data for the first time. But Google does have dominance in search traffic and data, and its Android platform is the biggest operating system in mobile. Finally, it has Gmail, through which it can build audiences and segments to be marketed to.

When it comes to impact on Adobe or Oracle, that remains to be seen. Google is a marketing and ad company, Adobe is a content-focused company, and Oracle is trying to serve enterprise with everything. There are overlaps, but each offer different use cases. With this announcement, Google is definitely getting more competitive for enterprise customers.

2. Google Optimize 360 (beta)

This website testing and personalization product helps marketers deliver better experiences. Marketers can show consumers multiple variations of their site and then choose the version that works best for each audience.

Significance: At first, this may look like a rebrand of Google Experiments, which helped people track analytics behind different A/B test pages. But that was done essentially through a tag, in a very manual way. Optimize does all of the work of setting up a real A/B test from end-to-end. You can literally drag comps of a site (without needing to know coding) into the product and test them out with live users.

Also read: Fewer tech glitches in its self-driving cars: Google

By adding this feature and the Data Studio feature below, Google could be taking a lot of work away from A/B testing tools Optimizely and other personalization tools. It’s also incorporating customization and data visualization — creating a seamless stack that could spark consolidation in the industry. Visualization of data is very difficult to do within Optimizely. And if you have to switch to a tool like Tableau for data visualization, that becomes yet another piece to connect to your product stack. Why bother, if you can get it all from Google?

Having multiple tools from many vendors can also affect your IT development time, and even stability: If one tool goes down, and other tools that are dependent on it also go down, it’s often hard to find the cause of failure.

That said, Google’s A/B testing still doesn’t appear to match the full functionality of Optimizely for split testing.

3. Google Data Studio 360 (beta)

This new data analysis and visualization product integrates data across all suite products and other data sources — turning it into interactive reports and dashboards. Built-in real-time collaboration and sharing is based on Google Docs technology.

Significance: Marketers will find Data Studio helpful because they need to constantly make data imagery for briefings, reports, and decks. Google hasn’t done this before. In some ways, the product looks like a competitor to Cyfe or Geckoboard. Data visualization dashboards are hot right now, and a lot of innovation and venture dollars have been invested here. This could spell trouble for some of the newer entrants. The question is whether the new Google visualizations are deep enough to seriously affect a player like Tableau. This is something we haven’t looked at yet.

4. Google Tag Manager 360

Built from Google’s tag management product, this offers enterprise marketers a simplified way to gather site information (all those tiny bits of code) and powerful APIs to increase data accuracy and streamline workflows, to allow them to move faster and make decisions with confidence.

Significance: This was based on a small feature in GA, but was never a fully built-out and standalone product.

5. Google Analytics 360, rebrand of GA Premium

Google said it will roll out “exciting” new capabilities throughout the next couple of months as investments continue to grow. Sources are telling VentureBeat to wait until Google’s I/O event for more news. GA 360 will serve as the measurement centerpiece by analyzing customer data from all touchpoints and integrating with its ad products to drive marketing effectiveness, Google said.

Significance: This is really just a rebrand of GA Premium — not much new here. But Google really is the king of analytics.

6. Google Attribution 360, rebrand of Adometry

Google says this has been rebuilt from the “ground up” to help advertisers value marketing investments and allocate budgets with confidence. Marketers can analyze performance across all channels, devices, and systems to achieve their most effective marketing mix. VentureBeat’s understanding, though, is that Google still heavily relies on Tune and Kochava for some mobile attribution capabilities. Google’s main strength has been attribution for display advertising.

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Google releases Analytics 360 Suite for easier customer tracking

Google released a new version of its Google Analytics product, adding new features and bringing in existing offerings that previously worked separately. Marketers can use the suite to track and respond to their customers more seamlessly than ever before. Above all, it’s a response to the growing threat by Facebook.

In the past year or two, Google had already released several of the features of what today is being branded Google Analytics 360 Suite. But the new release debuts several new features, including most significantly what appears to be a data management platform (DMP) to manage user profile data across a company’s site — a critical tool for large companies. This is where Facebook has come on very strong, particularly in the explosive mobile advertising market.

Google has brought these features into one place, giving enterprise-size marketers a much more powerful feedback loop: These marketers can now get data about customers coming to their site and respond more easily in real time with content that is specialized for those visitors.

With the new features, Google also appears to be encroaching on the territory of several big players in the enterprise data cloud or DMP space — for example, Oracle and Adobe. It also steps into A/B testing, where Optimizely is dominant, and data visualization, where Tableau has seen tremendous growth.

Also read: Fewer tech glitches in its self-driving cars: Google

Google’s moves are significant, because it has the advertising reach and infrastructure scale to undermine many of these other players. Google said it’s applying the same infrastructure that allows it to handle billions and billions of daily search queries — generating answers before users even finish typing — to give enterprise marketers similar functionality. In this case, it means allowing marketers to provide their customers with the content, offers, or products that users are likely looking for, based on those customers’ past behaviors.

Facebook’s growing threat

The move is also significant because Facebook continues to grow in mobile, now threatening Google’s longtime dominance in display advertising. Google has chugged along with many of its analytics products for years, but has never pulled them together to offer a powerful suite for marketers.

Jon Cifuentes, an analyst at VB Insight, VentureBeat’s research arm, agreed: “Google is above all a marketing and advertising company — with channel dominance in search, email, display — with mobile and display threatened for the first time in years with Facebook, especially around mobile. It makes sense for them to beef up audience tracking.”

Google cited Pawan Divakarla, who leads analytics at Ohio-based Progressive Insurance, as an example of the suite’s significance:

“The Google Analytics 360 Suite gave us the really big ah-­ha moment. When we launched our mobile app, it provided insurance quotes. But after looking at the data, we saw people were attempting to buy insurance. So, we shifted our mobile strategy to offer ecommerce. Google gave us that insight,” Divakarla said in a canned quote in Google’s announcement.

The new suite certainly rivals Facebook in terms of tracking people across devices and channels. But more than that, it integrates with other products like AdWords, DoubleClick, and third-party platforms through an API.

One thing that is clear: This is an enterprise-grade product, and is priced as such. The existing product, Google Analytics Premium, has been priced at $150K/year, and Google acknowledges that this is the fee you’ll have to pay for one of the main products of the 360 suite. But you’ll have to then pay for additional products a la carte, and associated fees with increased usage, features and services, Google spokesman Joe Osborne told VentureBeat.

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Fewer tech glitches in its self-driving cars: Google

The rate of failures in software of self-driving cars that Google developed was declining as technology was learning from its mistakes, in order to bring the tech company closer to its autonomous vehicle creation goal.

These self driving autonomous cars travelled 424,000 miles and had experienced 272 episodes in which the human test driver had to assume control of the vehicle which is called disengagement, when the autonomous technology failed.

"As we continue to develop and refine the self-driving software, we are seeing fewer disengagements" despite more miles driven, Google said in a 33-page report submitted by law to the California Department of Motor Vehicles on Dec. 31.

California regulations call for test drivers and steering wheels in autonomous vehicles.

Google's development of self-driving cars has spurred outsized interest around the world, but the company best known for search has disclosed little about its strategy, business plans or ultimate goals.

Without the need to watch the road, people in cars will talk on phones, watch entertainment, purchase consumer goods, among many other options, providing valuable data to Google.

The report, covering the period Sept. 24, 2014, when Google began testing on roads of Palo Alto, California, to Nov. 30, 2015, found disengagements occurred about every 785 miles in the fourth quarter of 2014. A year later, that had expanded to 5,318 miles between episodes.

Eighty-nine percent of disengagements occurred on city streets, where more obstacles and stop-and-go traffic make autonomous driving more difficult.

Project director Chris Urmson said Google deliberately tests cars in different weather and times of the day, which explained why some months saw more episodes than others.

Google, a unit of Alphabet Inc, said it kept the threshold for measuring disengagements low to gather as much data as possible to refine the technology.

Also read: Google told to expand right to be forgotten

There were another 69 episodes in which the test driver chose to take control of the vehicle rather than the car signaling to the driver to take control.

Using a simulator to replay the situation, Google found in 13 of these instances its cars would have hit another object had the test driver not taken control. Google said two involved traffic cones, and three were due to "another driver's reckless behavior."

Urmson said the California DMV had not seen the report when it issued draft rules in December restricting how autonomous vehicles could operate for the next three years.

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Easy to Clear Outdated Links from Google

After a ruling from Europe's top court that Google should remove links to 'outdated information' about individuals at their request, the search giant has opened up an online form for those wanting to be forgotten.

According to the report in ZDNet, The decision on the  'right to be forgotten' was handed down earlier this month after Google appealed an order by the Spanish Data Protection Agency (AEPD) to remove links to articles about an individual published in a Spanish newspaper in 1998 by Spanish newspaper. The AEPD ruling came after a Spanish national found links to the articles, which contained details about a real-estate auction that was held to settle social security debts, after searching for his own name online. He requested they be removed, as he believed the articles contained information about him which was no longer relevant.

Following the ruling, many other individuals have approached Google to remove links to information about them that they consider outdated. Now, the company has launched a form where individuals can make their 'right to be forgotten' requests online.

The form asks for a user's details, the links to the 'outdated information', and an explanation of why they should be removed. Anyone wanting to use the form will also need to provide a scan of their photo ID, to stop fraudulent attempts to remove information. "Google often receives fraudulent removal requests from people impersonating others, trying to harm competitors, or improperly seeking to suppress legal information," it says.

Google notes that the form is just its first try at working out the takedown mechanism, and it will be "working with data protection authorities" to develop it in future.

Also read: Google told to expand right to be forgotten

The company has published no timeline on when users can expect their requests to be dealt with. "We will assess each individual request and attempt to balance the privacy rights of the individual with the public’s right to know and distribute information. When evaluating your request, we will look at whether the results include outdated information about you, as well as whether there’s a public interest in the information—for example, information about financial scams, professional malpractice, criminal convictions, or public conduct of government officials," it says.

Unsurprisingly, the European Court of Justice's ruling was not met with enthusiasm by Google. At a recent annual shareholder meeting, Google's chairman Eric Schmidt told investors the case was "a collision between the right to be forgotten and the right to know".

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