While many of us are navigating the shift to hybrid work, every team’s experience is unique. Distributed work is taking many different forms—from the fully remote to a specific mix of in-person and in-office—but there are potential gaps across all the places that people work. Google Workspace helps teams bridge these gaps by providing tools for them to connect, create and collaborate securely wherever they are. Today, we’re taking this one step further by announcing new ways to bring Miro’s intuitive whiteboard experience to Google Workspace so that teams can ideate and innovate more immersively.

With a shared commitment to extending inclusive, flexible collaboration experiences for all, we’re partnering with Miro to bring whiteboarding capabilities into Google Meet. We’re also deepening the existing experience within Google Docs, Sheets and Slides, making it easier for teams to ideate and co-create asynchronously and in real time. 

Deepening collaboration in meetings 

With the new Miro experience in Meet, you’ll get an immersive side-by-side video and whiteboard experience that’s ideal for brainstorming, sketching, and iteration during meetings. This approach fosters idea generation and participation from all team members, even if they’re in different locations. And using a Miro whiteboard in Meet is seamless: simply attach the Miro whiteboard to the meeting in Google Calendar or select a board during a meeting to share and collaborate in real-time. These new experiences will be available in early 2022.

Seamlessly integrate content from Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides 

Real-time collaboration across a distributed team often spans multiple files—from brainstorming in documents, to project management in spreadsheets, to presenting your ideas in slides. Miro integrates with Google Drive, so teams can easily access and embed their Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides into Miro’s infinite canvas, making it easier to visualize and manage all the pieces of a project from one shared space. You can also save your Miro boards to Drive, and Docs, Sheets, and Slides automatically sync across both applications, so you’re always working with the latest content.

Start using Miro in Google Workspace today

The Miro app for Workspace is one of the growing number of 3rd-party applications you can use to bring the apps and services you use every day to your Google Workspace experience. Try the Miro app in Workspace with your existing credentials, or sign up for Workspace and Miro to start using the free versions together. And stay tuned for future innovation as we partner with Miro on delivering visual collaboration capabilities that are mission critical for the hybrid workplace.

Since the launch of Gmail in 2004, and Google Docs two years later, we’ve been building flexible, helpful and innovative solutions that allow people to connect, create and collaborate securely — from anywhere on the planet and on any device. When we debuted Google Workspace last October, we not only introduced a new brand, but also our vision for a single, integrated experience for everyone: Everything you need to get anything done, now in one place. Across apps like Gmail, Chat, Calendar, Drive, Docs, Sheets, Meet and more, our consumer, enterprise and education users choose Google Workspace to stay in touch, share ideas and get more done together every day. 

Over the last year, we’ve delivered innovations that bring together the content, communications and tasks that help millions of businesses, nonprofits and classrooms transform how they collaborate, make the most of their time, and have more impact. Now we’re bringing those same innovations to everyone else. Starting today, all of Google Workspace is available to anyone with a Google account.

Bring your projects and passions to life in Google Workspace

By bringing Google Workspace to everyone, we’re making it easy for people to stay connected, get organized and achieve more together, whether it’s advancing a cause, planning your family reunion, assigning next steps for the PTA or discussing this month’s book club pick. 

You can create a secure collaboration space in Google Chat to keep everyone up-to-date, share ideas, and keep track of all your important info in one place, from videos and pictures of your last trip, to a Google Sheet of your family’s annual budget. Smart suggestions help you bring in recommended files and quickly include the right people with @-mentions, whether you’re drafting a message in Gmail to the whole group or scheduling a meeting invite in a shared Calendar. To keep things moving, you can use smart canvas to generate a checklist in Google Docs and quickly assign roles and next steps. And if your project calls for a spontaneous conversation, you can present the Doc, Sheet or Slide you’re working on together directly into a Google Meet call with just one click. 

What’s more, you’ll have peace of mind as you work with others knowing that we designed Google Workspace to operate on a secure foundation, with the protections needed to keep you safe, your data secure, and your information private.

Starting today, you can enable the integrated experience in Google Workspace by turning on Google Chat. Use Rooms in Google Chat as a central place to connect, create and collaborate with others. Over the summer, we’ll evolve Rooms to become Spaces and introduce a streamlined and flexible user interface that helps you stay on top of everything that’s important. Powered by new features like in-line topic threading, presence indicators, custom statuses, expressive reactions, and a collapsible view, Spaces will seamlessly integrate with your files and tasks, becoming your new home in Google Workspace for getting more done — together. Learn more about our vision for collaborating in Spaces.

Introducing Google Workspace Individual

For some people, pursuing their passion and getting involved in the community leads to great business ideas. For other entrepreneurs, a single Google account is the basis for managing their long-established businesses or getting the word out about their next big endeavor. With Google Workspace Individual, we’re delivering a powerful, easy-to-use solution that was built to help people grow, run and protect their business.

With this new Google Workspace subscription offering, individual small business owners can get more done, show up more professionally and better serve their customers. Building on the integrated Google Workspace experience now available to everyone, the solution provides premium capabilities, including smart booking services, professional video meetings, personalized email marketing and much more on the way. Within their existing Google account, subscribers can easily manage all their personal and professional commitments from one place with access to Google support to get the most out of their solution.

Workspace Individual was created to help people focus their time on doing what they love — like meeting with customers and designing personalized services — and less time on everyday tasks like scheduling appointments and emailing customers. Workspace Individual is rolling out soon to six markets, including the United States, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Australia and Japan. Sign up to receive updates on Google Workspace Individual. 

Google Workspace: How it’s done

Every day, the world’s most innovative companies, schools, nonprofits and governments use Google Workspace to transform how people work and achieve more together. It’s a daily part of how leading healthcare providers revolutionize patient care, schools turn remote learning into an immersive, personalized experience, and aerospace companies rethink flight. Now, with Google Workspace for everyone, you can organize your junior sports league with ease, take that fundraiser to the next level, or even turn your hobby into a business. Whatever it is, Google Workspace helps people (teams, families, friends, volunteers, neighbors…) connect, create and collaborate. Google Workspace is how it’s done.

The ecommerce playing field has been hard to navigate for most retailers, and Cart.com is on a mission to change that. Traditionally, retailers needing to run their online store, order fulfillment, customer service, marketing, and other essential activities have had to cobble together systems to get the capabilities they need – much less having access to analytics across these functions. The result is costly, siloed ecommerce operations that are difficult to manage and scale.

It’s clearly not a formula for success, yet that’s the reality facing most retailers. Cart.com, in contrast, has set out to democratize ecommerce by giving brands of all sizes the full capabilities they need to take on the world’s largest online retailers. Our end-to-end environment empowers retailers to keep more of their revenue, set up proven strategies for managing all aspects of their business, and act on valuable insights from customer data every step of the way.

Together with our talented team, we’re building a unified ecommerce platform that already provides value to many leading or up and coming brands including Whataburger, GUESS, Dr. Scholl’s, Rowing Blazers, and Howler Bros. 

We’re excited about the opportunity ahead as we reimagine traditional approaches to online sales, fulfillment, marketing, accessing growth capital, providing a unified view of all ecommerce and marketing analytics, and other activities. Expectations for Cart.com are high, and we are building a company that can scale to $100B in revenue and beyond. Supported by the Startup Program by Google Cloud and Google Cloud solutions, we’re establishing a technology platform to transform all aspects of ecommerce for brands worldwide. 

Partner in disruption

At Cart.com, we’re currently targeting an underserved market. Our ideal customer is beyond demonstrating product-market-fit and is now at an inflection point seeking a growth opportunity. Typically, those companies are generating between $1M and $100M in annual revenue. We’ve seen an enthusiastic response from brands and retailers as well as investors, with backing from investors in just over a year totaling $143 million in three funding rounds.

Our strategy is to build an integrated ecommerce model that combines best-of-breed solutions, many of which we gain through acquisitions and then build upon to provide a streamlined and fully integrated experience for our brands. We’ve made seven acquisitions so far to round out our online store, order fulfillment, marketing services, customer service, and we have launched some integral partnerships including easy access to growth capital through our relationship with Clearco and product protection for customers on every purchase with Extend. Instead of acquiring a data company, we’re building our data platform on Google Cloud, across each operating function for a single-view for brands to harness actionable data. We see Google Cloud as the leader for data management, analytics, machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI).

Other reasons why we’re building our business on Google Cloud include scalability, excellence, security, reach, and data analytics that are far superior to other environments.

We also feel a cultural and mission alignment with Google Cloud and envision leaning into a long-term partnership of marketing, selling, and disrupting the disruptors together. Equally important to us are the investments Google Cloud is willing to make in early-stage companies like ours. The support through the Google Cloud for Startups program has been outstanding.

Built on Google Cloud

A wide range of Google Cloud solutions provide the foundation for our platform. For instance, Cloud Pub/Sub keeps our services communicating with one another. We rely on fully managed relational databases, like Cloud SQL and Cloud Spanner, to securely handle the huge volume of brand and shopper data generated every day.

Cloud Run allowed us to develop inside of containers before our Kubernetes infrastructure was ready to go. Now, we are taking advantage of all the capabilities in Google Kubernetes Engine. BigQuery integrates with all Google Cloud solutions and offers true data streaming natively out of the box, along with Dataflow for advanced analytics. We also use Container Registry to store and manage our Docker container images. Right now, we’re testing Cloud Composer to evaluate using it for data workflow orchestration instead of Apache Airflow.

The openness of the Google Cloud environment is further enabled by Anthos, which we may deploy soon to perform data integrations quickly as we acquire more companies over the next year. For example, if we acquire a company using Azure, we can easily align it with our Google Cloud ecosystem.

Enabling ecommerce 2.0

Recently, our team has been experimenting with Google Cloud Vertex AI and the fully managed services of AI deployment and ML operations. The capabilities would save us substantial time in the management of the ML lifecycle which allows us to focus more on developing proprietary AI that will transform commerce at scale.

Because Google Cloud is so far ahead in data science, our teams benefit from deep Google Cloud expertise as we look to provide brands with unmatched insights into customers to improve services and revenue. We’re also planning to test Recommendations AI among other tools to deploy customer product recommendations and personalization as turnkey productized offerings. Moving forward, we will likely use Bigtable to aid in serving machine learning to hundreds of thousands of brands due to its low latency and scalability.

Fanatical about brand success

We know that our work with Google Cloud for Startups and use of Google Cloud solutions for best-in-class data management, analytics, ML, and AI will enable us to offer even more transformative services to brands.

We also see the opportunity to use our platform and customer insights to break down barriers between brands, enabling retailers to share information and work better together when it’s in their best interests. What we’re building today on Google Cloud is fundamentally changing what’s possible for retailers of any size everywhere. 

As a startup, when recruiting talent or working with prospective customers, it helps to share our success with Google Cloud. We view them as an extension of the Cart.com team. It also validates our business as we continue building a more integrated, holistic approach to commerce that opens new opportunities and drives growth for brands worldwide.

For more details about Cart.com’s vision for unified ecommerce, check out our video.

If you want to learn more about how Google Cloud can help your startup, visit our page here to get more information about our program, and sign up for our communications to get a look at our community activities, digital events, special offers, and more.