Using Technology for Humanitarian Projects

David May 20th, 2008

The LDS Church has received great appreciation for its efforts from Hurricane Katrina.  President Henry B. Eyring even mentioned a personal phone call from Pres George W. Bush to Gordon B. Hinckley at a recent multi-Stake Conference address, admiring the quick and effective efforts of local church members.  But even the best organizations would be amiss if they didn’t take advantage of what they may learn from others.

With thousands of people affected by the Sichuan, China earthquake, Google China staff members rolled up their sleeves and joined other rescue organizations.

At the request of the government, we obtained new satellite images of Sichuan province (Earth KML) to help them better focus their recovery efforts. We developed and launched a “lost loved one” search based on our Custom Search Engine (CSE). To populate the CSE index, hundreds of Googlers worked around the clock looking through published tables, hospital records, news reports, and community sites. We tuned our Chinese news search, video search, image search, blog search, and oneboxes. We also partnered to build community sites, and launched both homepage promotions and a map-based information page. Google China has an extremely dedicated and passionate team and I am deeply honored to work alongside them.

Google has also set up a donation page so that you can donate directly towards recovery efforts.  Similarly, donations can be made on the LDS Philanthropies donation page for any of the humanitarian projects around the world or using a donation slip at your local congregation.

Another huge Google milestone for independent developers

David April 8th, 2008

There are now thousands of instances where developers and businesses have used Google Maps APIs to create maps integrated with their own data (also called mashups).  Where geographic data used to be limited to specialized developers and organizations with a large budget, this ability is now in the hands of high school students with pet projects. 

Last night Google launched a preview release of Google App Engine, "a way for developers to run their web applications on Google’s infrastructure."  This promises to be equally enabling but not limited to a specific function like mapping tools.  Any generic application which requires an application server, web server, and database can be powered by this infrastructure.

With Google App Engine, developers can write web applications based on the same building blocks that Google uses, like GFS and Bigtable. Google App Engine packages those building blocks and provides access to scalable infrastructure that we hope will make it easier for developers to scale their applications automatically as they grow. This means they can spend less time dealing with system administration and maintenance, and more time building and improving their applications. (There’s more detail on the new App Engine Blog.)

…This preview of Google App Engine is available for the first 10,000 developers who sign up; we will increase that number in near future. So, developers, please sign up, download the SDK, and start your engines.

Here is a geeky step by step video for using Google App Engine with Python: